The Ambiguities of Ownership and Class: A Reply to Nicholas Vrousalis

The article replies to Nicholas Vrousalis’s attempt to rescue radical republicanism from my critique that it fails on three counts: its non-contingency, domination, and structural injustice theses. Central to my response are the claims that (i) capitalist power cannot be reduced to legal ownership of the means of production, as the process of capitalization is constitutive of capital; (ii) neither neo-republican nor Kantian notions of domination adequately capture what is inherently wrong with capitalism, and (iii) the concept of “class domination” remains theoretically puzzling. I then defend an alienation-centered critique: capitalism’s mode of investment subjects citizens to an impersonal and anarchical form of governance, which, by being necessarily alienating, contradicts democratic self-determination. Overall, this critique forms the core of a “political, political theory of capitalism” and grounds the case for a specific kind of democratic socialism—socialism as reconciliation—which is more demanding than both republican and liberal socialisms.