Extended Book Review: Freedom and republicanism in Roberts’ Marx

Abstract

Freedom and republicanism in Roberts' Marx William Clare Roberts Marx's Inferno, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2017; 282 pp.: ISBN 9780691172903, $35.00 William Clare Roberts' new book undertakes to extract the critical kernel out of Marx's critique of political economy. Marx's Inferno is absorbing, wide-ranging, and original. Roberts enlists Inferno, the first part of Dante's Divine Comedy, to construct a structural analogy with the argument of Volume 1 of Capital. Roberts argues convincingly that Volume 1 (hereafter: Capital) is a self-contained work in political theory that mounts a freedom-based critique of capitalism. This critique, much like Dante's journey towards absolution, requires descent into a 'social Hell', the infernal depths of the capitalist mode of production. The book's overarching argument is that Capital must be understood as the 'self-consciousness of novel institutions of domination' and that 'therefore, if the laboring classes want to free themselves from this domination, they must get to the bottom of political economy itself, and destroy the social basis of its existence as a scientific discourse' (p. 17). In what follows, I take issue with three main themes of the book. The first theme deals with the 'impersonal' nature of domination embodied in the capital relation, the second with the putative connection between domination and republicanism, and the third with the political ramifications of this connection. Impersonal domination Chapter 3 of Marx's Inferno contains the basic ingredients of Roberts' account of capitalist domination. The chapter associates Marx's critique of political economy with its radical republican background, especially the work of William Thompson, John Francis Bray, Robert Owen in England, and Charles Fourier and Pierre Joseph Proudhon in France. It then argues for three main claims: (1) Marx kept the emphasis of republicanism on domination as subjection to arbitrary power, but (2) complemented it with an 'impersonal' account of domination of labour by capital that is at once anti-moralistic and structural, and (3) Marx's account of fetishism is, fundamentally, about 'a form of domination, rather than a form of false consciousness' (p. 85). The rest of this section discusses claims (2) and (3). I shall take up (1) in the next section. According to Roberts' Marx, the opening chapters of Capital 'contain, not a theory of price, but an account of the structure of human relations in commercial society. The concept of value they elaborate is, first and foremost, a tool for understanding the dominating form that these relations take' (p. 102). Because decisions about what to consume and produce are fundamentally dependent on prices, 'deliberate judgments about the place of commodities in a decent life' become 'extremely fragile' (pp. 84-85). Moreover, because capitalist social relations are price-mediated, that is, mediated by properties of things, 'there is no way to ensure that one's labor power, or one's commodity in general, is marketable' (p. 88). It follows that both capitalists and workers are dominated under capitalism: The capitalist, dominated by market imperatives, is compelled thereby to exploit labor, and to do so within the confines of competitive market transactions that secure for the laborer the fair value of his ... labor power, (p. 102) Therefore, Roberts thinks, 'the dominant class in modernity, the class of capitalists, is as subject to ... impersonal domination as are the laboring classes' (p. 102). The worker is, in this sense, 'a slave of a slave' (p. 103). Roberts infers--correctly, I think--that capitalist domination is not equivalent to class domination. There is, however, an ambiguity in his claim that the capitalist is 'dominated by market imperatives'. Are market imperatives the ground of domination or its subject? The former idea is coherent: markets are the structure in virtue of which capitalists dominate workers. …