Library:Marx's Inferno/Chapter 2

Chapter 2

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