Marx's Inferno: What William Clare Roberts Gets Right and Wrong About Capital (UNLOCKED)

The book has many virtues. But Roberts twists himself into pretzels trying to explain away Marx's views on technological progress.

I liked William Clare Roberts’s book Marx’s Inferno: The Political Theory of Capital. Roberts is a very good writer, and he did an enormous amount of historical research that puts Marx’s exploration of “the social hell” in Capital in the context of debates among nineteenth-century critics of capitalism. I think I first read it when I was teaching the first round of my Zoom Capital class, and I found Roberts’s analysis particularly valuable in helping to figure out what Marx was up to in the early chapters.

Here, for example, is a confusing claim that Marx makes about capitalist exploitation in Ch. 7:

The owner of money has paid the value of a day’s labour-power; he therefore has the use of it for a day, a day’s labour belongs to him. On the other hand the daily sustenance of labour-power costs costs only half a day’s labour, while on the other hand the very same labour-power can remain effective, can work, during a whole day, and consequently the value which its use during one day creates is double what the capitalist pays for that use; this circumstance is a piece of good luck for the buyer; but by no means and injustice towards the seller.

In other words, in the transaction in the labor market between worker and capitalist employer, the latter buys the former’s capacity to work for a day (for however many days the employment lasts). The work the worker does during half of the day might be enough to produce the equivalent of the workers’ wages. The rest is profit. This is exactly the kind of thing you expect Marx to point out…right up until “but by no means an injustice toward the seller.”

What’s going on here?

Roberts writes:

One standard way of dealing with this claim is to say that Marx had a “technical” or “descriptive” concept of exploitation, which differed from the normal morally loaded sense of the term. Another has been to say that he thought moral norms such as justice to be ideological, and relative to the mode of production, and hence means to say that capitalist exploitation is not an injustice from within the bourgeois conception of justice that prevails in capitalist society. Both of these approaches have been roundly criticized by Norman Geras who adduces the dizzying array of texts from within Capital itself where Marx characterized capitalist exploitation as “unpaid labor” or labor “appropriated without equivalent.” These, he says, show without a doubt that “irrespectively of whether Marx characterized the relation of exploitation as an unjust one, he did certainly treat it as a relation of unequal exchange,” or of “robbery.” “Was Marx confused? How could he think…that the capitalist robs the worker but treats the worker justly?”

…I think this debate has largely missed the point. When he denies that capitalist exploitation is an injustice toward the seller of labor power, Marx’s target is Proudhon, not Rawls.¹ That is, he has in view not a theory of justice as the first virtue of the basic structure of society, but a transactional conception of justice according to which justice is embodied in reciprocal exchanges of goods and services at or near the cost of production. His point in chapters six and seven is to show that capital’s exploitation of labor power satisfies Proudhon’s criterion of justice.

Marx, in other words, isn’t throwing in some wildly off-topic moral anti-realism to the middle of a discussion about the dynamics of capitalism. Rather, at least as I’d read the point, Marx in much of Capital is waging a two-front ideological war. On the one hand, he’s arguing against bourgeois apologists (who think capitalism can’t be a system of domination and exploitation because it’s based on peaceful market exchange). On the other hand, he’s arguing with bad critics of capitalism (like, in his assessment, Proudhon) who thought that the problem with capitalism was that the “law of exchange” (value is traded for equal value) was being violated, perhaps because capitalists used the coercive power of the state to tilt the market scales in their direction, or because workers were bamboozled by the money-form into making unequal exchanges they would never agree to if they were paid in labor-time tokens. Marx thinks capitalism is a system of domination and exploitation, but not because the law of exchange is being violated.

Not, mind you, that he doesn’t think it’s ever violated in capitalist labor markets. He just doesn’t think that’s the fundamental issue, and it’s important to him that exploitation would still be going on even if no such violations occurred. See here for how I would read what Marx does think capitalist exploitation is, but for the moment, the point is just that (while Roberts certainly wouldn’t endorse everything I say in that essay²) I might not have gotten to that analysis if I hadn’t read Marx’s Inferno.

While I’m calling balls and strikes, I also think Marx’s Inferno made a valuable contribution, along with more recent work by other scholars like Bruno Leipold’s new book Citizen Marx, in helping direct attention to the importance of the classical republican notion of freedom (independence from arbitrary power and domination) in Marx’s thought. So, please don’t take anything I’m about to say as “you shouldn’t bother read Marx’s Inferno, you won’t learn anything from it.” You should read it. You’ll learn things. When Roberts is right, he’s very good.

But, when he’s wrong, he’s catastrophically wrong.

---

First, some context. Pt. 1 of Capital (“Commodities and Money”) covers the dynamics of markets in general. Marx, at least as I read him, thinks that these dynamics need to be combined with the historically specific circumstances of a propertyless labor force willing to sell itself to capitalists in order to jointly result in capitalism. We don’t get his account of how that comes about until Pt. 8 (“So-Called Primitive Accumulation”). But at the end of Pt. 2 (“The Transformation of Money Into Capital”) he argues that the profits that fuel capitalist society are only possible given the existence of such a labor force. In Pt. 3 (“The Production of Absolute Surplus-Value”), he explores the most obvious way that extra surplus-value can be pumped out of the working class. Capitalists can simply add extra hours onto the end of the working day. In Pt. 4 (“The Production of Relative Surplus-Value”) he explores an alternate strategy. Whether in combination with the first strategy or, independently of it once a legal limit has been imposed on the working day, capitalists can revolutionize the production process to get more out of workers during however many hours they spend on the job.

The simplest way this can be done, and chronologically the first, is that when workers who’d previously been independent artisans (with a capitalist merchant perhaps acting as a middle-man to bring their goods to market) have been reduced to the status of employees, the capitalist can conveniently bring a bunch of them together to produce together under one roof. That’s Ch. 13 (“Co-operation”). They’re producing the same way they always did, but they’re doing it in the same place, which could have various benefits ranging from reducing transportation costs to, Marx says, raising the “animal spirits” of the workers. They are, in other words, more productive when they’re around other people doing the same work.³ In Ch. 14 (“The Division of Labor”), the technological level of production hasn’t changed yet, but now different workers are doing different parts of the job to increase efficiency. The climax of Pt. 4 is Ch. 15 (“Machinery and Large-Scale Industry”), a long and fascinating chapter that easily could have been a freestanding short book (“Capitalism and Technology”).⁴ Rather than producing in the same old way except that the producers are in the same physical location, or even in the same physical location dividing up the old tasks among themselves to get it all done more quickly, production is now happening in an entirely new way, one that Marx often calls “specifically capitalist” in the sense that it didn’t arise, and wouldn’t have arisen, under feudalism or other pre-capitalist forms of society.

In Ch. 15, you get Marx’s theory of what this technology could do (in a different system), what it actually does (under capitalism), which aspects of mechanical production are specific to capitalism not just as opposed to what came before but what could come about in a socialist future, and which adhere to the technology itself. It’s one of the most interesting parts of Capital. And Roberts wildly misreads it.

---

This is surely not because Roberts isn’t a sharp and perceptive reader of Marx in general. But his misreading is so basic that it requires him to perform feats of creativity in interpreting some passages that pretty clearly contradict his view, and to simply ignore several others that contradict it even more clearly. What gives?

I take it for granted that he’s an honest person and that he’s managed to convince himself of his reading. Presumably, he has some fairly strong ideological motivation. I strongly suspect that it has something to do with (at least some degree of) sympathy on Roberts’s part for “degrowth communism” a la Saito. This view holds that, even after workers take over the means of production, the way out of ecological catastrophe comes not through a green technological revolution but through consciously rolling back the global productive forces.

To be fair, though, I could be entirely wrong about that, since other than one passing reference to our “current confrontation with anthropogenic climate change,” Roberts says nothing about this set of issues in Marx’s Inferno. Nothing I say below, though, relies on any particular assumption about why Roberts gets Marx so wrong on technology.

---

Roberts writes:

While Marx implies time and again that communist society will preserve—and even expand—the large-scale, scientifically and technically advanced industry developed by capital, he does not provide any clear guidance on the question of what this preservation and expansion might look like. His argument tends in another direction entirely.

Roberts, in other words, concedes that Marx is an advocate of preserving and expanding capitalist technological development, and that there’s abundant textual evidence of this commitment, but he holds the line at insisting that the actual argument Marx makes about technology in Capital has nothing to do with that. Instead, he goes on to claim, Marx’s point is just that technological development makes it impossible to go back to a society of small-scale artisans (so we have to go forward to communal ownership relations instead).

Now, Marx certainly does make that argument. That much isn’t in dispute. But Roberts doesn’t just make that correct observation. He’s also denying that Marx is making an argument that “tends” in the “direction” of embracing technological progress as the basis for future socialist development. Counterposing the two, he writes that “the Marx of Capital is less interested in the novel productive capacity of technically advanced cooperation than in the novel incapacity of individuals and small groups to produce anything independently.”

Anyone who reads Ch. 15 should know that Marx is doing both, and it shouldn’t take much reflection for it to be obvious that the two can’t really be separated. Why, after all, would the “novel incapacity” carry over into a post-capitalist society if that society wasn’t in the business of “preserving and expanding” existing productive technology? If we were willing to roll back our collective standard of living by regressing to the productive methods of independent artisans, it’s not as if the knowledge of how to operate simpler tools and engage in more time-consuming productive work has been lost forever and can’t be reconstructed. It’s just that no society has ever or will ever be willing to voluntarily regress in that way.

Roberts writes:

Such an interpretation seems to fly in the face of one of the central tenets of historical materialism: that only the development of the productive powers of labor will make anything like a liberating communism possible, and that only capital’s rule develops these productive powers to the extent necessary. This version of historical materialism rests, however, on a narrow and reified notion of what the material conditions of communism might be.

He says that there are “three chief instances where Marx seems to make this claim about the preconditions of communism" in Capital.

1:

With the material conditions, and the social combination of the production process, [factory legislation] ripen the contradictions and antagonisms of their capitalist form, thereby simultaneously ripening the rudiments of the formation of a new society and the impulses to overturn the old.

2:

The capitalist mode of production completes the breaking up of the original family bond between agriculture and manufacture, which embraced the childish, undeveloped shape of both. But at the same time it creates the material suppositions for a new, higher synthesis, for the union of agriculture and industry on the basis of the shapes worked out by their opposition.

3:

As a fanatic for the valorization of value, [the capitalist] ruthlessly compels humanity to production for the sake of production, thus to a development of the productive forces and to a creation of the material conditions of production which alone can form the real basis of a higher form of society, the fundamental principle of which is the full and free development of each individual.

He also grants a little later in a footnote that there’s a lot of evidence from manuscripts that were only published after Marx’s death that Marx adhered to this “version of historical materialism” (which I’d say is just historical materialism as such). But he dismisses this, only counting the evidence from within Capital itself.

Marx had, at times, a proclivity for certain techno-utopian lines of thought, which would see in the industrial capacity for producing absolute abundance the precondition of escaping capitalism. And yet Marx does not make anything like these arguments in Capital. The discipline imposed by writing for public consumption, and for the sake of influencing the workers’ movement, compelled him to make deliberate choices about what to include and what to exclude. Those choices are instructive regarding both his considered views and his sense of the discourse into which he was intervening.⁵

Even putting aside the evidence from outside of Capital, though, there are two giant problems with Roberts’s attempts to explain away the evidence for Marx’s “proclivity for certain techno-utopian lines of thought” within Capital. The first is that his explanation of the “three chief instances” falls flat. The second is that he’s ignoring far clearer evidence.

---

Commenting on the “three chief instances,” Roberts writes:

In each of these cases, Marx does not seem to mean by the material conditions of presuppositions of the new society the technological apparatus of production as such, nor even the forces of production more broadly, which would include the abilities and knowledges embodied in the collective working body. Notice in the third passage, for instance, how Marx sets the material conditions of production next to the productive forces as the two things developed by capitalist production. Notice, also, the context of the first two passages. In the first, while Marx claims that factory legislation gives a “monstrous spur to technique,” this is not introduced by Marx as an independent consideration but is tied immediately to the consequent magnification of “the anarchy and catastrophes of capitalist production, the intensity of labor, and the competition of machinery with the laborer.” In the second, the only material condition of a new synthesis of agriculture and industry indicated by Marx is the urbanization of the population, which both concentrates “the historical motive power of society” and “kills the metabolism between humans and the earth.”

This is the sum total of what Roberts says by way of explaining away his “three chief instances.” First, that Chief Instance #3 lists the “development of the productive forces” and the “creation of the material conditions of production which alone can form the real basis of a higher form of society” as two items rather than one, and second, that in all of these passages, Marx is linking these developments to various bad things that happen when technology is in capitalist hands.

The first point is extraordinarily unpersuasive on its face. Not only is Marx not stylistically above separating synonymous or near-synonymous things in his sentences with the word “and,” but in context the most natural reading of that “and” in Chief Instance #3 is something like “and because of this…”

More, if Roberts’s alternative reading is that all Marx means by “material conditions or suppositions” of socialism is the bringing together of the industrial working class as the agent of historical change that will bring about socialism, his own Chief Instance #1 talks about the same processes “simultaneously ripening the rudiments of the formation of a new society and the impulses to overturn the old,” which is a far clearer separation of two distinct items than the “and” in Chief Instance #3.

His other point is correct. As we’ll see, though, it doesn’t show anything like what Roberts reads into it.

He goes on:

In none of these places does Marx point to the power humanity has acquired through capitalism in a positive manner. Nowhere in Capital does he argue or imply that capitalism has developed human productive powers to the point where we can meet everyone’s needs, or that such a development would constitute a threshold before which the attainment of communism would be impossible. Instead, the power developed by capitalism is the power to destroy workers’ lives, to expose large swathes of humanity to immiseration and sudden desolation, and to undermine the earth’s capacity to sustain us all.

Now, Marx certainly does say that technology can do all of the things listed off in Roberts’s last sentence. He spends much of Ch. 15 documenting all of the above, and much later, in Ch. 26, we get a quick recap of many of these horrors in a sentence that almost has the cadences of the “He has… He has… He has…” sentences from the American Declaration of Independence, with the indictment being leveled at capital instead of King George.

We saw in Part IV, when analysing the production of relative surplus-value, that within the capitalist system all methods for raising the social productivity of labor are put into effect at the cost of the individual worker; that all means for the development of production undergo a dialectical inversion so that they become means of domination and exploitation of the producers; they distort the worker into a fragment of a man, they degrade him into the level of the appendage of a machine, they destroy the actual content of his labour by turning into a torment; they alienate from him the intellectual potentialities of the labour process in the same proportion as science is incorporated in it as an independent power; they deform the conditions under which he works, subject him during the labour process to a despotism the more hateful for its meanness; they transform his life-time into working-time, and drag his wife and child beneath the wheels of the juggernaut of capital.

That’s quite an indictment. (And it focuses exclusively on the immediate effects on workers, so it doesn’t even include the point Marx includes in several other parts of Capital about capitalist farmers being incentivized to use cultivation techniques that destroy the fertility of soil in the long run.) But it’s plainly directed at capital, and capital’s use of technology, rather than the technology itself. The crucial phrase at the beginning of that sentence is “within the capitalist system.” It’s the combination of technology with the incentive structure build into capitalist ownership relations that gets us “the dialectical inversion” so that better technology for producing more efficiently becomes a “means of domination and exploitation of the producers…”

And this exact point, that the technology itself isn’t at fault, but rather its use by capitalists, is the whole point of Ch. 15, a chapter that is, I’m sorry, absolutely dripping with evidence of Marx’s “proclivity for certain techno-utopian lines of thought.” It’s full of cases of Marx “point[ing] to the power humanity has acquired through capitalism in a positive manner.”

Roberts notes that Marx has a “reputation as a modernist, not merely ambivalent about capitalism’s progressive bona fides, but enthusiastic about them” but claims that “this enthusiasm does not seem to be much in evidence in Capital.”

And I’m sorry, but I don’t know what he’s talking about. Read Marx on the relationship between older hand tools and new industrial machinery:

If we now look at the part of the machinery which is employed in the construction of machines, and forms the actual operating tool, we find that the manual implements re-appear, but on a Cyclopean scale. The operating part of a boring machine is an immense drill driven by a steam-engine; without this machine, on the other hand, the cylinders of large steam-engines and of hydraulic presses could not be made. The mechanical lathe is only a Cyclopean reproduction of the ordinary foot-lathe; the planing machine is an iron carpenter that works on iron with the same tools as the human carpenter employs on wood; the instrument that cuts the veneers on the London wharves is a gigantic razor; the tool of the shearing machine, which shears iron as easily as a tailor’s scissors cut cloth, is a monster pair of scissors; and the steam-hammer works with an ordinary hammer head, but of such a weight that even Thor himself could not wield it. These steam-hammers are an invention of Nasmyth, and there is one that weighs over 6 tons and strikes with a vertical fall of 7 feet, on an anvil weighing 36 tons. It is mere child’s play for it to crush a block of granite into powder, yet it is no less capable of driving a nail into a piece of soft wood with a succession of light taps.

Or his description of the role of steam engines:

An increase in the size of the machine and the number of its working tools calls for a more massive mechanism to drive it; and this mechanism, in order to overcome its own inertia, requires a mightier moving power than that of man, quite apart from the fact that man is a very imperfect instrument for producing uniform and continuous motion…. Of all the great motive forces handed down him from the period of manufacture, horse-power is the worst, partly because a horse has a head of his own, partly because he is costly and the extent to which he can be used in factories is very limited. Nevertheless, the horse was used extensively during the infancy of large-scale industry. This is proved both by the complaints of the agronomists of that epoch and by the way of expressing mechanical force in terms of ‘horse-power’, which survives to this day. The wind was too inconstant and uncontrollable and, apart from this, in England, the birthplace of large-scale industry, the use of water-power preponderated even during the period of manufacture. In the seventeenth century attempts had already been made to turn two pairs of millstones with a single water-wheel. But the increased size of the transmitting mechanism came into conflict with the water-power, which was now insufficient, and this was one of the factors which gave the impulse for a more accurate investigation of the law of friction. In the same way the irregularity caused by the motive power in mills that were set in motion by pushing and pulling a lever led to the theory, and the application, of the fly-wheel, which later played such an important part in large-scale industry. In this way, the first scientific and technical elements of large-scale industry were developed during the period of manufacturing. Arkwright’s throstle-spinning mill was from the very first turned by water. Despite this, the use of water-power as the main motive force brought with it various added difficulties. The flow of water could not be increased at will, it failed at certain seasons of the year, and above all it was essentially local. Not till the invention of Watt’s second and so-called double-acting steam-engine was a prime mover found which drew its own motive power from the consumption of coal and water, was entirely under man’s control, was mobile and a means of locomotion, was urban and not—like the water-wheel—rural, permitted production to be concentrated in towns instead of—like the water-wheels—being scattered over the countryside and finally, was of universal technical application, and little affected in its choice of residence by local circumstances. The greatness of Watt’s genius showed itself in the specifications of the patent that he took out in April 1784. In that specification, his steam-engine is described, not as an invention for a specific purpose, but as an agent universally applicable in industry. Many of the applications he points out in it, for instance the steam-hammer, were not introduced until half a century later. Even so he doubted the applicability of steam to navigation. Yet steam-engines of colossal size for ocean steamers were sent to the Great Exhibition of 1851 by his successors, the firm of Boulton and Watt.

It seems to me that passages like this breathe with almost child-like awe at the wonders worked by all of this new technology. Marx’s excitement about the transition from having to pull machines by hand or tie them to horses to having “steam-engines of a colossal size” that can power entire ocean steamers, or that observation about steam-hammers for which it’s “mere child’s play” to “crush a block of granite into powder,” but which are “no less capable of driving a nail into a piece of soft wood with a succession of light taps,” is of a piece with the prose-poetry in the opening pages of the Communist Manifesto about capital creating marvels to surpass the pyramids of the ancient world and the great cathedrals of the Middle Ages.

But maybe you don’t feel the excitement pulsing through those passages, the enthusiastic modernism at the core of it all. Fine. This is, to some extent, a matter of tone, and as such there’s an element of judgment. But there’s no ambiguity whatsoever about Marx’s separation of the destructive consequences of technology “within the capitalist system” from the innate properties of the technology itself. It’s the primary theme of the chapter.

In his discussion of “autocratic” factory codes, for example, Marx grants that the technical necessities of large numbers of people working together with delicate machines necessitates everyone sticking to a coordinated plan (a point developed by Engels in his essay “On Authority”), but he calls the factory codes a “capitalist caricature” of the actual technical necessity. And elsewhere, he dismisses the idea that other negative effects of the combination of capitalist property relations and industrial technology can be blamed on the technology at all.

In his discussion of automation, for example, Marx mocks the bourgeois apologists who dismissed concerns about workers losing their jobs to new machines on the basis that technological progress is a net benefit for society. The apologists, Marx thought, were being ridiculous by conflating the technology with its application in a partiuclar economic system where the means of production are in the hands of nonworkers and those owners thus have an incentive to save money by letting some of them go with no reduction in hours for the rest. He makes this point by imagining Bill Sikes, the cut-throat from Charles Dickens’s Oliver Twist, making a defense at his criminal trial that rested on the same kind of conflation:

‘Gentlemen of the jury, no doubt the throat of this commercial traveller has been cut. But that is not my fault, it is the fault of the knife. Must we, for such a temporary inconvenience, abolish the use of the knife? Only consider! Where would agriculture and trade be without the knife? Is it not as salutary in surgery, as it is skilled in anatomy? And a willing assistant at the festive table? If you abolish the knife—you hurl us back into the depths of barbarism.’

Under capitalism, labor-saving technology is used not to save labor but throw some workers into the miseries of unemployment while others have to work as hard as ever. Indeed, in the initially unregulated free-for-all of nineteenth-century capitalism, Marx documents that some of the first effects of industrial machinery were to extend the working day, since relief from heavy lifting, for example, made it physically possible to keep the worker on the job for longer without exhaustion, and similarly jobs that once had to be done by big strapping adult male workers could now be more easily done by women and children. But, as he reminds us in n. 33, the “field of application for machinery” would “be entirely different in a communist society from what it is in bourgeois society.” Not a lot of ambiguity there.

How would it be different? Marx shows us, not by going forward to the future, but by reflecting on the dreams of antiquity:

“‘If,’ dreamed Aristotle, the greatest thinker of antiquity, ‘if every tool, when summoned, or even by intelligent anticipation, could do the work that befits it, just as the creations of Daedalus moved of themselves…and if the weavers shuttles were to weave of themselves, then there would be no need either of apprentices for the master craftsman, or of slaves for the lords.’ And Antipater, a Greek poet of the time of Cicero, hailed the water wheel for grinding corn, that most basic form of all productive machinery, as the liberator of female slaves and the restorer of the golden age.

Oh those heathens! They understood nothing of political economy and Christianity... They did not, for example, comprehend that machinery is the surest means of lengthening the working day. They may perhaps have excused the slavery of one person as a means to the full human development of another. But they lacked the specifically Christian qualities which would have enabled them to preach the slavery of the masses in order that a few crude and half-educated parvenus might become eminent spinners, extensive sausage-makers, and influential shoe-black dealers.

The difference is the same one Marx is pointing to in Ch. 10, when he says that all class-based systems involve exploitation (i.e. producers being compelled to work extra hours for the benefit of a ruling class in addition to the hours they need to work to meet their own needs) but that capitalism is distinctive because the exploiters are engaged in market competition with one another, the dynamics of which give rise to a “vampire-like thirst” for more labor time. Aristotle and Antipater, as products of a social order where exploitation was aimed mostly at supplying the personal needs of the exploiters, wouldn’t have been able to imagine that the crass, Trump-like capitalists Marx mocks as “eminent spinners, extensive sausage-makers, and influential shoe-black dealers” would be so overcome with this vampiric thirst that they’d apply technology that could in principle be used to create free time to do exactly the opposite. Again, “the field of application” for this technology would be very different in a post-capitalist order.

Marx does indeed worry about the “metabolic” connection between man and nature being wrecked by agricultural techniques that sacrificed long-term soil fertility to short-term profits. But quite apart from it being a bad idea to wildly generalize from a single example, even on that single example, we have Marx in the final paragraph of Ch. 15 taking time out of his indictment of the capitalist use of technology to hope for the “systematic restoration” of that metabolic connection, which “originated in a merely natural and spontaneous fashion” but whose restoration now needs to be consciously planned in a way that both ensures sustainability and sufficient productivity to be “adequate to the full development of the human race.”

At the risk of losing my “analytical Marxist” union card, what strikes me most about Roberts’s claims that “[n]owhere in Capital does” Marx “argue or imply that capitalism has developed human productive powers to the point where we can meet everyone’s needs” and that, “Instead, the power developed by capitalism is the power to destroy workers’ lives, to expose large swathes of humanity to immiseration and sudden desolation, and to undermine the earth’s capacity to sustain us all” is how undialectical this is as a reading of Marx, in the simple and straightforward sense that Marx tends to be attuned to sharply opposed possibilities lurking within the same phenomenon.⁶

Marx sees the knife’s potential to cut the throats of travelers, and its uses at the festive table. He rightly thinks Bill Sikes belongs in prison. But he doesn’t for God’s sake want to ban knives.

1. To be clear, I think Roberts could have just easily said “not Mill” or “not Aristotle” or etc. There’s nothing special about Rawls’s theory of justice here, although it’s a well-chosen example that makes for a vivid contrast. The point is just that the relevant sense of “justice” is “market fairness” (exchanging like for like).

2. In it, in fact, I quote him there on a point on which we definitely disagree. Does Marx think “value” is specific to the capitalist mode of production, or does he think it applies to commodity production in general as it existed long before capitalism?

3. I can’t help but point out that as I type this I’m sitting in a cafe with my friend Branko, who’s working on a Jacobin article while I write this Substack. This is, perhaps, a PMC application of the “animal spirits” theory.

4. I previously wrote about Ch. 15, and Marx’s theory of technology more generally, in a very different context here.

5. It’s interesting to note that this is precisely the opposite of the way Saito goes about trying to prove that Marx moved away from his original commitment to historical materialism. Saito uses passages in unpublished notebooks to show Marx changed his views after writing Capital. This is extraordinarily weak evidence, given that in many cases we’re not even talking about Marx’s own commentary but just passages he copied out into notebooks from scientific texts he was reading on soil fertility and the like. I’d suggest, though, that there’s a happy medium between Saito’s method of assuming that Marx endorsed everything he copied out into a notebook from other authors without an “I disagree!” note in the margins and Roberts’s method of simply disregarding the way that what Marx wrote in, say, the Grundrisse might shed some light on what he meant in Capital.

6. All joking about the union card aside, my position on “dialectics” laid out in that essay is just that dialectical language can often be used to capture important things, but it can also be used to obscure ambiguity, and the test is always whether we can translate the point into the ordinary language of causes, effects, and mechanisms.