Based on the theoretical contribution by Marx, particularly in The Capital, the text discusses the meaning of three founding categories of labour - concrete useful labour, abstract human labour and productive labour - as well as the contradictory relation that occurs among them, and shows that if the labour, in a generic social way, is the determining element for the constitution of the very human nature, in the capitalism the constitution of human being, by means of labour, occurs through his own destruction. His emancipation, his degradation, the affirmation of his human being condition happens through the negation of this condition; his humanization occurs by the production of his reification. Ultimately, it concerns the constitution of the fetichism of the capital - the capital that becomes subject of human condition reifying the social relations and the social human being. Due to the array of arguments presented, the text questions the labour as an educative principle as a proposal for a politic-educational principle that has an emancipating perspective.
Labour; Educative principle; Capital; Capitalism; Fetishism of the capital