Class antagonism cannot be deduced from the concept of capital.

Evidence

If the argument were truly dialectical it would have, on the one hand, to deduce the antagonism with the worker from the very logic of capital and, on the other, both worker and capitalist would have to be reduced to formal economic categories … But at the conceptual level, ‘worker’ means just ‘seller of labour-power’. In that case, however, I am unable to define any kind of antagonism. To assert that there is an inherent antagonism because the capitalist extracts surplus-value from the worker is clearly insufficient, because in order to have antagonism it is necessary that the worker resists such extraction. But if the worker is conceptually defined as ‘seller of labour-power’, it is clear that I can analyse this category as much as I like, and I will still be unable to deduce from it logically the notion of resistance. That resistance will emerge – or not emerge – only in terms of the way the actual worker – not its pure conceptual determination – is constituted. This means that the antagonism is not inherent to the relations of production but it is established between the relations of production and an identity which is external to them. — Ernesto Laclau, On Populist Reason, 298

Categorization

• QUESTION: A strong challenge: whether resistance is truly underivable from ‘seller of labour-power’ given the labour theory of value treats the sale as self-contradictory.
• XREF: connects to: No social group has an a priori privileged revolutionary role. — Ernesto Laclau, On Populist Reason, 299; The lumpenproletariat’s scandal is that its identity depends on articulation. — Ernesto Laclau, On Populist Reason, 293; Class is a contingent articulation of demands, not an ultimate core. — Ernesto Laclau, On Populist Reason, 487 (+5 more)

Broader Connections

• Marx explains capital better than class and class contradiction is not master key #corroborates (0.85)
• When everything is capital, labor and class become illegible categories #qualifies (0.75) — Wendy Brown, Undoing the Demos, 64
• Capital never fully extends economic laws into other social levels. #qualifies (0.70)