A individualidade em O capital – livro 1

Abstract

In order to investigate how the question of individuality appears in Capital – Volume I (1867), by Karl Marx, we conducted an immanent analysis of the Marxian text, drawing on the contributions of authors who elucidated the ontological character of his work, such as José Chasin and György Lukács. We found that, although the first volume does not present this complex in its full concreteness, it explicates the fundamental determinations that shape the forms of individuation within capitalist sociability. Thus, we identified that Marx reveals how individuals are constrained to act as personifications (personae) of economic categories through class relations, antagonistically expressed in the figures of the capitalist class and the working class. This made it possible to understand how the determinations arising from this social form subsume individuals under the autonomized dynamics of the valorization of value—as the effective subject of this mode of production—intensifying the production and reproduction of life within the limits of the functions that individuals must assume in order to animate this movement. We therefore conclude that individuality is effectively present in Capital – Volume I, not as the full expression of Marx’s understanding of this complex, but through the analysis of the forms of individuation that restrict the possibilities for the development of individuality.