Medida e infinitude na "Doutrina do ser" e na passagem do dinheiro para o capital

Abstract

The different formulations of the introduction to capital between the Grundrisse (1857–8) and the publication of Capital (1867) led Marxology to a series of debates concerning the nature of the relationship between the categories of simple circulation (e.g., commodity, value, money) and the concept of capital, as well as on the continuities and discontinuities of the transition from part I to part II of Capital. This thesis aims to provide an interpretation of the importance of the concept of “measureless” in the Science of logic in the formulation of the concept of capital in Karl Marx’s economic works. Marx analyzes money in the process of accumulation without measure as a bad infinity, and, in his next logical move, explains how the transition to capital happens. The measureless, which would lead to the presentation of the “essence” in the Science of logic, is understood as the bad infinity of money in the incessant process of accumulation. The development of an ontology based on the possibility of quantitative qualities and of a category for the measure demands that the singular, the particular, and the universal be integrated into a totality in which they are likely to be developed from each other. The passage from money to capital depends on the understanding of the determined being (product, commodity, and money) as posited by the essence (capital) and that its ability to create its own conditions of production and determine patterns of exchange, distribution, and consumption give it the form of a system in which its terminations function as internally related conditions. If, before, the act of social production originally 8

appeared as the placing of exchange values and this, in its further development, as circulation — as a fully developed movement of exchange values among themselves — , now, circulation itself returns to activity that puts or produces exchange value. In short, the analysis of simple circulation leads to the general concept of capital, because, in the bourgeois mode of production, simple circulation exists only as an assumption of capital and an assumption for capital. Money as capital becomes the condition for production and then returns from circulation to production.