RAFAEL VERSOLATO GILBERTO

The resumption of discussion about the capitalist organization of society at the end of the 20th century – at least since December 1991 – has called into question the meaning of the theoretical work that until then had been an unavoidable reference for understanding modern societies, namely Karl Marx's Capital. The general objective of this thesis is to show that this work is organized by a form of rigorous exposition, which has different levels of abstraction, in such a way that it is constitutive of the content. Considering that Book I is moment – in rigorous sense – of the exposition of the 3 Books of the work, the specific objective of this work consists of investigating the presentation of the capital-relation (Kapitalverhältnis) in Book I. Based on this, the hypothesis to be verified is whether the overall exposition of Book I or its architectonics is constitutive of the content of the object being presented. In fact, if this is the case, it is not possible to assume in the Marxian text an expository linearity guided by an ideal of "clarity" of content defined a priori. The research procedure was guided by the consideration that the theoretical exposition of the object is made by rigorous logical construction; at the same time, this exposition derives from the demands of what “is” the object presented; this relationship between logic and ontology inarguably involves language. The execution of this work required recourse to the manuscripts that condensed, for the first time, the set of themes that would be developed in the future in the 3 books of Capital, that is, the manuscripts of 1857-1858 known as the Grundrisse; the development of the results required the writing of 4 chapters and 3 complementary texts. The thesis that is demonstrated – or the result that this work arrives at – is that section VI (The Wage) of Book I plays a decisive role in presenting the form of manifestation (Erscheinungsform) and concealment of the capital-relation (Kapitalverhältnis), and therefore in understanding that the exposition of Book I presents the object (capital) in its pure form, without being reduced to mere empirical description. In this way, the investigation into architectonics reveals that it presents a content that is preserved because it is concealed when it manifests itself, so that the meaning of Book I of Capital is re-signified, which leads to a reconsideration of the interpretations made by tradition.