Marx's Inferno: The Political Theory of Capital

by William Clare Roberts

Marx's Inferno reconstructs the major arguments of Karl Marx's Capital and inaugurates a completely new reading of a seminal classic. Rather than simply 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, playing the role of Virgil for the proletariat, introduced partisans of workers' emancipation to the secret depths of the modern -social Hell.- In this manner, 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 about the nature of commerce, the experience of labor, the power of bosses and managers, and the possibilities of political organization. Roberts rescues those debates from the past, and shows how they speak to ever-renewed concerns about political life in today's world.

Genres: Philosophy, Politics, Economics, History, Nonfiction, Theory, Criticism

304 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2016

About the author

William Clare Roberts is assistant professor of political science at McGill University.

Reviews

[David M]

Alongside the optimistic doctrine, according to which capitalism produces processes of automation and scientific management that render the capitalist and market unnecessary - that is, communism grows within capitalism until it is ready to supplant its host - there is also the catastrophic or apocalyptic doctrine, according to which the steady immiseration of the proletariat, and the ever more severe crises of capitalism, will force at some point a complete scrapping of the capitalist system, compelling the desperate to invent a new social system to put in its place. - pp 151

An incredibly rich reading of the Most Important* Book Ever Written. The author's use of Dante as a prism on Marx is highly provocative (even if some readers might find it a bit strained at times; of course Marx had read the Divine Comedy, but there doesn't actually seem to be much evidence he considered it that central to his own project). Even better, his discussion of the neglected aspects of Marx's political thought is without peer. Roberts makes a compelling case for Marx the radical republican, a greater friend of liberty than John Stuart Mill.

*if not necessarily the greatest

[Kai · Rating 5 out of 5]

presumably no one needs another review that discussses how great this book is -- there are plenty of effective reviews out there already. i've picked up parts of it in the past, but finally needed to completely cross it off because i had to read The Inferno haha. it's weird because i'm not fully convinced by two of the three main arguments (the Dante one and on Marx's republicanism) but the third contextual argument placing Marx back into dialogue with his contemporaries is so expertly and effectively written that this book will remain essential for years. Roberts is one of maybe like fourish prominent marxists from South Dakota (present company extremely excluded) -- feels like that state is punching above its population?

[Sephie · Rating 5 out of 5]

"Marx's Inferno" is a strange book because it proceeds from a very weak core thesis - that Marx deliberately modeled Capital, Volume I on Dante's Inferno. Roberts does not provide nearly enough evidence to substantiate the strength of this claim; rather than just suggesting the use of the Inferno as a way of reading Marx, he claims it was intentional and rests this claim on shaky documentary evidence. But as a result manages to bring out an incredibly insightful and more accurate presentation of Marx's ideas than is often presented. There are times where I believe the thesis drives Roberts into some strange directions (for instance, his assertion that Marx morally opposed capitalist exploitation as an "unnatural" use of human labor-power, which seems to be both an unnecessary claim to make as well as a misleading one). There are also certain claims he presents as more original than they actually are, such as certain remarks on the state in the penultimate chapter, or his claim that the Dante-based reading surpasses the systematic dialectic approach embodied by writers like Michael Heinrich. But for the most part, Roberts' descent through Marx's work is extremely effective at dispelling various myths that have been propagated by critics and erstwhile allies of Marx alike (particularly around such topics as the law of value and Marx's views on technological modernism), and bringing out a politically useful reading of his late work in the process.

That politically useful reading is emergent from the two connected and subsidiary theses that Roberts puts forward in the process of reading Marx through Dante. First, Capital is best read in conversation with ongoing debates in the 19th-century socialist movement over how to respond to capitalism and its "science" of political economy, especially Marx's conflict with the mutualism of Pierre-Joseph Proudhon and the individual moralism of many of the utopian socialists. Second, Marx's political theory is firmly rooted in a republican tradition that conceives freedom as non-domination, and takes emancipation as the highest political priority. These two theses are the real meat of the book, and what make it worth engaging with; the Dante stuff occasionally brings out fantastic prose or interesting connections without necessarily bolstering these two arguments. The writing is generally quite clear, and even where it dips into the more difficult language of Hegelian terminology or republican political theory, he is adept at clarifying himself. Strong recommendation for all those interested in Marxist theory, or just want an innovative work of political theory that confronts one of the classics.

[Jacob Joshy]

This was a difficult read for me. I wouldn't guarantee that I was able to understand everything from this. But I love the way Roberts built his observations about the evolution and development of Socialist thought starting from Fourier to Saint Simon to Proudhon, and finally comes to the point where he establishes how Marx is different from the classical thought. At the same time I have some reservations about what he is trying to infer from these observations, and at points it seems to be deviating from the theories of established Marxists. Let aside all that, this book really is a tour de force with respect to Marxology as well as an important milestone in such a way that it contributes to the growing relevance of Marx and Marxism in academia.

[Durakov · Rating 5 out of 5]

I don't care to say too much about the appropriateness of reading Capital through Dante's Inferno or the political reading of Capital over a strictly economic one, but I will say that Roberts proves both to be extremely compelling. This was among the most fun and engaging books on the massive tome I've read so far, and, regardless again of how fitting the framing was, the comparisons with Capital produced a really exciting read on the literary aspects of the text.

Marx's Inferno is also among one of the clearest books I've read in a genre known for being somewhat impenetrable to new readers. I would totally recommend this as a great follow-up to Capital. Reading it against contemporary texts by other socialists did a great deal in defining the context and refining the uniqueness of Marx's contributions, much of which, according to Roberts, lies in looking to impersonal forces of domination, fraud, and treachery over individual actions or singular falls from grace. I just so happened to be reading this at the same time as Spinoza's Ethics, and so I was more than ready to jump onto a non-moralistic account of the workings of capital that places great emphasis on impersonal, systemic compulsions and dominations than individual actions and responsibility.

[Thomas Gallagher Romero · Rating 5 out of 5]

A mi forma de entender, este libro consta de dos tesis fundamentales: Marx se basó en la estructura de la Divina Comedia de Dante para escribir el primer tomo del Capital y el concepto fundacional de una sociedad comunista es la libertad como ausencia de dominación. En contra de lo que pueda sugerir el título y la sinopsis la tesis con mayor importancia para Roberts es la segunda.

Con respecto a la primera lo que más curioso me pareció es que esperaba una reconstrucción del Capital según la Divina Comedia pero no, el tío defiende que Marx se basó en la Divina Comedia literalmente para estructurar El Capital. La idea me parece muy chula. Efectivamente, el primer tomo del Capital cuenta con abundantes citas a Dante y existen registros de la obsesión de Marx con el poeta italiano pero desde mi punto de vista no creo que sea especialmente relevante si efectivamente Marx lo hizo a propósito o no. Todo marxista está condenado a un pequeño infierno particular: leer una explicación de El Capital, leer El Capital, leer otra explicación distinta de El Capital, volver a leer el capital y así ad infinitum sintiendo siempre que aún no lo terminaste de pillar. La estructura del Infierno facilita y hace más amenos algunos conceptos marxistas y eso ya hace que merezca la pena. Bien es cierto que enturbia o idealiza algunos otros.

Pero Roberts aprovecha este ejercicio estilístico para dedicarse a lo que realmente le interesa: analizar cual es el concepto fundacional del comunismo. ¿Es el comunismo un movimiento por la libertad? Antes de que a le piten los oídos a Milei creo que la mejor respuesta posible fue la reacción de los miembros del movimiento obrero en Nueva York a la muerte de Marx:

*"When word of his death reached New York City, “representatives of the various trades, labor, social, and other organizations” issued a public statement proclaiming that “now it is the duty of all true lovers of liberty to honor the name of Karl Marx.”"*

La palabra "liberty" parece hoy en día diametralmente opuesta al comunismo. Pasa con el concepto de libertad algo curioso: es intrínsecamente positiva en el imaginario popular. Es por ello que es tácticamente interesante saber articular tu proyecto político como un proyecto de libertad.

Antonio Escohotado, en una de sus múltiples pajas mentales de mierda, solía decir que la historia de los movimientos políticos se dividían en movementos por la libertad y por la seguridad. Al comunismo, junto al cristianismo, lo encuadraba en el segundo. En algo tenía que notarse que estuviese todo el día drogado. Así, conseguía vender una imagen del movimiento comunista como un movimiento cobarde, preso del miedo, que pretende asegurar las ganancias y avances del capitalismo a través de una "igualdad" impuesta.

Luego está el concepto del socialismo romántico de libertades negativas y positivas, acuñado por Isaiah Berlín en referencia al Leviatán de Hobbes, que hace poco rescataba un tío bastante parecido al malo de Sonic en el podcast de Rene ZZ. Su tesis se resume en que no existen tal cosa como los derechos positivos. Derechos negativos serían aquellos que se engloban dentro de ser libres de una imposición externa "no me puedes obligar a hacer X o no me puedes matar", derechos positivos serían los que implicarían a su vez una imposición sobre el accionar de los demás. Así, tienes derecho a que no te maten pero no tienes derecho a una vivienda porque implicaría que alguien tendría que trabajar para hacer y mantener esa vivienda para que tú vivas allí. El bigotudo imbécil este se olvida de que nadie tiene derecho a que no le maten de por sí. Tienes derecho a ser defendido en caso de que alguien intente matarte y tienes derecho a que quien te mate reciba un castigo proporcional para así disuadirlo. Bajo su propia lógica esto implicaría que el policía, juez, fiscal y recepcionista de los juzgados están trabajando para mantener tu derecho a no ser asesinado y por lo tanto lo perderías.

Recojo una idea del resumen de Mario Aguiriano de este libro: "Para la tradición republicana, ser libre es ser libre de la imposición de una voluntad externa y arbitraria sobre la propia. Marx, por su parte, supera el republicanismo clásico al demostrar que esta voluntad externa no es necesariamente la de un individuo o grupo concreto, sino que puede tomar una forma impersonal. [...] La clave de la idea “libertad = ausencia de imposición de una voluntad externa y arbitraria” no reside en el término “imposición”, y tampoco solamente en el “externa”: la mayor parte del peso reside en “arbitraria”. Los dictados del capital, por ejemplo, son un claro caso de arbitrariedad, al imponerse de forma ciega. Por el contrario, si tras el adecuado proceso de deliberación colectiva (como garantía de la no-arbitrariedad) la Comuna toma una decisión que no satisface a un individuo concreto, esto no la convierte en despótica, ni priva a dicho individuo de su libertad, ni hace que su imposición constituya una forma de dominación. De hecho, la capacidad colectiva de imponerla es garantía de la libertad individual de todos sus miembros, que solo puede sostenerse a través de la existencia de instituciones capaces de gestionar comunitariamente la vida social. Lo mismo se aplica a la existencia misma de dichas instituciones.

Para poder hablar del “reino de la libertad” no es necesario que cada individuo desee fervientemente la existencia de todas y cada una de las instituciones comunales, ni que decida constantemente si deben existir o no. Basta con que estas instituciones estén organizadas en torno a la ausencia de dominación. En resumen: carece de sentido imaginar la libertad como la capacidad de cada individuo de hacer lo que quiera en cada momento, o de apoyar explícitamente sobre todas y cada una de las decisiones colectivas: la libertad no puede consistir en la exención de toda responsabilidad social, y ninguna forma de autogobierno colectivo podría fundarse sobre este credo asocial y atomístico. De hecho, y aunque Roberts no desarrolla este punto, una concepción suficientemente rigurosa de “voluntad” debería ser capaz de desvincularla de la opinión, la apetencia y el deseo, para poder distinguir entre la adhesión racional del individuo a los mecanismos de gestión colectiva (por más que en ocasiones no coincidan con sus inclinaciones u opiniones), en la que se cifraría su libertad, y su apoyo individual explícito a todas las decisiones finalmente tomadas (que no es en absoluto un prerrequisito de su libertad). En rigor, que la voluntad de la comunidad no coincida con su postura no la convierte en externa: pretender que sí lo hace es confundir la adhesión racional a normas con la disposición psicológica. Ambas son internas al individuo, pero se mueven a niveles diferentes. En otras palabras: la voluntad de cada individuo de la sociedad comunista en sentido riguroso es su adhesión a los principios de la asociación de individuos libres (la no-dominación como garantía de su libertad), y esta debe separarse de sus posturas particulares sobre los diferentes asuntos sociales. La voluntad racional de cada uno de estos individuos consiste en no ser dominado por otros; y si defendiera la posibilidad de imponer arbitrariamente (esto es, despóticamente) sobre otros sus propios deseos, estaría contradiciéndose a sí mismo y abriendo la puerta a que otros impusieran arbitrariamente sus deseos sobre él. De ahí la necesidad de disociar la voluntad racional de la inclinación psicológica momentánea, lo necesario de lo contingente. [...]

El comunismo, cabe insistir, no consiste en la afirmación de la comunidad frente al individuo, sino en la superación de la misma escisión entre individuo y comunidad en una sociedad en la que la libertad de cada uno sea la condición de la libertad de todos. Es, en ese sentido, la síntesis de control desde abajo y centralización; donde lo que se controla es precisamente la toma de decisiones colectivamente vinculantes, y por lo tanto la propia vida no como átomo aislado sino como “individuo social” en un orden sostenido sobre la ausencia de dominación. Pues “ausencia de dominación” es que nada ni nadie pueda imponer su voluntad arbitrariamente sobre los demás, y esto es precisamente lo que estaría haciendo quien se negara a aceptar una decisión colectiva."

Los capitalistas afirman que el mercado, al estar constituido por las decisiones de incontables individuos, es una expresión de democracia espontánea superior a la democracia tradicional. Olvidan que un individuo privado de libertad nunca podrá realizar una asociación libre. Estará siempre sujeto a la imposición externa y arbitraria del conjunto del mercado, por mucho que forme parte también de él.

Por último, me parece interesante la idea de Roberts de que no tiene sentido definir en qué consistirá el comunismo. Si el comunismo, como asociación libre de individuos libres tiene sentido, es precisamente a través de las decisiones que tomen dichos individuos libres. Volviendo "Si la emancipación de los trabajadores solo puede ser obra de los trabajadores mismos, la idea de elaborar esbozos detallados de la sociedad futura carece de sentido. Corresponde a los individuos asociados dar forma a la posibilidad material del comunismo, donde la abolición de la política, entendida como dominación de clase, coincide con el florecimiento de la política, entendida como organización colectiva de nuestras vidas."

[Roberto Yoed · Rating 2 out of 5]

Despite being an interesting and unique project, this book reinforces the metaphysical and ideological conception about Marx's work being profoundly escathological (when in reality, dialectics, as well as Marx's method, and therefore his postulates, aren't as deterministic nor as rigid as some people tend to attribute). Ironically, dialectics are absolute, but that is another topic.

Also, the author thinks Marx is a republican and an owenist.

Read this if you are having a crisis of imagination, if that's not the case I'd suggest to move on.

[Dante · Rating 4 out of 5]

Journey into the depths of the 'social hell' that is Capitalism, and read along as Roberts deposits Jon Elster and G. A. Cohen at the infernal centre, reveals quite what is at stake in Marx's disputes with the socialists of his day and demonstrates the great force of his Owenite republicanism. A work of great ingenuity. I hope a review worthy of this text will appear in the next week or so.

[saml · Rating 4 out of 5]

pairing capital up with the inferno isn't merely a thin literary exercise, but it also isn't much more than that. it does allow roberts to talk about vices, which is a good starting point for worrying about marx's morality, and its subversive socialising quality. but i do not know enough about the republican tradition to know whether or not this book is apt to it, or whether it provides any profound normative foundation for political activity. and hence i can only appreciate this book as broadening our perspectives on marx, and leading us to consider the socialist movements in which he thought. it gives a clear sense that marx was intervening, which is as about a good a sense as one can give

[Morgan]

In this work Roberts seems to want to do for Capital Volume 1 what Lars T. Lih did for What Is to Be Done? – to clean out all the accumulated muck of intra-socialist debate regarding the book and read it in the context in which it was written, preparing the ground for actually productive discussion. The comparison goes further than that, too, in that both authors are intent on reinterpreting their chosen authors as devoted advocates of political freedom. Lih's Lenin is a social-democrat, Roberts's Marx is a social-republican.

Roberts places Capital in polemic with the socialisms associated with Proudhon, Saint-Simon, and Owen. He argues that it is not a work of economic theory, but a political work inverting early socialist themes to show what the worker movement actually needs to pursue in order to emancipate their own class: "the conquest of political power. The use of that political power to the attainment of social ends." (Interview from 1871)

If this was properly executed, it would be an incredible work. And in a sense it still is. Roberts's interpretation is highly compelling; he makes it very clear that Marx valued freedom more than equality and understood freedom primarily in a negative sense, as non-domination. He also effectively counters many other myths about Marx and Capital. However, contextualization is only one of the book's aims. The other is to read Capital as consciously modeled on Dante's Inferno. This second project, though not a mortal flaw, points to serious problems which painfully prevent the book from being a masterpiece. Chief among those are a certain lack of academic rigor and an overstating of the author's own interpretations, which make for a very bad combination to say the least.

The Dante thesis is the most obvious example. It is practically baseless, but adhered to throughout the book in a way which serves to obfuscate just as often as it clarifies. Another, less serious, example is the claim that Marx understood communism in 'Owenite' terms, which Roberts again does not provide enough evidence for, and even undermines in pointing out that Owen's and Marx's visions of socialism differed significantly. Such cases make it hard to know whether Roberts's other claims are grounded in evidence or largely conjured up from his own mind. This is completely antithetical to the kind of historical thoroughness exemplified by Lih's works on Lenin.

The overstating is even more prevalent. Part of the problem is that, for all the myths and slander, Marx and his magnum opus are much less universally misinterpreted than Lenin and his polemic of 1902. Marx has been partially redeemed for a very long time, and productive discussion of his work has a long history. The levelling Roberts wants to do, therefore, also involves tossing out some useful interpretations which don't fit in with a strict reading of his own opinions. But does Capital's nature as a work to enlighten the worker movement inherently exclude dialectical interpretations? Does reading capitalism as systematic fraud really erase its positive development of the productive forces as a factor from Marx's historical theory? And, sure, Marx primarily understood freedom in a negative sense, but does that make all interpretations of communism as positive liberty problematic? Roberts's approach often works to erase nuances from the text.

It's regrettable, really. Reading Capital through Dante is an interesting concept, as long as one does not claim that the former was consciously modeled on the latter. And it is not completely divorced from the aim of contextualization, either; Marx serves as the Virgil to the proletariat's Dante, showing it the social hell of capitalism's own making. The primary gain of this reading is in its illustration of how Marx sublates Christian-moralistic tropes in his analysis of market forces and exploitation. At the same time it does not map one-to-one and would therefore be better served by the article format than an entire book, or by focusing on Marx's sublation of moralism more generally. Roberts's attempt to fit Capital one-to-one leads him to some strange places. The final part of chapter 4, for example, is actively harmful in implying that capital is an alien force defiling pristine labor from the outside (as if capital is not a product of labor). If this was Marx's own conception we'd have to move past it.

I have to emphasize again here at the end that Roberts' overall interpretation is a fascinating one, one which I find very useful in my personal attempt at understanding Marx's political project and vision. The problem is that he formulates it in a totalizing and mystifying way, lacking the rigorous clarity which is vital to the kind of reinterpretation project he is undertaking.

[Jason · Rating 5 out of 5]

Great brilliant book but here is my question. He states that exploitation is not about workers not getting all the value they create, or, in other words capitalists expropriating surplus value. He says things like "Marx denies that the value of commodities is determined by the labor actually spent of them; it is rather the labor necessary to produce them in a socially average way that determines their vale. Moreover : if a thing is useless so is the labor contained in it; the labor does not count as labor it creates no value." Soically necessary labor must fulfill a social need not just a technical requirement. . . . only the act of exchange can prove whether that labor is ueful to others, and its product consequently capable of satisfying the needs of others." (80) He also says there is no way of determining, really in any absolute way the value of labor power--there is no way to tell when an amount of labor during a day switches from enough to bring the worker back another day (VLP) to producing surplus value.

I get than on an individual level one can't do that, but in the aggregate, is it still illegitimate to say on the whole, that the workers in a society over time do not receive all of the value they produce? It is certainly true that the market has a role to play in codifying value (if the capitalist doesn't sell things for more than the constant capital vs. the variable capital she spends, then there is no profit) but why throw away one understanding of exploitation and only focus on another, one that stresses the intensity of work?

Also, there is nothing about the tendency for the rate of profit to fall, or the organic composition of capital in this book.

Anyway.

[Lukáš · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book reads Marx's Capital as working out the template of Dante's Inferno, aimed at guiding the reader through and out of the Hell of Capitalism. Roberts both gives support for the feasibility of such a reading, but also locates the notion of Social Hell in the work of French socialists (Fourier, Saint-Simon, Proudhon) and reads Marx's critique as advancing towards a more complete picture. Besides this being already quite an achievement and a rather innovative position, Roberts also works out on Marx's relationship with republicanism, articulating his criticism as advancing republican political thought towards the domain of the social through the critique of political economy. The book is highly enjoyable, although I'd perhaps appreciate an even more literary / narrative form rather than formal academic argument, which, however, does not unmake it worthwhile if either Marx, socialism, republicanism or political theory is one's thing.

[Benjamin Burgis]

I'll probably write something about it for the Substack in the medium term of soon-ish, but the very short version is:

(1) Roberts brings in an enormous amount of knowledge about the utopian socialists, Proudhon, etc., and Marx's reactions to these people, and has a bunch of insightful things to say about how these polemics can help us understand what Marx is up to in Capital.

(2) In particular, he's very good on the question of normativity in Capital--what Marx is and isn't talking about when he uses the word "justice." And I deeply agree with and appreciate his emphasis on Marx's incorporation of a republican notion of freedom (freedom as non-domination).

(3) Although I don't think my perspective perfectly aligns with WCR on either of these subjects, I really want to emphasize that book has helped me get a better grip on what Marx is up to in the early chapters on commodities and money, as well as in the last chapter on the colonies.

That said:

(4) I think he seriously misses the mark in a lot of what he says about Marx's account of primitive accumulation, sees a problem that isn't really a problem, and tries to solve it by attributing to Marx a view of early capitalists "betraying" land-owners for which the textual evidence is awfully thin.

And most importantly, speaking of textual evidence:

(5) Marx is, I'm sorry, a 'productivist.' Marx's historical materialism, which is all over Capital and which he never seriously hints at retracting, absolutely commits him to thinking that development of the forces of production under capitalism has to proceed to a certain point to make socialism possible, and that the developmental clock can't and shouldn't be turned back. If you want to reject all this on ecosocialist grounds, go for it. (I strongly disagree with you, but I can at least respect your integrity if you say, "Marx has this view but he got it wrong." It's fine. Try it! Marx was wrong about some things. Just argue that this was one of them!) But trying, as Roberts does here, to creatively reinterpret away Marx's very clear commitment to this thesis, such that "material conditions" for socialism secretly means "workers' subjective desire for socialism," is just ridiculous. Do better, William Clare.

All in all, very much worth reading, but proceed with caution.

[Andreas Chari · Rating 5 out of 5]

"As a new Virgil, Marx tries to guide his readers along the internal connections binding exchange to exploitation, contracts to conquest, prices to poverty, development to despotism. His hope is that a pilgrim with many heads and many hands will follow him, a new collective Dante, whose poetry will constitute a new republic beyond the empire of capital."

[Jake · Rating 4 out of 5]

Having read both Capital and the Divine Comedy in the past, I really enjoyed this book. When I purchased it (it's been sitting on my shelf for a while), I was expecting more of a discussion of Marx and Dante together, as I found (and still find) the comparison between them fascinating. However, this is a book purely about *how* to interpret Capital via several lenses, one of them being Dante's model of Inferno.

Along with being modeled on the Inferno, Roberts argues that there are two other major things to keep in mind when trying to understand Marx's project: 1) that throughout the entirety of Capital, Marx is specifically addressing myths/beliefs/arguments of the workers movement and earlier socialists, so a basic familiarity with Owen, Proudhon, and others is necessary; 2) that Marx, and the socialists that came before him, descended from republicanism (which is pretty obvious), so the reader of Capital needs to keep the relationship to republicanism in mind along with one central aim that the republicans and socialists shared: eliminating domination in order to secure freedom.

These three elements that Roberts introduces seem sufficiently justified, though he primarily focuses on the relationship between Marx and previous socialists. As a reader, I wanted to know more about republicanism and Dante, especially since Roberts is pretty convincing in identifying Capital's literary homage to Inferno.

Hopefully, this research can lead to a more in-depth comparison between Dante and Marx as literary figures. Capital and the Divine Comedy both signal massive epochal changes in European history, and both were concerned with explicating the hidden (or subterranean) world hidden from plain view. There are also some similarities in their biographies: both were exiled and spent more than a decade writing their opus in exile, and both books were published towards the end of their lives. It could be a great study.

[Ian Szabo · Rating 4 out of 5]

A very good introduction to Marx's first volume of Capital that pulls Marx out of much of cold war narratives in which he has been situated to uncover what his political project was within its historical context, namely that of a Socialist-Republican critique of other socialists and labor leaders who failed to articulate their beliefs at the level of politics (especially Proudhon), in many ways anticipating Lenin's criticisms of economism. The narrative of Marx basing the template of Capital on Dante's Inferno is certainly interesting, but I think the fact that the book tends to stray from this narrative fairy regularly reveals the degree to which it's slightly overstressed and more or less secondary to Capital Vol. 1 overall.

[Reilly Pryma · Rating 2 out of 5]

Revision: 2/5 (You can see the original review below)
A harsh revision, yes, but after engaging with some robust philosophy, it has made me realize the bankruptcy of the totality of Roberts's vision of Marx. To state it outright, in Roberts dismissing the dialectic and, with it, and more importantly, the role of abstraction in Marx's thought, he is missing the entire damn point of Capital. This was put most revealingly when Roberts discussed the thought of Moishe Postone, I believe in Chapter 3, citing it as a failure because of its focus on abstract domination; Roberts simply says something like "why should we care about ideas alone?" This irked me initially, but I could not fully justify why. But now, having been introduced to even the basics of German Idealism, something Marx was very, very well-versed in, I see the absurdity of such a statement, which contains all the theoretical force and nuance of a 16 year-old posting on reddit about how silly all those old codgers were for talking about ideas when everything exists on the ground, man. To keep it brief, I think I could begin my objection with the fact human subjectivity is constituted by language, and language is an impersonal thing hanging above all of us. You could extrapolate this to broader horizons about reality, as Slavoj Žižek does in a book I reviewed after I read this one (see my review), but it suffices for now to say that the abstractions that are birthed from the foul, wet gash that lies between language and reality are NOT merely byproducts of person-to-person interactions or made-up ideas but are REAL forces in the world.
Need evidence? How about the ENTIRE FIRST PART OF CAPITAL, about VALUE, which is, get this, an ABSTRACTION that, regardless, has OBJECTIVE force in the world. The fact that Roberts misses this point would be wondrous if I had not myself missed, were it not pointed out first by David Harvey (in the "Companion to Capital) and then more pointedly by Žižek in the aforementioned book.
This whole matter of Marxian republicanism follows this, as it takes a very surface-level view of reality, often through an "agentic" structure that takes all the reified assumptions of bourgeois sociology and pretends to "use them correctly" while only becoming ensnared in them.
I could go on, but I think this is enough. Read a summary of Kant or Hegel before picking up Marx. It'll help greatly, because Marx was a philosopher, not just a political theorist.
So, yeah.

Previous (outdated) review:

Overall, 4.25/5
There is a lot to cover with Roberts's work here, which is sensible given that he is summarizing a 1000+ page text alongside much of Marx's greater corpus. However, I will try to be brief.
Firstly, on the ground level this is a first-class summation of what Marx is getting at. It is often difficult for us as a modern audience to wrap out heads around the content of Capital Volume 1, especially when reading it in a school (usually university) setting. As David Harvey said roughly, we are taught in a way that runs counter to how Marx thought and what he wanted us to see in society. Additionally, the hardest part of Capital by Marx's own admission (see the First Preface), Chapter 1, is what is usually assigned, which is often not fully understood by the instructors. With all this aside, I wanted to lay out what I appreciate.
Firstly, I think it is absolutely vital that Roberts deals with Marx's relation between labor and value early on and decisively (Chapter 3). Easily the biggest crime done to Marx's name (aside from blaming him for mass murder) is attributing a Labor Theory of Value to him. As Roberts puts it, it is a "Value Theory of Labor, not a Labor Theory of Value" (78, in my softcover edition). To sum it up quickly, the value that labor produces is not inherent to the labor, as is often supposed, but is determined by socially necessary labor in the abstract, which is itself determined by the productivity of labor but also, crucially, by how willing actors in the market are the purchase the products of labor. This clarification both places Marx firmly in the camp of subjective preference view of value that mainstream economics currently holds but also cleverly plays into a narrative of domination by the impersonal forces of the market, enabled by the commodity fetish.
Secondly, to jump to the other end of the book, I think Chapter 7 was especially important. While I was at first skeptical of Roberts attributing a republican (in the classical sense obviously, not an American sense) mode of though to Marx, upon loosening the definition a bit to focusing on freedom from domination (a reasonable move) and also providing a wealth of evidence, I'd say I'm convinced. It also, obviously, dispelled many ill-conceived notions of what Marx thought a communist future would look like, i.e. NOT a collection of purely equal industrial foot-soldiers or a towering technocratic centrally-planned bureaucracy or anything like the horrors of the USSR and "Communist" China, but instead a free association of self-governing worker-controlled workplaces, arranged into republics that prioritize the development of its citizens but is able to, after rigorous discussion and checks and balances, enforce community decisions without dominating its constituents.
Thirdly, the dealing with exploitation via surplus value (Chapter 4) was generally solid, as was Chapter 5, the consistent failing of capitalism to live up to its promises.
Finally, the connection to the Inferno was, overall, generally nice.
But here we get to issues, particularly with Chapter 6, on primitive accumulation which is supposed to parallel the Ninth and final circle of Hell, the sin of treachery. I think Roberts contorts Marx's account somewhat to fit into his assigned sin of treachery, moralizing the feudal lords and burgher class that swept into their place as betraying their people, as if they were not constantly dominating them from the start. He also downplays the role of wealth extorted (to put it extremely mildly) from the New World and the trade routes to the East, as well as the gradual formation of the bourgeois class across Western Europe beginning with the decline of feudalism in the Renaissance, things Marx dealt with rather well in the appropriate section of the German Ideology, though rather quickly.
But here comes my biggest issue: Roberts's dismissal of the dialectic. This comes right at the beginning, Chapter 1, pages 10-11. I don't want to get into the rabbithole of the dialectic, but basically it's a philosophical system that view the human social world as primarily composed of ongoing processes, not things, all interacting within a totality. This is a very, very condensed summary. But within the dialectical method one moves between the empirics, the things on the ground, and into processes, the true constituents of reality, via abstraction. This is how Capital was written: Marx would observe something or investigate some data, connect it with other happenings in the empirical world, and elevate them to broader truths by abstracting them into conceptual processes. This is important for two reasons: firstly, it sheds light on how Capital was operationally written. Another problem is that by framing the stages of Capital primarily in literary references and debates with other socialists (Fourier, Proudhon, etc.) Roberts gives a creeping implication that Marx is maybe a bit arbitrary, that he's just trying to get at people in an internecine conflict; I never thought this, nor do I believe that Roberts is at all trying to imply this, but this reading becomes somewhat possible due to Roberts never properly connecting Marx's work to the material reality, since this requires the dialectical method.
But another big issue is that of the epistemology surrounding capitalism; I have to note here I am a massive fan of Georg Lukács's essay "Reification and the Consciousness of the Proletariat," which deals with the implications of the commodity fetish for bourgeois thought and the way forward for the working class. It is here that Lukács is able to masterfully intertwine the economic bases of capitalism and its philosophical manifestations, alongside why on an epistemological level the proletariat and attain consciousness for society. However, Roberts, in discussing the commodity fetish (where he also discusses Lukács briefly), dismisses the epistemological problem for the political problem of fetishism (as a means of domination by the market); it is, of course, both.
I will leave it at there. Overall, it was a very enjoyable read, and I think it is a good jumping-off point for a reading of Capital itself, provided one goes into Roberts's piece with a critical mindset. So, 4.25/5

[Graeme · Rating 4 out of 5]

Roberts seems to have two main goals in this work. Firstly, he claims that Marx's analysis of capital in "Capital" is structurally influenced by Dante's Inferno. Secondly, he claims that "Capital" was primarily an engagement with other forms of 19th century radical and socialist thought, as well as the worker's movement more broadly. Roberts is much more successful with the latter than the former.

Early on in the work a lot of effort is put into drawing parallels between the catabasis in Capital and how it resembles Dante's Inferno. In addition, attention is drawn to the fact that Marx had read the Inferno and it is plausible to see a direct influence between the two works. However, as the work continues the connection to Dante becomes far more extraneous to the questions that Roberts explores. The interpretive claims that Roberts make about Marx do not seem to be contingent on the connection that Roberts draws been Capital and the Inferno. That said, I don't think this was much of a problem for the work as the two sides of his argument are not in tension with one another.

Robert's key claim about Capital is that Marx was offering a diagnosis of capitalism that rejected moralistic criticism of capitalism in favour of a structural diagnosis of capitalism as a system that frustrates republican freedom (freedom as non-domination). Roberts lays out the objective domination of the market; the domination of capital over labour in the workplace and the role of the state in perpetuating capital's dominance over labour and draws out how Marx shows that the utopian socialist, Ricardian socialist and mutualist responses to these problems misunderstand capital. In most cases these earlier responses, assume that the independence traditionally sought after in republican political theory can be regained as long as labour receives its proper due and is not exploited by capital. This can take the form of an association of independent small proprietors, intentional communities and the like. However, Roberts claims that this is a naive goal and misunderstands capital's domination of labour. Capitalism means that independence has to be overcome in favour of a form of non-dominating association that retains the interdependence of capital but without the domination of the capitalist or of the market.

The way Roberts relates Capital to republican political theory is very interesting and hopefully leads more theorists to consider the relationship of capitalism to freedom as non-domination. The republican turn in political theory has often been reluctant to engage in serious criticism of capitalism, despite the history of socialist thought drawing attention to the way in which modern labour is a form of slavery (domination).

[Mariam Rawwas · Rating 3 out of 5]

Roberts argues that Marxist scholarship has focused too much on Hegel as an influence for Volume I of Marx's Capital, to the detriment of Dante as a literary model for the structure of his argument, as well as the context of the work as a response to Proudhon, Saint-Simon, Fourier, et al. Roberts instead forwards "impersonal domination" as the key thrust of Marx's argument, and the championing of liberty as the core of Marx's project. But this focus on anti-moralism seems to square poorly with the Christian ethic forwarded by Dante in the Divine Comedy, as Roberts admits, and while I agree with the homology of the structure, and appreciate the novelty of the reading, I wish this was connected better to the arguments presented therein, a clarification of the relation between form and content. I also think there should have been more of a treatment of Feuerbach, especially given the discussion of Marx in connection with theology. It also doesn't feel like a novel reading of the content of Volume I, seeming very similar to Søren Mau's conception of "mute compulsion," which was soon to be published. Also, in this mobilization of allegory of Marx as a Virgil-like figure leading the proletariat "through" and "beyond" the "material," "social" "hell" of capitalism, don't we simply return to a Hegelian (dialectical) reading of the project of Volume I? And while there has been a move towards the Grundrisse (by Hardt and Negri, among others) against an Engelsian reading of Marx, I disagree with the suggestion that recent scholarship has neglected Volume I in favor of Marx's unfinished works (in fact, quite the opposite: few people - me included - even read Volumes II, III, or IV).

[David Montano · Rating 3 out of 5]

A very insightful study on Das Kapital which spends most of its time constructing context from appropiate socialist ideas which preceded its publication. Slightly exciting to see that a few 18th and 19th republican principles were included in William Robert's analysis as well since its been an area of focus for past books I've read. Given that other works which criticize or build an analysis of Marxian canon can end up being inaccessible, the premise of this book lends an interesting and soothing hand. Framing the mammoth Capital Vol. 1 as a "descent into social hell" while also asserting several analogies to Dante's "Inferno" makes the academic task much more enjoyable. Past the window dressing, however, there are concise and insightful clarifications for key terms such as "commodity fetish-ism" ,"impersonal domination", how prices factor into Marxian economics, and others. While these explanations were great in the first half (ish) of the book, the rest starts delving into slightly less interesting theortical constraints on practical action. It was also unfortunate to see the contempt Marx had on reformist thought, but certainly it was not surprising. There also seemed to be some hair-splitting in regard to republican intellecutals Marx criticized and the republican impetus which powered William Robert's "freedom as non-domination" analysis, but this conclusion certainly requires more reading on my part.

Rating: 3.5/5

[Michael · Rating 5 out of 5]

Incontinence. Force. Fraud. Treachery. Purgatory. We descend.

Marx's Inferno is a fantastic overview of volume 1 of Marx's Capital, differentiating Marx from his socialist contemporaries and forebears, framed by the allegory of Dante's Divine Comedy. As Dante was accompanied by Virgil who served Dante as his guide through Hell, William Clare Roberts outlines the goal of Volume 1 of Capital as such that Marx advised and guided the working class and his socialist contemporaries on the true workings of the social Hell of capital. The allegory of Dante's Inferno serves as a frame for analyzing the structure of Volume 1, and its key themes in relation to the many forms of domination of the working class by capital. Importantly, Marx was not just guiding the working class, but was in dialogue with his socialist contemporaries - Proudhon, Saint-Simon, Fourier, Owen - on correctly understanding how the working class was subjected to domination (of political, objective, and impersonal varieties), and thus correctly programming the road to emancipation. The social republic based on collective freedom and communally-associated production, therefore, must uproot these specific forms of domination in order to liberate the working class from the social Hell in which they are occupied.

Full review to follow.

[Paul · Rating 4 out of 5]

Fascinating close read of Capital. The thesis that its overall structure is based on Dante's Inferno is presented, plausibly, but not forced. If I had all the time in the world, I'd follow up by reading all of the authors Roberts both appropriates and takes issue with; the footnotes are a veritable goldmine of references to interpretive debates about Marx, Capital, and the intellectual history of socialism in general. Although Roberts criticizes Ellen Wood's "Origins of Capitalism" in one such footnote, his book shares with hers both a rigorous argument and a kind of orthodox house of cards which is perfectly constructed but vulnerable to shadings of the real world. It is unfortunately true that one needs to emphasize that even in the orthodox readings given to Marx by Roberts, Marx's commitment to democracy, to the exploited, to giving power to the mass of people whose labor enables the world, is quite clear.

["Nico" · Rating 5 out of 5]

"As a new Virgil, Marx tries to guide his readers along the internal connections binding exchange to exploitation, contracts to conquest, prices to poverty, development to despotism. His hope is that a pilgrim with many heads and many hands will follow him, a new collective Dante, whose poetry will constitute a new Republic beyond the Empire of capital."

An analysis of the Republican discourse Marx was engaged in with his writings, and the influence of Dante's Inferno on the structuring of Capital. The author is too modest in making his argument. Frankly, deciding whether these arguments are 'right' or 'wrong' misses the point of discourse analysis. Marx and Engels are inseparable from the discourses they were engaged with, that these discourses manifest in their literary works is a matter of course. The value of this work—contrary to the author's narrower, modest intent—is towards materializing Marx and Engels from the social processes that produced them.

[d]

Excellent, very stimulating and clarifying. Roberts argues his interpretation forcefully, and in doing so clarifies much debate about interpreting Capital and situating Marx as a thinker. Here, Capital is a political intervention that both inherits and reworks the socialist debates of its day, oriented in particular against Proudhon's program. The objection to capitalism as a form of domination places Marx in a radical republican tradition. Playing Virgil to the working class's Dante, Marx leads us down into the hell of political economy so that we may ascend to a society that has transcended capitalism.

[Rob Rabiee · Rating 4 out of 5]

Harvey’s review in Jacobin was a bit unfair; Roberts covers an awful lot of Marx here, and he does it well. The Dante conceit is cool, but as I consider it more, the conceit feels a bit underdeveloped. I often found myself going, “Oh! Right! Malbolge! This book is also about Dante or something, right?” So as literary analysis, it’s just OK - but as a reading of ‘Capital’ as a political (not solely economic) work, it shines. Worth reading if only for the careful contextualization of Marx in French socialist, Owenite, and republican tendencies.

[Ravi · Rating 4 out of 5]

An impressive piece of scholarship. While I am not entirely certain the Dante metaphor is successful and I am not qualified to comment on whether its depiction is an accurate account of Capital, Roberts' careful engagement with the debates between Proudhon and Marx alone make this book worth reading. It is hardly a surprise this well researched book won the highly prestigious Deutscher Prize.

[Christina Brummett · Rating 4 out of 5]

Wow. A lot to wrap my head around, and I'll probably have to revisit it after I read more theory...but I learned a lot and am ready to go learn more.

[Katelyn · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very clear and interesting analysis of Capital and Marx's beliefs

[Fifi Nono · Rating 4 out of 5]

A careful consideration of Marx's political ideas in relation to broader socialist discourse in the 19th century. I still don't know what the fuck that has to do with Inferno but that's okay.

[Mia · Rating 4 out of 5]

More accessibly written than most political theory books, and super helpful to think deeper about concepts of domination within Marx as well as the literary element I hadn't considered before.