Machinery, productive subjectivity and the limits to capitalism in Capital and the Grundrisse

GUIDO STAROSTA

Science & Society

Guilford Press

Año: 2011 p. 42 - 58

0036-8237

Marx’s exposition of the forms of the real subsumption of labour to capital – in particular, the system of machinery of large-scale industry -, constitutes the dialectical presentation of the determinations of revolutionary subjectivity. This means that the development of the emancipatory subject is for Marx the immanent result of the unfolding of the reified forms of social mediation of capitalist society. More specifically, it is the outcome of transformations of the materiality of human productive subjectivity that they bring about. The essence of this capitalist transformation of the production process of human life lies in the mutation of the productive attributes of the collective labourer according to a determinate tendency: the individual organs of the latter eventually become universal productive subjects. This is the inner material content underlying the political revolutionary subjectivity of the proletariat. However, Marx’s dialectical exposition of those transformations in Capital is somehow truncated and does not unfold the plenitude of the material determinations underlying the revolutionary being of the working class. The latter is presented as no more than an abstract possibility.  A gap therefore remains between the ´dialectic of human labour´ unfolded in the chapters on relative surplus-value in Capital, and the revolutionary conclusions at the end of Volume 1 in the chapter on ‘The Historical Tendency of Capital Accumulation’. Through a careful reading of the relevant passages of the so-called ‘Fragment on Machines’ from the Grundrisse, it is possible to find the elements for the completion of the systematic exposition of determinations of revolutionary subjectivity.