1.

Record Nr.

UNINA9910154298003321

Autore

Roberts William Clare

Titolo

Marx's inferno : the political theory of capital / / William Clare Roberts

Pubbl/distr/stampa

Princeton, NJ : , : Princeton University Press, , [2016]

©2017

ISBN

0-691-18081-4

Descrizione fisica

1 online resource (299 pages)

Disciplina

335.412

Soggetti

Capitalism - Political aspects

Lingua di pubblicazione

Inglese

Formato

Materiale a stampa

Livello bibliografico

Monografia

Note generali

Previously issued in print: 2018.

Nota di bibliografia

Includes bibliographical references (pages 259-276) and index.

Nota di contenuto

Frontmatter -- Contents -- Acknowledgments -- A Note on References and Translations -- 1. Introduction: Rereading Capital -- 2. Taenarus: The Road to Hell -- 3. Styx: The Anarchy of the Market -- 4. Dis: Capitalist Exploitation as Force Contrary to Nature -- 5. Malebolge: The Capitalist Mode of Production as Fraud -- 6. Cocytus: Treachery and the Necessity of Expropriation -- 7. Conclusion: Purgatory, or the Social Republic -- Bibliography -- Index

Sommario/riassunto

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.