Library:Marx's Inferno/Chapter 2

Chapter 2 Taenarus: The Road to Hell

Descend, so that you may ascend.

— Augustine, Confessions, IV.xii

The close of the feudal Middle Ages, and the opening of the modern capitalist era are marked by a colossal figure: an Italian, Dante, both the last poet of the Middle Ages and the first poet of modern times. Today, as in 1300, a new historical era is approaching. Will Italy give us the new Dante, who will mark the hour of birth of this new, proletarian era?

— Friedrich Engels, introduction to the 1893 Italian edition of The Manifesto of the Communist Party

This book argues that the structure of the first volume of Capital was inspired by Dante’s Inferno, and that attending to this structure helps to reveal Marx’s argument both in its detail and in its overall scope and import. Attention to the literary form of Capital aids in discerning its argument, in part, because the structure of Dante’s Inferno is not only an imaginative plot but also a rigorously constructed poetic embodiment of a moral ontology with both Christian and classical, Aristotelian, roots. This moral ontology—a systematic typology of possible wrongs, which reflects, negatively, the structure of being itself and humanity’s place in that structure—did not disappear with the Middle Ages. It persisted as one current of European discourse through Marx’s day and even into our own, helping to form, among other things, the popular moral economy that has always been a counterpoint and stumbling block to what Marx called bourgeois political economy. In the form of this popular moral economy, the moral ontology systematized by Dante formed one of the crucial funds of ideas and intuitions out of which socialism developed in the nineteenth century.

R. H. Tawney once quipped that, “The last of the Schoolmen was Karl Marx.” As many commentators, friendly and critical alike, have argued, there is more than a little truth to the quip. One of Marx’s earliest texts is a notebook in which he translated and annotated most of De Anima. Had his political commitments and activities not rendered him ineligible for an academic post in any German university, Marx planned to write a book on Aristotle. And there has been a long line of commentators who have followed Ernst Bloch in reading Marx as the inheritor of a tradition of “left-wing Aristotelianism.” Hence, it is reasonable to think that Marx would have found in the Inferno’s articulation of what is wrong with the world a preestablished harmony with his own way of thinking about what is wrong with capitalism.

My argument, however, is very nearly the reverse of this. Marx adapted the Inferno to his own purposes, which were deeply at odds with at least several crucial elements of the moral economy of early socialism. Most prominently, Marx thought the moralism of moral economy to be completely out of place in the confrontation with the capitalist mode of production. The fundamental continuity between Dante’s moral ontology and socialist moral economy consisted in the attribution of responsibility for the wrongs of the world to the choices of individuals. The damned souls of Dante’s poem have made their own Hell, in which they are trapped for eternity. No one is responsible for their sins but themselves. Thus their damnation is perfect and natural justice, and there is no evil in this wide world that is not attributable to one such damned soul or another. The sum of evils is equal to the sum of evil deeds, performed by responsible souls. Despite all of the distance separating them from Dante, many early socialists retained the Christian notion that “disorder in society” is nothing other than “moral evil,” caused by “our passions and our ignorance.” We are all free to educate ourselves about the workings of society and the demands of justice and thereby to eliminate the ills befalling us. Even those, like Robert Owen, who proclaimed the formation of character by circumstances, and inveighed against the doctrine of individual responsibility, thought that ignorance alone stood between the current state of social bedlam and a new moral world in which we will be able to freely form the circumstances that will form the character of the next generation.

To Marx, this moralizing and individualizing tendency in socialism simply transferred to the secular world the modes of thought developed by Christian theology, applying “humanized” Christian moral categories to the social world. From as early as 1843, Marx was critical of this sort of secularization. He claimed that “this state and this society produce religion, which is an inverted consciousness of the world, because they are an inverted world.” In other words, it is because the social world takes a certain form that a certain form of religion arises within it; hence, the secularization of religion in the form of a humanistic morality is bound to replicate the mystification that the humanist decries in religion. If “religion is the general theory of this world, its encyclopaedic compendium, its logic in popular form, . . . [and] its moral sanction,” then the secularization of that religion in the form of a humanistic morality will be the same. Far from having a critical purchase on the world as it exists, this morality will merely supplement it.

If Dante’s poetic tour of Hell has a special resonance with the socialists’ moral criticism of the modern world, this is because Dante was, in Engels’s words, both “the last poet of the Middle Ages and the first poet of modern times.” His moral ontology is not merely a relic of the Aristotelian Middle Ages, but a harbinger of the new world of capital. As Marx says in Capital itself, “Christianity, with its religious cult of man in the abstract” is the faith most appropriate to “a society of commodity producers.” Dante’s moral categories are the original and highest poetic expression of a religion born of exchange relations, of which the morality of the early socialists is merely a rough knock-off. Marx wants to criticize the world that gives rise to such a religion and such a morality. In order to do so, he has to show, among other things, that the ills that religion and morality attribute to the free actions of the human soul—that is, to “the human essence” as an “abstraction inhering in each single individual”—can only properly be attributed to “the ensemble of social relations.” The responsibility that religion and morality hang on the individual, Marx places on the form of society as such. Marx’s critical theory of modern society, therefore, must show how the dynamics of that society give rise both to the ills socialism is concerned to combat and to the illusion that those ills are the moral responsibility of individuals.

It took Marx over twenty years to follow through on these intuitions, which he first formulated in the early to mid-1840s. In the 1850s, in exile in Britain, he discovered Dante’s Divine Comedy and hit upon the idea that his critique of bourgeois political economy had to take the form of a descent into the modern Inferno. Casting the proletariat as the pilgrim, he took upon himself the role of a Virgil, guiding the revolutionary class through the evils of the modern world in such a way as to reveal capital itself as the guilty party, the sinner trapped in a Hell of its own making, incapable of salvation. This katabasis would, simultaneously, constitute a proper culmination and criticism of socialism itself, revealing the ways in which its moralism derived from and supported the very world it sought to combat.

Marx wanted to publish a work that would be both a systematic treatment and a thoroughgoing critique of both the capitalist mode of production and the political economy that reflected and justified it. He wanted to do so, in part, because he thought that the existing socialist theory botched the job by oversimplifying and misidentifying the issues facing the workers’ movement. Marx was convinced that capitalism was not a simple problem, amenable to simple solutions, and that the “solutions to the social question” circulating and competing for attention within the workers’ movement—cooperative colonies, people’s banks, monetary reform, nationalization of land—were so many mirages and distractions along the path to real emancipation. Marx’s fourfold literary mission—depiction and critique, of practice and of theory—required a literary armature to support it. And Marx’s sense of the scope and systematic nature of the problem required of him that he find a mode of presentation that would allow him to keep the various moments distinct from one another and properly interrelated. These multiple demands go someway toward explaining why Marx was so slow in writing Capital. They also suggest why Dante’s poem, despite its moralism, would have been an attractive resource for Marx. The Inferno presents the reader with a descent through a systematically ordered underworld, in which the evils encountered early on are symptoms and presentiments of the evils encountered further along, in which description, diagnosis, and castigation go hand in hand, and in which scatological name- calling and eschatological first philosophy are necessary complements of each other.

This first chapter will move from this “would have been” to a more solid basis upon which to erect the argument of the book. It will canvass the evidence that Marx was well-acquainted with Dante’s poem and that Capital and the Inferno bear enough resemblance to warrant suspicion. It will also indicate a precedent; Marx, on at least one other occasion, used a literary source as a model for one of his own works. Finally, it will turn to the context within which Marx, in 1859, first suggests a parallelism between Dante’s Inferno and his own critique of political economy. By the time Marx wrote Capital, there was a significant tradition of socialists couching their criticisms of modern society in infernal terms. Most importantly, Marx’s nemesis, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, had cast the revolutionary task as one of escaping from an inverted underworld. Marx picked up on and developed this metaphor into an itinerary for his critique of political economy. In sum, this chapter builds the case that Marx had the motive, the opportunity, and the history to rewrite the Inferno as a descent into the modern social Hell of capital.

The Elements of the Case

The plausibility and value of reading Capital as a modern Inferno can only emerge from the reading itself. Nonetheless, some readers will want assurances up front that this is not a purely imaginative or speculative endeavor, and a scholar is honor bound to respect this reasonable demand. The following review of the documentary evidence—which establishes that Marx could have modeled Capital on the Inferno—is meant to provide such assurance.

There is a certain immediate resemblance between Capital and the Inferno: both are explicitly figured as descents into the depths, descents that reveal what is wrong with the world, and that trace that wrong back to its origin. This resemblance has suggested to others that Marx’s project in Capital is akin to Dante’s. We know that Marx was well acquainted with Dante’s poem, and that he was reading it during the time when he was formulating and composing Capital. He cites all three parts of the Commedia, both in Capital and in other works contemporaneous with its composition. From the testimony of those close to him, and from his own hand, we know that Dante was among his favorite poets during this time, his exile in London. We know that, at least in part through the study of Dante, he taught himself Italian. And we know that the conceit of treating the critical presentation of economics as a tour of Hell was one that Marx had encountered in Proudhon. There is also some evidence that Marx was willing and able to compose works in homage to literary exemplars: The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte plays on the plot of Shakespeare’s Hamlet. Taken together, this circumstantial evidence is strong, but not dispositive. Reading Capital with the Inferno in mind, however, proves extremely fruitful, as I hope the remainder of this book demonstrates.

Clues and Opportunities

I am not the first to have noticed similarities between Marx’s Capital and Dante’s Inferno. David McNally has recently written about the transition between parts two and three of Capital, where Marx leaves the sphere of exchange to enter “the hidden abode of production, on the threshold of which one reads, ‘No admittance except on business.’ ” McNally sees in this an allusion to the entrance of Dante and Virgil into Hell. “Marx intends us to understand that in leaving the apparently heavenly sphere of exchange . . . we are descending into a hell, and that therein resides the fundamental truth of capitalism. As with Dante, so for Marx the voyage through the sufferings of hell is essential if we are to acquire genuine knowledge of our world.” Before McNally, S. S. Prawer called special attention to the influence Dante exerted on Marx, especially in Capital. What has struck these readers is the general trajectory of Capital, from the surface down to the depths, and the sense, again general, that the agonies Marx highlights are hellish. As we will see, both of these features are quite common in the socialist literature of the nineteenth century. What has gone unremarked is that the parallels between the two works are both more mundane and more far-reaching. Yes, they both begin on the surface, and descend beneath this surface. But they also do so in thirty-three chapters, and in four major steps. When Marx went over Capital for the French edition—the first and last “thorough re-working” of the text that he was able to undertake—he made the subsections of two chapters—four and twenty-four—into freestanding chapters, increasing thereby the number of chapters from twenty-five to thirty-three. He left no indication of why he felt this change was called for. Perhaps it is coincidence, but Dante’s Commedia is composed of three canticles of thirty-three cantos, plus a prefatory canto to make a round hundred.

This curiosity would be nothing more than that, but both the Inferno and Capital can also be divided internally into four structuring sections. Dante’s Hell has four major parts, arranged as a series of descending circular levels. “Upper Hell,” outside the gates of Dis, is where the sins of incontinence (lust, gluttony, avarice and prodigality, sloth, envy, wrath, and pride) are punished. Dis, the walled city within Hell, holds the violent. Within and below Dis is Malebolge, where the manifold species of fraud are punished in ten concentric trenches. Finally, the central pit, Cocytus, contains those who have committed treachery, with Lucifer—the original sinner—plugging the hole at the bottom of everything.

Now, consider Capital. Although it has eight parts, these are not of equal import. Part one, the first three chapters, considers the capitalist mode of production from the perspective of the market. Part two, the following three chapters, is transitional, motivating a change of vantage point from the market to the site of production, the workshops and factories. Hence, these chapters form a natural unit with part three, “The Production of Absolute Surplus-Value,” which comprises Marx’s consideration of capitalist exploitation as the forced extraction of surplus labor. Parts four, five, six, and seven belong together, and mark another shift in standpoint; Marx is here concerned with what he calls the real subsumption of the labor process, whereby capital reconfigures how people labor—through cooperation and industrialization—and appropriates that productivity to itself in the form of accumulation. The final part, on

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the “primitive accumulation” of capital, stands apart and plays a special role, indicating as it does the origin and tendency of capitalism in the expropriation of peasants and colonized peoples. The parallel structures of the two works can be schematized as shown in figure 1. Hence, if one goes looking for similarities between Dante’s work and Marx’s, one can find them. Moreover, Marx certainly had the wherewithal to put them there to be found. Wilhelm Liebknecht was, by his own account, “from the summer of 1850 until the beginning of the year 1862 . . . almost daily and for years nearly all day in the house of Marx.” He testifies that Dante was among the authors Marx “read almost daily,” and that the elder man had the habit of declaiming aloud from The Divine Comedy, from which he had apparently memorized