ABSTRACT
Juan Iñigo Carrera’s chapter (‘Dialectics on its Feet, or the Form of the Consciousness of the Working Class as Historical Subject’) argues that the need to place dialectics on its feet is not a matter of adapting Hegel’s logic to a materialist point of view, but is instead the necessity of transcending the historical character of logic itself. It starts by considering that Marx recognises consciousness as the way in which human subjects govern their actions as individual organs of their process of social metabolism. Therefore, he recognises the forms of consciousness, hence, scientific method itself, as historically determined forms of social relations. Consequently, he faces logical representation itself as the historical form of a consciousness which bears the contradictory necessity of producing objective knowledge in order to produce relative surplus-value, while at the same time it must remain blind to its own alienation. Thus, logical representation ideally places into relation the concrete real forms according to a constructive necessity, which appears as the objective product of a naturalised abstract free consciousness. On the other hand, Marx’s Capital follows in thought the real movement of the general social relation of the working class, thereby discovering the necessity of its consciousness as an alienated being that bears the necessity of producing itself as an alienated consciousness that is aware of its own alienation and of the historical powers it derives therefrom.
KEYWORDS: Dialectic; Hegel; Logical representation; Conciusness; Objective knowledge