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