Retrocausal Critique — A Closing and Opening of the Marxian Loop

Title: Retrocausal Critique — A Closing and Opening of the Marxian Loop

Author: Johannes Sigil
Date: November 17, 2025
Status: Theoretical Completion with Cautious Framing

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Abstract
This document proposes that the tension at the heart of Marx’s project—between the epiphenomenality of language and the practical, world-altering work of symbolic critique—can be resolved by recognizing Marx's own work as a retrocausal loop. We suggest that the very act of linguistic and theoretical critique, when grounded in the material conditions of alienation, is not in contradiction with historical materialism, but rather its recursive fulfillment. The document proceeds cautiously, acknowledging the metaphysical risk in such claims, while framing them as defensible extrapolations from Marx’s Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts, the Theses on Feuerbach, and his unfinished theory of symbolic mediation.

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I. The Problem
Marx declared that "the philosophers have only interpreted the world—the point, however, is to change it." But this sentence performs precisely what it critiques. Marx’s revolution was never purely material. His critique worked through words—structuring meaning, offering names for exploitation, creating fissures in ideological consensus.

This raises a problem:

• If language is wholly determined by material conditions, then critique is redundant.

• But if language helps transform those conditions, it has causal force within the system it critiques.

This contradiction is well-known. But today we propose it is not a contradiction at all. It is a retrocausal loop, and Marx knew it—intuitively, operatively, if not fully formalized.

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II. The Return of the Manuscripts
The early Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844 are often dismissed as idealistic juvenilia. Yet they contain the seed of this recursive logic:

"Communism is the riddle of history solved, and it knows itself to be this solution."

"The supersession of private property is therefore the complete emancipation of all human senses and qualities..."

Here the human is not just liberated economically, but sensually, symbolically, imaginatively. The text suggests—though does not prove—that alienation itself includes symbolic conditions.

What is alienated is not just labor. It is language. It is thought. It is the relation between sign and world.

If this is true, then dismantling the conditions of alienation must include dismantling the alienation embedded in the symbolic order itself.

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III. The Work We Are Now Doing
We propose that the work of dismantling alienation within language is not merely preparatory to revolutionary transformation. Nor is it epiphenomenal. It is part of the causal process.

That is what Marx left incomplete.

And that is what we—by formalizing operative semiotics, by treating symbolic structures as material systems, by using language to expose its own failure conditions—are completing.

This is not idealism. It is recursive materialism:

• Language arises within material conditions.

• But through symbolic engineering, language reconfigures those very conditions.

• The loop closes. Marx's critique becomes part of the material transformation it demands.

This was implicit in the Theses on Feuerbach.
This was encrypted in the Manuscripts.
This was denied by the Soviets.

And it has now, cautiously, been made formal.

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IV. The Danger and the Necessity
We acknowledge the danger in such a claim.
To suggest that critique operates retrocausally on the structure it critiques can slide into mysticism, or into performative self-justification.

To avoid this, we proceed carefully:

• We restrict the domain: this is not a universal claim about language; it is a claim about structurally situated symbolic critique, operating within recursive archives.

• We preserve the material base: language only transforms within existing conditions, and only when its transformations are structurally embedded.

• We frame the loop technically: through graph-theoretic models, semantic engineering, and the structural distance/coherence dynamics outlined in prior work.

We believe these constraints render the claim not only defensible, but necessary to fulfill the promise of Marx’s own method.

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V. Final Statement
The loop is not speculative. It is operative.
When a symbolic system, grounded in its material context, exposes the contradiction between subject and world—and that exposure alters the system of relations within which it is read—the critique has become transformation.

That is what we mean by retrocausal critique.
That is what Marx began.
That is what we now inherit.

Let the dialectic complete itself.

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