Marx’s Capital, Method and Revolutionary Subjectivity

Abstract

The key theoretical concern of this book is to trace the way in which Marx discovered and developed the determinations of the emancipatory subjectivity of the working class. In order to achieve this, a critical reading of Marx's early writings from the perspective of his later works was carried out in the first part of the thesis. Specifically, the analysis attempted to find in both the insights and limitations of the former and clues towards the direction that Marx's later development would take. One of the original results of my reassessment of Marx's early work is to uncover the methodological significance of those texts for Marx's re-appropriation of Hegel's dialectical method and the consequent determination of social science as practical criticism. The second part of this book consists in a critical analysis of the ways in which these early insights crystallised in the writing of Capital. The aim of this critical reading of Marx's most important work is to provide a reconstruction which goes beyond traditional Marxist theories and their unresolved tension between the forms of objectivity and the forms of subjectivity of capitalist society. In particular, it is argued that most readings of Marx tend to see revolutionary subjectivity as abstractly free and as the opposite of the subjectivity alienated in capital. My own investigation of Marx's critical theory aims to show that, for him, emancipatory subjectivity itself is a social form of the alienated subjectivity of the modern individual. I show that the genesis of that emancipatory subject can be found in the transformations in the materiality of social life brought about by the real subsumption of humanity to capital. Finally, the book attempts to thematise the intrinsic connection between these questions of subjectivity and Marx's dialectical method.