William Clare Roberts is associate professor of political science at McGill University and the author of Marx's Inferno: The Political Theory of Capital.
At times, capitalism resorts to exceptional violence to subordinate workers. Much more commonly, however, it exercises an impersonal, economic form of power that shapes our environment and compels our compliance on a daily basis.
Karl Marx gave us an extraordinarily rigorous study of capitalism — not out of idle academic interest but because he wanted to understand what structures would have to be overcome in order to win a world free of domination.
Capital doesn’t merely show us how capitalist production works. It shows us why capitalism is an affront to freedom.