Machinery, Productive Subjectivity and the Limits to Capitalism in Capital and the Grundrisse

摘要

This paper has argued that, in their unity, the Grundrisse and Capital provide the elements for the scientific exposition of the determinations of capital leading to the social constitution of the revolutionary working class. As we have seen, Marx's treatment of large-scale industry in Capital differs from the exposition he had initially formulated in his research manuscripts known as Grundrisse. This has led many scholars to see the two perspectives as somehow incompatible, perhaps even reflecting a change of mind on the part of Marx, from an early optimistic view of the emancipatory potentialities of the forms of real subsumption to a more pessimistic view of the latter as yet another expression of the despotic rule of dead over living labor. I have offered a different reading of this aspect of Marx's intellectual development.