For Marx, this apologistic Robinsonade pervades political economic theory. He regards it as an inverted or mirror image understanding of the real historical process, but he also believes that its pervasiveness provides important clues for making sense of the complex and counter-intuitive process by which capital is reproduced. Capital is structured to take the readers through this looking glass, so that they can see the historical process the right way up, and thereby transcend the deranged image of social relations presented in political economic theory. By starting within the Robinsonade of political economy, Marx intends to explode political economy from within. Piling up counterexample after exception after contradiction, he aims to demonstrate the aggressive ignorance required to sustain the naive vision of capitalism as a system fundamentally and essentially grounded on personal freedom. Along the way, he makes regular use of the imagery of Enlightenment – only to debase it with terms drawn from anthropological analyses of purportedly primitive and uncivilized societies.22 It is no accident that Marx’s own term of choice for political economy’s distinctive epistemology of ignorance is the “fetish” – an anthropological term for a material object onto which “primitive” religions arbitrarily confer mystical value ([1867] 1990, 163–177).23 The overall structure of Marx’s text remains poorly understood.24 The nature of its object – a system of knowledge that actively produces ignorance – has proven remarkably resilient in blunting, confusing, and redirecting readers, who quite regularly arrive at conclusions opposite to those Marx set out to prove. The Robinsonade that is the object of Marx’s critique is a pervasive framework for making sense of our economic and social institutions. Thinking against this grain is difficult, and the often oppressive application of Marx’s work attests to the challenge of creating critical analytical frameworks that can counter processes that actively produce distinctive forms of ignorance. In this context, a close engagement with Robinson Crusoe can serve a useful clarificatory function for political and economic theory – but not because it provides a simple and clear model for our most essential social relations. Instead, it provides a particularly accessible illustration of the intense struggle to preserve ignorance of the violence at the heart of civilization. It makes readily available the vast network of rationalization and denial with which Marx is wrestling in Capital. At the same time, Capital can cast light on Robinson Crusoe’s iconic literary status by showing how the work is much more than a simple diversion or innocent entertainment. Through its juxtaposition of Robinson’s island “bathed in light”, with the graphic violence of its account of primitive accumulation, Capital makes explicit the oppressive nature of the aggregate social relation that Defoe is struggling to deny.25 It re-situates Defoe’s fantasy of the self-sufficient individual within the context of a complex global system that helps to generate the illusion of individual self-sufficiency by severing persons from certain kinds of social bonds, while enmeshing them in a much more intricate set of connections that are global in scale, and barbarous in their results. Read together, the two texts highlight the role of denial – not just as an individual psychological dynamic, but as a collective social one. If Robinson Crusoe operates to protect its readers from the realization that they are implicated in colonial barbarism, Capital, by contrast, seeks to confront its readers with the intrinsic interconnections between such barbarity and their most cherished ideals. Through this analysis, Marx attempts to rupture the apologistic force of the Robinsonade, while analysing the profound structural transformation that will be required to realize ideals of autonomy and equality on a global scale. In the process, he provides a model for analysing the production of forms of ignorance as part and parcel of the process by which distinctive forms of domination are reproduced. Through the structure of the argument, Marx indicates that emancipatory transformation requires epistemological as well as practical labour. Without this combination, we risk channelling political energies into the creation of an isolated island of illusory freedom that remains blind to the production of its own barbaric shore.

Nicole Pepperell