The Gordian knot foiled all attempts to undo it until Alexander the Great came along and cut it open with his sword. This legend is often presented as a model of what it means to act decisively and to think outside the box. Few seem to have given much thought to the threads that were cut into small pieces and rendered useless by Alexander's act. The problems of our world are intertwined in much the same way as the threads in the Gordian knot, and the typical way of dealing with them, particularly now, particularly in our society, also seems modeled on Alexanders solution. Except that here, the separate pieces into which they have been reduced are not only useless but positively harmful as a means of understanding these problems and, therefore, also as a means of resolving them. Marx even has a term for what's left after this massacre has done its work. It is 'ideology', or the separation of what cannot be separated without distortion, and it is found throughout the common sense and learned discourse of our time, with the separation of knowledge into different academic disciplines serving as chief enforcer, should that prove necessary. And dialectics? Dialectics is about unravelling the Gordian knot and the world for which it stands, without tearing it to pieces. It does so because reality, being what it is, requires such an approach, especially if we are to acquire an adequate understanding of the 'bigger picture', or how capitalism works as a whole, where and how we fit into it, and what can be done to help bring about the kind of world we so badly need. What's at stake? Only everything. Most knowledge may be said to derive from 'connecting the dots' or from 'breaking up what is taken to be the whole in any sphere into its constituent 'dots', or 'parts'. The question that remains is that of where the dots come from, and what they consist of. The more popular answer is that they exist in the world as logically separate and easily separable things ('factors', in the social sciences) that can enter into relations with other things, but can also remain independent of them. Set apart from each other at the moment of conception, such things are also viewed as static and unchanging until something from outside interrupts their 'peace' and brings about a change of one kind or another. This view, which is usually taken to reflect everyone's perception of the world, is called the 'philosophy of external relations'. An alternative view on the nature of the parts into which reality is divided is that they are themselves relations, such that the main connections referred to above are contained as aspects of each part in turn, the main difference between them being the vantage point that each provides for viewing and investigating the others, and the whole to which they all belong. But it is not only these relations that are held to be internal to all the elements that are directly or indirectly related to one another. The same applies to the changes that these relations have undergone, are undergoing now, and are likely to undergo in the future. The world of separate and static things has been replaced here by a world of evolving relations (or mutually dependent processes). In this view, which is called the 'philosophy of internal relations', nothing has disappeared from (or been added to) 'what's out there', but everything has been reorganised in order to appear at least a little and often a great deal differently than before. How to study such a world; what to prioritise; how to put together the results of such studies--for oneself and then for others; what kind of criticisms are relevant; how to conceive the relation between theory and practice; and even what kind of questions to ask have all undergone the equivalent of a revolution. For Marx, whose 'ultimate aim', as stated in the Preface of his major work, Capital, Vol. I, is 'to lay bare the economic law of motion of modern society' (i. …