A economia como sistema da representação em Karl Marx

Abstract

The object of this research is Karl Marxs understanding of economy, as elaborated in his mature work, namely Das Kapital. It presents the thesis that Marx sees the socioeconomic order as a system of representation, as a symbolic configuration of experience and sociability. Its main hypothesis is that it is in the characterization of the fetishism of this reality, as inverted sociability, reified, denied in its own affirmation, by the autonomization of its constitutive representations, that the radical intelligibility of economics is unveiled in Marxs later work. Fetishism, therefore, is a central category not only in the Marxian criticism of this economy investigated in detail, but also in the definition of the nature of economics in Marx. This dissertation is structured in four chapters. In the first, the Marxian philosophy of economy is explained and linked to modernitys tradition of ontologic expressivism. In the second chapter, the dialectics of fetishism is systematically discussed based on the unfolding of the forms of economic life under the capital-relation as a representational ideal that praxiologically orders reality. In the third, the research presents the concept of representation in Marx and its relation to economics, analyzing the forms of representation in economic life as relations of objectivity, intersubjectivity and transcendence. The chapter also discusses how, from the Marxian critique of capital as fetishism, the economic order can be defined as a system of representation. In the final chapter, from Marxs thoughts on pre and post capitalist non-fetishist economic forms, this work attempts to confirm the hypothesis that any economic reality, for Marx, is a system of representation.