The Capitalist Mode of Production and the Insufficiency of Ownership for Domination

Vrousalis (Reference Vrousalis2020, 94) explains how capitalist reproduction works as follows:

This account of the capitalist mode of production makes three assumptions. First, future production is assumed to be automatically, almost deterministically driven by investment from past savings, in the form of accumulated surplus value produced by past labor. Savings from past labor (accumulated seed corns) is thus presented as being both necessary and sufficient to enable the capitalist to reinvest into further production.

Second, capitalists’ profit, and thus their savings to be reinvested in production are taken to result from the extraction of surplus value from labor. Because the owner controls labor, she has the power to extract; because she extracts, she can continue to produce and thus to control labor.

Third, because future production automatically results from past savings (which in turn result from control over past labor), unilateral control over the net product of past savings, in the form of ownership rights over the use of such product, is assumed to be sufficient to confer to the owner unilateral control over labor.

There are some problems with each assumption. With regard to the first assumption, as Keynes (Reference Keynes1936), Veblen (Reference Veblen1904), and many others (e.g., Borio Reference Borio2016; Levy Reference Levy2021; Orlean Reference Orlean2014) argue, past savings or profits are neither necessary nor sufficient for further production. They are not necessary for credit and may enable investment in further production even without past savings (see Borio Reference Borio2016; Cordelli and Levy Reference Cordelli and Jonathan Levy2022). Most importantly, savings are not sufficient because further production does not deterministically follow from past accumulation. Rather, production necessitates the successful “capitalization” of past savings, which in turn does not depend on the intrinsic quality and quantity of savings alone. Let me explain.

“Capitalization” in primis refers to a specific mode of valuation, whereby “valuing something means assessing the expected future monetary return from investing in it.” (Muniesa et al. Reference Muniesa, Liliana, Horacio, Álvaro, Florence, Alaric and Véra2017).Footnote ¹¹ Financiers, investors and entrepreneurs engage in quintessential acts of capitalization when trying to determine the prospective profitability of an enterprise. Capitalization also refers to a systemic process of monetary valuation, which is enabled by law, sustained by capital markets, and supported by cultural norms (more below). A good is capitalized when it is attributed monetary value, through this process, in light of subjective expectations about its future profitability.

Under capitalism, the ability of those who own the means of production to engage in production is contingent on these means, including past savings, being capitalized.

True, it is in principle possible to imagine cases where production happens without capitalization, such as the case of a small business where the daughter inherits both the existing machinery and enough surplus profits from years past to employ two people. But, if the daughter’s only purpose is to, say, build things for their own sake, we are outside capitalism, as there is no purposive activity aimed at future profitability. If instead the daughter decides to employ the machines and people with an eye toward making future profits, she has now herself began to capitalize her own past profits, which have in turn become a form of variable capital invested to employ the two workers. She has also valued her machinery in a particular way, as fixed capital, believing that it can produce a product for sale on markets that can yield a profit in excess of her costs. Further, and importantly, in a capitalist economy, the economic value of the daughter’s past profits and their capacity to sustain further production will themselves depend on the existence of capital markets (e.g., markets for investible money and credit) which are governed by a principle of capitalization, and so will the value of the collateral she might need to get credit to, say, perform maintenance. And, in order to survive competition, the daughter may very well have to attract outside investment to, say, buy new machines or expand—a process which will be based on mechanisms of financial valuation that revolve around the principle of capitalization. Under capitalism, production and economic reproduction thus essentially depend on a systemic process of capitalization, which is made central by the omnipresence of capital markets.

Which goods get capitalized in a complex capitalist economy in turn depends on the volume and direction of investment, especially but not exclusively by institutional investors and financiers, in further production, which in turn does not necessarily depend on savings or past profits. Consider, as a paradigmatic example, the stock market valuation of ride-sharing companies such as Lyft. In 2019 Lyft valuation amounted to $15 billion. This valuation did not result from past savings, as the ride-sharing company was at the time still deeply unprofitable, nor it result from the ownership of valuable means of production, as Lyft did not even own its cars. Rather the valuation depended on Lyft’s ability to attract investment on the basis of its expected future profitability, which in turn depended on investors’ expectations of a future of lower car ownership (Molla Reference Molla2019).

The process of capitalization is systemic, as it is structured and directed by precise background conditions. The law plays an essential role in enabling and directing the process of capitalization for it establishes what can be considered an asset, a liability or a return on investment (Muniesa et al. Reference Muniesa, Liliana, Horacio, Álvaro, Florence, Alaric and Véra2017; Pistor Reference Pistor2019). Corporate and intellectual property law are also essential to protect claims to revenues. But the law is not enough.

Given the presence of money as a store of value, investors always face the choice between either investing in specific capital goods and thus in further production or, instead, exercising what Keynes calls their “liquidity preference,” and choosing to hoard precautionarily or to speculate, by investing in liquid assets, thereby forgoing investment in further production. This choice is often made on the basis of fragile expectations concerning how a radically uncertain future will turn out to be. The formation of such expectations is, in turn, fundamentally shaped by what the economic sociologist Jens Beckert (Reference Beckert2016) calls “the politics of expectations.” This comprises the set of institutions, social norms, and cultural practices, not reducible to legal rules, that govern the formation and coordination of investors’ subjective expectations, and their ability to imagine possible futures. Such actors and norms provide frames for the assessment of risks (e.g., economic models of valuation) and produce cultural narrative of expected success (e.g., the Baby Boomers ideology), or expected catastrophes, that drive specific patterns of investment in or away from production.

Further, since the actual viability and profitability of a business are also a function of the volume of investment in that business, investors’ expectations about prospective profitability also and crucially depend on investors’ estimations of other investors’ expectations of future monetary profits (see Orlean Reference Orlean2014). The overall process of capitalization—in which goods, including productive assets, get successfully capitalized through investment—is thus a legally structured and culturally embedded, mimetic, and recursive social game of expectations (Beckert Reference Beckert2016; Keynes Reference Keynes1936; Orlean Reference Orlean2014; Veblen Reference Veblen1904).

The fact that the quantity of accumulated past savings or the inherent productive quality of particular means of production cannot alone determine the direction of capitalization and thus the viability of further production for profit can also be briefly illustrated through an historical example.

Consider, for instance, the massive “deindustrialization” during the early 1980s of the US rust belt.Footnote ¹² Here, rates of fixed investment in manufacturing plummeted and 2 million jobs were lost. Throughout, neither the rate of past savings, the presence of workers willing to work, nor the inherent productive capacity of the existing plant and equipment in the factories, changed. Rather, what happened was that, to tackle inflation, the US Federal Reserve engineered high interest rates—the “Volcker Shock.” When interest rates soared, expectations shifted and major potential investors in manufacturing chose to hoard money, thereby forcing many factories to shut down. Existing plants and equipment in those factories were no longer capitalized, and thus no longer able to sustain further production, even as their productive intrinsic qualities—their being “means of production”—remained the same.

This example well shows how under capitalism production does not deterministically follow from the accumulation of past savings. It rather essentially depends on the mediation of capitalization, which in turn depends on investment driven by expectations about a largely imagined future. Following Keynes and Veblen, one may even say that what makes capitalism distinctive from feudalism and other economic systems is precisely the fact that under capitalism, it is the future, not just the past, that shapes the economic present.

Implications for the second assumption follow. If the ability of those who own the means of production to keep producing is conditional on the process of capitalization, then, “the means of production,” whether machines, steel, or accumulated seed corns, cannot become capital until they enter the process of capitalization—they are attributed value now on the basis of their expected ability to produce future profits. “Capital” is not, as political philosophers tend to assume, any resource endowed with objective productive qualities. After all, there are many objects in the world that could be in principle deployed to produce things, but which remain untouched by the process of economic valuation. To define all of them as capital would render the concept so over-expansive as to be useless. Capital is rather better defined as “capitalized assets”—assets invested with value in expectation of future returns (Levy Reference Levy2025; Pistor Reference Pistor2019). This is what makes capital conceptually distinct from wealth. While wealth is a past-oriented, and static concept, capital is a future-oriented and inherently dynamic one.

Now, if the capital value of productive assets inextricably depends on an expectations-driven process of capitalization through investment, so does the profit the capitalist can earn.Footnote ¹³ While the contest between capital and labor is crucial for determining the ex post distribution of the net product achieved from production, causally speaking, the volume of the net product and profits unavoidably depend on the ex-ante willingness of investors to invest in wealth-generating production to begin with (Kaldor Reference Kaldor1955).

From this analysis, it follows that the third assumption is also flawed. The fact that an agent has ownership rights over “the means of production” or “the net product” in the form of rights to control their use, is insufficient to confer to the agent the actual power to unilaterally control the working lives of others and thus to dominate them, because no single owner, not even the capitalist class as a whole, has unilateral control over the overall process of capitalization of the net product from which future production and thus the acquisition of the dominating power depends. 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. Footnote ¹⁴

The Contingency of Capitalist Domination

An implication of my analysis so far is that the owner of the means of production is importantly different from the benevolent slave master who because he has ownership rights over the slave, ipso facto also has the actual power to interfere with the slave. The difference is that the existence of the master’s actual power of interference is neither conditional on, nor equally mediated by, a process of monetary valuation. True, the master’s power is conditional on the existence of the legal institution of slavery. But once this institution grants to the master ownership rights over the slave, such rights are sufficient to provide the master with the power to control the slave. Legal ownership rights over the means of production, by contrast, are not sufficient to provide the owner of such means with the power to control nonowners, for such power depends on an investment-driven process of valuation, which alone can transform mere means of production (and past savings) into capital.Footnote ¹⁵ Whereas republicans may thus affirm that slave masters always dominate, they cannot claim that those who own the means of production always do so.

One could object that even if the ownership of the means of production is not sufficient for domination, the ownership of capital is. But, first, notice that this move would require an important modification of the economic account offered by Vrousalis, and implicitly endorsed by others, since such an account assumes that ownership of past savings (the accumulated net product of past labor), or physical factors of production are sufficient for domination. But, as I have argued, savings cannot per se count as capital, because they are not capitalized, and the inherent productivity of the means of production is insufficient to make them capital. Second, republicans treat legal ownership as an institution that confers rights of use and control over things that pre-exist the ownership claim (e.g., seed corns, factories, or land), or are constituted by that very claim (e.g., being a slave implies being someone’s property). But what counts as capital and who the owner of capital is, whether it is me or you, does not pre-exist, and cannot be determined by, the legal institution of property alone for such institution does not control the process of capitalization which constitutes or transforms an object, idea, or human skill, perhaps yours, perhaps mine, into capital.

Radical republicans could then concede that owners qua owners do not necessarily dominate. They could, however, try to rescue the noncontingency thesis by arguing that, insofar as surplus value is an average across the system—some capitalists make money, some lose it—all in all, there is always someone who (unjustly) dominates.

However, this response is problematic for recall that the noncontingency thesis was meant to represent an advantage of the radical republican critique over exploitation-based critiques, that is the fact that only radical republicanism can prove that injustice under capitalism is not contingent on owners’ (extractivist) subjective dispositions (in a capitalism of benevolent owners it may be possible to find workplaces that are not exploitative, but capitalism would still be unjust (Vrousalis Reference Vrousalis2020, 97). However, given the economic account radical republicans seem to endorse, they cannot but agree that complete absence of exploitation is impossible under capitalism, for capitalism is a system of economic reproduction and the actual extraction of surplus value is essential to that reproduction. Therefore, the noncontingency thesis can only be understood as the claim that whereas both the amount of total exploitation, as well as the identity of the exploiters are dependent on subjective dispositions, by contrast, the total amount of domination, as well as the identity of dominators are not, because the owners of the means of production, qua owners, always dominate. But so understood the noncontingency thesis is false, for owners do not, in fact, always dominate, and how much domination exists under capitalism, as well as the identity of dominators, necessarily depend on the subjective expectations and dispositions of particular investors. Domination is as contingent as exploitation.Footnote ¹⁶

One (e.g., Gourevitch Reference Gourevitch, Frank and Sellers2024; see also Bryan and Kouris Reference Bryan and IoannisKouris2022) could rebut that domination under capitalism is noncontingent because to exploit capitalists must dominate, and capitalists’ dispositions to exploit are necessitated by the structural imperative of competition. The problem with this response, however, is that it neglects a previous step: to dominate capitalists must have the actual power to do so. Now, as we saw, the capitalists’ power to dominate, and thus to exploit, is itself contingent on a complex process of capitalization the direction of which depends on investors’ expectations about the future. We then need to ask: are the subjective expectations of investors that drive the direction of capitalization themselves necessitated by the structural imperative of competition to reproduce labor exploitation? Not necessarily. The capitalist structure incentivizes investors, financiers and entrepreneurs to make their investments toward the end of profitability, but prospective profitability need not always depend, or be expected to depend, on the prospective exploitation of labor. Why, for example, do investors often expect oil to be more profitable than renewables, and so decide to invest in the former rather than the latter? The answer has nothing to do with the exploitation of labor but rather with investors’ subjective attitudes toward risk in an environment of high price volatility, and with trust, or lack thereof, in political institutions (see Christophers Reference Christophers2024). The scale and distribution of the power to both dominate and exploit thus remain highly contingent on dispositions. Regardless, even if correct, the above restatement of the noncontingency thesis would no longer provide radical republicanism with a clear advantage over exploitation-based critiques of capitalism. To the contrary, it would make both the existence of domination and its noncontingent character entirely derivative from the existence and noncontingency of exploitation.

But let us leave the question of contingency aside, and work with the valid assumption that, under capitalism, there are always at least some owners that have the power to control the labor of others. For radical republicanism to succeed as a critique of capitalism, it is essential that such control amounts to domination. But, does it?

Does Unilateral Control over Labor Imply a Power of Interference?

Radical republicans have argued that work relations under capitalism are an instance of domination qua neorepublican unfreedom, because they consist of workers being subject to capitalists’ arbitrary or unilateral, that is unchecked or nonreciprocal, power to control the labor process (Gourevitch Reference Gourevitch2013; Vrousalis Reference Vrousalis2020, 88; Gädeke Reference Gädeke2019).

But, does the owners’ power to control the labor process amount to a power of interference, as required by neorepublican unfreedom? I suspect it does not.

Interference, according to neorepublicans, consists in “the removal, replacement, or misrepresentation of options” for choice (Pettit Reference Pettit2013, 52). To assess whether employment relations under capitalism necessarily feature a power of interference by capitalists, it is worth distinguishing between the three stages at which this power can be located. First, there is the stage of contracting, characterized by the power of capitalists to make employment offers and to set the terms of employment contracts. This stage comes after an unequal distribution of productive assets has already been publicly authorized. Second, there is the point of production. At this stage, the employer has already hired a particular employee and has the power to give orders to the employee within the workplace. Third, there is the distributive stage. In temporal order, this is the initial stage characterized by the power to determine the distribution of productive assets through the law of property.

Radical republicans often locate the power of interference at the stage of contracting. In their view, capitalists dominate because they have the asymmetrical power to discretionally decide whether to offer a job and on what contractual terms. Even when this power is said to be structurally enabled by the broader division of property, interference remains an attribute of control over labor, not property distribution.

If this is so, it is hard to see how capitalists dominate. This is because by simply having the power to decide on whether to offer jobs and on what terms, the capitalist, at this stage, does not have the power to reduce options. At most, he has the power to add one option to the option set already available to the employee (e.g., destitution or charity), without removing any (see Corvino Reference Corvino2019).

It could be objected that the employer’s power to make an offer amounts to a power of interference because the offer is not refusable, and nonrefusable offers sometime have, as Pettit (Reference Pettit2013, 53) argues, “restrictive effect” on the agent’s choice. But, although choosing to remain destitute may be psychologically more costly now that a better alternative has presented itself, the option set is not reduced by the existence of such costs. The job offer simply adds a more attractive alternative.

What if the job offered is poorly compensated, or terms are unfairly set? This may make the offer exploitative—the employer takes unfair advantage of the nonowner’s lack of reasonable alternatives—but insofar as the job still adds a more attractive alternative to the original baseline, no interference occurs (Corvino Reference Corvino2019).

One could adopt a moralized baseline and argue that in a just society, the employee would start with much better options. However, this is not something individual employers have the power or responsibility to make available at this stage. Nor does capitalism itself generates a reasonable benchmark price for the offer that the capitalist should respect, and against which legitimate expectations can be assessed, beyond that offered by the market mechanism (Corvino Reference Corvino2019).

The owners of capital, therefore, can certainly exploit (and be seriously blameworthy for it) but they do not have the power to interfere, and thus to dominate, by simply having the power to unilaterally control the labor process. This reasoning, as Fausto Corvino (Reference Corvino2019) convincingly argues, applies also to the second stage—the point of production. While we may say that, whenever an employer takes advantage of an employee’s lack of substantive exit options to impose unreasonable demands on her, the employer is exploiting the employee, we cannot say that just because of this the employer dominates. For as long as the employee retains a formal right to exit, and as long as what keeps the employee from leaving is not the employer’s doing but rather the external lack of alternatives, we cannot say that the employer has the power to reduce the employee’s options compared to the original baseline.

One could argue, however, that the power of interference is located at the third level—the level of property distribution. Capitalists have the power to interfere not because they have the power to control the labor process but because they have the power to support a property system that excludes some from the ownership of the means of production (Corvino Reference Corvino2019; Gourevitch Reference Gourevitch2013). But, why does this power count as an arbitrary power of interference? The answer cannot be that it is because the exclusion subjects nonowners to domination (that is someone’s power of interference) at the employment stage, for as we saw what happens at that stage is best understood as exploitation. The answer cannot be either and simply that the exclusion unjustifiably reduces the options of nonowners compared to an ideal baseline of fair distribution, otherwise capitalism’s injustice would become contingent on background fairness, and radical republicanism would just become another distributivist theory.

The answer must then be that the exclusion amounts to interference because it forces nonowners to work under exploitative conditions in order to gain subsistence (Corvino Reference Corvino2019). But this answer renders the notion of domination completely redundant in two respects. First, what is wrong with capitalism is not that the capitalists dominate, by having the power to interfere, whether they exercise that power or not, but rather that the capitalists actually interfere by forcibly removing, through the law, the option of not having to work under exploitative conditions. Second, the normative work is done by exploitation, not domination. What violates the freedom of nonowners is not that they are subject to a power of interference, but rather that they are forced to work under exploitative conditions.

There is more. The exclusion of nonowners from the means of production can count as arbitrary interference only if the exercise of the power to exclude is insufficiently controlled, or does not track the workers’ avowable interests. But, the exercise of such power could arguably be rendered nonarbitrary, in republican terms, by subjecting the law of property to democratic sanctioning and periodic revisions, or by providing reasons as to why the system may be all things-considered justified to all those subject to it (e.g., perhaps because it overall serves the worst-off’s interests better than any alternative system).Footnote ¹⁷ It seems then that radical republicans who adopt a neorepublican account of domination are unable to support the domination thesis.

From Interference to Dependence?

Radical republicans could abandon interference. They could argue that capitalism dominates by simply making the workers’ ability to access subsistence dependent on the discretionary will of owners, whether the latter have the power to interfere or not. They could follow Bryan (Reference Bryan2023, 698) in arguing that even workers who have independent access to capital can be dominated, to the extent that “they remain dependent on the cooperation of capitalists on terms insensitive to their own needs, to engage in productive activity and make a living.” In order to judge whether someone is unduly dependent so as to be dominated, republicans would need to ask, first, “to what extent is an agent reliant on the cooperation or permission of others to be able to meet their needs by engaging in productive activity?” and, second, “to what extent are (a) the decision as to whether that cooperation or permission is forthcoming and (b) the terms of that cooperation or permission forced by the agent, using relevant forms of control, to track their interests?” (Bryan Reference Bryan2023, 699).

This is a more promising account of domination. But 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.Footnote ¹⁸ The dependence account of domination would then lead to the conclusion that everyone, including, say, the NYC rentier, is dominated under capitalism—a conclusion that may find some textual support in Marx but that most radical republicans reject (with the exception of Roberts). Note, it will not do to respond that the NYC rentier is not dominated, or at least less dominated, because it is unlikely that the preferences of investors, the resulting process of monetary valuation, as well as global markets, will develop in such a way as to deprive her of all her rental income, because the status of an agent as dominated or nondominated, or even more or less dominated, is not supposed to depend on such probabilistic calculations. Otherwise, a slave would also be more or less dominated depending on the likelihood of the master’s benevolent cooperation. Nor it will do to say that the NYC rentier has more control over the direction of financial markets (e.g., over the formation of other investors’ expectations about the future) than the pensioner, because she might not.Footnote ¹⁹

But, even if radical republicans were to embrace the implications of the dependence account, they 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.

In sum, the radical republican critique fails to show that capitalists dominate workers by (i) having the power to interfere with the workers’ lives or (ii) because workers are dependent for their subsistence on the unchecked cooperation of capital. Therefore, it seems that radical republicans must abandon the domination thesis and argue that, while capitalists often exploit, they do not dominate. This would, however, amount to giving up on a republican critique of capitalism. But maybe there is a third way: radical republicans could argue that even if capitalists may not dominate, capitalism does, and this is what makes capitalism inherently unjust. We shall then ask: does capitalism unjustly dominate?

The Limits of the Agential Account

Gourevitch’s account of structural domination operates with a legalistic conception of the relevant dominating structure under capitalism. Such structure, however, cannot be reduced to “the legally protected distribution of productive assets.” It must rather be expanded to include the process of capitalization, for capitalization, we saw, is necessary to transform ownership rights over the means of production into the actual power to dominate. But capitalization, as we also saw, is not only enabled by legal rules far beyond property law (Pistor Reference Pistor2019); it is also driven by a wide variety of institutions and agents (e.g., rating agencies, media companies, fund managers, etc.), not all of which even own capital, as well as by ideological norms and cultural practices, beyond legal rules, that govern the formation and coordination of investors’ expectations about a radically uncertain future.

Now, while we may plausibly infer from an agent’s participation in the capture and punishment of runaway slaves an intention to support slavery, given the complexity of the capitalist structure as above redefined, it does not seem equally plausible to infer from mere participation in it, an intention to confer to owners the power to dominate labor. Since under capitalism (i) owners, including e.g., working-class pensioners, have often no reasonable alternatives but to invest their savings somewhere, (ii) profit, as we saw, need not directly or exclusively derive from the domination of labor, and (iii) most owners, because of the separation between ownership and control, as well as the complexity and opacity of capital markets, cannot be reasonably expected to control and foresee the outcomes of their investments, we cannot infer even from an intention to invest for profit an intention to perpetrate labor domination.Footnote ²⁰

Gourevitch (Reference Gourevitch2013, 602) may respond that even if owners do not consciously intend to reproduce domination, we can still attribute this intention to them because such intention “is an intention that all owners necessarily have insofar as a defense of private ownership (and thus of its domination-enabling role) is a necessary presupposition of any owner’s use of his productive assets.” But this is unconvincing. For one, if “defending private ownership” is the relevant feature in identifying intentional dominators, then owners cannot be the only dominators, as nonowners, e.g., propertyless working-class libertarian voters, can defend private property too. Further, we cannot say that just because the pensioner intends to invest her savings somewhere, she also intends to defend private property and its domination-reproducing effects for she might not have reasonable alternatives but to use her property in those ways and, in any case, the process through which particular uses of property reproduce or rather undermine the structural preconditions of those uses, and translate into labor domination is highly complex, mediated and opaque in nature, such that owners may not always be reasonably expected to know when their use of property reproduces its own structural preconditions.

This speaks to a broader problem with most republican accounts of capitalist domination. Such accounts do not take sufficiently seriously the fact that, under capitalism, people are dominated by (largely unintentional) abstract, rationalized structural imperatives that are historical specifically to the modern capitalist era, and distinguishable from premodern, concrete social relations of direct dependency, like slavery.Footnote ²¹ Indeed, arguably the founding insight of modern social theory since Marx is that domination under capitalism is not agential (Postone Reference Postone1993; Sayer Reference Sayer1987). Among radical republicans only Roberts (Reference Roberts2016) seems to have taken this lesson to its full conclusion, but as I will now turn to explain, this comes with a great cost for the normative force of republicanism as a critique of capitalism.

The Limits of the Impersonal Account

On a nonagential account of structural domination under capitalism, domination is still “of people by people” but such people are themselves dominated by social relations mediated by market forces. Unlike a hurricane, market forces are not a force of nature but rather the “aggregated preferences of the owners of money and the producers of commodities” (Roberts Reference Roberts2016, 83). But, very much like a hurricane, such forces dominate without any particular agent necessarily intending that domination or being fully responsible for it. Indeed, domination under capitalism consists precisely in the fact that “commercial society…renders us systematically irresponsible for our economic life,” insofar as “the exposure to the market leaves each producer a slave to the decisions of others, made without any consultation or debate. The preferences of others [as they aggregate in and through the market] impose themselves on each producer without any need to justify themselves, and without the possibility of consultation” (101). This is a notion of domination—which we may call “domination as deresponsibilization”—that significantly departs from central accounts of domination within republicanism (see also Battistoni Reference Battistoni, Chiara and LaneForthcoming; MacGilvray Reference MacGilvray2011).

But how does this deresponsabilization happen? First, competition leaves producers with no reasonable alternatives but to fall in line with the social division of labor (Roberts Reference Roberts2016, 96). Second, the complexity of markets often makes it impossible for individuals to foresee the consequences of their economic choices (Roberts Reference Roberts2016) Third, being a producer is a social role the occupant of which is entirely substitutable. This means that refraining from acting in a structure–compliant way would not mitigate, to any relevant extent, the reproduction of whatever injustice that structure causes.

Structural domination under capitalism is, then, not the intentional, culpable imposition by owners of a legally sanctioned condition of undue dependence over nonowners. To the contrary, capitalism’s domination consists in the fact that, by all being dependent on an aggregation of arbitria, both owners and nonowners are equally rendered incapable of free, responsible action.

This account may represent a better description of how capitalism constraints free human action. But, it is not clear how an “aggregation of arbitria” or “the market” can dominate. Indeed, the notion of impersonal domination is arguably incoherent, for if domination consists in subjection to an arbitrary will then impersonal structures, lacking a will, cannot dominate. If, instead, it consists in subjection to arbitrary power, we need to ask: when does subjection to arbitrary, nonagential power amount to domination, given that, say, subjection to the arbitrary (uncontrolled) power of a hurricane does not? If the (plausible) answer is that only subjection to socially constituted power asymmetries that are based on, reflect, or generate status asymmetries (e.g., sexist or racist normative structures) amount to domination (see Gädeke Reference Gädeke2019), then it seems that subjection to a purely impersonal form of power such as the price mechanism or the rational imperatives of competition cannot amount to domination, for everyone is equally subject to that power so that no status asymmetry arises and the power itself, in virtue of being impersonal, has no higher status.

But even if we assume, arguendo, that capitalism can dominate impersonally, we should ask: does capitalism dominate unjustly? If capitalism dominates through the aggregation of arbitria and if such arbitria are decisions of people who cannot be held responsible for their own decisions, how is capitalism really different, normatively speaking, from a hurricane? Sure, unlike the hurricane (at least abstracting from climate change), capitalism is socially constituted. But, if lack of responsibility is core to capitalist domination, then such domination cannot be unjust because it is produced by an aggregate of actions no one is responsible for. The hurricane may be bad for leaving some unduly dependent on the power of others, but this does not make the hurricane itself unjust (see Atanasio Reference Atanasio2019; Estlund Reference Estlund2024). What can be unjust, at most, is the fact that those with ex post remedial responsibilities to overcome the badness brought about by the hurricane, which in the case of capitalism would include nonowners, fail to act on them. But this is different from saying that the hurricane itself, and for similar reasons capitalism, is unjust, or that it unjustly dominates. Now, one could argue that this is not a problem as we do not need to deem capitalism unjust in order to criticize it. But this is a problem for republicans, if only because republicans tend to think that domination, definitionally, is unjust, such that just domination is not domination (see Gädeke Reference Gädeke2019), and/or that the distinctive wrong of capitalism is a form of injustice (e.g., Vrousalis Reference Vrousalis2020).

In response, it could be argued that even if the capitalist mode of production does not unjustly dominate, the capitalist state does, by avoidably supporting a capitalist mode of production that foreseeably leaves some dependent on the power of others. However, it is unclear whether any single state can have efficacious control over the capitalist mode of production. Indeed, the structural imperatives of capitalism arguably dominate states too (e.g., Streeck Reference Streeck2017, 149) and, in any case, how powerful particular states are vis-à-vis capitalism is an entirely contingent and contextual matter. Regardless, if the state is the relevant dominating agent, then we, whether capitalists or not, are arguably all dominators as members of the state. It seems then that radical republicanism would reach the conclusion—a conclusion that is not logically incoherent but that is not what republicans support—that, under capitalism, we are all dominated and dominators, qua citizens rather than capitalists. Finally, if the state is the relevant dominator, it is unclear to what extent radical republicanism offers a distinctive critique of capitalism. Capitalism does not dominate, the state does (in the same way in which a state that could prevent hurricanes may arguably dominate its citizens by failing to undertake the necessary preventative measures, but this would not make hurricanes themselves dominators).

In sum, 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.

I started this paper by arguing that, given existing critiques of capitalism, radical republicanism’s original, philosophical contribution should be regarded as including the noncontingency, the domination, and the structural injustice theses. I hope I have shown how radical republicanism, in its many iterations, fails to vindicate them. This is not to say that there is not something wrong with the capitalist mode of production (indeed, I have assumed that workers are often exploited under capitalism). It simply provides reasons to doubt that republicanism, with its specific focus on domination, offers a satisfactory and nonredundant account of what this distinctive wrong is. Those interested in developing a normative critique of capitalism should either do more to explain why a domination-center account is necessary or they should give up on republican domination as their central category of analysis.