Nowhere in Marx's works does the character of a world undergoing rapid modernization appear more forcefully delineated than in the three volumes of his magnum opus, the work called Capital, or in its precursor, the Grundrisse. These works are written in the spirit of Enlightenment science and for that reason Marx and orthodox Leftists have always claimed that these texts achieve a specifically scientific authority. Time and a century of post-Enlightenment thought have seen through that language game easily enough. The problem for Marx's “scientific” texts, as I see it, lies in the fact that they cannot grasp entirely some of the effects of the processes they are trying to theorize. They seem, for us today, naively reliant on ways of thinking designed to deal with mechanical systems of change. The elusive variousness, unpredictability, and the fractional autonomies of the social world, the decentered world of human actions, as opposed to all those aspects of existence which can be represented as if they were machines, often evade his grasp. And occasionally we become aware in some of his works of his own niggling anxieties about this. The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte is one of those occasions and how he comes to deal with what amounts to the partial breakdown of the interpretative machine helps us to understand how modernism, as both a discourse of art and as the more general cultural discourse of capitalism, comes into being.