Abstract

… The ultimate contradiction of capitalism—in the words of Marx—can be understood and should be described as follows: capitalism is the value-system, its development and its maintenance (money being the external value); value is produced exclusively by work done by men and women; the fate of capital is thus the fate of this work—the subjective praxis of the individual. Inasmuch as the real process of production includes within it the accomplishment of this praxis, it is precisely the same thing as a process of value-formation, a process of valorization. *From here stems the first moment of Marx's problematics: his analysis of capital as it effectively exists; in other words, his analysis of the process of its formation, which in turn leads to the analysis of the real process of production and the revelation, in this process, of the element that produces value, namely, this subjective praxis. Economic analysis, therefore, is nothing more than the analysis of the effects of the real component parts of the process; the composition of capital into value refers, inasmuch as it is an organic composition, to its technical composition and this is where its whole explanation lies.