The revolutionary subject and living labor. Marx, Menchu, Payeras

Abstract

In a germinal work, the American philosopher, Cornel West, traced the genealogy of the hegemonic subject of modernity, emphasizing only the discursive element because it had been left out of many other analyzes of white racism: The confluence of three discursive practices pour in a modernity where the ideology of white supremacy predominates: The overturn towards the subject as an epistemological foundation in philosophy, the rebirth in immediately pre-modern Europe of ancient Greco-Roman aesthetics and optics, and the objectification of human biological nature as an observable thing according to observation and visual evidence in the new science. This confluence and not its isolated aspects constituted the discursive framework of the ideology of white supremacy used to justify colonialism, imperialism and classism itself within Western Europe.