Iñigo Carrera, J. (2002c). Transformations in capital accumulation: From the national production of an universal labourer to the international fragmentation of the productive subjectivity of the working-class. Documento de Investigación del Centro para la Investigación como Crítica Práctica, Buenos Aires.

ABSTRACT

The revolutionary action of the working-class needs to organise itself through the awareness of its concrete determinations. Since we are focusing on a process characterised by international integration and fragmentation, it could seem that the most concrete approach is that circumscribed to the economic policies that prevailed in the different national processes of capital accumulation involved. Still, this approach ends up by bringing down all historically-specific necessity to the immediate action of those that personify capital. Thus, apologetics of capitalism presents national capitalists and state-bureaucrats as the social subjects whose abstract will rules the historical movement. Opposite to this sterility it could seem that the starting point lies in capitalism’s global unity, once this unity is represented as the movement of accumulation regimes, their rise, ‘failure’ and fall. Still, then, the subject of historical change seems to have vanished, as if this were ‘a process without a subject’. Once again, abstraction has displaced the concrete. It could seem, then, that the answer lies on circumscribing the global unity of accumulation to its concrete manifestation: class struggle. Still, considered in itself, class struggle comes down to a series of confrontations in which, now the working-class prevails and advances, now it is defeated and retreats, at the rhythm imposed by the development of working-class consciousness. Thus, consciousness appears as that which determines by itself the working-class as an historical subject. Even the most concrete form is turned into an abstraction when it is separated from its determinations. Human natural history consists in the history of the transformation of the material conditions of social life through labour. The development of the human being as a historical subject is but the development of its capacity to act in a conscious and voluntary way over the rest of nature, to transform it into a means for itself. In other words, it is the development of human productive subjectivity. This development is the only concrete materialistic, and therefore the only scientific starting point to produce the co nsciousness about any historical movement. Therefore, this will be our starting point here, to unfold the concrete determinations of the current transformations of capital accumulation and its present crisis.
KEYWORDS: Productive subjectivity; International division of labour; National form of capital accumulation

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