The intimacy of the capital: historical materialism revisited in the dialectic of public-private

Abstract

The paper seeks to revisit historical materialism, the marxian considerations on the "bourgeois intimacy" and, consequently, his conclusions on the incidence of systemic imperatives and logic of capital in the conduct of everyday life. The central argument of the paper is that the Marxian critique of intimacy hypostatized by the society founded by the Capital is not reduced to the elements given a priori by its economic theory, but synthesizes a theoretical path driven by philosophical anthropology present in the Manuscripts of 1844. Thus, the paper assert that, mainly because it establishes a clear distinction between nature and culture, Marx was separated the Hegelian morality and reaffirmed the historical character, ideological and contingent of family relationships. In this sense, it will be shown that in asserting the primacy of possessive individualism of the bourgeois family, the author identifies the "private owner" and the "bourgeois husband" - in the sense that the bourgeois intimacy is configured, first of all, by the sense of ownership from the other. Finally, we discuss how these asymmetrical relations are worked in O Capital, where the intimate sphere appears with a dual function: the maintenance of the social metabolismo of capital (the reproduction of skilled labor and the reproduction of consumers) and the moral maintenance of the system (that is through the reproduction of the value system that perpetuates the logic of the commodity).