Ep 240: Our Social Hell w/ William Clare Roberts

This Wreckage

Sean KB and AP Andy

Music, Arts

4.2 • 970 Ratings

🗓️ 28 February 2024

⏱️ 50 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Sean is joined by political theorist William Roberts to discuss his excellent 2017 book, Marx's Inferno: The Political Theory of Capital which excavates not just Marx's use of the structure of Dante's Inferno but the radical political theory that undergirds it. What is the relationship between the analysis in Capital and the debates within the workers movement of the time typified by the likes of Proudhon, Saint-Simon and Owens? What is the place of radical republicanism in Marx's theory? How has this tradition in the workers movement been buried by history and what might we do with it today?

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Transcript

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0:00.0	All right.
0:03.0	All right.
0:06.0	Whoa! Who!
0:09.0	Hello and welcome to the Antifana.
0:12.0	This is episode 240 or 241, depending on how we put things out.
0:16.5	I of course am Sean K B on a solo episode today, Sans Andy, but we do have a very, very awesome and exciting guest that is the associate professor in the
0:27.4	Department of Political Science at McGill University in Quebec and the
0:31.4	author of Deutsche Award-winning monograph Marx's Inferno, the political theory of capital from 2017.
0:39.2	William Claire Roberts, welcome to the show.
0:41.9	Thanks for having me, Sean.
0:44.0	Your work, I think, as I was thinking, reading it and thinking about it is very thorough and
0:51.1	very groundbreaking.
0:52.1	It's a re- of capital volume one.
0:55.7	Through the structure of classics,
0:57.7	through the structure of Dante's Inferno,
1:00.1	you use this structural argument and this political theory argument within your reading to illuminate a lot of, I think really important historical debates that were happening within the workers movement at the time of Marx's writing that that we today seem to think have been kind of swept aside by history, are unimportant for our
1:20.4	understandings of politics today or even Marx's work in the past as so much water has gone
1:26.3	out of the bridge and so much of Marx's work has obscured by the dead weight of the 20th century.
1:31.6	So nearly a decade on with this work because you I'm
1:35.9	rounding up. It's a seven-year-old work. Your Marxists in fronto has been really
1:40.9	influential I think for critical Marxists who are trying to
1:45.0	excavate some sort of positive politics out of the wreckage of 1991 and
	...

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