What is "critical" about critical realism?

Dan Little asks What is "critical" about critical realism?

Little lists three (3) elements of "critical" philosophy:

1. Critical thinking as emancipatory: This meaning is reflected in Marx's eleventh thesis on Feuerbach. "The philosophers have sought to understand the world; the point, however, is to change it."
2. Critique as illusion-destroying: Another dimension of the idea of criticism in the Marxist tradition is the idea of "critique" -- focused intellectual effort to uncover the implicit (and misleading) assumptions of various schemes of thought and policy.
3. Critique as self-creation: This involves the feature of "reflexiveness" that obtains in the social world. We constitute the social world, for better or worse. And the forms of knowing that we gain through the social sciences also give rise to forms of creating of new social forms -- again, for better or worse.

The third point is really a really a realisation of the maxim that the subjective influences the objective, and the objective influences the subjective.

In essence, we are to use critical realism to uncover the reality behind the scenes and change that reality for the betterment of humankind.