Capital as “Automatic Subject” and the Class Struggle: On the Form-Determinations of Working-Class Political Action in the Critique of Political Economy

This article develops a reading of the precise form in which Marx introduces the class struggle in his dialectical presentation in Capital and argues that, in its simplest form-determination, the class struggle is the most general direct social relation between collective personifications of commodities through which the unity of the indirect relations of capitalist production asserts it-self. More specifically, it shows that the class struggle is the necessary concrete form taken by the purchase of labourpower at its full value and, therefore, by the attainment of the socially-constituted normal material reproduction of the productive attributes of wage-labourers in a capitalistic “exploitable shape”, i.e. in the conditions demanded by the valorisation of the total social capital. In this sense, the class struggle is a necessary form in which the valorisation of capital realises its own immanent determinations. The reason for this does not lie in the ab-stract methodological principles of structuralism. Rather, it is an expression of the concrete de-velopment of the historically specific alienation inherent in the generalised commodity form; in the form of the total social capital, the materialised social relation between private and inde-pendent individuals becomes determined as the concrete “automatic subject” of the movement of modern society. Thus, the article argues that the class struggle must be grasped as a neces-sary mediating form assumed by the very “automatism” which governs the movement of the ob-jectified form of capitalist social relations. It goes without saying that this does not imply the de-nial of the transformative powers of human practice personified by wageworkers. But it does imply that whatever transformative powers their political action might have – whether capital-reproducing or capital-transcending– must be an immanent determination begotten by the movement of the valorisation of capital and not external to it.