with Dr. Jacob Roundtree, SNF Agora Postdoctoral Fellow in Moral and Political Economy
Jacob Roundtree explores the political project of Marx’s magnum opus, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy. He argues that the proper way to approach this text is not as a technical work of political economy, but as a monumental work of political theory. On Roundtree’s reading, Capital is an attempt to scientifically disclose the ideologically veiled, political character of capitalist economic relations from the standpoint of the proletariat. Marx is more concerned, Roundtree argues, to paint capitalist society as an anarchic, dehumanizing system of impersonal domination and class conflict than he is to provide an explanation of how prices are determined or how resources are allocated. Marx certainly does offer solutions to such traditional problems of economics, but they are ultimately in service of his political theoretic agenda. To comprehend and critically evaluate the political theory Marx articulates in the pages of Capital, it is necessary to situate it within its primary ideological context and to examine its historical relationship to modernity. By contextualizing Marx’s Capital as an intervention into this grand discourse on modernity, we can accomplish several important intellectual tasks. We can resolve long-standing interpretive issues, determine the relative truth value of Marx’s system of political thought, and assess the political epistemic legitimacy of the recent return to Marxism. Roundtree’s paper is one small part of a larger project that aims to contribute to fulfilling these tasks.
SNF Agora Conference Room and Zoom