Marx would also go a step further to maintain that our concentration on the distinct, abstract, and atomized manifestations of cognitive or perceptual experience is not the result of any careful critical empirical analysis, but rather, is the uncritical ideological offspring of one historically particular material mode of distinct, abstract, atomized social relatedness. Thus we could say that misplaced concreteness is a cognitive, and all too often cognitivistic, expression of the capitalist mode of social relations.
Men are the producers of their conceptions, ideas, etc.—real, active men, as they are conditioned by a definite development of their productive forces and of the intercourse corresponding to these, up to its furthest forms. Consciousness can never be anything else than conscious existence, and the existence of men is their actual life-process. If in all ideology men and their circumstances appear upside-down as in a camera obscura, this phenomenon arises just as much from their historical lifeprocess as the inversion of objects on the retina does from their physical life-process. (GI, 47)
… whence and why the historical prevalence of the fallacy of misplaced concreteness? Why do substance metaphysics and a Newtonian space-time dominate the modern era—that era that accompanied the decline of the feudal economy? Why are we moving away from them now? To be coherent, the commission of the fallacy must be explained from within the processive viewpoint. This is precisely what Marx explicitly does.
Anne Fairchild Pomeroy, Marx and Whitehead: Process, Dialectics, and the Critique of Capitalism
