Abstract
This essay argues that a materialist ontology can contribute to a renewal of the analysis of contemporary labour processes and indicate new possibilities for addressing workers struggles. An ontological/explanatory critique is indispensable to a transformative praxis that confronts the capitalist organization of labour and creates alternatives for the emancipation of labour and humankind. Part of this critique would have to be directed to theory itself, including Labour Process Theory. The main contributions of a materialist ontology in this respect are related to: commodity production inserted in a wider historical context; the overcoming of the subjectivist/objectivist dilemma; labour processes and struggles as open-ended dynamics in which the possibility of freedom always plays a central role; the focus on the qualitative aspects of value (social form), its manifestations and expressions in concrete labour processes and the ways it conditions or determines social relations of production, actions and struggles; the consideration of everyday life and its ontological deep determinants; the analysis of workers organisations and struggles as social exercises of freedom (conscious choices) under structural historically constructed constrains.
Highlights
Tiene rol central; foco en los aspectos cualitativos del valor, sus manifestaciones y expresiones en procesos de trabajo concretos y las formas por las cuales condiciona o determina relaciones de producción, acciones y luchas; la consideración de la vida cotidiana y sus determinantes ontológicos profundos; la análisis de organizaciones de trabajadores y luchas como ejercicios sociales de libertad bajo restricciones históricamente construidas
This essay argues that a materialist ontology can contribute to a renewal of the analysis of contemporary labour processes and indicate new possibilities for addressing workers struggles
The effort is to have this in mind and study labour processes and the political activity of workers as historically concrete relationships within the social totality, retaining ‘the precise separation of 368 the real, as a process that exists in itself, from the ways by which it comes to be known’ (LUKÁCS, 1978a, p. 8)
Summary
This essay argues that a materialist ontology can contribute to a renewal of the analysis of contemporary labour processes and indicate new possibilities for addressing workers struggles. The coherence of capitalism[7] is achieved through an abstraction of the real process in which emerges the category of value: ‘an objectively 365 central category in the ontological sense’, ‘the central category of social production’ that results from a historical process[8]
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