Styx: The Anarchy of the Market

This chapter examines part one of Capital, where Karl Marx views capitalism as a market society. It considers the moralizing discourse to which socialism was heir, according to which the market is a sphere of akrasia—incontinence, weakness, lack of self-mastery or self-control—and anarchy, drawing attention to two sets of intellectual influences. First, there is the moral criticism of the incontinence and slavishness of those who frequent the market. Second, there are the early socialist writers who rallied around the figure of Robert Owen. The chapter also discusses the continuity between Owenism and republicanism, the mystery of money and the fetishism of gold, and Marx's contributions to the socialist discourse about the market. Finally, it analyzes Marx's critique of the role played by the labor theory of value in Owenism and Proudhon.

Conclusion: Purgatory, or the Social Republic

This chapter concludes the book's argument by summarizing the themes from the earlier chapters into an account of the positive political theory of Capital and shows how Karl Marx appropriates Dante's Inferno via the social Hell trope. It challenges G. A. Cohen's suggestion that Marx subscribed to an obstetric doctrine regarding politics, noting that the terms in which Marx criticizes capitalism highlight the principles according to which communist institutions would have to be constructed and judged. Although Marx is often seen as a proponent of collective self-mastery or autonomy, his diagnoses of capitalism's evils consistently point out forms of domination rather than heteronomy. The chapter emphasizes the connection between socialism and Marx's midwifery and contends that Marx's republicanism found support in Robert Owen's appeals for cooperative communities regulating all production. The chapter thus argues that Marx should be appreciated both as a radical republican and an Owenite communist.

Dis: Capitalist Exploitation as Force Contrary to Nature

This chapter examines parts two and three of Capital, where Karl Marx claims to reveal “the secret of modern society,” the capitalist exploitation of labor power, and which corresponds to Dante's circles of force. Marx's critique of capitalist exploitation takes aim at “cleanly generated” capitalism. It is what capital does with and to labor power, rather than any distributional causes or effects, that constitutes exploitation. Capital bends labor power to an alien and unnatural end, using it to generate a surplus excessive of the aims and needs of the laborers. The monstrous productivity of capital—in particular, the overwork it enforces—is inherent in this mode of exploitation. The chapter first considers the views of Pierre-Joseph Proudhon and the Saint-Simonians regarding exploitation before discussing the novelty of what Marx does with exploitation in Capital, drawing attention to his arguments on surplus labor.

Cocytus: Treachery and the Necessity of Expropriation

This chapter examines part eight of Capital, where Karl Marx highlights the treachery involved in “primitive accumulation.” Marx's narrative that the history of capitalism's creation is a history of treachery finds its most fitting illustrations in the depths of Dante's Hell, where Cocytus, the frozen wasteland at the bottom of the world, entombs the treacherous in ice. In the final three chapters of Capital, Marx shows how the modern state has come to be dependent upon capital accumulation, and, thus, the primary agent of primitive accumulation. The chapter first reconstructs Marx's account of the origins of the modern proletariat and of the capitalist class in order to harmonize his views on primitive accumulation with his understanding of capitalist exploitation. It then considers Marx's argument against separatism and petty production, and more specifically his contention that the working class can exit capitalism only through a confrontation with the necessity of expropriation.

Malebolge: The Capitalist Mode of Production as Fraud

This chapter examines parts four through seven of Capital, where Karl Marx argues that capitalism is guilty of fraud. Rewriting Dante's long passage through the Malebolge (the ringed field where the sins of fraud are punished), Marx claims that the capitalist mode of production is a fraud, promising good but delivering evil. He insists that the accumulation of wealth as capital requires and creates a dependent population in excess of the demand for labor power. In order to appreciate Marx's distinctive approach to these matters, the chapter considers Pierre-Joseph Proudhon's writings, drawing special attention to the collective forces of production and the ontological status of association. It also discusses the three monsters of fraud mentioned by Marx in Capital, in particular the mechanism by which the surplus labor of the proletariat relates to the wages of labor.

Taenarus: The Road to Hell

This chapter argues that Karl Marx composed Capital as a modern, secular Inferno. It first considers the similarities between Capital and Dante's Inferno before discussing the history of socialists comparing modern society to a “social Hell.” It then examines how Marx's nemesis, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, developed this trope in two texts with which Marx was well acquainted and how Marx appropriated the same trope for his own critique of political economy. Finally, it analyzes the notion that modernity amounts to “a social Hell,” tracing its origin to the works of Charles Fourier. The chapter contends that Marx is not trying to convince some ideal-typical bourgeois economist to come over to the side of socialism. Rather, he is trying to convince his fellow socialists to cast aside their reliance upon ideas and arguments derived from or typified by Proudhon and other has-been and would-be leaders and theorists of the movement against capitalism.

Introduction: Rereading Capital

This book examines Karl Marx's critique of capitalism by rereading his Capital as political theory. It considers Capital's ambition to lay bare, for the first time, the inner workings of the capitalist mode of production and the political economy that analyzes it. It argues that, in Capital, Marx had a grand aspiration—to write the definitive analysis of what is wrong with the rule of capital—and that he modeled this aspiration on a grand literary framework: rewriting Dante's Inferno as a descent into the modern “social Hell” of the capitalist mode of production. The book also contends that Capital is best read as a critical reconstruction of and rejoinder to the other versions of socialism and popular radicalism that predominated in France and England in the 1860s and 1870s. This chapter provides an overview of the book's argument.