"Emerging from the backdrop of Marx’s attempt to demonstrate impersonal agency being operative at all levels of society, there is an increasing tendency in Marxist scholarship to interpret the fetish character of capital not only in an epistemological framework, as the NML did, but also in ethical and political terms as a problem of freedom and domination. North and Reitter endorse this scholarly trend by including an essay by William Clare Roberts on the French translation that underscores the unfreedom of “market-dependent producers [that is, wage earners], who must sell in order to buy and buy in order to live” (RC, 722). This unfreedom in the market resembles the worker’s domination in the factory, and it suggests that Marx subscribed to a socially and politically comprehensive concept of freedom that is incompatible with social-democratic attempts to ameliorate the plight of workers by creating better working conditions. In other words, Marx’s imagination of what it means to be free is not exhaustively understood merely by citing his attention to struggles over the length of the working day and the alleviation of human toil through more rational coordination of the work process. Marx’s expanded concept of freedom will be at the center of a sequel to this essay, a review of contemporary scholarship exploring the evolution of Marx’s thought from his early journalism to his late scientific notebooks."
#Marx #Capital #Capitalism #CriticalTheory #PoliticalEconomy #CommodityFetishism