Work, knowledge and society: Brief notes on the relationship between being and consciousness

Abstract

At a time in which contradictions of all types reign our daily lives, imposing immediate answers for the most urgent of objective problems (such as persistent unemployment, social inequality, wars, global warming, degradation of human relations, etc.) questions such as the relationship between being and consciousness are commonly seen as mere academic dilettantism. Our purpose here is to point out that it is very probable that vulgar Marxism itself contributed – given the historical opportune moment – to the scenario in which idealist thought, in its most recent configurations, has taken over issues regarding knowledge and subjectivity, as if one could expound on these topics by putting inquiries into the issues of being to rest. The idealism that has reigned in recent decades has promoted the disqualification of the old project of using reason and knowledge as a means for social transformation. For a long time, critical currents of social thought, particularly those linked to Marxism, were able to sustain the thesis that labor was the most adequate of categories for initiating a process of construction of the knowledge necessary to reconstitute, within thought, the most important aspects of social reality. The centrality of labor would result from the fact that social existence itself is dependent on this activity, which - in the broad sense employed here -summarizes a range of activities destined to produce and reproduce the conditions of the (social) subsistence of the human species.