36 Pages Posted: 8 Aug 2013

Date Written: 2013

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to read Part I of Capital – the chapters on the commodity, exchange, and money – in conjunction with Dante’s account of the sins of incontinence. Incontinence is a lack of self-control, a weakness that afflicts one’s deliberate choices, and makes one prone to doing what one wishes one wouldn’t. An incontinent is a slave to her or his passions. In Marx’s account of commercial society, I discern a socialized version of incontinence, a condition in which the producers of commodities suffer from a very peculiar lack of self-control: a propensity to do what they would rather not in the face of price-signals. Marx thinks there is something deeply wrong with this feature of commercial society. Because value is determined by abstract, socially necessary labour-time, no producer can know until after the fact whether or not their labour was productive at the socially necessary level. This exposes producers to all manner of forces outside her control, forces that take the form of the prices of goods. But, because these forces are merely the aggregated preferences of other people, the susceptibility of producers to act otherwise than they would like in the face of price-signals is simultaneously their enslavement to the actions of others, made without any consultation or debate. The preferences of others impose themselves on each producer without any need to justify themselves, and without any possibility of being contested. There is no way to ask whether the activities that set the terms of sale are themselves worthwhile. Being subjected to forces outside one’s control is the unalterable condition of every finite being. While this can be very frustrating, there is nothing wrong with it. But when these forces originate in the incontestable and unjustified desires of other people, there is something wrong. This wrong is the wrong of domination. The socialized incontinence of commercial society is also, on Marx’s account, the impersonal domination of each of its members.