The Historical Determination of the Capitalist Mode of Production and of the Working Class as the Revolutionary Subject

Abstract

Prominent Marxist theoreticians conceive the working class as a revolutionary subject based on moral or ethical superiority, a natural will for freedom, self-valorization, the need to avoid barbarism, etc. From a materialist viewpoint, human history consists of the transformation of the material conditions of social life through labor. Capitalism is the historically specific development of human subjectivity by transforming the powers of free individual labor into those of the social labor consciously organized by the collective laborer who privately performs it. Thus, the material product of the labor of the working class increasingly consists of the development of its capacity to scientifically organize production, whereas this capacity goes on confronting it as an alien social power embodied in that same product, that is capital, that falls beyond its control. With its free consciousness thus embodying alienation, the working class carries this absolute contradiction inherent in the socialization of private labor (a contradiction that transcends the contradiction between social production and private appropriation) beyond its limit, until revolutionarily organizing labor as a direct social power. As a historical social relation, freedom is transformed by this revolutionary transformation of the materiality of labor: the absence of personal domination based on the objective consciousness concerning one's own individuality as the bearer of productive social powers annihilates the absence of personal domination based on submitting to domination by the social powers embodied in the product of one's own labor.