Physical education na human formation under rhe aegis of capital

Abstract

This article analyzes the ontological determinations that articulate labor, human formation, and Physical Education within capitalist sociability. To accurately grasp the movement of reality and unveil the internal connections of our object of study, we recover the theoretical-methodological foundations of historical materialism, established by Karl Marx (1818–1883) and Friedrich Engels (1820–1895) and further developed by György Lukács (1885–1971), as the guiding matrix of this bibliographic investigation. The study is organized into three interconnected moments: first, we discuss labor as the founding ontological category of the constitution of the social being, emphasizing that, in producing their own existence, human beings transform nature and themselves, developing bodily, physical, and mental capacities inseparable from their historical formation. Next, we examine the modern emergence of Physical Education and its functionality in shaping the worker in bourgeois society, demonstrating that its constitution as a social complex is linked to the demands for discipline, efficiency, and docility required by the process of surplus-value production. Finally, we show how the logic of capital accumulation continuously redefines the demands imposed on the body, deepening forms of subsumption, instrumentalization, and capture of subjectivity, while restricting possibilities for the omnilateral development of human capacities. We conclude that Physical Education, although structurally determined by capitalist sociability, preserves contradictions in its content and practice that open pathways for the affirmation of conscious teleology and for forms of human formation not entirely subordinated to the imperatives of valorization. We argue that overcoming the alienating determinations imposed on corporeality requires a radical critique of capitalist logic and the recovery of labor as teleological praxis—conditions necessary for constructing a Physical Education committed to full humanization, emancipation, and the integral development of the social being.