Marx's Inferno:

The Political Theory of Capital

I came to this book from a recommendation by Corey Robin on FB. The author is William Clare Roberts. an academic at McGill University. No small amount of it is over my head. The first chunk especially so, nearly convincing me that I would never understand Marx. It got better after that, and I’m still reading. With some texts I find myself reading words but zoning out on the broader context. Old age, I guess.

A few quick takes:

The extent to which Marx and Engels’s ideas were cross-fertilized by other socialists, especially Robert Owen, Henri de Saint-Simon, and Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, was enlightening. Though not Marx’s intellectual equal, they were no slouches either.

It’s said that the first chapter in Capital on commodities is insuperably difficult. Based on descriptions in Roberts and others, it seems pretty straight-forward to me. Used a lot more words than seemed necessary, so I’m probably missing a lot.

I’m starting to think that Michael Harrington’s argument, that the most valuable materials from Marx and Engels got obscured thanks to the Soviet elevation of the Communist Manifesto and the October Revolution, is too easy. M&E were pretty strict in defending their own subtle analyses, in their own way philosophically intransigent and radical. At the same time, they were attuned to the more pedestrian workers’ struggles for democratic rights, which is more in keeping with Harrington’s stance.

The socialists were better at politics than Marx, whose insistence on his own deep analysis must have limited the reach of his message. I’ve read that he was not all that influential in his day, compared to his rivals such as Proudhon or his later interpreter, Karl Kautsky.

The overwhelming feature of the commodity analysis is what Roberts calls its depersonalization. All are ensnared by capitalism as a system. Individual morals and willpower don’t enter into it. At the same time, which is my observation, for purposes of political agitation, moral condemnation of identifiable personalities is indispensable.

I’m most intrigued by a suggestion from WCR that Marx was hostile to central planning. Since M&E are skeptical of other socialists’ views on cooperation, association, and labor-time chits, the socialism to which it all leads is not obvious.

Money crankery was in full flower all the way back to 1800. Marx’s takes on it sounds right to me. It prompts the thought that as long as there are finance and money, assorted scribblers will cook up schemes for their reform, thinking they are fixing Capitalism. This explains the popular, ignorant enthusiasm for “Modern Monetary Theory,” for which its principal exponents, smart economists like Stephanie Kelton and Randy Wray, are not responsible.

The insistence on the inescapable flaws of commodity production is not very congenial to certain old-time socialist, anarchist, or syndicalist schemes, such as labor-managed firms, worker-controlled factories, etc. I would say in any case the market is susceptible to regulation, and wealth is still susceptible to heavy taxation. Different ways of managing factories are worth exploring, though they are far from crucial for socialist transformation. Even so, you can have Marxism without revolution.

Socialist rhetoric in this vein — e.g., “an empire of force and fraud” — can be tempting but by Marx does not get to the bottom of things. Marx wanted to insist that there is nothing unfair in wage labor, in the sense that the worker got less than he provided. Free-wheeling, competitive markets have the fundamental flaw of extracting surplus value. To dwell on secondary concerns is to affirm the fundamental problem:

“For it is not as if personal and political domination and abuse have disappeared under the reign of capital. Capitalism means more, to Marx, than the impersonal domination of the market and the de-personalized exploitation of labor. The reign of capital also empowers and impels capitalists to exercise a sort of personal dominion over the workplace, and over the labor process that occurs there. It gives rise to a labor market that is stratified by gender, age, race, and nationality, and to an immense population dependent upon wages for survival. It usurps the political power of the state, which comes to be dependent upon capital accumulation for its operations, and, therefore, deploys force of arms to establish the conditions of that accumulation. Capital’s social Hell is labyrinthine, and its recesses hold many monsters.” — William Clare Roberts, “Marx’s Inferno.”

This marvelous reading points up the superficiality of takes such as that from Professor Joseph Heath, to the effect that there is little in Marx beyond an aversion to inequality.

More on Roberts to come, after I’ve finished his book.