PresentationWill

William Clare Roberts (Université McGill)

Quand :
28 janvier 2014 @ 11:30 – 13:00
2014-01-28T11:30:00-05:00
2014-01-28T13:00:00-05:00
Où :
Salle 309 CRÉUM
2910 Boulevard Edouard-Montpetit
Université de Montréal, Montréal, QC H3T 1J7
Canada

Dans le cadre de ses midis de l’éthique, le CRÉUM accueille William Clare Roberts, qui nous offrira une présentation intitulée « At the Mercy of the Market: Rudiments of a Freedom-based Critique of the Market in 19th Century Socialism ».

En voici un résumé:

Normative political theorists, whatever their opinions of the justice of distributive outcomes in a market economy, have agreed that market transactions themselves are freedom preserving. However, there are in the 19th century socialist tradition neglected resources for articulating a freedom-based critique of the market. It was a commonplace of pre-Marxian socialism that money, and the commerce it makes possible, constitutes a threat to the freedom of producers. This threat was understood in two ways: monetary commerce 1) undermines the positive freedom of workers to satisfy their true needs in a dignified manner, and 2) endangers the negative freedom of workers by compelling them to produce whatever will satisfy the desires of money-owners. Marx jettisons the first, positive freedom understanding of the market’s danger to freedom, but develops the second into a republican rejection of commerce, on the grounds that market actors are subjected, via price competition, to the arbitrary wills of anonymous others. This impersonal domination experienced by people in a market society is central to Marx’s conception of “the fetish character of the commodity.” Unfortunately, Marx’s discussion of commodity fetishism has generally been received as a criticism of the market which continues the positive freedom tradition. This paper, by recovering Marx’s predecessors, seeks to rearticulate the socialist critique of the market in terms that liberals and republicans must grapple with.