György Lukács's ontological interpretation of Marx's theory of value

• Grant number: 16/17054-4
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships abroad - Research Internship - Doctorate
• Start date: March 15, 2017
• End date: March 14, 2018
• Field of knowledge: Humanities - Sociology - Fundamentals of Sociology
• Principal Investigator: Jesus José Ranieri
• Grantee: Murillo Augusto de Souza van der Laan
• Supervisor: Ingo Elbe
• Host Institution: Instituto de Filosofia e Ciências Humanas (IFCH). Universidade Estadual de Campinas (UNICAMP). Campinas , SP, Brazil
• Institution abroad: Carl von Ossietzky University, Germany
• Associated to the scholarship: 14/10520-4 - The lukácsian ontological concept of value: advancements and limitations, BP.DR

Abstract

At the end of the 1950s, György Lukács proposed a rebirth of marxism that would be able to face the neopositivists developments of the bourgeois philosophy and the theoretical distortions of Marx advanced by stalinism. Though he could not finish his research, he left an ontological reading of Marx. In the core of this conception, we find labour as the founding category of the social being and model of the praxis. Investigating this complex, Lukács presented us his ontological idea of value as an intricate and dynamic relation between teleology and causality based on a radically historical, immanent, unitary and objective perspective that does not abdicate a reflexion about the consciousness' active role in the causal network of reality. His analysis focuses on the unfolding and the connection between the different forms of valuation: those related to use values, to economic values and to the range of "not economic" values. It is this valuation concept that this project takes as its object, advancing the hypothesis that the lukácsian conception is fruitful to interpret social values, specially economic values, since undertakes a dialectical comprehension of objectivity and subjectivity in the field of valuations, trying to keep distance from the conceptions that obliterate the role of consciousness in the reproduction of the social being, but also from the ones that overestimate this same role. Nevertheless, regarding economic values, Lukács strain the comprehension of Marx's value theory, interpreting it as valid to all social formations. This represents a limit, in our provisonal understanding, of the lukácsian conception of human emancipation.