Marx taught a way of reading institutions through control of production, dependence, exploitation, and class power. Its lasting instruction is never to take an institution’s account of its own neutrality at face value, because the account sits on top of an unequal material relation. A hospital, a welfare office, or a platform describes itself as a service. Marx’s method asks who owns it, who works in it, whose labor it appropriates, and what its smooth operation buys. The instruction outlasts the remedy Marx attached to it, which was to change who owns the institution.
A state owner and 900 convictions
The state owns the Post Office in Britain. Between 1999 and 2015 more than 900 subpostmasters, who ran its branches, were convicted of theft, fraud and false accounting on the strength of shortfalls reported by its Horizon accounting software. The Post Office brought about 700 of those prosecutions itself. The shortfalls came from faults in the software. The institution kept the account, treated every gap between the account and the person as evidence about the person, and prosecuted on it.1
Public ownership didn’t protect anyone, and on its own theory the subpostmasters were prosecuted by their co-owners. Castoriadis made the general point from inside the socialist tradition. A society in which a separate managerial apparatus still directs production hasn’t achieved workers’ autonomy, whatever its property deeds say.2 Milovan Djilas, who had helped build Yugoslav communism, argued in The New Class (1957) that the party bureaucracy running collectively owned property had become a ruling class of its own.3 Changing the owner doesn’t settle who classifies, who keeps the records, who defines the exceptions, and who can make any of it answer.
A hospital, welfare agency, university, or public bureaucracy can dominate without extracting surplus value from anyone — without taking an unpaid portion of anyone’s product, in the strict Marxian sense. It dominates by defining the authoritative record, controlling the eligibility categories, monopolizing the evidence, making exit ruinous, or holding a decision procedure that is effectively irreversible. The instrument is the record and the procedure around it, and the underlying ownership and work arrangement — the relation of production — may be entirely ordinary.4
Iris Marion Young listed exploitation as one of five faces of oppression, beside marginalization, powerlessness, cultural imperialism, and violence. She treated domination separately, as institutional conditions that keep people from taking part in determining their own actions.5 Her distinction holds at the level of mechanism too. An institution can make someone subordinate by denying them standing, excluding their knowledge from consideration, or leaving them unable to change decisions that govern their lives. Sometimes the decisive question is who appropriates the product of their labor. At other times it’s who gets to write the description of reality that counts, and who can force it to be reconsidered.
The labor question reaches past class
Marx asked who does the work and who appropriates the benefit, and the question survives in a wider form. Socialist feminists spent decades trying to fit housework, childbearing, and social reproduction — the daily work that keeps workers alive, housed and able to work again — into a framework built around commodity production and wage labor.6 Unwaged reproduction absorbs the maintenance of labor (someone fed this worker, washed his uniform and, for about three years, wiped his ass). That’s why the wage relation — the deal in which an employer buys labor time and counts the worker’s upkeep as none of its business — looks self-contained. The nurse’s workaround, the claimant’s reconstruction of her own paperwork, the customer’s self-service, and the immigrant’s translation work sit in the same position. In each, an officially bounded system takes the benefit of work whose cost is counted somewhere else.7
An efficiency figure can’t be trusted until somebody asks who made up for what the system left undone.8
The tradition’s critics have made versions of this argument for a century. The tradition has swung between reduction, which treats race, gender, bureaucracy, status, disability, and colonialism as side effects of capital, and aggregation, which stacks them beside class in a lengthening catalog and then can’t say what makes them objects of one theory.9
Different systems of domination can run through the same institutional mechanisms without sharing a historical cause. Race need not secretly be class, and bureaucratic domination need not secretly be capitalist exploitation. Political economy explains why one population was made economically vulnerable, and racial history explains how another was marked and coercively governed. Once institutions act, though, these distinct histories answer the same questions. Who builds the official record? Who benefits from its simplifications, and who carries what it leaves unresolved? What does refusal cost, whose testimony can contradict the record, and can the error travel back into a revision?10
Asking the same questions of different histories lets the critiques agree without being merged. Feminism’s invisible labor, anarchism’s suspicion of hierarchy, Black radical critiques of economistic universality, and anti-bureaucratic socialism’s demand for autonomy remain separate arguments. They share a refusal to let the institution that writes the official account also hold unlimited authority over what falls outside it.11
After ownership
Marx’s critique of formal freedom keeps its force. A right that takes six months, expert counsel, and lost wages exists mostly on paper. A worker who can refuse an order but will lose housing by refusing isn’t free because the legal form of consent survived.12 The converse holds as well. A society with public ownership and generous provision can still classify people through machinery they can’t contest, as the subpostmasters found. Freedom needs material capacity and the power to correct (corrigibility), and neither substitutes for the other.
Administrative friction makes people spend three hours on redundant forms. Constitutional friction stops an institution from turning a contestable judgment into irreversible action without challenge. A decent politics removes the first and keeps the second on purpose, because the second is where correction happens.13
Extending Marx starts from the fact that someone still classifies, decides, commands, and refuses correction after the ownership problem is solved. That fact is why Public or Private, She Was Denied Both Ways asks what keeps power answerable before asking who should own it. The extension’s task is to build institutions where dependence does not become subordination, expertise does not become jurisdiction, and a record does not outrank the person it describes. Who should own the institution still matters, and the harder question is whether the people it governs can make its mistakes matter to it.14
Notes
“British Post Office scandal”, Wikipedia, summarizing the convictions, the Post Office’s own prosecutions, and the High Court’s 2019 findings on Horizon. The same case read for what the machine’s version of the truth did to standing: Nobody Broke a Rule, and Nobody Can Fix It. The case in full: Apologies Are Cheap When No One Can Challenge the Error.
Cornelius Castoriadis, “Prolétariat et organisation,” Socialisme ou Barbarie 27 and 28 (1959); part I in English as “Proletariat and Organization, I,” in Political and Social Writings, vol. 2, trans. David Ames Curtis (University of Minnesota Press, 1988).
Milovan Djilas, The New Class: An Analysis of the Communist System (Praeger, 1957).
Domination by representation, category and prediction: Neutral Isn’t Fair and Prediction Is Rule-Making. The three problems the ownership question leaves open: Aligned With Whom?.
Iris Marion Young, Justice and the Politics of Difference (Princeton University Press, 1990), ch. 1 on domination and ch. 2, “Five Faces of Oppression.” Standing as the mechanism that makes a complaint admissible: A Good Complaints Office Can Protect a Bad Rule.
Lise Vogel, “Domestic Labor Revisited,” Science & Society 64.2 (2000): 151-70; Nancy Fraser, “Behind Marx’s Hidden Abode,” New Left Review 86 (2014).
The adaptation that keeps the ledger true appearing on no line of it: The Rule Works. She Doesn’t Fit.; A Great Metric Can Mean Someone Is Quietly Fixing It.
The accounting boundary that decides which costs count: Change the Denominator and the Success Disappears. The labor question generalized to repair: The Capture of Maintenance.
Cedric Robinson, Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition (Zed Press, 1983), on the economism the classical tradition could not see past.
The recurring institutional mechanisms, and the questions asked across distinct histories: Read an Institution by Its Workarounds.
Murray Bookchin, “Anarchism: Past and Present” (1980), on hierarchy surviving exploitation’s abolition.
The learning, compliance, and psychological costs that decide whether a nominally available right is available: You Were Free to Choose.
The depth a correction must reach to change anything: How a Failure Repeats Tells You What’s Broken. Capability without corrigibility: Better at Finding You, No Better at Fixing Its Mistakes.
Why expertise does not transmit into rule: “What the Numbers Say” Is Someone’s Decision.