💾 Archived View for bjornwestergard.com › notes › roberts-marxs-inferno.gmi captured on 2024-03-21 at 15:12:35. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
⬅️ Previous capture (2023-07-22)
-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Page 101:
I think Marx's concern about the anarchy and incontinence of the market can be summed up neatly by saying that commerical society leaves us unfree because it renders us systematically irresponsible for our economic life. It is this systematic irresponsibility that Marx pinpoints when he treats individuals as the personifications of economic relations. Of course, as Marx says, "a single individual can, by chance, cope with these "thingly relations of dependence; however, "the mass of those dominated by them cannot, since their very existence expresses the subordination, and the necessary subordination, of the individual to them". The freedom of the market is the domination of the mass of producers. This is the political theoretical core of Marx's structuralism.
Check out Arthur Ripstein's "Commodity Fetishism" article (page 747, referenced on page 98 footnote 178 in MarxInferno).