Class, contradiction and antagonism

Abstract

The indistinction between contradiction and antagonism also characterizes the conceptualization of class in open Marxism. In this chapter we recover the notion of class as an antagonistic social relation, but we try to show that its most fruitful development requires recovering the distinction between contradiction and antagonism. To this we will devote the first section. There we will raise, in the first place, the distinctions between contradiction and external opposition (or antithesis) and between external opposition and antagonism to then, in the second place, point out in what sense the relation of capitalist exploitation is objectively contradictory. In the third section, on that basis, we will present a conceptualization of class centered on the relation of exploita-tion, but which understands the wage relation as a mode of subordination of concrete labor to abstract labor, that is, as an essential moment in the subsumption of labor to capital. In the conclusions, we will briefly discuss some consequences of this conceptualization for the relationship between class struggles and struggles against other forms of oppression.