Extended Book Review: Freedom and republicanism in Roberts’ Marx

Abstract

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.

The market ideology conception of fetishism: An interpretation and defense

“…As Sewell emphasizes, what characterizes capitalism is precisely both a 'chronic instability or unpredictability' and 'a continuous dynamic of capital accumulation […]' (1992,(25)(26). 12 Now, Vrousalis also insists, against Roberts, that the agents of this domination are not 'markets or market imperatives', but '[c]apitalists who dominate each other by jointly constituting the 'external coercive necessities confronting the individual capitalist' (2017( , 3, quoting Marx, 1976. Here, I do not engage in this debate, however, for it would take us too far afield.…”

“…The market is a social practice of commodity production and exchange, that is, a collective solution to a coordination problem: the problem is for private producers to make a living in the absence of some form of central planning, and the solution the commodification process which generates market exchange and competition (Cohen, 2000; Roberts, 2017, for example, 78n97; Sewell, 1992; Vrousalis, 2017). Those who enact the market participate in commodifying things—from means of production to products to their own ability to produce—by repeatedly reducing them, by means of money and other measuring devices, to units which can be counted, added, compared, and converted into one another.…”

“…According to the first conception, the concept of commodity fetishism alerts us to a form of market ideology that plays a crucial role in the reproduction of market domination (Cohen, 2000; Elster, 1986). On the second conception, by contrast, commodity fetishism refers to market domination itself, understood as a form of structural domination with a specific profit‐maximizing logic (Roberts, 2017, Vrousalis, 2017, Ripstein, 1987).…”

“…To solve this problem, I draw on the market domination conception of fetishism, and specifically on its analysis of the profit‐maximizing logic of market domination (Ripstein, 1987, Roberts, 2017, Vrousalis, 2017). I argue that this logic makes market ideology pervasive (see Sewell, 1992), which deprives agents of the symbolic‐material discrepancies between social milieux that would help them break free from market ideology.…”

Socialist Republicanism

“…40 In the same spirit, Nicholas Vrousalis objects to republican critiques of capitalism on the grounds that "domination without arbitrariness" is common in modernity. 41 Both workers and capitalists are thought to be subject to non-arbitrary wills: those shaped by impersonal market imperatives. Similarly, Thompson suggests neo-republicans do not sufficiently appreciate "the functional logic of the economy", whereby workers are "dependent less on the individual capitalist than on the structure of extractive power".…”