Marx's Inferno Roberts, William Clare
2016, 2016., 20161220, 2016-12-20
eBook
Marx's Infernoreconstructs the major arguments of Karl Marx'sCapitaland inaugurates a completely new reading of a seminal classic. Rather than offering a critique of classical political economy, ...William Roberts argues thatCapitalwas primarily a careful engagement with the motives and aims of the workers' movement. Understood in this light,Capitalemerges as a profound work of political theory. Placing Marx against the background of nineteenth-century socialism, Roberts shows howCapitalwas ingeniously modeled on Dante'sInferno, and how Marx revised republican ideas of freedom in response to the rise of capitalism. Combining research on Marx's interlocutors, textual scholarship, and forays into recent debates, Roberts traces the continuities linking Marx's theory of capitalism to the tradition of republican political thought. He immerses the reader in socialist debates from the past, showing how they speak to ever-renewed concerns about political life in today's world.
The ongoing critical redeployment of primitive accumulation proceeds under two premises. First, it is argued that Marx, erroneously, confined primitive accumulation to the earliest history of ...capitalism. Second, Marx is supposed to have teleologically justified primitive accumulation as a necessary precondition for socialist development. This article argues that reading Marx’s account of primitive accumulation in the context of contemporaneous debates about working class and socialist strategy rebuts both of these criticisms. Marx’s definition of primitive accumulation as the ‘prehistory of capital’ does not deny its contemporaneity, but marks the distinction between the operations of capital and those of other agencies – especially the state – which are necessary, but also external, to capital itself. This same distinction between capital, which accumulates via the exploitation of labour-power, and the state, which becomes dependent upon capitalist accumulation for its own existence, recasts the historical necessity of primitive accumulation. Marx characterizes the modern state as the armed and servile agent of capital, willing to carry out primitive accumulation wherever the conditions of capitalist accumulation are threatened. Hence, the recent reconstructions risk obliterating Marx’s key insights into the specificity of a) capital as a form of wealth and b) capital’s relationship to the state.
The Red Pill Roberts, William Clare
Radical philosophy,
10/2022
213
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
Rare is the book that provokes in Roberts both frequent agreement and teeth-clenching, head-shaking, wincing frustration. But such is Vivek Chibber's The Class Matrix. Chibber is his generation's ...foremost advocate of analytical Marxism, a program of articulating and defending socialist politics using the tools of contemporary social science. Here, Roberts argues that The Class Matrix is itself what must be escaped. It is superficially rigorous but built upon critical ambiguities, equivocations and contradictions. Like much online and podcast commentary, it hovers indefinitely between angst and trolling. Like a bad legacy sequel, it can match neither the scope nor the insight of the original work of Erik Olin Wright or Adam Przeworski, to which it hearkens nostalgically. If this is what analytical Marxism is today, it is time to cancel the franchise.
There is something amiss about post-Rawlsian efforts to bring political theory down to earth by insisting upon the political primacy of the question of legitimacy, peace, or order. The intuition ...driving much realism seems to be that we must first agree to get along, and only then can we get down to the business of pursuing justice. I argue that the ideological narratives of the powerful pose a political problem for this primacy of legitimacy thesis. To prioritize the achievement of democratic legitimacy seems to make sense only to the extent that we already live in a world in which systematic domination—and its ideological baggage—has been stamped out. I draw on the social study of domination for the sake of combatting in political theory the temptation to focus on the static design of the constitutional state at the expense of ignoring or even condemning the social processes that motivate legal and constitutional changes.
Abstract
When Marx dissected the capitalist economy and intervened in the international workers' movement, he did so in the service of freeing people from alien, uncontrolled power. His political ...project was the realisation of what he called the social republic, and his theoretical project was to identify the forces that promote or retard this political project. In order to bring out the specificity and cogency of the social-republican Marx, this essay uproots the positive-freedom reading that has overgrown the edifice of his thought. Marx certainly hoped for 'real freedom', which is a sort of self-realisation. He also hoped for a sort of collective self-determination. And he thought that collective self-determination was a prerequisite for general self-realisation. But Marx also thought that generalised freedom from domination was a prerequisite for collective self-determination.
Via a critical reading of Saba Mahmood's Politics of Piety, this essay argues the traditions of "history from below", subaltern studies, and postcolonial feminist studies have issued in a series of ...conceptual difficulties around the idea of emancipation. Mahmood rightly criticizes the tendency of these traditions to conflate agency and resistance. Her own effort to decouple agency and desire from emancipatory politics, however, undercuts theory's capacity to diagnose domination and ties theory too closely to the self-understandings of its subjects. Distinguishing appropriately between agency and freedom and between desire and interests can revivify the idea of emancipation. A universal interest in freedom from domination can be defended on this basis without discounting the self-understandings and actual desires of people. This argument points the way to a division of labour between emancipatory political theory, which analyses public institutions in the name of the universal interest in freedom, and emancipatory politics, which begins from people's actual desires in order to build support for institutional change.
Marx's Inferno reconstructs the major arguments of Karl Marx’s Capital and inaugurates a completely new reading of a seminal classic. Rather than offering a critique of classical political ...economy, William Roberts argues that Capital was primarily a careful engagement with the motives and aims of the workers’ movement. Understood in this light, Capital emerges as a profound work of political theory. Placing Marx against the background of nineteenth-century socialism, Roberts shows how Capital was ingeniously modeled on Dante’s Inferno , and how Marx revised republican ideas of freedom in response to the rise of capitalism. Combining research on Marx’s interlocutors, textual scholarship, and forays into recent debates, Roberts traces the continuities linking Marx’s theory of capitalism to the tradition of republican political thought. He immerses the reader in socialist debates from the past, showing how they speak to ever-renewed concerns about political life in today’s world. 
In his recent book on Strauss, Steven B. Smith has called attention to “a curiously neglected passage from the very center of Natural Right and History,” a passage in which Strauss “acknowledges the ...way political decisions grow out of concrete situations and cannot be deduced from a priori rules.” The passage reads:
Let us call an extreme situation a situation in which the very existence or independence of a society is at stake. In extreme situations there may be conflicts between what the self-preservation of society requires and the requirements of commutative and distributive justice. In such situations, and only in such situations, it can justly be said that the public safety is the highest law. A decent society will not go to war except for a just cause. But what it will do during a war will depend to a certain extent on what the enemy—possibly an absolutely unscrupulous and savage enemy—forces it to do. There are no limits which can be defined in advance, there are no assignable limits to what might become just reprisals.
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