Iñigo Carrera, J. (2003a), El Capital: razón histórica, sujeto revolucionario y conciencia [Capital: Historical Reason, Revolutionary Subject and Consciousness]. Imago Mundi.

by
Iñigo Carrera, Juan

El Capital: razón histórica, sujeto revolucionario y conciencia [Capital: Historical Reason, Revolutionary Subject and Consciousness]

Ediciones Cooperativas, Buenos Aires, 2003. Second edition, Imago Mundi, Buenos Aires, 2013.

ISBN: 978-950-793-161-1

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Part I: Historical reason and revolutionary subject

Chapter 1: The historical reason to be of the capitalist mode of production and the determination of the working class as revolutionary subject.

  1. The question today
  2. The commodity, or the productive powers of social labour performed as private individual labour
  3. Capital, or the productive powers of the doubly-free labourer
  4. Relative surplus-value, or the constant revolution in the productive subjectivity of the doubly-free labourer
  5. Concentration of capital and the state, or the full development of the productive powers of social labour performed as private labour
  6. Idealist inversions
  7. The historical end of capitalism, or the working class as revolutionary subject

Appendix I: Working-class consciousness and the development of productive subjectivity

Appendix II: How critical political economy empties the capitalist mode of production of its historical specificity

Part II: The concrete historical development of capital

Chapter 2: Transformations of capital accumulation. From the national production of a universal worker to the international fragmentation of the productive subjectivity of the working class

  1. The starting point
  2. The materiality of the production process and the productive subjectivity of the worker
  3. Accumulation under its classic national form
  4. Handicraft skill in the machinery system and workers’ political power
  5. Latent labouring surplus-population and cheap degraded productive subjectivity
  6. The national process of capital accumulation in Japan
  7. The fragmentation of the working-class within classic countries
  8. New sources of latent labouring surplus-population
  9. International fragmentation of productive subjectivity and differentiation in the capacity to accumulate
  10. The specificity of capital accumulation in China
  11. Towards general overproduction by means of the international fragmentation of productive subjectivity
  12. The manifestations of general overproduction in East Asia
  13. Working-class internationalism

– Statistical Appendix

Chapter 3: The capitalist state

  1. General autonomous organisation by the market and direct organisation by the state
  2. The historical specificity of the state as the political representative of social capital
  3. The development of the capitalist state as a necessary concrete form of the production of relative surplus-value
  4. The reversion from the interventionist state to the neoliberal state throughout the last quarter of a century
  5. The national form of capital accumulation in relation to its centralisation
  6. The production of large-scale industry’s worker
  7. What kind of political action for the working class today?

Chapter 4: Apropos the USSR

  1. The realisation of the historical powers of the capitalist mode of production
  2. The national form of capital accumulation
  3. The ideological inversion of the absolute national centralization of capital as realised socialism
  4. Capital’s retreat from the production of a universal labourer to the production of a differentiated labourer
  5. The revolutionary consciousness of the working class

Chapter 5: The general rate of profit and its realisation through the differentiation of industrial capitals

  1. Average industrial capital
  2. The centralisation and valorisation of industrial capital in relation to interest-bearing capital
  3. Small industrial capital
  4. Release of surplus-value by small industrial capitals
  5. The fragmentation of the collective worker’s productive subjectivity based on the subsistence of small industrial capitals
  6. Capital specialised in the production of an increase in the productivity of labour
  7. From the differentiation of capitals to the differentiation of the national processes of capital accumulation

Chapter 6: Cycles and crises in capital accumulation

  1. Capitalist crisis
  2. Cyclical determinations of the process of social metabolism that arise from the determination of labour’s productivity by fluctuations in natural conditions
  3. Cyclical determinations inherent in the commodity-form of the general social relation
  4. Cyclical determinations inherent in the capital-form of the general social relation
  5. The manifestation of the historical nature of the capitalist mode of production in the cyclical movements of accumulation
  6. An exploratory identification of the current concrete phase of global capitalist accumulation

– Statistical Appendix

Part III: The scientific method

Chapter 7: The dialectical method. A critique of scientific theory

  1. The point is to change it
  2. Green is the tree of life
  3. Grey is all theory…
  4. The historical nature of scientific theory
  5. Dialectical cognition; i.e., the organisation of action by means of the reproduction of one’s own necessity in thought
  6. Marx’s advance towards conscious revolutionary action;
  7. Marxism’s retreat into ideology

Chapter 8: Mathematical knowledge. A critique of formal logic and calculus

  1. The specificity of quantitative determination
  2. The specificity of the knowledge of quantitative determination, i.e. mathematics
  3. The quantum, from sets to numbers
  4. Critique of mathematical analysis (calculus)
  5. The simplest development of matter into its quantitative determination: time, space, universe, movement.

Chapter 9: The development of the dialectical method by Marx

  1. The method of investigation
  2. The method of exposition and its critical reading

Chapter 10: From the critique of political economy to critical political economy. The case of Rubin and his heirs

  1. The inversion of the reproduction of the concrete in thought into logical representation; or how to present private labour as if it were its opposite
  2. The ideological content of the inversion performed by Rubin; or political economy as a contradiction in terms
  3. The modern heirs of Rubin; or critical political economy as the negation of the historical specificity of the revolutionary powers of the working class

SUMMARY

What is to be done? Does the question consist in not having had acted after interpreting the world, or is it the interpretation itself as the basis for organising the transformative action, where the problem lies? The Scientific theory has shown that the limited scope of any theoretical representation is to be a way of conceiving reality, a way of interpreting the world. Conscious human action seems to clash, thus, against an absolute limit to the knowledge of its own necessity. This is not an abstract epistemological issue. If scientific knowledge was limited to dwell on interpretation, the transformation of present society into a society based on freely conscious individuality (socialism or communism) would be doomed to impossibility. Again: what is to be done? We can only face the question in a radical way. This is, starting from a critical confrontation of the determinations of our social being, putting everything in doubt.

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