Work and human emancipation in Marx: the Grundrisse

Abstract

Zaira Vieira's work is an excellent debate on the role of work as an ontological foundation in Marx's mature work, especially in the preparatory drafts of Capital, the so-called Grundrisse, and the problem of the possibility of capitalist accumulation without work raised there by Marx . The merit of Zaira Vieira's book is that it deals with a controversy that, since the 1960s, has insisted on condemning Marx's mature work due to the paradox of living labor as the foundation of value in a time of almost absolute predominance of dead labor and how to reconcile certain ideas and passages from the Grundrisse, in which Marx speculatively alludes to the possibilities of capitalist accumulation without work.