Corpo e Capital em Marx

Abstract

This research aims to investigate the relationship between body and capital in the writings of Karl Marx, tracing a path whose starting point will be the Economic-Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844, where we will seek to understand why Marx directs himself to an explanation of the production of human corporeality, of human senses, while criticizing work under the bourgeois mode of production in these writings that represent, in his trajectory, the beginning of his studies on political economy. We will seek to investigate how this theorization of the body appears as a presupposition and position in the critical studies of Marx's maturity that will be systematized in the magnum opus Capital, book I. In this, by expressing the movement of capital becoming a subject, Marx reveals to us the relationship between human corporeality and the incorporeality of value using the physiological concept of “metabolism” both as an explanatory analogy about the functioning of the capital production mode, and as a real representation of the condition of the body in the value production process, where bodies, undifferentiated in abstract work and, at the same time, hierarchical in the market, appear as organs of capital that vitally functionalize its determinations and express its contradictions.