IFFS Play

Political philosophy is witnessing a revival of critiques of capitalism. Against those who argue that capitalism is unjust because of (i) its distributive outcomes, (ii) the oppression of workers at the point of production, or (iii) the extraction of surplus value by the owners of capital, radical republicans have recently defended the view that the distinctive wrong of capitalism amounts to a form of structural domination, which is contingent neither on distributional outcomes nor on capitalists’ extractive dispositions. The point of socialism, in turn, is to achieve non-domination in the labor process, by means of workers’ ownership and control. In this presentation, Chiara Cordelli show some of the limits of radical republicanism as a critique of capitalism and sketches an alternative account of the wrong of capitalism as an alienated relation between citizens and their socio-political order. Overcoming such relation requires, she argues, not just workers’ control, but the politicization of investment decisions otherwise treated as purely economic, and the involvement of citizens in the conscious planning of the economy. Research seminar at the Institute for Futures Studies.