It is not the ownership of the instruments of production which it is important for the state to assume. If the state is able to determine the aggregate amount of resources devoted to augmenting the instruments and the basic rate of reward to those who own them, it will have accomplished all that is necessary.
—(Keynes Reference Keynes1964, 378)
INTRODUCTION
In a recent article in this journal, Chiara Cordelli criticizes “radical republicans” for failing to ground a domination-based anti-capitalism.Footnote 1 She argues instead for an alienation-based critique, one that emphasizes the mode of investment as opposed to the mode of production, and “reconciliation” as opposed to exploitation. Cordelli’s conclusions resonate with Keynes’s General Theory (see the quotation above). In what follows, I undertake to defend the radical republican (hereafter: radrep) position against Cordelli’s criticisms.
Cordelli argues that radrep anti-capitalism presupposes three claims, all of which are false:
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I. The non-contingency thesis: domination under capitalism is noncontingent in a way other wrongs, including distributive wrongs, are not;
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II. The domination thesis: the owners’ unilateral control over labor capacity (e.g., the fact that owners can unilaterally decide whether to offer jobs, and on what terms) amounts to a form of domination;
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III. The structural injustice thesis: capitalism’s injustice consists in a form of structural, not merely interactional, domination. (Cordelli Reference Cordelli2025, 1807)
In a nutshell, radreps “cannot prove either that domination under capitalism is less contingent than other wrongs, that capitalism’s distinctive wrong amounts to domination, or that such domination is unjust” (1807). Cordelli has done us all a considerable service by disentangling these three theses and presenting them in a crisp way. I will assume she is right that radreps need these three theses. Taking each of them in turn, I will argue that Cordelli’s criticisms fail, so that radreps are entitled to them. Alienation, I will argue, is a necessary but insufficient condition for capitalism’s fundamental wrong and ill—the domination of labor by capital.
Before mounting my defense, it is worth noting the polemical force of Cordelli’s criticisms. First, Cordelli is right to insist on the distinctiveness of the wrong of capitalism. Just as different forms of arthritis have differentia specifica picking them out as ills, so different modes of production have differentia specifica picking them out as ills.Footnote 2 The fact that both slavery and feudalism are exploitative, for example, does not mean that each of them has no distinctive ill-making features, or that the cure is the same in both cases. The same is true of capitalism, juxtaposed with other modes of production. Second, Cordelli is right to put pressure on the soft underbelly of the recent republican revival in political philosophy, namely, its lack of a theory of property and of a theory of the state. For either of these things, radreps must look elsewhere. For a better political economy of property, I will argue, radreps should join forces with analytical Marxism. And for a better theory of the state, radreps should learn from the Rousseau/Kant nexus. These are concessions, I will argue, that do not threaten the normative core of the radrep research program.
CAPITALISM IS NECESSARILY DOMINATING
Cordelli begins by arguing that the radrep’s affirmation of the non-contingency thesis misunderstands capitalization, the valuation of productive assets on the basis of their expected value. Properly understood, the existence of such capitalization implies that the capitalist’s financing of investment cannot be dependent only on past savings or accumulated past labor. So the radrep case for the non-contingency of domination is, at best, incomplete. Cordelli’s argument goes as follows:
The accumulated seed corn, the machines under the industrial owner’s control, or the cars used by Lyft, may cease to be capital if the process of valuation fails to capitalize them. True, all owners have the power to control labor in potence—conditionally on how the process of capitalization plays out—but they do not have, just qua owners of the means of production, the actual power to control labor, which is what domination requires (Pettit Reference Pettit1997). If the owner does not have, just qua owner, the power to extract, and if he does not unilaterally control the valuation of the net product, such that he cannot unilaterally control whether the net product can sustain further production, then, the owner lacks the power to (unilaterally) control the labor power of others, and thus to dominate, by simply controlling the net product. Hence, private ownership of the means of production and of accumulated past labor is insufficient for domination. (Cordelli Reference Cordelli2025, 1809, my emphasis)
There are two important claims in this passage:
(1) Capital’s power over Labor (landless peasants, industrial proletarians, gig economy workers) is contingent on many features other than their ownership of productive assets, including the capitalization process; and
(2) Capital’s power over Labor is contingent on some form of control over the capitalization process.
Cases like Lyft suggest that the capitalists sometimes lack control over the process of valuation of the net product—capitalization. So, if (2) is true, then Capital does not have power over Labor in Lyft-type cases. A fortiori Capital does not dominate Labor. I will argue that claim (1) is true but uninformative and that claim (2) is false. To do this, I will refer to two simple models of the domination of Labor by Capital. The first is a baseline Marxian model, which features frictionless markets and stabilizing expectations. The second is the post-Keynesian model used by Cordelli, which features relatively autonomous and possibly self-fulfilling expectations. In both cases, I will argue, (1) is true and (2) is false. If I am right, then Capital dominates Labor, quite independently of whether it controls the capitalization process.
The Baseline Model
The simplest and most general models of the domination of Labor by Capital resemble Marx’s immanent critique of political economy in volume 1 of Capital. These models begin with Walrasian assumptions of “frictionless” economic relationships: perfect competition among capitalists, no transaction costs or externalities, and instantaneous market clearing.Footnote 3 One virtue of Walrasian models is their generality. Adding more realistic assumptions about imperfect competition, transaction costs, disequilibrium expectations and prices, and externalities can be implemented as special cases of the baseline model.
Crucially, the baseline Marxian model has no independent role for expectations or agent valuations. Here, “the fundamentals”—meaning: technology, preferences, and resource endowments—determine the equilibrium price of each variable. In this frictionless world, every “factor of production” (land, labor, and capital) receives its marginal product, such that all buying and selling reflects that ratio. One major discovery of the analytical Marxists, especially John Roemer (Reference Roemer1982; Reference Roemer2017), was that the domination of Labor by Capital is possible even under such unrealistic assumptions. That is, granting the neoclassical economists their assumptions, an economy can be shown to be exploitative, given only facts about technology, preferences, and endowments. All you need is unequal endowments, as well as a labor market (or a functional equivalent, such as a credit market) ensuring that the surplus product redounds to the capitalists as profit. The economics of Walras and Marx, Roemer showed, are compatible.
On this set of assumptions, (1) is true but uninformative. For if expectations always reflect the fundamentals, then there is no room for the “animal instincts of entrepreneurs” or for any extrinsic information to do any work. And if agents’ valuations or expectations play no non-trivial role in the determination of who has power over whom, then control over such valuations also has no role in the determination of who has power over whom. So (2) is false.
The Post-Keynesian Model
Cordelli is not interested in these frictionless, expectationless economies (Cordelli Reference Cordelli2025, 1809f). Rather, her focus is on economies in which “investors’ expectations about prospective profitability also and crucially depend on investors’ estimations of other investors’ expectations of future monetary profits.” (Cordelli Reference Cordelli2025, 1810). This idea resonates with much Keynesian and post-Keynesian modelling in economics.Footnote 4 I will therefore call Cordelli’s model “post-Keynesian,” although nothing hinges on that term. It bears noting that, if the general theory of the domination of Labor by Capital is well-described by the baseline Walrasian model, then Cordelli’s non-Walrasian concerns can always be accommodated as special cases. I now want to explain why, even on the post-Keynesian model, (1) is true and (2) is false.
Consider an economy in which expectations of profitability have no center of gravity: the valuation of the net product can get stuck above or below the fundamentals for a very long time. One way this can happen is through self-fulfilling prophecies, or what economists call “sunspot equilibrium.”Footnote 5 Sunspot equilibria are equilibria that do not reflect the fundamentals; instead, they reflect what market participants think that other participants think (that other participants think, and so on). For example, if enough people think that petrol prices are going to be high because sunspot activity on the sun’s surface is too low, then they will go out and buy petrol. This will bid up the petrol price, making petrol prices high. The prophecy turns out to be self-fulfilling.Footnote 6
Now suppose that the structure of endowments in this economy is such that Labor is compelled, by her propertylessness, to place her labor capacity under the command of Capital, in return for wages. This is exactly as in the baseline model, save for the determinants of the rate of profit. The rate of profit depends, in part, on expectations of profitability, which can be self-fulfilling. If something like this post-Keynesian picture is correct, then most capitalist transactions between consenting adults will depend on market capitalization and concomitant expectations of total sales, profitability, labor and non-labor costs, and the like.Footnote 7 So far, Cordelli is right; (1) is true.
I now explain why (2) is false. In a nutshell, the fact that you control X, and thereby X’s value, does not mean that you control what makes X valuable. Footnote 8 So the capitalists can control labor’s use value, as well as its exchange value, without thereby controlling some process that makes it valuable. Consider some illustrations. If you control the only toothpaste in town, then you control my toothpaste activity. But that does not give you control over anybody’s toothpaste valuation. If you own all the water wells, then you get to dictate that I work for you on extortionate terms in order to obtain water. But that does not give you control over anybody’s water valuation.Footnote 9 Or consider:
Sunspot Mafioso—Sunspot Mafioso depends, for the existence and exercise of his power, on a general belief that he will enforce compliance with his own interests.
Hobbes believed that “reputation of power, is power; because it draweth with it the adherence of those that need protection.” (Hobbes Reference Hobbes1994, 152) If something like this is true, then the Sunspot Mafioso’s reputation for power makes him powerful. As long as enough people believe he is powerful, that belief is self-fulfilling.Footnote 10 Crucially, Sunspot Mafioso can be powerful without controlling anyone’s expectations—these expectations may be spontaneously self-fulfilling. Something similar is true of the capitalists in the post-Keynesian model. Their profitability, an indication of the extent of their power over the workers’ labor capacities, is dependent on “extrinsic” expectations that do not reflect the fundamentals. And, like the Sunspot Mafioso, the capitalists need not control these expectations. So (2) must, again, be false.
Of course, the analogy only takes us so far. Unlike the Sunspot Mafioso, the capitalists cannot make a profit unless they exploit labor: somewhere, someone must produce surplus value. Without a surplus in the economy as a whole, capitalism is not reproducible as such. It follows that Capital’s power over Labor must be such as to guarantee a minimum level of profit in the economy as a whole. So whatever determines the exact rate of profit—the fundamentals alone or the presence of extrinsic expectations—a certain degree of power over the labor process is indispensable to capitalist reproduction as such. This is consistent with (1), as well as with denying (2).
To sum up the argument of this section. There seem to be cases where domination obtains not despite, but because of everyone’s expectations. In Cordelli’s post-Keynesian model, these expectations can be self-reinforcing (or self-defeating) and rational. Moreover, capitalist domination in these models is contingent on the expectational features that constitute it but non-contingent on control over these features.Footnote 11 It follows that capitalization is a necessary and constitutive feature of how capital reproducibly controls labor (claim 1 is true), while control over capitalization and related processes is not (claim 2 is false). It follows that Capital can reproducibly control Labor even when Capital does not control the capitalization process.Footnote 12 So the non-contingency thesis is safe.
DOMINATION IS CAPITALISM’S DISTINCTIVE WRONG
Radreps have a harder time when it comes to explaining the grounds of capitalist injustice. Cordelli criticizes Pettit and other republicans for thinking that capitalist domination presupposes the ability to interfere arbitrarily with workers, whether at the point of the labor contract, at the point of production, or at the point of surplus-distribution. (Cordelli Reference Cordelli2025, 1807). Cordelli’s argument goes something like this:
(3) Domination presupposes a power to interfere arbitrarily with another’s choice set by removing, penalizing, or manipulating options.
(4) Under democratic capitalism, the capitalists lack such powers.
So (5) Under democratic capitalism, the capitalists do not dominate (3, 4).
Some radreps resist conclusion (5) by denying (4). This argumentative strategy is short-sighted, because (3) is too vague. That is, the very idea of “arbitrary interference” is so vague that there will always be some account of it that makes (4) true. A better strategy is to jettison (3) altogether. This is to deny that domination will always make someone worse off or remove, penalize, or manipulate her existing options. So, radreps can grant Cordelli the assumption that capitalists need not interfere arbitrarily, in the sense of (3). Domination does not presuppose such interference.
That does not take the radreps very far, however. Cordelli also criticizes a non-interference-based account of domination (e.g., Bryan Reference Bryan2023). On that account, capital dominates labor not because it can interfere with or manipulate options, but because, and insofar as, Capital is not forced to track the interests of Labor. That alternative, says Cordelli, is also untenable:
once we consider the mediated nature of capitalist production, its implications are not those that most radical republicans are prepared to accept. Indeed, if we take seriously the fact that something cannot be capital if it is not capitalized and that no single capitalist, nor the capitalist class as a whole, can control unilaterally the process of capitalization, then it becomes clear that no capitalist can meet their needs by engaging in productive activity (or even qualify as a capitalist) without the cooperation of a great many others, as well as the “cooperation” of investment and capital markets, which no capitalist can force to track their interests. (Cordelli Reference Cordelli2025, 1814)
Cordelli is right that an account of domination defined in terms of interest-tracking overgenerates. Her example of the New York rentier being dominated by capitalists (because she cannot force her interests to be tracked) is a convincing reductio ad absurdum. A corollary is that we cannot understand capitalist domination by appeal to interest-tracking alone. We need a theory of legitimate interests to do that.
Fortunately, there is an alternative account of domination, which does not make the theory hostage to vague formulations about preferences, option-restriction, or tracked interests. This alternative is based on impartial justification to each person. The idea draws upon Rousseavian and Kantian materials and goes something like this. Suppose that poverty cannot be reciprocally justified to free and equal people because it would make the poor into servants of the rich (Cordelli Reference Cordelli2020; Rawls Reference Rawls1971; Ripstein Reference Ripstein2009). For similar reasons, capitalist private property cannot be reciprocally justified to free and equal people because it would make the poor into servants of the capitalists. And since servitude entails domination, capitalism is necessarily a form of domination.Footnote 13 Call this the democratic authorization argument.
Cordelli responds that advocates of this argument:
would still need to prove that the democratic process is insufficient to eliminate domination under capitalism. Indeed, if the capitalist mode of production were subject to a democratic and revisable vote, everyone could be regarded as having equal power to force the scheme of economic cooperation to track their own interests. (Cordelli Reference Cordelli2025, 1814)
Radreps can grasp this nettle. They can say that no democratic revisable vote could condone capitalist private property, just as no democratic revisable vote could condone poverty. Otherwise, free and equal humans would be, in Kant’s memorable phrase, “throwing away their own freedom” (Kant Reference Kant1996, 103). At least this is what a complete radrep response to Cordelli could say without appealing to interference, option-restriction, or interest-tracking. Such a response would then connect the democratic authorization argument with a political economy of the capitalist state. Under such a state, the capitalists necessarily have an extra say qua capitalists—whether they choose to exercise it or not. This is why, under capitalism, “all citizens are politically unfree” (Cordelli Reference Cordelli2025, 1819). Here’s a standard version of that argument:
without nationalization of the means of production, increases of productivity require profitability of private enterprise. As long as the process of accumulation is private, the entire society is dependent upon maintaining private profits and upon the actions of capitalists allocating these profits. Hence the efficacy of social democrats—as of any other party—in regulating the economy and mitigating the social effects depends upon the profitability of the private sector and the willingness of capitalists to cooperate. The very capacity of social democrats to regulate the economy depends upon the profits of capital. This is the structural barrier which cannot be broken: the limit of any policy is that investment and thus profits must be protected in the long run […] Moreover, the very electoral support for any particular government depends upon actions of capitalists […] Hence any party is dependent upon private capital even for its electoral survival in office. (Przeworski Reference Przeworski1985, 42, my emphasis)
Here, Przeworski states the canonical structural domination version of the democratic authorization argument. Capitalism makes the implementation of any democratic decision subject to the private choices of the owners of productive assets. Radreps take this to be unjust, indeed, capitalism’s central injustice.Footnote 14 Now, it might appear that Capital’s rule over politics wrongs owners and non-owners alike (Cordelli Reference Cordelli2025, 1816). It follows that both Capital and Labor are wronged. This is true in the sense that Capital’s rule wrongs capitalists and workers alike qua citizens. But that wrong derives from the distinct wrong of Capital’s rule over Labor at the point of production. So what explains capitalist rule over politics is capitalist rule over production, where the latter explains the former. Capitalists and workers are wronged qua citizens because the capitalists wrong the workers qua workers, and not vice versa. Labor is, in the relevant sense, prior to citizenship.
It bears adding that radrep injustice is not just any form of inferiority or subordination: it makes a moral difference that the capitalists not only treat working people as their servants, but that they have the power to enforce that servitude. Our working lives are up to them. This helps explain why radrep anti-capitalism is distinctively domination-, not subordination-, based.Footnote 15 Cordelli does not offer a refutation of this fundamental radrep theorem.Footnote 16 So the domination thesis seems safe.
CAPITALIST DOMINATION IS STRUCTURALLY UNJUST
Cordelli’s third, and perhaps most difficult, challenge is that radrep domination is not really structural. This is formulated in terms of a dilemma. Either capitalist domination is fundamentally agential, in which case it cannot explain the structural features of capitalism; or it is “impersonal,” in which case it does not amount to injustice or oppression. She sums this up as follows:
either radical republicanism retains an agential account of structural domination, but then, given the mediated nature of capitalist reproduction, it has trouble identifying an intentional dominator. Or, radical republicanism embraces the notion of impersonal domination, but then it must prove that such notion is not incoherent, and, in any case, cannot make sense of the claim that capitalism unjustly dominates. (Cordelli Reference Cordelli2025, 1814)
I agree with Cordelli that the impersonal account cannot be salvaged.Footnote 17 Moreover, extant radrep accounts emphasizing intentional wrongdoing cannot explain capitalist domination as a form of structural injustice. But this dilemma is not exhaustive, since there are accounts of domination that presuppose neither intentional wrongdoing nor “impersonal” domination. I sketch one such account presently.
Suppose that there are plural requirements, that is, requirements that certain pluralities of agents act jointly, though not severally.Footnote 18 The idea behind plural requirements is that you and I may be required to make it the case that a certain pattern of actions obtains, even if neither of us is individually required to do so. For example, you and I might be required to perform the pattern “I F, you G.” This is consistent with my lacking the unconditional obligation to F and you lacking the unconditional obligation to G. Consider an illustration:
Sunbathers—You and I are sunbathing on a beach. A non-white child is drowning in the deep. She can only be saved if I swim north and you swim south. If only one of us swims, then they will break their hand and fail to rescue the child. So proper communication (about the who and what of the joint action of rescue) is required in order to bring it about that the child is saved. The communication never obtains because we each believe, justifiably but falsely, that the other is a racist. Each of us will continue to justifiably believe this, even if the other publicly declares their conditional intention to rescue the child. The child drowns.
The idea behind Sunbathers is that you and I may be required to make it the case that “I swim north (F1), you swim south (F2).” This remains true even if I am not unconditionally required to swim north and you are not unconditionally required to swim south. In other words, we are plurally but not severally required to do our parts. That there might be a plural but non-several requirement to rescue is plausible if the downside for each of us is a broken hand and a failed rescue. Suppose that this idea of plural requirements is plausible. And suppose that a plurality P of individuals Pi ought to F, where F-ing reduces to a pattern of individual actions Fi. Then the plurality P has a plural capacity to ensure that F obtains. So if you and I are plurally required to rescue the child, then you and I must be able to do so.Footnote 19 The existence of this capacity is independent of whether you and I actually form a group agent.
The attractive feature behind the idea of a plural requirement is that it preserves the Marxian thought that the capitalists as a whole wrong the workers as a whole, although no capitalist wrongs any worker. Suppose, along the lines of the Baseline Model, that there is a system of perfect competition in which all capitalists are price-takers.Footnote 20 Then the capitalists do best by themselves and the workers if they maximize profit by running their productive assets as capitalist firms. In not giving up her profits, none of the capitalists K1, K2, …, Kn does her workers any wrong, assuming enough capitalists are not giving up their profits either. And yet, the capitalists collectively do violate a plural requirement not to dominate. More generally, class domination involves groups of agents wronging other groups, without necessarily amounting to group agents. Footnote 21 This makes agentless class domination possible.
This is just a sketch of how radreps can resist the agential horn of Cordelli’s dilemma—which makes domination merely interpersonal—without concessions to the “impersonal” horn—which treats injustice on a par with hurricanes. So the structural injustice thesis can be salvaged. I now turn to Cordelli’s positive argument.
THE COMPUTER MACHINE
Cordelli’s positive argument for the reconciliation view begins with an example which, she argues, involves alienation without domination:
Computer Machine—an important part of your life, including transformative decisions concerning whether, say, to have children or what career to pursue, is governed by a reason-sensitive computer machine, which reliably and transparently makes those decisions on your behalf in ways that you could reasonably endorse, but without you having any direct involvement in those decisions. (Cordelli Reference Cordelli2025, 1818)
Cordelli proceeds to argue that Computer Machine is problematic because it involves alienation: “your agency would not be directly involved in guiding your own life, and in initiating new trajectories, you would be unable to understand and affirm your resulting life as your own” (1818). This conclusion extends to any political community governing itself in similar ways. And since capitalism is relevantly analogous to the Computer Machine, it draws the same alienation objection. Here’s a more precise reconstruction of this argument:
(6) Political legitimacy requires individual and collective self-government.
(7) The Computer Machine makes such self-government impossible.
So (8) the Computer Machine world is illegitimate (6, 7).
But (9) Capitalism is relevantly like the Computer Machine world.
So (10) Capitalism is illegitimate (8, 9).
Before I explain how radreps can embrace conclusion (10), I raise some concerns about the main premises. As it stands, premise (6) is not self-evident. The fact that individuals are entitled to self-government or autonomy does not mean that collectives are entitled to self-government—at least not in the same sense. Cordelli motivates the latter by appeal to a theory of political legitimacy that extends beyond democratic authorization (Cordelli Reference Cordelli2025, 1819). As I explain below, this is not a distinction radreps need to accept. Premise (7) is Cordelli’s alienation claim. Taken together with (6), (8) follows. And to get (10) out of (8), we need something like premise (9).Footnote 22
Domination and alienation theorists can agree about (8)–(10). I will discuss one way radreps can do so without appealing to claims about alienation or collective self-government, like (6)–(7). This is a variant of the democratic authorization argument discussed above. It goes something like this:
(11) An institution is legitimate if and only if it is democratically authorizable.
(12) Capitalism, like the Computer Machine world, is not democratically authorizable.
So (10) Capitalism is illegitimate (11, 12).
Premise (11) is a relatively uncontroversial way of defining legitimacy. It says that the democratic state’s right to command and the correlative duty of citizens to obey depend only on what that state may be authorized to do.Footnote 23 The crucial premise is (12). The argument for it is that the political community described by the Computer Machine would not be giving itself its own laws. Delegating to the Machine, or an AI, is not something a political community can permissibly do to itself. The individual parallel would be an agent attempting to contract into her own murder, or her own enslavement. Both contracts are invalid and therefore unenforceable, because they generate a structure of rights inconsistent with the normative capacity to make them. To enter into such agreements would be to throw away one’s freedom.
These concerns are captured in Kant’s well-known argument against a hereditary nobility. Ripstein sums it up as follows:
The problem with hereditary nobility is that free citizens could not consent to a system in which the availability of someone to serve in an official capacity depended on an innate legal classification. Such an arrangement is defective from the standpoint of right for two reasons: “What a people (the entire mass of subjects) cannot decide with regard to itself and its fellows, the sovereign cannot also decide with regard to it.” The people considered as a collective body (“with regard to itself”) cannot agree to limit the available supply of candidates for public office. Second, the people considered severally (“with regard to its fellows”) cannot give up the entitlement to be judged on the basis of their own acts. (Ripstein Reference Ripstein2009, 291, my emphases)
Insofar as the acts of the Computer Machine are not the acts of people considered severally, to hand over political decision-making to the Machine is to give up the entitlement to be “judged on the basis of their own acts.” This entitlement is unwaivable, just as the entitlement to freedom from slavery is unwaivable. So this is just another way of saying that a people cannot democratically subject itself to the Machine. And since the Machine world and capitalism are relevantly similar, (12) follows. So if Cordelli is right that the alienation theory can make sense of the problems thrown up by the Computer Machine, then so can the domination theory.
There is a catch. Are radreps seriously saying that all capitalisms are equally illegitimate? If so, then there would be as little reason to obey the law under democratic as under undemocratic capitalism. This is absurd. In response, radreps can relax (11) by arguing that legitimacy is a scalar magnitude. If this case can be made, then democratic capitalism can claim some degree of legitimacy over undemocratic capitalism. On the other hand, if Cordelli were to show that legitimacy requires more than democratic authorization, such that (11) is altogether false, then that would be a boon for her derivation of the illegitimacy of capitalism.
CODA: MARX OR MINSKY?
I wish we could say “both.” But we cannot, at least not at the most fundamental level. Minsky’s economics, and post-Keynesianism more generally, is anti-finance but not anti-capitalist; Marx’s economics is both. Cordelli’s arguments show how the former theory can be grounded. Its focus is on control over capitalization, the socialization of investment, and, at the most fundamental level, the reconciliation of citizens with their own future under democratic political institutions.
On this picture, questions about property relations, public ownership, class power, and the mode of production are only incidental. As the Keynes epigram at the top of this article suggests, it is conceivable that Cordellian reconciliation will be achieved under democratic capitalism.Footnote 24 On the Marxian picture, such a reconciliation is highly desirable, but remains lexically inferior to democratic socialism. That is, democratic capitalism is lexically superior to undemocratic capitalism, but democratic socialism is lexically superior to both.
None of this makes Cordelli’s account orthogonal to the socialist critique of capitalism. On the contrary, according to the domination theory, alienation is the subsumption of human productive capacity to the rule of capital. It follows that alienation is an indispensable moment in capitalist domination, such that democratic reconciliation—disalienation—must be part of its transcendence. But alienation is just that: a moment in capitalism’s fundamental wrong and ill—the domination of labor by capital.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Thanks to Alex Bryan, Tom O’Shea, and two anonymous reviewers for helpful comments on drafts of this article.
CONFLICT OF INTEREST
The author declares no ethical issues or conflicts of interest in this research.
ETHICAL STANDARDS
The author affirms this research did not involve human participants.
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