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"The resilience of capitalism as an economic or social form derives from its relationship to the psyche and to how subjects relate to their own satisfaction. This is why psychoanalysis is requisite for making sense of capitalism’s appeal. Psychoanalysis probes the satisfaction of subjects and tries to understand why this satisfaction takes the forms that it does. It does not transform dissatisfaction into satisfaction, but analyzes why certain structures provide satisfaction despite appearances. In this sense, it represents a new way of approaching capitalism and of understanding its staying power.
To psychoanalyze a system is inherently to criticize it. But previous efforts at marshaling psychoanalysis for the critique of capitalism have consistently placed psychoanalysis in a secondary position. Critique has been primary, and critics have deployed psychoanalysis to serve the critique. In the chapters that follow, I will do the reverse: the psychoanalysis of capitalism will remain the motor for the analysis, and if a critique of capitalism emerges from this psychoanalysis, it will never become the driving force of the analysis. Of course, no one is a neutral analyst of capitalism. But it is my contention that immersing oneself within its structure and within its psychic appeal must function as the prelude to any effective critique or defense of the system."
"Despite Freud’s conviction that the worst is certain, that we will never be able to overcome repression and realize our desires, his understanding of repression allowed for the development of the leftist critique of capitalism in a wholly unanticipated direction. No anticapitalist thinker of the nineteenth century thought to criticize the repressive nature of the capitalist system, but in the twentieth century, thanks to Freud and the critics who took up his mantle, it became almost impossible to avoid it.
The critique of capitalism for most of the twentieth century was a critique of capitalism’s repressiveness, though of course the critique of inequality never disappeared. The turn from equality as the primary ground of contestation to repression resulted in an expansion of the challenge to the system. Capitalism became a problem not just for workers toiling without just remuneration for their labor but also for the exploiters themselves. Even the capitalist enjoying the profits deriving from the appropriation of surplus value remains caught within the spell of repression. The factory owners who can buy whatever they want nonetheless suffer under a system that prohibits any proper satisfaction of desire. The problem with capitalist success is not so much the inequality it produces as its intractable emptiness. This development of the critique required the revolution to do more heavy lifting: it would promise not only equity but also deliverance from repression.
The turn from the critique of inequality to the critique of repression manifests itself most clearly in the case of the Frankfurt School. Whereas Marx takes capitalist inequality as the fundamental problem confronting the critic of capitalism, the Frankfurt School, in a stunning turnaround, sees the equality that capitalism produces as its chief danger. Rather than failing to engender equality, the capitalist form of injustice is a forced equality. Capitalism’s repressiveness functions through the elimination of all genuine difference, and thus even the communist attack on capitalism falls into its trap by leveling all difference through enforced economic and social equality.
The Frankfurt School’s critique of capitalist equality reaches its apex in Theodor Adorno’s Minima Moralia. Here Adorno offers a revelatory statement that incorporates both an unremitting indictment of capitalism’s elimination of difference and one of his few positive proclamations about an anticapitalist alternative. He begins, “That all men are alike is exactly what society would like to hear. It considers actual or imagined differences as stigmas indicating that not enough has yet been done; that something has still been left outside its machinery, not quite determined by its totality.”5 As Adorno sees it, capitalism’s victory does not consist in leaving the proletariat outside, but in their inclusion within a repressive system in which nothing unique or singular can persist. This is a line of thought that one could not imagine from Karl Marx, even though Adorno clearly situates himself in the Marxist tradition, as do the other members of the Frankfurt School. But their Marxism has encountered the thought of Sigmund Freud.
Adorno goes on to offer a vision of emancipation that also veers away from that of Marx. It is not a society in which the workers appropriate the value that they themselves produce but one in which singularity could remain intact. Adorno continues, “An emancipated society, on the other hand, would not be a unitary state, but the realization of universality in the reconciliation of differences.” This idea of emancipated society takes as its starting point as much Freud’s analysis of repression as Marx’s of capitalism. Repression, according to the Frankfurt School, is the forgetting of what fails to fit within the capitalist system, and the critical task becomes one of drawing attention to this repressed material. This repression is not, however, always sexual repression, as it would be for other theorists attempting to bring Marx and Freud together.
Several anticapitalist theorists following in Freud’s wake equated the destruction of capitalism with the complete elimination of sexual repression. They either worked to bring about sexual liberation with the belief that this would portend the end of capitalism, or they worked to combat capitalism with the belief that this would free repressed sexuality. Otto Gross and Wilhelm Reich were the key exponents of this position, but it gained popular support in the student movements of the 1960s, in which the idea that political and sexual revolution were intertwined became an accepted dogma. Both Gross and Reich believed that political and sexual revolution would be mutually reinforcing. If one produced sexual revolution, that would lead to political revolution, and vice versa. Hence, they often theorized about how changes in either the political or sexual arena might lead to the elimination of repression in both.
One can see this intertwining of the political and the sexual in much of Gross’s late work. The title of his essay “Zur funktionellen Geistesbildung des Revolutionärs” (On the Functional Intellectual Formation of the Revolutionary) makes evident his political aspirations. There the link between these aspirations and his investment in psychoanalysis comes to the fore. Toward the end of the essay, he says, “As a precondition of each moral and spiritual renewal of humanity is the necessity for a total freeing of the coming generation from the violence of the bourgeois family—and even the patriarchal proletarian family is bourgeois!”7 Contra Freud, Gross sees neurosis as the result not of the fundamental antagonisms of human sexuality but of the repressive force of the bourgeois family and the restrictions that it places on the free expression of sexuality. Gross conceives of free sexuality—the slogan of the 1960s—as the basic human desire. The proletarian revolution would not only free workers from their chains but also sexuality from bourgeois repression.
In the years after Gross’s premature death at the age of forty-two in 1920, Wilhelm Reich took up the mantle of the revolutionary psychoanalyst."
"The putting into question of the link between capitalism and repression has already been accomplished. In the first volume of the History of Sexuality and in some of his lecture series at the Collège de France, Michel Foucault challenges the repressive hypothesis and even names Reich as a specific target for critique. He begins the first volume of his History of Sexuality with a direct riposte to the identification of capitalism with repression. He claims, “By placing the advent of the age of repression in the seventeenth century, after hundreds of years of open spaces and free expression, one adjusts it to coincide with the development of capitalism: it becomes an integral part of the bourgeois order.” For Foucault, power in the capitalist system doesn’t function through repression, not through negation or prohibition, but in a positive way. Power produces desire rather than just restricting it. Foucault’s redefinition of power and categorical rejection of the repressive hypothesis attempt to point toward a third version of the critique of capitalism—beyond injustice and beyond repression.
But even as Foucault mocks the association of capitalism with the repression of sex, his critique takes the same angle as that of the Freudian Marxists from whom he distances himself. That is to say, Foucault abandons the idea that capitalism demands the repression of desire, but he clings to a belief that capitalism blocks or damns up what would otherwise flow freely. His vitalism—his insistence on the spontaneous power of life itself—leaves him incapable of fully abandoning the image of capitalism as a system of constraint. Though capitalism doesn’t constrain desire, its discursive regime of sexuality that forces sex to speak and that forces bodies to become sexualized acts as a barrier to the flow of bodies and pleasures. Foucault’s politics consists in unleashing this flow, which is why he would feel so comfortable writing a preface to Anti-Oedipus, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s panegyric to decoded bodily flows.
Ironic though it may be, the critique leveled by Foucault is just another version of the attack on repression. Despite what Foucault himself says, the model for the freeing of bodies and pleasures—the ethic he pronounces at the end of the first volume of the History of Sexuality—is the liberation of desire that one finds clearly articulated in the thought of Gross and Reich. Bodies and pleasures do not suffer from repression, according to Foucault, but power does stifle them. This is the key point: power doesn’t permit the free movement of bodies and deprives them of the pleasure that they are capable of experiencing. Critique or revolution then fights against this restriction. Though Foucault rejects the terms repression and desire, his replacements—power and bodies—perform precisely the same roles. In this sense, he does not mark a new epoch in the history of the critique of capitalism."
"Both Marx’s critique of capitalism’s injustice and the pseudo-Freudian critique of capitalism’s repressiveness focus on what the economic system denies to its adherents rather than what it provides for them. This focus unites Marx, Reich, and Foucault. It has been primarily the apologists for capitalism, as one might expect, who have focused on what the system does offer. But we can examine what capitalism provides from the perspective of critique. Capitalism has the effect of sustaining subjects in a constant state of desire. As subjects of capitalism, we are constantly on the edge of having our desire realized, but never reach the point of realization. This has the effect of producing a satisfaction that we don’t recognize as such. That is, capitalist subjects experience satisfaction itself as dissatisfying, which enables them to simultaneously enjoy themselves and believe wholeheartedly that a more complete satisfaction exists just around the corner, embodied in the newest commodity.
In this light, this book represents a third direction in the critique of capitalism. Rather than taking inequality or repression as the starting point, it begins with the satisfaction that capitalism provides. The problem, I contend, is not that capitalism fails to satisfy but that it doesn’t enable its subjects to recognize where their own satisfaction lies. The capitalist regime produces subjects who cling feverishly to the image of their own dissatisfaction and to thus to the promise, constantly made explicit in capitalist society, of a way to escape this dissatisfaction through either the accumulation of capital or the acquisition of the commodity.
The fundamental gesture of capitalism is the promise, and the promise functions as the basis for capitalist ideology. One invests money with the promise of future returns; one starts a job with the promise of a higher salary; one takes a cruise with the promise of untold pleasure in the tropics; one buys the newest piece of electronics with the promise of easier access to what one wants. In every case the future embodies a type of satisfaction foreclosed to the present and dependent on one’s investment in the capitalist system. The promise ensures a sense of dissatisfaction with the present in relation to the future.
One of the constant complaints from critics of capitalism is that the capitalist system has the ability to incorporate every attack by integrating the attack into the system. The accuracy of this truism is readily apparent in the way that commodification works. Capitalism seizes apparently revolutionary practices or figures and transforms them into commodities. An acquaintance with a Che Guevara T-shirt or a Karl Marx coffee mug, let alone the sight of sex toys in a shopping mall or eco-friendly cars at the neighborhood dealership, seems to bespeak its truth. But the secret of capitalism’s integration of critique lies not in the process of commodification, no matter how self-evident it appears. The secret is in the promise. If one invests oneself in the promise of the future, through this gesture one accepts the basic rules of the capitalist game.
The promise of the better future is the foundation of the capitalist structure, the basis for all three economic areas—production, distribution, and consumption. If we examine only the field of consumption, universal commodification seems to hold the key, whereas if we confine ourselves to the field of production, the imperative to accumulate appears foundational. In the field of distribution, it is the idea of speed: one must move commodities to market in the least amount of time possible. If we look at what these three fields have in common, however, the answer is the promise of the future. One buys the commodity to discover a potentially satisfying pleasure, one accumulates more capital to some day have enough, and one speeds up the distribution process to increase one’s future profit.15 Any sense of satisfaction with one’s present condition would have a paralyzing effect on each of these regions of the capitalist economy.
This is the problem with the insistence on revolutionary hope: it partakes of the logic that it tries to contest. Revolutionary hope represents an investment in the structure of the promise that defines capitalism. As a result, it is never as revolutionary as it believes itself to be. Though obviously the act of promising precedes the onset of a capitalist economy, once this economy emerges, the promise enters completely into the capitalist logic. To take solace in the promise of tomorrow is to accept the sense of dissatisfaction that capitalism sells more vehemently than it sells any commodity. As long as one remains invested in the promise as such, one has already succumbed to the fundamental logic of capitalism.
From the early Charles Fourier and Robert Owen to Fredric Jameson and Antonio Negri, the idea of a better future has driven the Left in its critique of capitalism. In his discussion of Marx, Jacques Derrida exemplifies this type of investment, as he emphasizes the emancipatory promise at the heart of his deconstructive politics. He notes, “Whether the promise promises this or that, whether it be fulfilled or not, or whether it be unfulfillable, there is necessarily some promise and therefore some historicity as future-to-come.” While every other concept is subject to deconstruction, this promise of “justice-to-come” functions as the condition of possibility for deconstruction and thus cannot be deconstructed. Deconstruction does not encapsulate the entirety of anticapitalist politics today in any sense, but Derrida’s investment in the promise is representative. But it is just this investment in the promise that must be abandoned, along with the sense of dissatisfaction inherent in it. As long as radical politics operates with the belief that revolution will remove some of the prevailing repression, it accepts the ruling idea of capitalism and buys into the fundamental capitalist fantasy. No revolution can transform dissatisfaction into satisfaction, but this is how revolution has been conceived throughout the entirety of the capitalist epoch. The revolutionary act has to be thought differently. The revolutionary act is simply the recognition that capitalism already produces the satisfaction that it promises.
And yet, this revolutionary act is far more difficult than storming the Bastille or the Winter Palace. In the latter instances, all that is required is sufficient political force. But the break from the promise of a better future seems theoretically untenable alongside a position of critique. Critique appears to imply a future ideal from which one launches the attack on the capitalist present. The task is thus that of freeing critique from the promise of a better future. Why would one be critical at all without such a promise? What could be the possible ground for the critique ?
This work attempts to answer these questions by situating the future not as a possibility on the horizon but as the implicit structure of the present. There is, in other words, no future to realize except to accede to the exigencies that are already written into the ruling capitalist system. The point of critique is not promissory, not futural, but wholly immanent.
Obviously, a critique that is not futural still points toward a future that is better in some sense of the term. One cannot avoid implicitly positing some version of a better future when one analyzes the present—otherwise one would simply accept the present rather than analyzing it. But the point is that one must not imagine a future that would produce a level of satisfaction history has hitherto denied to us. There is no deeper or more authentic satisfaction that will overcome the antagonisms of society or the failures of subjectivity, despite what anticapitalist revolutionaries have traditionally promised. We do not need the belief in a future replete with a deeper satisfaction in order to reject capitalism, if that is what we decide to do.
The alternative to capitalism inheres within capitalism, and the revolutionary act is one of recognizing capitalism’s internal and present future. The measuring stick for critique is not the promise of a better future but capitalism’s underlying structure. The identification or recognition of this structure provides the key to the emergence of an alternative. Capitalism’s hold over us depends on our failure to recognize the nature of its power.
Capitalism functions as effectively as it does because it provides satisfaction for its subjects while at the same time hiding the awareness of this satisfaction from them. If we recognized that we obtained satisfaction from the failure to obtain the perfect commodity rather than from a wholly successful purchase, we would be freed from the psychic appeal of capitalism. That is not to say that we would never buy another commodity, but just that we would do so without a psychic investment in the promise of the commodity, which is already, in some sense, a revolution. This change would eliminate the barrier to structural changes to our socioeconomic system and would create a different system. Problems of political organization and struggle are difficult, but they pale in comparison to the problem of capitalism’s psychic appeal. Understanding the importance of the psychic investment in the capitalist economy and the need to break from it is Freud’s legacy for the contemporary critique of capitalism.
The great task for twentieth-century critical thought was that of bringing Marx and Freud together, of thinking through the analysis of capitalism in light of Freud’s discovery of the unconscious. In order to carry out this task, thinkers alit on the role that capitalism played in repression. But repression was not Freud’s last word on the unconscious. It became increasingly less important as his thought changed toward the end of his life. This change in the significance of repression occurred as the structure of Freud’s system underwent an overhaul. Whereas the early Freud associated repression with unacceptable sexual desires, the later Freud linked it the subject’s intractable attachment to loss.
With Freud’s 1920 discovery of the subject’s tendency to repeat loss and failure, the edifice of psychoanalysis underwent a profound readjustment. Rather than targeting sexual repression, Freud turned his focus to the satisfaction that the subject derives from repeating experiences that don’t provide pleasure. This forces Freud to distinguish between pleasure and satisfaction, and he concludes that satisfaction trumps pleasure. Repetition comes to define subjectivity for Freud: the unconscious doesn’t just hide disturbing sexual ideas from the subject’s consciousness, but impels the subject to act in ways that subvert its own interests and the subject finds satisfaction in these acts because they produce a lost object for the subject to desire and enjoy. The subject’s satisfaction is inextricable from self-destructive loss, and even though it represses its self-destructiveness, lifting this repression would provide no relief. After 1920, Freud discovers a subject that incessantly undermines itself, and this undermining extends to all attempts at a cure.
As Freud sees it, the fundamental proof of an attachment to loss and failure is the refusal to be cured that patients display. Freud labels this refusal the “negative therapeutic reaction,” and its emergence suggests that subjects find satisfaction in their suffering. If therapy threatens to relieve this suffering, patients often respond by finding ways to make themselves worse again. Freud doesn’t dismiss this behavior as a function of neurosis but sees in it a verdict on the subject as such. It manifests itself most clearly in the inability of any subject to live out a harmonious existence. Freud concludes that the satisfaction of subjects depends on a disturbance to their psychic equilibrium, on the absence of what they desire rather than its presence. The presence of an object reveals its inadequacy, while its absence allows the subject to find it satisfying. This creates a world in which subjects subvert their own happiness in order to sustain their satisfaction.
Freud himself has difficulty formulating the implications of the new theory of subjectivity and integrating it into his existing theory, and yet it represents the most radical moment of Freud’s thought because it enables us to understand why subjects so often fail to act in ways that would obviously benefit them. That said, many refused to follow Freud in this discovery, and those who tried to combine Marx and Freud often adhered to the early Freud, the Freud of repressed sexuality. This makes sense for the revolutionary: Freud’s early model provides a clearer target for emancipatory politics than his later model, which seems difficult to reconcile with any form of politics other than complete conservatism. The later Freud is a far more politically pessimistic thinker.
According to the first model, we repress a possibility that we hope to realize. According to the second, we repress an act that we are perpetually accomplishing. Though Freud locates at all times the source of neurotic illness in the past—“Hysterics suffer mainly from reminiscences,” as Freud and Josef Breuer put it in the opening work of psychoanalysis—the emphasis moves from a past desire for a different future to the repetition of a past trauma in the present.17 Freud emphasizes repression less in his later thinking because it provides no barrier at all to the effectiveness of repetition.
In a certain sense, we might think of the early Freud, the Freud focused on sexual repression, as a thinker still invested in the capitalist ideology of the promise. Even if he refused to believe in the possibility of fully overcoming repression, he nonetheless viewed psychoanalysis as a solution that promised a better future. The shift that the patient could undergo is palpable. After writing Beyond the Pleasure Principle, however, Freud recognizes that the repetition would act as a constant barrier to a better future, and he becomes increasingly skeptical about fundamental change in individuals and in society. The attitude that Freud takes to the subject’s repetition becomes less futural because the possibility of overcoming repression ceased to play a central role.
The repression of sexual desires appears to work: though subjects may manifest these desires through obsessional rituals or hysterical pains, they are not actually having the illicit sex of their unconscious fantasies. Repeatedly adjusting one’s batting gloves (as many baseball players do) may in fact be a wholly sexual act, but not everyone will readily recognize it as such. One can do it in public without violating laws against public indecency, whereas one could not openly masturbate in the same situation without risking arrest. Similarly, no one interprets the silence of the hysteric who cannot speak as a public performance of fellatio. Repressed sexuality manifests itself in symptoms—like adjusting one’s batting gloves—that don’t themselves appear sexual. Repression not only brings suffering to the subject but also shelters this subject from the obvious manifestations of its repressed sexuality. This is not the case with the compulsion to repeat. Though Freud believes that the subject represses the idea of its repetition, the satisfaction that the repetition of loss produces occurs without abatement or obstruction.
Repression becomes a less important category in Freud’s later thought because he comes to accept that the repression provides no barrier at all to the satisfaction the subject derives from repetition. As long as repression concerned just sexuality, Freud could believe in the transformative effect of lifting it. Psychoanalysis, according to this early conception, might enable the patient to pass from dissatisfaction to satisfaction by uncovering the repressed. This offers a tidy link between psychoanalysis and revolutionary politics, between Otto Gross and Rosa Luxemburg.
Once the idea of a satisfying repetition takes hold, however, this image of psychoanalysis ceases to be tenable. There is no clear political gain from lifting the repression associated with repetition. All that psychoanalysis can do—the extent of its intervention—is to assist the patient in recognizing its mode of repeating and the satisfaction that this repetition provides. The dream of freeing patients from dissatisfaction dies with the discovery that patients resist the psychoanalytic cure precisely because they already have the satisfaction that psychoanalysis promises them.
The thinkers who have brought Freud to bear on the analysis of capitalism have turned to psychoanalysis to prove that capitalism is even more dissatisfying than earlier critics thought it was. The problem is not just inequality for the working class but repression for all. For someone like Adorno, this is apparent in the widespread investment in astrology among capitalist subjects. While it appears as a harmless enough interest, astrology infects the social order, especially the middle class (and not necessarily the economically oppressed), with a false satisfaction. In his essay “The Stars Down to Earth,” Adorno notes, “It is as though astrology has to provide gratifications to aggressive urges on the level of the imaginary, but is not allowed to interfere too obviously with the ‘normal’ functioning of the individual in reality.” The popularity of astrology columns in newspapers, even if one reads them just for fun, signals the existence and repression of desires that the system cannot gratify. The victims of capitalism in Adorno’s eyes are not just the working class but everyone subjected to the repressiveness inherent in the mode of subjectivity that capitalism demands.
This broadening of the analysis of capitalism has led to stunning insights into just how expansive the problem of capitalism is, but at the same time, this new critique buys the capitalist dream with its insistence on dissatisfaction. It could do this only insofar as it stuck to Freud’s early theory of the psyche and refused to integrate his later thought. This later Freud has had no place in the critique of capitalism as it was developed by traditional Freudian Marxism in the twentiethth century. As a result, the task of bringing Marx and Freud together remains for us today. If the real Freud is the Freud of the subject’s self-destructiveness, then this is no easy task. The fit between this Freud and Marx is not a comfortable one.
The aim of this book is not to provide another catalogue of capitalism’s horrors or its defects. That is the province of other works. Instead, it tries to understand why so much satisfaction accompanies capitalism and thus what constitutes its hold on those living within its structure. The starting point of this power is capitalism’s relationship to desiring subjectivity, which the first chapter investigates. The next chapters that make up the core of the book explore how capitalism protects us—from the encounter with the public, from our gaze, from sacrifice, from the absence of guarantees, from infinitude, from our nonproductivity, from love, and even from abundance. But it does enable us to experience the sublime in everyday life, as the concluding chapter shows. The book ends with capitalism’s sublimity, but this is also where it starts. The staying power of capitalism, its resistance to critique, is inextricable from its production of sublimity, which gives it the power to satisfy. Capitalist subjects cling tightly to their dissatisfaction, and this dissatisfaction is the main thing holding them to capitalism. No matter how attractive it appears, there is no commodity that holds the appeal of a lasting dissatisfaction."
-Todd McGowan, Capitalism and Desire. The Psychic Cost of Free Markets, Columbia University Press, 2016.
