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

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 fi…