Between the absolute, relative surplus-value and accumulation of capital: building the concept of class struggle in Capital.

• Grant number: 24/02789-5
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships in Brazil - Master
• Start date: November 01, 2024
• End date: October 31, 2026
• Field of knowledge: Humanities - History - Theory and Philosophy of History
• Principal Investigator: Jorge Luís da Silva Grespan
• Grantee: Maria Luísa Ams Fernandes Vieira
• Host Institution: Faculdade de Filosofia, Letras e Ciências Humanas (FFLCH). Universidade de São Paulo (USP). São Paulo , SP, Brazil

Abstract

The trilogy of Capital, the meaning of its dialectics and the conceptual problems in Karl Marx are quite debated. Still very little explored in this work of maturity, however, the class struggle does not have great expressiveness as an object of investigation within the context in which Marx establishes the nexus of development of the concept of capital in the concreteness of society unveiled by him. The problem that guides this research is precisely how the concept of class struggle is present and goes through the construction of Book I of Capital, specifically in chapters VIII: The Working Day, XII: Division of Labor and Manufacturing, XIII: Machinery and Modern Industry and XXIII: The General Law of Capitalist Accumulation. In short, what is proposed in this project is to reassemble how the working class is progressively characterized and what its movement of action within the class conflicts throughout these chapters, in view of the process of immanent deepening of categorical contradictions in the method of exposition of the work, between absolute (chapter VIII), relative (chapters XII and XIII) and the process of capital accumulation (chapter XXIII). The final goal is to construct an interpretation of what Marx proposed as class struggle in Book I, defining this concept within the articulation between the transformations of social forms and categories.