‘Capital accumulation and class struggle: On the content and form of social reproduction in its alienated form’

GUIDO STAROSTA

Manchester, UK

Congreso; International Symposium on Marxian Theory; 2010

This paper reconstructs the precise form in which Marx introduces the class struggle in his dialectical presentation and discusses the implications that follow from it. In contradistinction to many contemporary readings that tend to ontologise the class struggle, thereby turning it into the content of the movement of social life in its capitalist form, the chapter argues that it is a necessary form in which the valorisation of capital realises its determinations. The reason for this does not lie in abstract methodological principles. Rather, it is an expression of the concrete development of the historically-specific alienation inherent in the commodity-form; in the form of total social capital, the materialised social relation between private and independent individuals (value) becomes determined as the concrete subject of the movement of modern society. This does not imply the denial of the transformative powers of human practice personified by the workers. What this does imply is that whatever transformative powers the political action of workers might have – both capital-reproducing and capital-transcending political action – must be an immanent determination begotten by the alienated movement of capital as subject and not external to it. And in its simplest determination (i.e. as an expression of the formal subsumption of labour to capital), the class struggle only exists as a necessary form of capital’s reproduction but not of its transcendence. The paper concludes that the determinations of the revolutionary mode of existence of the class struggle must be therefore sought in the real subsumption of labout to capital (an argument that I developed in my Bergamo paper from 2008).