Marx’s Inferno: the political theory of Capital (William Clare Roberts)
Marx’s Inferno: the political theory of Capital | |
|---|---|
| Author | William Clare Roberts |
| Publisher | Princeton University Press |
| First published | 2017 |
| Type | Book |
When word of his death reached New York City, “representatives of the various trades, labor, social, and other organizations” issued a public statement proclaiming that “now it is the duty of all true lovers of liberty to honor the name of Karl Marx.”[1] This call has become, over the course
of the twentieth century, nigh unintelligible. “Liberty” has become the shibboleth of antisocialism and anticommunism. That Marx was ever taken to be a devoted advocate of “the liberation of all downtrodden people,” as these laborers and socialists claimed, seems, not antiquated, but bizarre. Justice, certainly. Progress. Science. Equality. Universal solidarity. But liberty? What has Marx to offer “all true lovers of liberty”?
If this book is to accomplish one thing, it ought to make this eulogy seem not only intelligible but also sensible and reasonable. Marx’s critical theory of capitalism diagnosed the rule of capital as a complex and world- spanning system of domination. He sought, in Capital, to analyze the mechanisms of this system and to reconstruct a notion of freedom adequate to its abolition. In order to be properly appreciated, Marx’s Capital must be recovered as a work of political theory, written in a specific political context, but seeking also to say something of lasting importance about the challenges to—and possibilities for—freedom in the modern world.
My argument is twofold. First, I contend that, in Capital, Marx had a grand aspiration, to write the definitive analysis of what’s wrong with the rule of capital, and that he hung this aspiration on a suitably grand literary framework: rewriting Dante’s Inferno as a descent into the modern “social Hell” of the capitalist mode of production. Dante, of course, staged his own, individual, salvation story, telling us how his encounter with the evil of the world prepared his soul for its journey to blessedness. But his pilgrim was also supposed to be an Everyman, whose descent into damnation and resurrection into grace might be reiterated by all of the faithful. Marx, on the other hand, cast himself as a Virgil for the proletariat, guiding his readers through the lower recesses of the capitalist economic order in order that they might learn not only how this “infernal machine” works, [2] but also what traps to avoid in their efforts to construct a new world.
Second, I argue that in order to understand Marx’s attempt to realize this grand aspiration, Capital is best read as a critical reconstruction of and rejoinder to the other versions of socialism and popular radicalism that predominated in France and England in the 1860s and 1870s, when Marx was composing his magnum opus. These competing discourses—the remnants of Owenism, Fourierism, and Saint-Simonianism,[3] the social republicanism of James Bronterre O’Brien,[4] and, most crucially, the mutualism of Pierre-Joseph Proudhon[5] — were at the forefront of Marx’s concern when he was writing Capital. The foundation of the International Working Men’s Association (IWMA) in 1864,[6] and Marx’s conviction that the group held the seeds of a renewal of revolutionary politics, spurred him to get his thousands of pages of manuscripts and notes into publishable form. He hoped that the book would provide the theoretical guideposts for the resurgent movement. In order for it to achieve this status, Capital had to either co-opt, undermine, or openly confront the existing theoretical commonplaces of the rival camps, which dominated the political landscape that Marx hoped his own outlook would come to occupy. Hence, in the process and for the sake of unfolding Marx’s critique of capitalism,[7] my book examines Marx’s borrowings from and arguments against the other socialists, many of which remain sub rosa to those unfamiliar with the writers in question.
Marx’s grand ambitions and his internecine struggles are not separable from one another, either, but are thoroughly intertwined. The notion that modernity is a “social Hell” was originally suggested by Charles Fourier and his protégé Victor Considérant, and had already been developed in the works of Pierre-Joseph Proudhon into a metaphorical history of humanity’s descent into and escape from the underworld. The moral
- ↑ “Reported Death of Karl Marx,” New York Times, March 16, 1883.
- ↑ Jameson, Representing “Capital,” 146.
- ↑ Booth, Saint-Simon and Saint-Simonism; Iggers, The Cult of Authority: The Political Philosophy of the Saint-Simonians; Harrison, Robert Owen and the Owenites in Britain and America; Garnett, Co-Operation and the Owenite Socialist Communities in Britain, 1825– 45; Claeys, Machinery, Money, and the Millennium; Claeys, Citizens and Saints; Pilbeam, French Socialists before Marx; Pilbeam, Saint-Simonians in Nineteenth-Century France
- ↑ Plummer, Bronterre; Claeys, Citizens and Saints, pt. III.
- ↑ Puech, Le Proudhonisme dans l’Association internationale des travailleurs; Hoffman, Revolutionary Justice; Prichard, Justice, Order, and Anarchy; Vincent, Proudhon and the Rise of French Republican Socialism.
- ↑ Collins and Abramsky, Karl Marx and the British Labour Movement; Braunthal, History of the International; Stekloff, History of the First International.
- ↑ Throughout, I will use “capitalism” as an umbrella term for those “societies in which the capitalist mode of production reigns” (Marx, Capital, 1:125; MEGA, II.6:17; MEGA, II.7:19).