The purpose of this study is to discuss some topics concerning capitalism at the end of this century, contraposing various integrationist manifestations ideologically broadcasted through such fashionable terms as globalization, the end of the society of labor, the end of capitalism, etc., terms which convey an ample ongoing project of domination , compatible with the demands of an economic order in an organic crisis. As such, the following presuppositions should be considered:

1. Labor, in its teleological dimension, as the protoform of human activity, as the starting point of the social beings (Lucáks), as the metabolic form of relating man and nature (Marx), as the creation of socially useful objects or of use values is an uneliminable human condition on one side; on the other, beyond its ontological dimension, labor still is the original explicative category per excellence of contemporary society, where, notwithstanding "neos" and "posts", its fundamental articulation is still within the idea of "an immense collection of market goods" (Marx).

2. The Marxian claim that capital and labor contain a unrelenting structural antagonism, as yet, has full historical validity, and in spite of the integrationist fads, the structural relations of society remain fundamentally the same.

3. Again in Marx, one will find the third presupposition, in which "not one level of technological development implanted in the capitalist mode of production can eliminate the real necessary subordination of labor to capital, independent of the particular kinds of modifications that have occurred within the occupational standard of society" (1993: 98).

4.Thus, capitalism exhaustively, incessantly strives to rebuild the bases of its hegemony every time the contradictions among its fundamental composing classes become more accentuated, or when the subaltern classes articulate themselves as to organically strive for the suppression of the fundamental contradictions (Gramsci), capitalist logic reedits its old staging of "building the new over the matrix of the old, or still, of "changing everything so that everything remains as is" (Dias, 1981); and

5. That which is central to the production of Marx and of his followers still has perfect historical and analytical validity; in this respect, I would like to emphasize a production of Lenin of 1916, which contains analyses which I consider indispensable for an adequate comprehension of current capitalism.

This is the fundamental ideological effort of this text, which is, in Marxist terms, to update an interpretation of current capitalism as a social formation which specializes in creating and recreating categories "loaded with ideology", even when it paradoxically (apparently) and uselessly insists on decreeing the end of these categories themselves, therefore, making use of its powerful public and private ideological apparatuses.
One of capital's essential instruments for the permanent exercise of concealing its dominance is to denature the names of things. To disfigure, to distort, to falsify the nature of words and concepts as to divulge opposing sentiments to those of which the true essence would lead to repulsion, all this, is done in the direction of bestowing opacity to domination, of limiting the world vision of the dominated to that of the dominant. Among these "fashionable" categories, globalization is emphasized and the central object developed within this study.

Clarilton Ribas - Docente na Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina