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 “long passages.” There is also independent confirmation of Marx’s affection for Dante: in an undated “confession,” written in Marx’s hand and found in his daughter Jenny’s album, the Florentine heads a list of favorite poets, a list that also includes Aeschylus, Shakespeare, and Goethe. Unlike Aeschylus, Shakespeare, and Goethe, however, Dante seems to have been a relatively late discovery for Marx, coinciding basically with his term of political exile in London. Citations from Dante crop up suddenly in his writings from the 1850s and continue, off and on, throughout the rest of his life. The first published citation is in his column for the New York Daily Tribune, April 4, 1853, and highlights precisely the experience of living in exile. Thereafter, Marx seems to have turned to the poet periodically. There is a cluster of citations in 1859 and 1860—in the New York Daily Tribune, the Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, and, especially, Herr Vogt—and another cluster in the first volume of Capital. It has been claimed that Marx taught himself Italian by reading Dante and Machiavelli.26According to Liebknecht, the phrase from Purgatorio concluding the preface to Capital—“Segui il tuo corso e lascia dir le genti”—was, throughout this time, an oft- repeated dictum of Marx’s. In short, Marx loved Dante, and knew the Divine Comedy—perhaps especially the Inferno—very well. He would certainly have been capable of drawing on that work for inspiration in the composition of his own.

Precedent

Besides being capable, Marx was on another important occasion willing to construct one of his own works around a borrowed literary motif. In his Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, Marx was concerned to dissect the collapse of the 1848 revolution in France into the dictatorship of Louis Bonaparte and the Second Empire. In the course of this dissection, Marx confronts the fact that the apparent beneficiaries of the collapse—Bonaparte and his clique—were, by all accounts, far too incompetent to have brought about this result by any design or stratagem. As Marx writes:

The Constitution, the National Assembly, the dynastic parties, the blue and the red republicans, the heroes of Africa, the thunder from the platform, the sheet lightning from the daily press, all the other publications, the political names and intellectual reputations, the civil law and the penal code, liberté, egalité, fraternité and the second Sunday in May—all have vanished like a series of optical illusions before the spell of a man whom even his enemies do not claim to be a magician. . . . It remains to be explained how a nation of thirty-six millions could be taken by surprise by three swindlers and delivered without resistance into captivity.

The beneficiaries are not responsible for the outcome. And so Marx sets for himself the task of explaining by what agency and by what actions the revolution came to naught. Throughout his text, Marx figures this task as one of revealing the parties responsible for the death of the revolution. And throughout, he models this revelation on Hamlet’s revelation of his father’s murderer in The Mousetrap, the play within a play in Shakespeare’s tragedy. A brief retelling of Marx’s tale should suffice to establish the basic contours of the modeling.

The theatrical metaphors of the Eighteenth Brumaire are obvious from the opening lines, in which “the great events and characters of world history” are said to repeat themselves, “the first time as tragedy, the second as farce.” The actions of 1848–51 are said repeatedly to occur on stage. Marx refers to the parliamentary roles of the Legitimist and Orleanist parties as “Haupt- und Staatsaktionen,” a form of popular traveling theater in which the high dramas of Elizabethan and German playwrights were debased into melodramas accompanied by improvised buffoonery. He also tells us that the leaders of the proletarian party were absent from the “public stage,” and that the proletariat was in “the background of the revolutionary stage” throughout the period he is analyzing.

This absence is crucial because it is the proletariat that had given the Revolution of 1848 its particular cast. The proclamation in February 1848 that the new French Republic was a “social republic” indicated “the general content of the modern revolution,” a content that would reappear in a “positive form” in the Paris Commune of 1871. But on June 21, 1848, the National Assembly shuttered the national workshops that had embodied Louis Blanc’s “right to work.” There followed four days of street battles between 50,000 armed and barricaded Parisian workers and up to 125,000 French troops and mobile guardsmen. Thousands were killed, maimed, or exiled to Algeria. This was, to Marx, the moment at which the social republic, the proletarian revolution, died

Nonetheless, death was not the end of the revolution. As he tells his readers at the beginning of the concluding section VII, “In the June days of 1848” the social republic “was drowned in the blood of the Paris proletariat, but it haunted the succeeding acts of the drama like a ghost.” A bit further on, he tells us which ghost he has in mind:

“But the revolution is thorough [gründlich]. It is still on its journey through purgatory. It goes about its business methodically. By 2 December 1851, it had completed only one half its preparatory work; it is now completing the other half. First of all it perfected the parliamentary power, in order to be able to overthrow it. Now, having attained this, it is perfecting the executive power, reducing it to its purest expression, isolating it, and pitting itself against it as the sole object of attack, in order to concentrate all its forces of destruction against it. And when it has completed this, the second half of its preliminary work, Europe will leap from its seat and exultantly exclaim: “Well undermined, old mole! [Brav gewühlt, alter Mahlwurf!]”38

As everyone notes, the final exclamation is a citation of Hamlet’s line, “Well said, old mole!” (I.v.162). It comes early in Shakespeare’s play, just after the ghost of the king has enlisted his son to avenge his murder. After speaking with the ghost, Prince Hamlet attempts to confer with Horatio and Marcellus to obtain their silence regarding the ghost’s appearance and Hamlet’s interaction with it. But every time Hamlet proposes an oath of silence, the ghost pipes up from beneath the stage—Hamlet calls attention to its presence in the cellarage—impatiently commanding the trio to swear. Hamlet tries to get away from the ghost, since the impatience of its demand is continually disrupting his proceedings with Marcellus and

Horatio, but the ghost is always there, under them wherever they stand. Eventually, Hamlet cries out: “Well said old mole! Canst work i’ the earth so fast? A worthy pioneer!”

While commentators get pleasantly waylaid by the parallel genealogies within the two texts—a dead uncle and his eponymous nephew; a dead father and his eponymous son—or by the echo of Hegel—who characterized the work of Geist using the same reference—it seems that the political meaning of Marx’s invocation is relatively straight-forward. The revolution is dead. Marx, casting himself in the Hamlet role, is the son of the dead revolution come to reveal the parties guilty of its murder and to pledge vengeance. The prime culprits belong to the bourgeois “party of order,” who have replaced fraternité with fratricide. But the bourgeoisie has also been enabled by the petit bourgeois democrats, the workers’ old coalition partners, organized under the banner of the Montagne. Marx uses his work to call out “the bourgeois and the épicier” for their perfidious mouthing of republican ideals and their shameful capitulation before Bonaparte. And he closes with a threat, predicting that “when the emperor’s mantle finally falls on the shoulders of Louis Bonaparte, the bronze statue of Napoleon will come crashing down from the top of the Vendôme Column.” Just as Hamlet directed The Mouse-trap to “catch the conscience of a king” (II.ii.580), so Marx published The Eighteenth Brumaire to publicly indict and condemn the French bourgeoisie and petite bourgeoisie. He borrowed Shakespeare’s plot because it served ably to condense and direct his own literary and political endeavors.

Hence, it seems not unreasonable to suppose that Marx might similarly have borrowed the plot of Dante’s Inferno in order to supply himself with an order for his exposition in Capital. Moreover, this borrowing would have suited Marx’s political aims and temperament. It would have underlined his desire to rework socialism’s relationship to political economy. It would have well-captured his ambivalent admiration of that bourgeois science. It would have appealed to his perverse desire to encourage his opponents’ worst thoughts about him. And it would have supplied an appropriately complex skeleton on which to hang his ambition to get to the bottom of what is wrong with capitalism. To these substantive points we must now turn.

The Social Hell

Marx is often represented as having “created,” in G.D.H. Cole’s words, “that distinctively German Socialism which was soon to assume an ideological dominance over most of the continent, driving the older forms of Socialism before it as chaff before the wind.” One of the themes of this book, by way of contrast, is that many of the elements of Marx’s work were commonplaces in the socialist and communist discourses of the mid-nineteenth century, and they retained their status as commonplaces long after Marx. Most of the phrases, tropes, and bits of technical vocabulary we have come to associate with Marx actually originated elsewhere and circulated very widely within the publications and speeches of socialists, mutualists, cooperativists, and communists. They were not in themselves the badges of a distinctive, or distinctively German, socialism, and they could not drive away the elements of the older socialisms because they were as integral to those older patterns of thinking as they were to Marx’s.

This is in no way meant to imply that Marx was simply derivative of his discursive context, the amanuensis of Monsieur Nineteenth Century Socialism. Rather, Marx’s specificity and originality can emerge, if at all, only on the condition that we understand what he has done with these commonplaces, how they have come to be related to one another in his works, and how this set of internal relationships gives a distinctive cast to his work. In his superb study of Greek myths of the underworld journey, Radcliffe Edmonds emphasizes “the ways in which different authors make use of myth, the way they manipulate a common set of traditional elements in various ways to achieve different ends.” If we follow Edmonds in defining myth as “an agonistic form of cultural discourse, a traditional language for the communication of ideas from the author to his audience, in which competing versions vie for authority,” then we can say that this book aims to articulate Marx’s Capital against the background of the socialist myths redeployed and complicated by that text. Marx’s contribution to socialism can only be appreciated by following the traditional elements of socialist discourse as they enter into and are reordered by Marx’s work. And this reordering can only be rendered visible as a contest with other socialists, a contest over the proper ordering of and relations among the traditional elements.

It is not by accident that I introduce this consideration of Marx’s appropriation of a common set of socialist tropes by way of scholarship on Greek myths of the underworld, for a crucial case in point is Marx’s appropriation of the socialist comparison of the modern social world to Hell. This trope has a long and colorful history in socialist literature, both before and after Marx. It seems to have emerged out of the idiosyncratic imagination of Charles Fourier; it found sustenance in the workers’ writings of the July monarchy in France; and it was reworked significantly by Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, before Marx gave it another twist. It continued to be a staple of French socialist writing into the twentieth century. Despite its apparent heavy-handedness, it was a flexible myth, suggesting different lessons in different contexts and uses. The history I tell will be limited, picking out only a few of what I take to be the most significant instances.

Origins in Fourier and Fourierism

As with so many elements of the discourse around “the social question,” the notion that modernity amounts to “a social Hell” seems to begin its public life in the works of Charles Fourier. In his Théorie des quatre mouvements (1808), Fourier had compared the terrors of “the first creation”—tigers, bedbugs, gout, and so on—to “a foretaste of hell.” With the publication of his Traité de l’association domestique- agricolein 1822, however, he introduced into French literature the metaphor of l’enfer social, a trope that would reappear in dozens of permutations over the next thirty years of Fourierist evangelism. The social Hell was polyvalent. It named the misery of the multitude of the poor. It named the “labyrinth of passions” in which we are trapped by commerce. It named the barbarity of civilization under “the laws of philosophes and conquerors.” Of all these senses, that of the misery of the poor and wretched was the most appropriated, even as this shaded into a moralizing catalog of the sins that kept the multitude imprisoned in its terrors.

In 1843, Victor Considérant, the dean of Fourierism in France, published, in his Démocratie Pacifique, a Manifeste de la Démocratie au XIXesiècle. A plea for France to step back from the brink of social war and to organize economic production and distribution by the institution of Fourier’s phalanges, the Manifeste is also a fierce denunciation of the “new feudalism” brought about by the anarchy of laissez-faire competition. This denunciation culminates in §XI, “The social Hell. Absolute necessity of a solution.” Here, Considérant compares the miseries of “our regimof free competition” or “our industrial regime” to “the cruelest conceptions of the myths of antiquity.”53 The suffering of the poor masses in the midst of commercial society is compared to the torment of Tantalus. The wage laborers, driven every day to work by the recurrent threat of poverty, share the fate of Sisyphus. The wealth the workers continuously create just as continuously flows out of their hands and into the purses of the wealthy, just as the water carried by the Danaïdes flowed out of the cracked tub as quickly as they could pour it in. Drawing his lesson, Considérant writes:

Our industrial regime, founded on competition without guarantees and without organization, is it not thus a social Hell, a vast realization of all of the torments and all of the tortures of the ancient Taenarus. There is a difference, though: the victims of Taenarus were guilty, and in the mythological hell there were judges.

Since he had begun the Manifeste in a Saint-Simonian vein, contrasting the ancient economy of slavery—“the exploitation of man by man in its most complete form”—with the modern “democratic spirit,” this revelation that the modern economy embodies the worst tortures that the ancients could imagine is supposed to throw into question the reality of historical progress to date. In light of the Saint-Simonian and Fourierist attempts to marshal Christian ethics and spirituality in support of a new social order, it is not surprising that Considérant makes no mention of any Christian hellscape. Hell is, for him, a place in the pagan imaginary, Taenarus, the descending path walked by Heracles. We have not avoided this survival from barbarous antiquity, and so we can only abolish it.

Development by Proudhon

Three years after Considérant’s Manifeste, Proudhon published his Système des contradictions économiques, ou La philosophie de la misère. This was supposed to be the positive system to follow on the scathing critique in Qu’est-ce que la propriété?, which had brought Proudhon great notoriety. Since, in his earlier work, Proudhon had sharply differentiated himself from both the hierarchical organizers of labor (the Saint-Simonians, the Fourierists, Louis Blanc) and those who called for a community of property (Étienne Cabet and the Icarians, Wilhelm Weitling), it did seem incumbent upon him to provide some distinctive alternative to the system of private property. In this regard, the Système was quite a disappointment. Instead of being prescriptive, it was a long analysis of the interrelated aspects of the modern social system, which aimed to highlight the destructiveness of each aspect and the potential for saving the whole by properly ordering them vis-à-vis one another.

There are in Proudhon’s writings of the 1840s numerous invocations of the promise of an economic science that would reveal the tendency toward order in human society and catalyze the development of that order. In Qu’est-ce que la propriété? he summed up this prospective development by coining a phrase that would have a long life as another socialist myth: “the sovereignty of the will gives way to the sovereignty of reason and ends up being replaced by a scientific socialism.” Proudhon’s notion of this incipient social science was heavily indebted to Charles Fourier’s conception of the “series,” the sum of an ordered succession of elements. The underlying idea is that the successive “stages” or “periods” (époques) of history exhibit, in turn, successive principles, and that only at the end of the series will these opposed principles come into a harmonious interrelation. As Proudhon put it, “while in nature the synthesis of contraries is contemporaneous with their opposition, in society the antithetic elements seem to be produced at long intervals, and to be resolved only after long and tumultuous agitation.”

Because science is supposed to grasp the series, it must proceed through the elements of the series in turn, showing how any partial summation of the series, including any element on its own, is self-contradictory and inadequate from the point of view of justice. Hence, science, in Proudhon’s sense, must proceed methodically, following a determinate path, and may be said to pass from appearances—the partial aspects of the world presented by each époque—to the reality of the whole series. As Proudhon put it, “to explain the system of the world, . . . one must leave the circle of appearances.” This was the task Proudhon tried to accomplish in his Système.

In the course of his exposition of this social science, Proudhon has recourse, like Considérant before him, to the image of Hell. Discussing the consequences of Louis Blanc’s proposed right to work at a guaranteed wage, Proudhon writes:

Certainly I do not care to deny that labor and wages can and should be guaranteed; I even entertain the hope that the time [époque] of such guarantee is not far off: but I submit that a guarantee of wages is impossible without the exact knowledge of value, and that this value can be discovered only by competition, not at all by communistic institutions or by a decree of the people. For in this there is something more powerful than the will of the legislator and of the citizens: that is, the absolute impossibility that man should do his duty after being discharged of all responsibility to himself: but, responsibility to oneself, in the matter of labor, necessarily implies competition with others. Ordain that from January 1, 1847 labor and wages are guaranteed to all: immediately an immense relaxation will succeed the fiery tension of industry; real value will fall rapidly below nominal value; metallic money, despite its effigy and stamp, will experience the fate of the assignats; the merchant will demand more and deliver less; and we will find ourselves in a still lower circle in the hell of misery of which competition is only the third turn.

The lower circle of Hell to which Proudhon refers is monopoly, the fourth époque in his own Système. Here we have a striking conjunction of liberal and socialist myths. Proudhon endorses the necessity of free competition in the labor market and acknowledges that this competition is one aspect of the social Hell condemned by Considérant. He thereby casts his scientific journey from appearances to reality as a descent into this Hell, an exploration of its internal arrangement and structural necessity.

As in Considérant’s text, Hell is a social reality surrounding us. However, far from being the rhetorical culmination of Proudhon’s indictment, this is merely one of his many asides. Indeed, he begins his consideration of the fifth époque—“the police, or taxation”— by turning the trope on its head. He imagines the progress of humanity as the journey of a traveler marching up a “zigzag” path from the valley to the mountaintop. Despite its confidence, “the social genius,” upon reaching “the perspective of monopoly,” “casts backward a melancholy glance, and, in deep reflection, says to itself: ‘Monopoly has stripped everything from the poor hireling: bread, clothing, home, education, liberty, and security. I will lay a tax upon the monopolist; at this price I will preserve him his privilege.’ ” Far from descending through a Hell of misery, the reader is here told that we are following the social genius on its ever-ascending path, the course of which progressively correct past errors. Proudhon betrays his affinities with the liberal thinkers of spontaneous order, intimating “that out of the common efforts of mankind, out of the struggles and collaborations among men, largely without design, intent, or self-consciousness, come the institutions, beliefs, and all that goes to make up civilization.” The liberal myth of providence trumps the socialist myth of Hell on earth.

However, Proudhon has not abandoned the trope of the social Hell. He ends his discussion of free trade with a passage equal in its vehemence to anything in Qu’est-ce que la propriété?, calling free trade

the centralization over the whole face of the earth of this regime of spoliation and misery, . . . property in its might and in its glory. And it is in order to bring to its consummation this system that so many millions of workers are starved, so many innocent creatures turned back from the breast into oblivion, so many girls and women prostituted, so many souls sold, so many characters wasted! If only economists knew a way out of this labyrinth, an end to this torture! But no: always! never! like the clock of the damned this is the refrain of the economic Apocalypse. Oh! if the damned could burn hell!

These words cast the economists as the mouthpieces of Hell, declaring the eternity of the torments undergone by the suffering masses. They revert to the earlier metaphor, casting the journey through the époques as the nightmarish path through the infernal labyrinth. They suggest that, far from being a holdover from antiquity, the social Hell is a historical necessity and a trial we must undergo in order to arrive at “the exact knowledge of value” that will set us free. Finally, unlike Considérant’s pagan underworld, Proudhon’s Hell is obviously a Christian one. The descending circles suggest Dante’s Inferno, while the labyrinthine structure recalls both Dante and Fourier.

Five years later, imprisoned for his criticisms of Louis Bonaparte, Proudhon again turned his pen to elaborating the socialist myth, this time with considerable inventiveness and precision. “Humanity,” he proposed in his Idée générale de la révolution au XIX^e siècle,

in the theologico-political sphere, wherein it has been agitated these six thousand years, is like a society which, instead of being placed on the outside of a solid star, is shut up inside a hollow sphere, lighted from the interior and warmed, like the subterranean world of Virgil, by an immobile sun in the zenith common to the lands curving around it.

Imagining this world, and the course of history in it, Proudhon claims that “the progress of civilization . . . would bring vast movements to these infernal regions,” movements that would reveal the true scope and nature of this upside-down world, and simultaneously install in the minds of the inhabitants the conviction that “the earth is too cramped for the humanity that works it [l’exploite].”

Then these men, who had at first taken their orb to be infinite, and had sung its praises, and who had nonetheless been imprisoned like a nest of beetles in a clod of earth, begin to blaspheme God and nature. . . . Menacing heaven with eye and fist, they begin audaciously to drill into the ground, so well that one day, the drill encountering only the void, they conclude that to the concave surface of this sphere corresponds a convex surface, an exterior world, which they set out to visit.

This situation is, Proudhon says, a representation not of our physical existence but of our mental one, of the history of “our political and religious views.” The ideas of “God and Prince, the Church and the State,” have dominated and defined the sphere of our thinking. We have now exhausted our explorations of these ideas, outgrown them. “We must burst this casing if we want to arrive at a more exact notion of things and leave this hell, where the reason of man, cretinized, will end up being extinguished.”

Luckily for us, Proudhon thinks we have already, with “the drill of philosophy,” begun to break out of “the embryonic shell” these ideas have provided for our thought. Completing this task—which is simultaneously one of society turning “from within to without,” of “invert[ing]” every social relation— is the calling of the revolution. For carrying out this mission, Proudhon suggests turning to “the economists,” for “they are miners by trade.” What is it about philosophy and economics that will help us to escape from the prison of the old ideas? Very simply, they both teach, according to Proudhon, that all authority is illegitimate. They teach “the laws of nature and of society.”

This may seem a puzzling lesson for Proudhon to draw, given his passionate denunciations of the economists in both Qu’est-ce que la propriété? and the Système. There is certainly a knot to untie here (and I will make a suggestion about how to do this below). But what matters for present purposes is only that, in the Idée générale, Proudhon develops the myth of the social Hell into a comprehensive representation of both human history and the revolutionary project, one, moreover, that seems to integrate his earlier invocations of the myth with the Fourierist images. As in Considérant, the social Hell is a remnant of the past, a condition of humanity’s immaturity, the limits of which we have now, finally, encountered. As in Proudhon’s earlier text, only science, an excavation below the apparent surface, can show us the way out of this Hell. Finally, and also repeating a feature of the Système, only our very imprisonment beneath the earth could have developed our capacities to the point where we would require and seek liberation into a life above the earth. The journey through the underworld is part—if a contrapuntal part—of the providential march of human progress.

Marx’s Katabasis

These developments of socialist infernalism were not unknown to Marx. He seems to have had a copy of the second edition of Considérant’s Manifeste in his personal library, and there are marginal notations on the pages containing the discussion of the social Hell. He wrote The Poverty of Philosophy as a response to Proudhon’s Système, and he studied that work intensively. He read Proudhon’s Idée générale as soon as he could get his hands on it, at the end of July or beginning of August 1851. He summarized it for Engels in a letter, then sent the book to his friend for his thoughts. Engels wrote up a lengthy critical assessment later in the year, which he sent to Marx. Marx planned to publish a long review of Proudhon’s book in Joseph Weydemeyer’s Die Revolution, but the journal went bankrupt before he could realize this intention. As I will now argue, Marx’s familiarity with this trope was not barren. He himself deployed it in a novel and interesting way.

The 1859 Preface

Thirteen years after Proudhon’s much-anticipated Système, an obscure little book was published by Franz Duncker in Berlin. Titled Zur Kritik der politicshen Ökonomie (Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy), it was written by a German exile from the revolutions of 1848 who had largely disappeared from the German radical scene after 1852. Karl Marx had been making a meager living in London as a newspaper correspondent for the New York Tribune, the Neue Oder-Zeitung in Breslau, and the Zuid Afrikaan, a Dutch-language paper in South Africa. While this journalism was, considered in sum, the majority of what Marx would publish in his entire life, it was not addressed primarily to a working-class or socialist audience, and it was not, perforce, very heavy on either political agitation or theoretical elaboration. And, as Marx said in a contemporaneous letter to Joseph Weydemeyer, he had “given up associations [and] withdrawn completely into [his] study.”

Marx intended this new book to return him to the partisan fray. To Weydemeyer, Marx put his aims this way:

In these two chapters the Proudhonist socialism now fashionable in France . . . is demolished to its very foundations. Communism must above all rid itself of this “false brother.” . . . I hope to win a scientific victory for our party. But the latter must itself now show whether its numbers are great enough to buy enough copies to banish the publisher’s “moral scruples.” The continuation of the venture depends on the sale of the first installments.

The numbers of Marx’s party were quite small, as it turned out. The further installments were never published, and, eight years on, when Marx published volume one of Capital, he had to apologize for “the long pause” between Zur Kritik and its “continuation,” and to begin again from the beginning, recapitulating “the substance of that earlier work” at the start of the new one.

Despite its having fallen apparently stillborn from the press, Zur Kritik was destined to deliver to later generations one of the iconic statements of Marx’s project. His preface—it has come to be so detached from the work it prefaces that it is generally referred to simply as “the 1859 Preface”—comprises what Marx calls a “sketch of the course of [his] studies,” an intellectual autobiography that traces his path from editor of the Rheinische Zeitung to surveyor of bourgeois political economy. While engaged in journalism, Marx claims, he had run up against “so-called