Capital Returns

Published date01 December 2018
DOI10.1177/0090591717733989
Date01 December 2018
Subject MatterReview Essays
/tmp/tmp-17Ypy5EUtGPs8E/input 733989PTXXXX10.1177/0090591717733989Political TheoryReview Essay
review-article2017
Review Essay
Political Theory
2018, Vol. 46(6) 938 –946
Capital Returns
© The Author(s) 2017
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Marx’s Inferno: The Political Theory of Capital, by William Clare Roberts. Princeton
University Press. 2017, 304 pp.
Portfolio Society: On the Capitalist Mode of Prediction, by Ivan Ascher. Zone Books.
2016, 192 pp.
Reviewed by: Charles Barbour, Western Sydney University, Sydney, New South
Wales, Australia
DOI: 10.1177/0090591717733989
Zombie Marxism
In 1888, five years after Marx’s death, Engels published a small book called
Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy. In it he
introduced the now familiar distinction between the early and the later Marx.
To bolster his argument that Marx had rejected the Hegelian philosophy of
his youth so as to develop instead the materialist science of his maturity, he
included as an appendix the famous “Theses on Feuerbach,” which he had
found among Marx’s literary remains. Whether he knew it at the time or not,
Engels was instituting a long tradition of scholars plundering Marx’s archive
to develop new interpretations of his work, to challenge established ortho-
doxies, and to make Marx relevant to new situations. Of course, something
like this happens with all great thinkers. But, if only for the simple empirical
fact that owing to the commitment of Marx’s followers, scholars have so
much posthumous material to work with, Marx’s case is almost certainly
unique. No other thinker has died and been reanimated in this fashion as
many times as Karl Marx.
In this context, however, the most recent Marx revival, of which the two
books under consideration here are examples, is unusual. For, rather than
unearthing the archive to reveal a hidden truth of Marx, it is focused squarely
on the first volume of Capital. Throughout the previous century, when scholars
wanted to return to Marx, as they often did, Capital was perhaps the last text to
attract their attention. Yes, The Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts, or
The German Ideology, or the Grundrisse, or the Theories of Surplus Value, but
not Capital. Even Althusser, who is undoubtedly the exception in this regard,
proposed a “symptomatic reading” of Marx’s “masterpiece,” or a reading that

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attended less to what Marx said than to what he left unsaid. But history moves
in irregular ways. And as the world sinks deeper into the permanent crisis called
“neoliberalism,” many seem to be sensing that Capital cannot easily be dis-
missed as either a dilapidated monument of the past or a dangerous blueprint
for totalitarianism, but is instead a living document that speaks directly to some
of the most pressing questions of our age.
Both Roberts and Ascher find a new Marx, or a new way of making sense
of Marx, then, not by picking through his archive, or conjuring up what he
left unsaid, but, surprisingly, by taking him at his word. Roberts suggests that,
when read in relation to the debates that were raging among socialists when
Marx wrote it, Capital appears as less of an economic treatise than a political
one, or a work concerned less with economic equality in the socialist sense
than with political freedom in the republican one. In a somewhat different
fashion, Ascher proposes that on a formal level at least, the economic theory
set out in Capital remains entirely relevant today, but for the fact that in con-
temporary capitalism, it is less labour that produces value, than credit,
finance, and risk. Neither author dwells on the old irony, noted by many
before, that the history of Marxism did as much to obscure as to illuminate
Marx’s thought. Rather, both approach Capital with fresh eyes, and show us
that its fecundity as a text exceeds the colossal number of things that have
been said about it (not to mention those that have been done with it) thus far.
Market Domination
Along with the tradition of plundering the Marx archive, Engels’s Ludwig
Feuerbach
played a role in instituting another tradition among Marxists, one
that was sustained at least until Althusser—the tradition of asserting that
Marx invented a new science. It is surely curious that a body of work so
devoted to the notion that individuals do not exist in isolation, but are condi-
tioned by social and material practices, should itself so often be characterized
as the creation of an individual genius. Even a cursory glance at Marx’s writ-
ings reveals that he never thought in isolation, but always in response to oth-
ers. And eliding the fact that Marx was less of an inventor than a responder
has probably done as much damage as good. As just one small example, we
might consider Marx’s 1844 essay “On the Jewish Question.” For the title
alone contains an ambiguity that is worth examining. Is Marx writing on the
Jewish Question, or the question of Jewish emancipation that ricocheted
throughout German culture in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries? Or is
he writing on The Jewish Question (Die Judenfrage), or the book by Marx’s
former mentor Bruno Bauer that Marx explicitly reviews in his piece? In
either case, and even if both are true, if our intention is to retrieve some

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Political Theory 46(6)
element of what Marx was attempting to do when he wrote “On the Jewish
Question” (rather than, say, retroactively compose a coherent discourse called
“Marxism”), then it would be helpful, one assumes, to read...

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