Capital, propriedade e transição: a “expropriação dos expropriadores” segundo Karl Marx

Abstract

This thesis deals with the well-known socialist slogan of the expropriation of the expropriators from Karl Marx’s point of view. Departing from the existence of controversial and divergent interpretations of this slogan within the socialist movement – already since the end of the 19th century –, the thesis aims to understand the meaning Marx gave to this expression, determining the origin and foundation of the expropriation of the expropriators, as well as the type of transformations in production and property that its development would imply. The aim is to recover the ontological and historical foundations of the expropriation of the expropriators, analysing this expropriation in connection with the fundamental elements of the process of capital production and its main tendencies of development – elements that were the focus of Marx’s studies throughout his life, the main result of which is recorded in the work Capital. The present thesis is based on the immanent study of Marx’s ideas contained in the first volume of Capital and integrates in a complementary way elements from other works and texts of the author that deal with the subject. Its results reveal the materialist foundation and the processual and historical character of the expropriation of the expropriators for the author, whose necessity and possibility arises from the development of the accumulation of capital, and from the centralisation of capital that became a hindrance to the development of social productive forces, as well as from the expansion of social misery and the sharpening of the antagonism between capital and labour. Its results also reveal that the expropriation of the expropriators is inscribed in the process of revolutionary transformations that the masses and the proletariat carry out in order to leave behind the expropriation and alienation of labour by capital and its corresponding capitalist property, and to establish in its place the social property based on the cooperation of labour and the common ownership of the means of production and land, which presupposes the free development of the social individual. The research seeks to contribute to the recovery of the radical Marxian critique and to address to the problems of transition beyond capital, at a historical moment when the search for a global alternative to the social system in which we human beings live constitutes an urgent necessity.