"The dichotomies of violence and ideology, of coercion and consent, of dominance and hegemony, of RSAs and ISAs litter the traditions of Marxist theory. They all reproduce the fundamental intuition of social contract theory, of modern economics, and of Weberian sociology “that power comes it two fundamental and irreducible forms,” the power to act forcibly on the body and the power to alter thoughts and act on ideas".

"Mau’s book is driven by the conviction that economic power is irreducible to this “violence/ideology couplet,” and that its distinctiveness can only be grasped once we recognize that economic power “addresses the subject only indirectly, by acting on its environment” — in particular, by reshaping “the material conditions of social reproduction.” This is a valuable insight, and Mau’s careful attention to its elaboration and to thinking about its ramifications makes his book one of the most fruitful additions to Marxist theory in recent years. Economic power is indirect, mediated power. It shapes our choices by shaping the material and social environment in which we make choices.

Cass Sunstein — “Obama’s superego” — together with his University of Chicago colleague Richard Thaler, coined the phrase “choice architecture” to intervene in this domain of indirect power as a space of deliberate government. However, as Mau rightly argues, the choice architecture of capitalist society — despite the dreams of “libertarian paternalists” like Sunstein and Thaler — is mostly produced inadvertently. Capital is not a cabal of capitalists or government officials. Nor is it a supra-individual Hegelian subject acting of its own accord. Rather, it is “an emergent property of social relations,” a “fixation” of our own social activity. We make it — but we seem incapable of unmaking it. This is the power of capital — the ability of this emergent choice architecture to reproduce itself, even in the face of organized efforts to derail or transform it''.

WILLIAM CLARE ROBERTS

on Søren Mau