Marx's Inferno

Marx's Inferno reconstructs the major arguments of Karl Marx's Capital and inaugurates a completely new reading of a seminal classic. Rather than simply offering a critique of classical political economy, William Roberts argues that Capital was primarily a careful engagement with the motives and aims of the workers' movement.

Understood in this light, Capital emerges as a profound work of political theory. Placing Marx against the backdrop of nineteenth-century socialism, Roberts shows how Capital was ingeniously modelled on Dante's Inferno. Marx, taking the role of Virgil for the proletariat, introduced partisans of workers' emancipation to the secret depths of the modern "social Hell." In this manner, Marx revised republican ideas of freedom in response to the rise of capitalism.

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 labour, the power of bosses and managers, and the possibilities of political organisation.

Roberts rescues those debates from the past and shows how they speak to ever-renewed concerns about political life in today's world.