GABRIEL BARMAK SZEMERE

This dissertation investigates the historical character of the economic categories of "value," "abstract labor," and "capital" developed by Karl Marx in Capital and other mature works, seeking to understand how these categories not only describe the material dimension of the production process, common to all historical periods, but also reveal the specific social forms that organize production and socioeconomic relations in capitalism. This work explores to what extent Marxian economic theory can be seen as a theory of history, capable of elucidating the historical development tendencies of the capitalist mode of production. As capitalist social forms historically consolidate, grounded in the opposition between wage labor and capital, they introduce a new form of temporality, the "logical-historical temporality of capital," which dictates the general directions of capitalist historical movement. This movement, however, is marked by a central contradiction: while it promotes the cyclical reproduction of capitalist relations, ensuring their historical continuity, it also drives the transformation of productive forces and social relations in general, which in turn imposes obstacles to the reproduction of capital, resulting in economic crises and social catastrophes. Thus, the historical movement of capitalism is both cyclical and tendential, pointing to the permanence as well as the necessity of overcoming the capitalist mode of production.