Spurious radicalism: Radical republicanism and the critique of capitalist social domination

Abstract

For more than a decade, a sizable contribution to the theory of neo-republicanism has attempted to critique domination in capitalist society. Within this emergent ‘radical republicanism’, theorists have attempted to assimilate Marx’s critique of political economy by arguing that capitalist society is typified by dependency on arbitrary power —a form of domination— that is also systematic, impersonal, and structural. However, in purporting to critique capitalist domination through neo-republican means, these attempts fail to grasp the specifically capitalist character of domination. By theorizing capitalist domination as dependency on arbitrary will between individual subjects, radical republicanism regresses to a subjectivistic and decidedly liberal social theory that renders invisible Marx’s emphasis on the peculiar social and objective dimensions of capital’s compulsion for surplus labor as a form of domination. While capitalist society is unthinkable without human subjects, it cannot be understood subjectively – as the product of willful actions and decisions – because it obtains a peculiar autonomy and objectivity as a force of human-made (second) nature impelling human subjects to reproduce a form of society that is antagonistic to them. Marx’s critique of capital as a specific form of domination becomes apparent in his analysis of the ‘real subsumption of labor under capital’. This concept explains how the compulsion for surplus labor is transformed by capital into a form of ‘objective social domination’ wherein society confronts us as an alien power through a series of subject-object inversions.