Natureza e função do contrato de salário para a exploração da força de trabalho no modo de produção capitalista

Abstract

This dissertation deals about the wage contract, aiming to identify its nature and the function it plays for the exploitation of work in the capitalist mode of production. We understand the wage contract as a legal distinctive mediation essential for the realization of the social relationship of genuinely capitalist production. Only in the form of capitalist sociability does the exploitation of labor is operate through a contractual disguise. The contract celebrates the apparently egalitarian agreement between equal and free subjects of law – workers and capitalists – for the exchange of equivalent goods, that is, the exchange between labor power and money. This work presents itself as a theoretical-bibliographic research, based on critical social theory and is divided into three sections. In the first one, we discuss the theoretical and philosophical foundations of the wage contract from Hegel and Marx. In the second, we approach the central elements of labor relations in pre-capitalist societies and their particularity in the capitalist mode of production, identifying, through the analysis of the process of primitive accumulation of capital, the historical-material foundations that gave rise to the emergence of labor wage earner, and the capitalist mode of production, and the contract to mediate the purchase and sale relationship between capital and labor. In the last section, we carry out the dialectical movement from the sphere of circulation to the sphere of production, in order to identify the essence of the wage contract in the process of mystification of exploitation in the sphere of circulation. Finally, we understand that the wage contract contributes to the obscuring of the exploitation of the workforce in the bourgeois order.