Descent Into the Inferno: The Politics of Marx’s Capital

with CAPITAL STUDIES GROUP

An 8-Week Reading Group:

Marx’s Inferno, by William Clare Roberts, reconstructs the major arguments of volume I of Karl Marx’s Capital and inaugurates a completely new reading. His argument is that Capital was primarily a careful engagement with the motives and aims of the workers’ movement of the mid-19th century. Understood in this light, Capital emerges as a profound work of political theory. For Roberts, Capital was ingeniously modeled on Dante’s Inferno, with Marx in the role of the proletariat’s Virgil guiding us down to the secret depths of capitalism’s “social Hell.”

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.

The CAPITAL STUDIES GROUP is a diverse group of students, activists and teachers who are have dedicated themselves to a chronological reading of all three volumes of Marx’s Capital.

Fees for the MEP zoom sessions are sliding scale; no one is turned away for inability to pay.