This chapter undertakes to discover a means by which the practice of literary criticism can derive an imperative for activism that confronts and changes the social conditions it critiques. Through intertextual close readings, Smith explores the case of Karl Marx’s use of world literature in his critique of capitalism and the state set within the history of the development of continental philosophy. Smith pays particular attention to Marx’s uses of quotations from and allusions to world literature (including Homer, Sophocles, Virgil, Shakespeare, Cervantes, Goethe, and Heine) to register the harmful inversions caused by an economy based on money and commodities. If literature registers the contradictions of its time in its form and content, then the urge to resolve those contradictions sits restless in literature. When Marx inserts literature into his theoretical texts, he transfers into his texts the impulse of the contradiction to resolve itself. Similarly, literary criticism is well-placed to unfold clear, obvious and necessary logic that leads to activism.