Entre a superexploração e o colapso: o conceito de trabalho em Oliveira e Kurz

Abstract

This dissertation critically analyzes the status of labor in capitalist modernity through a comparative reading of Francisco de Oliveira and Robert Kurz, taking as its axis the Marxian critique of value and abstract labor. Starting from the distinction between an “esoteric” Marx and an “exoteric” Marx, we reconstruct the foundations of the critique of political economy as historically determined social forms that structure capitalist sociability.

In the first moment, the research examines how the commodity form and abstract labor organize modernity, producing an impersonal domination mediated by value and money, which extends to social temporality and forms of life. We then analyze the work of Francisco de Oliveira, emphasizing his critique of dualistic reason, conservative modernization, and the problematic incorporation of labor into Brazilian capitalism. We highlight how, in the periphery, accumulation takes place through the fusion of absolute and relative surplus value, structural informality, and exclusion as a functional element, which erodes the material bases for the formation of a revolutionary subject. Nevertheless, we show that Oliveira remains anchored in the hope of emancipation via class struggle and state mediation, revealing the limits of his critical radicalism.

Thus, we present the categorial critique of Robert Kurz, who radicalizes the Marxian critique by interpreting labor not as the ontological foundation of emancipation, but as a historically specific social form of capitalism. Kurz diagnoses the structural crisis of valorization and the obsolescence of labor as a form of social mediation, understanding financialization and the state as expressions of a collapsing capital.

Finally, the comparison between Oliveira and Kurz highlights fundamental tensions between a social critique still situated within class-based Marxism and a negative critique that points to the historical exhaustion of this form of mediation, contributing to the contemporary debate on labor, crisis, and emancipation.