Willing Slaves of Capital: Spinoza and Marx on Desire

by Frédéric Lordon

Why do people work for other people? This seemingly naïve question is at the heart of Lordon's argument. To complement Marx's partial answers, especially in the face of the disconcerting spectacle of the engaged, enthusiastic employee, Lordon brings to bear a "Spinozist anthropology" that reveals the fundamental role of affects and passions in the employment relationship, reconceptualizing capitalist exploitation as the capture and remolding of desire. A thoroughly materialist reading of Spinoza's Ethics allows Lordon to debunk all notions of individual autonomy and self-determination while simultaneously saving the ideas of political freedom and liberation from capitalist exploitation. Willing Slaves of Capital is a bold proposal to rethink capitalism and its transcendence on the basis of the contemporary experience of work.

Genres: Philosophy, Nonfiction, Politics, Economics, Theory, Sociology, France

175 pages, Paperback

First published September 1, 2010

About the author

Frédéric Lordon est un économiste français né le 15 janvier 1962. Il est directeur de recherche au CNRS et chercheur au Centre de sociologie européenne (CSE).

Reviews

[Anna · Rating 4 out of 5]

I started reading ‘Willing Slaves of Capital’ in the first class carriage of a train home from my Christmas holiday, having had the rare luck to find a cheap advance ticket. It seemed like a fitting milieu. As translated French political philosophy goes, this is not too hard to follow. I haven’t read any Spinoza, yet Lordon explains him clearly enough that I didn’t feel the lack. His thesis uses Spinoza's concepts of desire to build on Marxian analysis of labour exploitation. In the 21st century, we do not merely sell our labour for subsistence, resenting it all the while. Instead, neoliberalism teaches us to find joy in our subjugation and meaning in our obligatory tasks. Lordon explains this in terms of ‘epithumogenesis’, a delightful term meaning ‘development of a regime of desire’. The desires of the employee are carefully aligned to the master-desire of the organisation - usually, maximising shareholder returns. I found this analysis interesting and useful, although there were understandably areas it missed, inevitable in such a short book. One was personal identification with the job, which I consider a slightly different thing to aligned desires. Likewise the obligation to be ambitious; satisfaction with the current job is not allowed, you must always be doing more work to demonstrate your fitness for an entirely theoretical more senior position. (My resentment towards academia might be showing here.)

Lordon nonetheless makes some important points, including this on the increasing liquidity of labour:

Once limited to asset markets, and to a very specific property of them, the scheme of liquidity irresistibly overflows and spread throughout the whole of capitalist society, evidently primarily serving those in a position to assert their desire as master-desire. Even though no market, especially not that of labour, can attain the degree of flexibility-reversibility of financial markets, liquidity draws the bullseye and pushes the master-desires towards obtaining the structural transformations that would allow them to get as close as they can. The most typical example is that of the capitalist argument that the only way to lower unemployment is to completely liberate layoffs from any regulatory framework.

The obvious British case study is the zero hours contract, which provides liquid labour as required. Lordon also asks whether it’s really so bad if employees have been successfully trained to enjoy their jobs. Yes, it is.

For however successful it is, the process of epithumogenesis has the effect, and in fact the intention, of fixing the enlistee’s desire to a certain number of objects to the exclusion of others. Within capitalist organisations, the very function of hierarchical subordination is to assign each individual a defined set task according to the division of labour, namely, to an activity object that each must convert into an object of desire. [...] Subjection, even when it is happy, consists fundamentally in locking employees in a restricted domain of enjoyment.

Thus employee enjoyment is only permitted when it falls within the master-desire of the organisation and doesn’t seek to question or change the organisation itself. This synthesis of Spinoza obviously has implications for Marx’s theories of class conflict, which Lordon handles as follows:

But this [new] definition of class does not possess the simplicity of the initial bipolar scheme, since belonging to the ‘employee-class’ (the class of ‘labour’) is no longer itself as strongly predetermining as it used to be; crucially, it no longer has the homogeneity that enabled it (at times) to act as a historical driving force. Nevertheless, this relative fragmentation of the class structure and the ensuing blurring of the social landscape in no way prevents re-homogenisations from taking place, but these must follow a different logic, notably, the affective logic of discontent.

Lordon also includes a solid explanation of desire alignment on a continuum, with the fit becoming close the more senior the employee. I was less convinced by the critique of Marx’s notions of value, using a comparison to Spinoza’s. I couldn’t escape the sense that the two were discussing fundamentally different things, to different ends. Lordon does not mention what seemed to me a significant aim of Marx’s theories on value: an explanation of prices not based solely on willingness to pay. This is vital as prices should not be a concept inseparable from free market economics. While there are definitely grounds to criticise Marx about value, Spinoza’s desire-based idea of value is pure free market economics and thus adds nothing of substance.

The final chapter considers the prospects for capitalism giving way to something new (‘re-communism’) and what this would mean for work. I found it notable that Lordon didn’t consider any of strains that technology is placing on capitalism, making his assessment of its weaknesses seem curiously pessimistic (or optimistic, if you’re rooting for The End of History). Lordon suggests that providing employees with creative freedom could bring it down; I’m more convinced by Paul Mason’s argument in Postcapitalism: A Guide to Our Future. Nonetheless, Lordon’s arguments are novel, thought-provoking, and occasionally inspiring. He’s certainly right that neoliberal capitalism tries to teach us to love our own exploitation. This is a somewhat abstract and esoteric book, yet it makes pragmatic and useful points.

[Anna Nicole Smith & Wesson · Rating 3 out of 5]

I'll always cherish the memory of one pompous professor who, at the beginning of his lecture, loudly proclaimed that, "you are all enslaved! You have no idea how enslaved you are!" To which I replied, "actually, I work in retail..."

Lordon's Willing Slaves of Capital has very, very little to do with Marx, and a whole lot to do with a Spinozist theory of desire under late capital. The text is very dense, but Lordon's use of "sad" and "happy" affect will illicit a smile. The text wasn't particularly memorable, other than perhaps Lordon's definition of enslavement and "bossing". It is repetitive, and like a lot of monist theory, single-minded. But, if you're working on a contemporary critique of capital on a somewhat macro level, Willing Slaves of Capital will probably be a good place to go. For casual critique I prefer Lazzarato or Bifo.

[Buck · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book would have been way better if it took of its awful reading of Marx's theory of Value. Which really subtracted the feeling of agreement i felt in his analysis of the affective engineering at the heart of contemporary workplace management. Im also not opposed to the idea, expressed in the final page, that "Since we are doomed to exo-determination, there is no possibility of being outside alienation. But it does not follow that all forms of alienation are equal. ". But frederic lordon tends to visualize an anti-capitalist politics basically along distributionist lines, and while he may eventually make a passing remark on the dual necessity to abolish work(as wage labour), he seems to not be able, due to his recalcitrant insistence on a distorted view of Marx's notion of value as a moralist/transcendent principle, view the radical critique of Capital as a critique of the fetishized form of appearance of social relations in the manifest expressions of money(hence why he seems to visualize reforms along the lines of "workplace democracy" and raised wages).

[Rhys · Rating 4 out of 5]

When I started Willing Slaves of Capital, I thought that the author was playing pretty loose with Spinoza and Marx. But the book grew on me - it was clearly written and Lordon delivered on the thesis (which was the role of conatus in our coerced/sad and willful-though-still-coerced/joy relationship with work).

I would have been interested in some discussion on education/expertise and professionalization of the workforce as it related to our being willing slaves of capital.

Particularly interesting, though, was his points on neoliberalism and its cooptation of 'joy' and 'entrepreneurship' and how breaking from this vector might define a communist direction.

"Almost negatively, as its real condition of possibility seems so far away from us, it is again Spinoza who gives us perhaps the definition of true communism: passionate exploitation comes to an end when people know how to guide their common desires – and form enterprises, but communist ones – towards goals that are no longer subject to unilateral capture; namely, when they understand that the truly good is what one must wish for others to possess at the same time as oneself. This is for example the case with reason, that all must want the greatest possible number to possess, since ‘insofar as men live according to the guidance of reason, they are most useful to man’. But this redirection of desire and this understanding of things are precisely the goal of Spinoza’s Ethics, and he does not hide that ‘the way [is] very hard'" (p.156).

[Gülüzar - Ertl · Rating 5 out of 5]

Yaşadığımız dünyada birçok bağımlılık ilişkisini ve kapitalizmin her şeye rağmen ufak badireler dışında bir sorun yaşamadan devam etmesini anlamak oldukça zor. Bunu tek bir sebeple açıklamak mümkün değil elbette ama Kapitalizm, Arzu ve Kölelik bu devamlılığın nedenlerinden birini oldukça iyi anlatmış.

Ücretli emek ilişkisinde paranın elde edilmesi gibi gerilimli bir ilişkiden gönüllü kölelik oksimoronuna geçişi ve bu sürecin nasıl yönetildiğini görmek açısından önemli bir kaynak.
Dışsal arzuların içsel hale getirilmesi, üretirken maruz kalınan yükle tüketirken elde edilen fayda arasındaki ilişkinin koparılması gerekir. Hiyerarşik yapılanmanın küçük parçalara bölünerek dağıtılması, ücretli emeğin yaratmış olduğu gerilimli duygulardan sevinçli duygulara ve şirketin bir parçası olma hissine sebep olur. Bu tür “sevinçli duyguların ise düşünmeye sevk etmeme gibi bir özelliği vardır.”

Arzuların yönetilmesinin neden bu kadar önemli olduğunu belki şu cümle açıklıyordur; ”düşünce, büyük ihtimalle zorlayıcı bir karşılaşmayla – yani, kederli bir duyguyla- harekete geçer. Sanki sevinçte bir nevi kendine-yeterlik varmış gibi, mutluluk bu denli sorgulanmaz.”

Kitapla ilgili uzun uzun yazmak ve tartışmak mümkün. Benim burada yapmak istediğim kitabın görünür olması ve bu mevzulara meraklılar tarafından ıskalanmamasına çabalamak. Yoksa bir de özgür irade ve üst belirlenim mevzusu var ki tartışmaya doyamayız.

Bunun yanı sıra Fransa’nın önemli entelektüellerinden biri olan yazar Frederic Lordon aynı zamanda iki yıl önceki Gece Ayakta- “Nuit Debaut”- eylemlerinin örgütleyicilerinden biridir.

[César · Rating 5 out of 5]

I am not sure if I have the philosophical to properly understand the book, its postulates and its implications, but it was such a great read. I won't deny it was a bit sad at times, seeing oneself and one's life being described as it is, but it's well worth it. Yes, it might be depressing, but knowing what one is up against and how one willingly gives up one's desires or aligns them with someone's/something's else while believing one is doing it by one's own uncorrupted free will it's the best way to counteract and analyse one's own actions. Being introduced to Spinoza's ideas just opened my mind further and will be reading him, hopefully soon.

[Kenny · Rating 4 out of 5]

I've struggled a lot with deciding how to rate this book. Sometimes Lordon is extremely frustrating, and at other times he offers incisive diagnoses of modern "passionate servitude." The last 20-or-so pages of the book answered some of my questions, but certainly not all. In stripped-back terms however, here's what I think the book does well, and what it does poorly:

--Pros--
-One of the few books in the Marxist tradition which engages with, and provides a compelling critique of business studies
-Articulates a criticism of the Marxist theory of value which I have struggled to explain myself, at least prior to reading this book
-Gives a good, structural account of how and why people come to 'desire their own servitude' (r.e. 'colinearisation')

--Cons--
-Borderline-incoherent reading of Spinoza - does Lordon realise that joyful affects increase a body's power of acting, and hence that 'joyful servitude' cannot be criticised for doing otherwise?
-Deeply unsatisfying view and motivation of Lordon's alternative to capitalism ('recommunism'), which reduces anticapitalism to a form of organisational studies
-The ludicrous diagrams Lordon draws are totally unnecessary. If it was stupid when Lacan did it, it's stupid when Lordon does it
-Seemingly misunderstands that not all people desire money, and that the 'universal equivalent' does not in fact function as a 'master-desire'

[Gökalp Aral · Rating 4 out of 5]

Denilebilir ki kitabın ve haliyle yazarın temeldeki hedefi, bir kapitalizm eleştirisi olarak Spinoza'nın duygu teorisini kullanmaktır; bu doğrultuda arzunun hizlanması, "gönüllü" kölelik, paranın işleyişi ve benzeri birçok konu, tatmin edici bir biçimde açıklanıyor. Yazarın kapitalizme bakışı, hem ekonomik bir işleyişi hem de bunun eleştirisi büyük ölçüde Marx'tan etkilendiyse de atıflarda ve analizlerde Marx'ın adı kitabın başından sonuna dek çok az geçiyor. Hatta Büyük Dönüşüm'de, Karl Polanyi'nin Marksizm'e ilişkin söylediği, "sınıf çıkarını maddi çıkara indirgemek" yönündeki eleştirisinin -ki yanlış anımsamıyorsam Polanyi'nin adı bu kitapta bir kere geçiyordu- bir duygusal açılım biçiminde genişlediği de eklenebilir. Çünkü hem kitabın sonuna doğru gelindiğinde, Marksizm ile yazarın doğrudan atıf yaptığı birkaç yerden birinde yani, yabancılaşmaya dair söyledikleri de bunu destekler nitelikte.
Ortodoks Marksist yorumlar düşünüldüğünde, kitabın savundukları ve karşı çıktıkları için birçok sorun da bulunabilir: en başta patron-efendi tanımının muğlaklığı ve genişliği -çünkü arzuları (ya da conatus enerjisini) yeniden yönlendirenler, dizayn edenler sadece işveren, yani üretim araçlarının mülkiyetini ellerinde tutanlar değiller- ciddi bir sorun. Mücadelenin kime karşı yapılacağı bir yerde kayboluyor. Aynı zamanda bir başka sorun olarak arzunun kontrolüne dayalı bir mücadele biçimi de sorunlu gözükebilir çünkü mücadelenin odağına dair bir sapma anlamına gelecek. Komünizm hakkında kitabın son birkaç bölümünü oluşturan yazılar da benzerlikle bir sapma olarak değerlendirilebilir.
Sonuçta şöyle söylenmeli: Spinoza'nın düşüncesinden hareketle geliştirilmiş bir neoliberalizm eleştirisi olarak düşünüldüğünde müthiş ama Marx ile Spinoza'nın uzlaştırılması olarak düşünüldüğünde ise çeşitli tartışmaları getirebilir bir kitap -büyük olasılıkla getirmiştir de ancak kitabın ilk basımından bu yana geçen zaman düşünüldüğünde.

[Zéro Janvier · Rating 3 out of 5]

Dans cet essai de 2010 où il mobilise philosophie, sociologie, économie et politique, Frédéric Lordon s'appuie sur les pensées de Marx et Spinoza pour tenter de répondre à cette question centrale :

"Comment un certain désir s'y prend il pour impliquer des puissances tierces dans ses entreprises ? C'est le problème de ce qu'on appellera en toute généralité le patronat, conçu comme un rapport social d'enrôlement."

Commençons par le dire clairement : "Capitalisme, désir et servitude" n'est pas le livre le plus accessible de Frédéric Lordon. Même si l'auteur prend la peine de définir et d'expliciter les concepts philosophiques qu'il mobilise, le texte est parfois resté difficile à suivre pour le profane que je suis. Malgré tout, le propos est brillant et diablement intéressant.

Je suis donc embêté au moment d'écrire cette critique. L'auteur alterne entre un désir de vulgarisation et la difficulté à conserver une profondeur de réflexion sans perdre le lecteur. Le résultat est bon, mais pas toujours aisé à lire.

[Louis · Rating 4 out of 5]

In this book the French economist Frédéric Lordon tries to give us an explanation of what he calls the ‘joyful servitude’ of this (neoliberal) age. The problem is this: since the end of the seventies of the previous century, the power of capital and capitalists has been dramatically increased, allowing them to make demands on the labouring class that was not imaginable in the previous era of Keynesian welfare state. The best example hereof is, the by now well known, ‘productivity-pay gap’. This refers to the fact that since the end of nineteenth-seventies productivity has gone up but wages have lagged behind. In other words: the productivity gains have not been translated into higher wages nor into a reduction of labouring time for the labour class, which was the case in the previous economic regime. At the same time, work has been hailed as the way to develop ourselves, as the centre of joy and self-fulfillment. Bosses do not only want that you do your work good but that you are also genuinely passionate about it. According to Lordon, this is strengthened by the shift from manufacturing to service jobs (at least in core countries of the capitalist world-system), in which the relational and attitudinal competences of employees have become more important. Lordon cites the example of Indian workers for a an outsourced American service company in which the employees had to take on an American alter-ego when they communicated with their clients, they were advised to consume American culture in order to help achieve this. A lot of us seem to have bought into this idea that it is through our jobs that we can find self-fulfillment and that we should pour or heart and soul into our jobs. According to Lordon this especially clear in the case of employees higher on the corporate ladder, which seem to often have completely internalised the norms, values and aims of their company as their own vocation. Hence, we have a bizar tension in which capital seems to have become more brutal and oppressive (at least in the West, in the periphery of the capitalist world-system capitalism has always been brutal), while at the same time labourers seem to have become more passionate about their oppression.



According to Lordon, traditional Marxism is not able to account for this phenomenon. Thus, what Lordon in this book tries to do is to explain this phenomenon that he calls ‘joyful servitude.’ He does this by bringing Spinoza in a Marxist framework. By doing so, he inscribes himself in a French intellectual tradition which started with Louis Althusser, another famous exponent of this tradition is the French philosopher Étienne Balibar. To a lesser extent, we could also include the economist André Orléan . Lordon’s attempt to utilise Spinoza in order to explain the phenomenon of joyful servitude, is quite interesting and could give philosophers compelling tools to analyse and explain certain forms of ‘false-consciousness,’ without faling in the pitfall of paternalism and without having to take on board Lordon’s whole Spinozist framework. The book is quite short, it consist out of three chapters, and is written in a very clear way. In the first chapter he explains and begins his Spinozist analysis of the central problem. The second chapter continues and deepens the analysis. Finally, the last chapter show us how we can understand domination and exploitation within this framework, what liberation thereof would imply and how this liberation can occur. In next two paragraphs I will try to give an overview of the core argument.

We should conceive of each human beings as a conatus: a desiring object that strives to maintain its own existence. In the beginning this desiring is not yet directed, it gains direction because of its experience and the affects that these experiences affect. Broadly speaking there are two categories of affects: the sad and joyful affects. Sad affects push us to avoid certain experiences whereas joyful affects stimulate us to gain certain experiences. Bosses (bosses of all kinds, generals, employers, professors,…) “enlist and align” other conati for the fulfillment of their own desires. Lordon calls the conatus that “captures” the force of other conati “the master-desire.” The master-desire can can do this in two ways: by playing on the sad or joyful affect. This leads respectively to sad servitude and “joyful servitude.” According to Lordon we can find both strategies in capitalist domination: ultimately capitalism is a form of sad servitude because it relies on the threat of hunger. If you have no job you have no money and if you have no money cannot live. In the end, only capitalists can provide you with the means to live: money. This the ultimate backdrop of every form of capitalism. However, capitalism has developed and introduced elements of joyful servitude. Fordism introduced this via consumerism: giving the labour class better wages and more free time so that they can enjoy a wider sphere of consumer products. However, in this case the motivational factor is still external to the labouring activity. Neoliberalism, goes a step further and achieves joyful servitude by coupling joyful affects to the labour activity itself.

Lordon, also introduces, the very interesting concept of “epithumé”: “a regime of desire.” As I have mentioned before, the desiring of a conatus is not directed at the beginning, it gains it through living. We could say that through our lived experiences our desire is conditioned by the affects. An epithumé makes use of this mechanism, it is the conditioning of our desires that reproduces certain social relations. This does not always happen intentionally, it can happen also unintentionally. But an epithumé can also exist in consciously generating certain desires, the generating of desires is what Lordon calls “epithumogenesis.” Moreover, since (in the Spinozist framework) value is created by the act of desiring (instead of value that already exists before we desire, and which we desire because it is valuable), an epithumé will also lead to “axiogenesis,” the creation of value. An epithumé will thus direct our desires and in doing so also direct our valuing. Domination within this framework is fixing the scope of joyful affects to a limited group of joyful affects by the master-desire. Exploitation is the extracting by the master-desire of the biggest part of joy, by disproportionately claiming the recognition of a collective endeavour.

What I found less convincing, is the thorough structuralism of this work, which leaves not a lot of room for taking serious subjectivity. Related to this, Marx’s concept of alienation is completely abandoned and rendered meaningless since alle existence, is according to Lordon alienation. He takes alienation to be heteronomity, and since everyone is determined by the interplay of each others affects, all there exists is heteronimity, and hence alienation. However,this does away with one of the most interesting and relatable aspects of Marxism. For me, for example, the concept of alienation under capitalism was one of the elements of Marxism that initially draw me in. Precisely because I could recognise the experience that it described. Lordon’s idea of permanent and general alienation is also incredible unnuanced. Possibly, it also diminishes the strength of the conceptual apparatus that Lordon has built in this book. It makes it difficult to make a distinction between desirable and undesirable forms of interdependence. This becomes clear by the fact that Lordon heavily focuses on the unequal relation between capitalist and labourer, and not so much on the impersonal relations within the market tout court. His tools seem to be not sharp enough to analyse these kind of relations. A more comprehensive Marxism would be able to analyse and critique both the wage-relation between labour and capital and the impersonal market relations. Such a framework would provide a more powerful critique of capitalistic relations by pointing out what is problematic about these kind of relations. Thereby it would also guide us towards what kind of relations would be desirable, and thus give us some direction of what desirable institutions would look like. Nevertheless, this work provides with a lot of interesting tools and concepts on which can be built.

[Önder Kurt · Rating 5 out of 5]

Önemli yerlerin altını çizip, not almak bu kitapta işe ayarmıyor zira kitabın tamamının altını çizmek gerekiyor..Şu “bir kitap okudum hayatım değişti” kategorisinde yerini alabilecek türden bir kitap, özellikle Marxistler için. Bu kitap, kapitalizmin bütün vahşiliğine rağmen nasıl oluyor da rıza ve gönüllü kölelik ürettiğini anlama araçları sunan Spinoza’nın yaşadığımız geç kapitalizm evresinde sömürü dinamiklerini anlamak için Marx’ın çok önemli bir tamamlayıcısı, ortağı olabileceğini ortaya koyuyor.

Şu paragraf bir fikir verebilir:

“Kapitalizme özgü toplumsal yapılardan kurtulmak, duygusal kölelikten kurtulmamızı sağlamaz. Tek başına, arzunun ve sarf edilen güçlerin başıbozuk şiddetinden kurtaramaz bizi. Spinoza'nm duygular konusundaki gerçekçiliği, bu noktada belki en çok Marksist ütopyanın işine yarar: Sarsıp kendine getirir. Sınıfların ve sınıf çatışmalarının tamamen tasfiyesiyle siyasetin ortadan kaldırılması, proletaryanın zaferiyle bütün husumetlerin aşılması, sınıf çıkarlarından tamamen arınmış sınıfsızlığm ortaya çıkması... - bunların hepsi post-siyasal birer hayalden ibarettir ve belki de Marx'in yaptığı en büyük antropolojik hata budur:56”

[Uğur · Rating 4 out of 5]

A wonderful work that examines the extent to which our selves are controlled and guided while being transformed into Gregor Samsa by a system in which we live and, moreover, we connect to it everywhere at any moment rather than living.

Lordon tried to explain the problems we had with Marx and Spinoza. In addition to Marx's political economy, he also explained Spinoza's theory of emotion by considering all aspects of our modern slavery.

In order to understand a person, it is undoubtedly the most important rule to focus on the source of emotions and their reflections. However, this is exactly the part that is missing in materialist philosophy. Materialist thought, which could express any deterministic rules, was putting human nature and emotions aside. At this point, he combined Spinoza and Marx like pieces of a puzzle.

A person is a living being who carries the motive of existence and has moved to the expressed point, not expressing it thanks to this motive. This situation, which reveals the purpose and motivation to live, has also given rise to feelings of desire and desire in man, and man has also found a way to realize his existence according to his desires and desires. For this reason, all other emotions are also expressions of the negative and positive aspects of desire. Since desiring also expresses will and freedom, in our vital actions, starting with desire, showing will and performing freely means the very nature of man in Spinoza. At this point, Marx's political economy of class when handling Lordon author, about the human condition and emotions of Spinozist approaches found in the top desires people why they are slaves of their own desires away from someone's desire fulfilled that they have currently is a living organism, as it enters into the question of why we wasted our moments deep.

Going further, while realizing an undesirable situation, he begins to desire what he does not desire over time, entering into his alienation from his desires, which can be the cause of depression for readers who have not thought much about the subject. Let them read it anyway. These are your facts too. I would say think a little about the loss of your moments in the country where we wake up a little poorer every day. Sad readings.

[Tomaso Machiavelli di Spinoza · Rating 4 out of 5]

4.5/5

“Le consentant n’est pas plus libre que quiconque, et pas moins “plié” que l’asservi : il est juste plié différemment et vit joyeusement sa détermination. Il n’y a pas plus de consentement qu’il y n’y a de servitude volontaire : il n’y a que des assujettissements heureux”.

Frédéric Lordon pose une véritable masterclass (digne du triplé de CR7 contre l’Espagne à la CdM 2018), dans ces 200 pages qui en valent mille. Réutilisant parfaitement les concepts spinozistes - parfois de manière quelque peu pompeuse, mais jamais vainement et juste par soucis de distinction - pour penser de manière très froide et réaliste le capitalisme et sa structure, ainsi que les possibilités d’une éventuelle émancipation.

La démonstration qui met en évidence la structure des affects qui sous-tend le capitalisme - et ses évolutions entre les écrits de Marx et la structure néolibérale actuelle - est d’une finesse et exactitude qui donnent des frissons. Pour bien en saisir la profondeur il faut, à mon sens, maîtriser un minimum les concepts de l’anthropologie spinoziste.

La dernière partie du livre est tout autant édifiante; toujours dans une réthorique spinoziste, Lordon s’essaye à penser les possibilités de dépassement des structures capitalistes de façon extrêmement froide et réaliste, sans tomber dans le piège d'idéalisation communiste - tout en se faisant le pourfendeurs du capitalisme et le défenseur du communisme.

La richesse conceptuelle - appuyée sur une utilisation parfaite de la pensée spinoziste et de nombreuses autres références - et la rigueur, cohérence et honnêteté intellectuelle dont font preuve les observations et les conclusions qui en sont tirées font selon moi la richesse et la pertinence de cet ouvrage.

On peut cependant lui reprocher la répétition de certaines idées (au moins ça finit par rentrer, c'est peut-être l'objectif) et la mobilisation assez secondaire de Marx par rapport à Spinoza (alors que dans le titre il y a "Marx et Spinoza") - j'ai notamment lu des critiques de son interprétation de la théorie de la plus-value marxienne.

[Roberto Yoed · Rating 2 out of 5]

The book is basically the first volume of Capital written in spinozian jargon. Surprisingly, it is easier to read (despite sometimes having to return to my 'Ethics' annotations) than some of the marxists takes I've been reading lately.

The real problem with this book is not the spinozian take (it is it's biggest achievement!). The serious mistake is it's understanding of the theory of value not in economic nor scientific terms but in moral terms: Lordon proposes a revisioned and metaphysical view of communism as well as an absolute theory of alienation that ends up falling in pure idealism.

[Remi · Rating 1 out of 5]

Abstract arguments without examples and no real-world applicability.

[Trevor · Rating 5 out of 5]

I’m not for a second going to pretend that this is an easy book to read. It certainly is not and is written in academic language that demands your full attention. But then, Marx is hardly known as a light read and Wodehouse proves Jeeves is absurdly intelligent by having him read Spinoza for entertainment. The title could therefore be taken as something of a threat, or warning at least. What I’m going to do is give you the simplified McCandless version and then some quotes from the book itself. BUT the book is relatively short and, although difficult, is going to give you more than my version will.

For years I’ve been fascinated by the idea that people undermine their own interests in support of situations that benefit others over themselves. This is variously understood across theorists, from Marx’s ruling ideas of any era are those of the ruling class, to the Frankfurt School’s false consciousness, to Bourdieu’s symbolic violence, to Foucault’s Power/Knowledge, many theorists have struggled with this idea, or ideas very similar to it.

This book considers Spinoza’s thoughts around what I guess you could call the ‘life force’ – the drive to act – and how this is linked to desire. Now, desire is also a seriously interesting idea, one that, I’ve found over the years, theorists mention in whispers, even when it is central to how they understand the world.

But this book is about why people make themselves into ‘willing slaves’. And the author links this to desire. The sort of zero case is when you act according to your own desires – in finding a partner, in making yourself something for dinner, in choosing a degree to study. We assume that these cases involve us in our free will and that our choices display our desires – our own desires. However, capitalist society is constructed so that the vast majority of us need to work for someone else. That is, we need to subjugate our desires to the desires of the person paying us. The primary way this is achieved is by the fact that the person paying us is providing us with something we absolutely need – money – and we need this to meet our minimum requirements to go on living – food, clothing, shelter – as well as additional things that make life worthwhile. Money is the ideal commodity, in this sense, since it can morph into any object of our desire. As such, we sell our ability to be an end (and to work towards the ends of our own desires) to become a means towards someone else’s desires so that we can live. This underlying violence is a precondition of capitalism, the violence is both in the threat of starvation and in the transgression of Kant’s categorical imperative that the capitalist should always treat others are ends in themselves, not means to an end.

But capitalism is a totalising system – in fact, the author goes so far as to say it is totalitarian. As such, the author uses a geometric vector metaphor to explain this point – but I’m just going to say that mostly what we might desire, if left to our own devices, would be unlikely to point in exactly the same direction as that of our boss. But that increasingly, to get a job at all, we need to ‘prove’ not that we have the skill set necessary to do the job – you can acquire skills – but that you have the passion and desire to be the sort of person that does this job. In fact, that your passions and desires completely align with the task you are being employed to perform. My new partner has me watching things on TV after a break of about a decade. One thing we are currently watching is called Patriot. In this the main character is essentially a hitman, but is pretending to be an engineer. He constantly lets down his boss by his lack of dedication to his primary role of creating perfect circles. The main character provides the perfect counter-example of the ideal employee – someone whose passion and desire is not shown as meeting that of the boss, regardless of outputs or outcomes. Rather the ideal employee should be more like the guy from Laurie Anderson’s Let X = X, “I met this guy - and he looked like might have been a hat check clerk at an ice rink. Which, in fact, he turned out to be.”

Except, proving to be the perfect match of the desire of your boss isn’t in the least an easy thing to show you are. And so, HR has been created to filter and assess and trick and prove that you match the desire you claim to have – not unlike the guy in The Lobster who tries to prove he is as sadistic as his new partner (I warned you I’ve been watching too much TV…). This is compared, in the book, to ‘the gift of tears’, something the Catholic Church believed was a gift from God to show someone had truly adopted the articles of the faith. But such tangible proof is basically not available in the modern world – and so other, although, not necessarily more accurate, ways are developed to show the alignment of desires.

The problem is that the alignment of desires is not a problem that is ever likely to go away. And as the author says, this problem isn’t fixed just because you employer shifts from being an exploitative capitalist to a workers’ collective. The division of labour, something Marx always saw as a fundamental problem facing human freedom, is likely to remain with us for quite some time, and so there is also likely to need to be some form of compulsion to encourage some people to do some jobs that are particularly unpleasant – even if the burden of such work is more equally shared across society.

I really enjoyed this book – but I’m going to leave some room now for some quotes. All from my ebook, so no page numbers, I’m afraid.

“this life is organised through institutional forms that introduce considerable differences, but within which affects and forces of desire continue to be the primum mobile.”

“The manager is the very model for the kind of happy workforce that capitalism would like to create – regardless of the manifest contradiction that simultaneously drives capitalism, in its neoliberal configuration, to also regress towards the most brutal forms of coercion.”

“Spinoza calls ‘conatus’ the effort by which ‘each thing, as far as it can by its own power, strives to persevere in its being.”

“For the conatus is the force of existence. It is, so to speak, the fundamental energy that inhabits bodies and sets them in motion. The conatus is the principle of the mobilisation of bodies. To exist is to act, namely, to deploy this energy.”

“The legitimacy of wanting to do something does not extend to wanting to make other people do it. Hence the ambitious development of the enterprise to the point that it necessitates collaborations requires a fully independent answer to the question of the forms that these collaborations should take.”

“the market division of labour – makes access to money imperative and money the cardinal object of desire, the desire that conditions all or almost all others.”

“Thus, in the monetary economy with division of labour that characterises capitalism, no desire is more imperious than the desire for money, and consequently, no hold is more powerful than that of enlistment through employment.”

“Spinoza proposes an altogether different mechanism of alienation: the real chains are those of our affects and desires. There is no such thing as voluntary servitude. There is only passionate servitude. That, however, is universal.”

“The ‘external’ conditions under which individuals pursue their desires determine the particular balance between hope and fear in each case, hence the dominant affective tonality that accompanies their effort.”

“As we know, there is hardly a more powerful employment ‘socialisation’ mechanism than the mortgage of the ‘young couple’, bound to the necessity of employment for the next twenty years.”

“The bosses (and owners) of such enterprises watch over their employees and conclude that they are not doing enough, or not well enough, or not fast enough – in other words they see themselves in their employees, making them an extension of themselves, almost a surrogate, to whom they directly ascribe their own desires and then fail to understand how these desires could be so poorly served by those they have made in their imagination, by a kind of meta-desire, their alter egos.”

“Capitalism must therefore be grasped not only in its structures but also as a certain regime of desire;”

“If auto-mobility is the quality of that which moves itself, then the production of employed auto-mobiles – namely, employees who occupy themselves of their own accord in the service of the capitalist organisation – is incontestably the greatest success of the neoliberal co-linearisation undertaking.”

“We no longer work merely to earn money and avoid material destitution; we seek the joy that comes from the joy of those to whom we offer our labour, namely their love.”

“the passionate mechanism of the demand for love leads the seeker to do what brings joy to the giver, hence to embrace/anticipate the latter’s desire in order to conform one’s own to it. As lines of dependence are also lines of dependence for recognition, the alignment of the subordinate with the superior, who is already aligned in the same way, is inscribed in the general structure – hierarchical and fractal – of passionate co-linearization.”

“To subordinate the entire life and being of employees to the business, namely, to remake the dispositions, desires, and attitudes of enlistees so that they serve its ends, in short, to refashion their singularity so that all their personal inclinations tend ‘spontaneously’ in its direction, such is the delirious vision of a total possession of individuals, in an almost shamanistic sense. It is therefore legitimate to call totalitarian an attempt to exercise control in a manner so profound, so complete, that it is no longer satisfied by external enslavement – obtaining the desirable behaviour – but demands the complete surrender of ‘interiority’.”

“It is a safe bet that if one day, following a change in customs and regulations, prostitution leaves the underworld to become an official trade, any company entering that market will expect its employees to kiss, and then to love, for real. Neoliberal capital is the world of the girlfriend experience.”

“The other face of neoliberal utopia, the laughing and charmed one, would rather take the form of a beautiful, spontaneous community of identically desiring individuals.”

“Yet the pressure of discovering in advance what can only be known after the fact and through the very experience of working is so strong that everything must be tried, however nonsensical: role playing (supposedly revelatory), inquisitional interrogations about normally irrelevant matters (but the personal life must harbour precious information, since it is ‘the full person’ that needs to be assessed), experimental protocols that are almost behaviourist (to test the subject’s reactions), graphology (the secrets of personality lurk in downstrokes and upstrokes), even physiognomy (plump means lazy), numerology (numbers don’t lie), and astrology (neither do planets). Although they have somewhat improved after the first phase of delirious excess in the 1980s and ’90s, recruitment practices remain at the edge of unreason, to which they are inevitably doomed by their impossible aims.”

“Spinoza’s maxim, addressed to the sovereign: lead subjects so ‘that they think that they are not led … but living after their own mind, and according to their free decision’.”

“the task is therefore to convert external imperatives, those of the enterprise and its particular objectives, into joyful affects and a personal desire, a desire that ideally they can each call their own. To produce consent is to produce in individuals a love for the situation in which they have been put.”

“one can therefore say that Bourdieu’s symbolic violence, a soft domination that the dominated themselves ‘consent’ to, is a domination through joyful affects.”

“Left to diffuse and impersonal mechanisms, the social division of desire, working through the mechanism set forth in Ethics, III, 49, makes individuals experience the arbitrariness of their assignations as necessity, as a fatum without a god, which therefore deserves love, or at least less hatred than if one imagined it the result of a free cause.”

“Helped by the social mechanisms of personalisation and institutional embodiment, bosses appropriate the symbolic profits of the collective creative labour of the enlistees, which they then attribute in toto to themselves … science bosses draw their recompense from being remembered for posterity as ‘discoverers’; university mandarins sign their names to publications for which their assistants provided the statistics and documentation without which their arguments would fall apart; film directors win recognition as unique authors of sets of images that only their directors of photography were technically capable of producing, and so on.”

“For how many capitalist enterprises would remain if people were freed from material necessity?”

“go find the boss who would rather be called a ‘capitalist’ than an ‘entrepreneur’.”

“Not all activities fall inside the money economy, but not a single one stands outside the economy of joy.”

“It is a question for which we should want an unvarnished answer: every disappointment is proportional to the hopes that preceded it, and it would be an understatement to say that the idea of communism, or the idea of breaking with capitalism, was full of hope.”

“Incidentally, symbolic violence is far from being limited to joyful affects, and its effects of classification, interdiction and belittlement can also produce sad affects (for example, of embarrassment or social shame).”

[Yoann Negre · Rating 5 out of 5]

Dans cet ouvrage, Lordon donne une leçon de structuralisme appliqué aux rapports de domination induits par le capitalisme. Plus précisément, il montre comment le capitalisme distille des éléments visant à structurer les individus dans un sens qui lui soit favorable.

Dans un premier temps, il va utiliser quelques concepts alambiqués comme la notion de "conatus", énergie fondamentale des corps qui les mets en mouvements selon les désirs et les affects. Ainsi, selon lui, le capitalisme cherche à mobiliser les conatus en manipulant les affects et les désirs de manière endogène et exogène par rapport aux individus. C'est ce que Lordon appelle réduire l'angle alpha à 0, l'angle alpha étant la capacité de résistance d'un individu aux désirs d'autrui, pour le dire simplement.

Endogène en poussant ces derniers à se mobiliser d'eux même à la servitude du capitalisme, ce que j'illustrerais avec les mythes libéraux, comme la méritocratie, ou encore le neomanagement, étonnamment peu cité dans le livre.

Exogène en poussant ces derniers à s'enrôler malgré eux à la servitude du capitalisme, via l'aiguillon de la faim, faisant qu'on est obligés de travailler pour se nourrir par exemple.

Ainsi, les capitalistes ne font pas que d'exproprier les travailleurs de la plue-value créé, ils prennent aussi leurs affects et leurs désirs pour les conformer à leurs propres désirs et affects.

Lordon conclue son livre par l'hypothèse d'une alternative au capitalisme, nous appelant à "devenir perpendiculaire" en référence à l'angle alpha, et appelant à la méfiance du fait que la révolution reproduit les conatus des personnes qui la font, avec le risque de reproduire des schèmes de domination, ce qui s'est historiquement vu dans beaucoup de révolutions à travers le monde, la Révolution Française de 1789 étant le meilleur exemple. J'ai bien aimé son terme de "récommune" pour parler des entreprises non capitalistes d'ailleurs, mais pas le plus simple à prononcer pour moi.

[Jason · Rating 5 out of 5]

It follows that is is part of power and by right to have made oneself sensitive to a great variety of affections, and to have opened wide the field of one's affectabilities. We could mention in this context the scholium of diet, in which Spinoza recommends supplying the body with all the varied elements that correspond to the complexity of its structures: tasty food, naturally, but also pleasant scents, melodious sounds, a variety of visual pleasures, ect. Alienation is fixation: indigent enticements of the body, narrow confines of the things one can desire, a severely restricted repertoire of joys, obsessions and possessions that tie one's power to a singly place and impede its expansion. (146)

[Brad · Rating 5 out of 5]

Fascinating account of neoliberal capitalist employment relations. I hadn't read anything this intellectual/philosophical/academic in some time. If you like words like aporiae, co-linearisation, and epithumogenesis, this is the book for you! There is even a mathematical diagram with vectors and stuff. Certainly lots going on to think about here like our voluntary servitude to our capitalist masters.

[Caleb Parks · Rating 5 out of 5]

An incredible 162 pages on the institution of Neoliberal employment. By combining Marx and Spinoza, Lordon has created a circuit that brings both better into current times than either by themselves. This was such an amazing read that I'm pursuing Spinoza as my next intellectual project.

[Ietrio · Rating 1 out of 5]

A scary apology of the Total State and of the brotherly protection Big Brother can bring to the poor imbeciles living under His watch.

[Can · Rating 5 out of 5]

Aylar süren okuma sonunda bitirmeyi başardım. Normalde kurgu dışı türde okurken notlar alırım, bazı bölümleri yeniden değerlendiririm ve geri dönüp karşılaştırmalar yaparım. Uzun sürdü çünkü, kısa olmasına rağmen bu kitapta altı çizilecek, not alınacak o kadar çok bölüm var ki okuma süresini bir hayli uzatıyor. Ayrıca okurken bazı paragrafları anlayabilmek ve özümsemek için tekrar tekrar okurken buldum kendimi sıkça. Tüm bunlar bence kitabın değerini vurguluyor.

İçerikten biraz bahsetmek gerekirse, kapitalizm üzerine eleştirileri Marksist bakış açısının yanında Spinoza'cı duygular dünyası tarafından yorumluyor. Sömürü düzeninin işlemesini sağlayan duygusal mekanizmalar çok güzel açıklanıyor. Rıza nedir ve gönüllü kölelik var mıdır gibi pek çok soruya cevap arıyor. İki düşünürün işbirliği konusunda da yazar çok başarılı bir iş çıkarmış. Farklı bakış açıları kazandırdığından benim için oldukça ufuk açıcı olduğunu söyleyebilirim.

[Mélina Sélina · Rating 4 out of 5]

La these de fond, telle qu'exprimee en debut d'ouvrage, est forte, mais le style quasi mathématique et la forme de micro chapitre demande condensation des concepts de des citations, perdant en fluidité. Les deux premieres parties, centrées sur le constat, forment plus à mon sens le coeur de l'ouvrage que la dernière partie qui se veut solutionniste en reprenant à Marx plusieurs de ces concepts mais dont le productivisme central mérite d'être questionné au regard plus récent de l'urgence climatique. Un bon ouvrage, à lire si l'on souhaite deconstruire le fonctionnement global des institutions et entreprises du monde d'aujourd'hui, ses forces comme ses limites, mais surtout son determinisme.

[Camille · Rating 4 out of 5]

Good introduction to Spinoza by way of Lordon's astute critique of the concept of Marxist telos. He questions the existence of alienation (you are never empty, you are occupied by/filled with something be it positive or negative), doubts the power of simply "seizing the means of production", and troubles the water on the often casually bandied about (espesh by me!) Leftist concepts of liberation and revolution. It is a short but challenging read and makes a good companion piece to something like Graeber's Bullshit Jobs.

[Özlem Sayar · Rating 5 out of 5]

"Esir almak, bedenleri başkasının hizmetinde hareket ettirmeyi varsayar. Dolayısıyla harekete geçirme esir almanın kurucu endişesidir. Zira nihayetinde, insanların aslen kendilerine ait olmayan bir arzuyu gerçekleştirmek uğruna eyleme geçmeyi "kabul etmeleri" gayet tuhaf bir durumdur. "Başkaları hesabına harekete geçmeyi" bu denli büyük ölçekte yaratabilmek için gereken muazzam toplumsal emeği gözlerden gizleyebilecek tek şey, alışkanlığın gücü, yani içinde yaşadığımız ve her yerde mevcut olan patronluk ilişkilerinin gücüdür."

[Devon · Rating 5 out of 5]

An awesome book and very fun read. The style is comedic at times- yet quite serious... Lordon develops a set of metaphors to describe the workings of contemporary capitalism as it relates to our subjectivities and explores the insights into our condition that this approach provides. His explication of Spinoza's determinism and how it can help shed new light on Marx's analysis is really brilliant. The affects produced in me by reading this were certainly joyful and thus my power to act is increased...even though in the end we are all still slaves to the passions...

[Kai · Rating 2 out of 5]

trying to figure out what drives me absolutely bananas about this book. it would seem like the kind of thing i would like, but there's something about the tone, the sloppiness, and the incorrect object/relation of analysis that combines to make me yell in frustration. also despite the title, there's barely a reference to marx here. hard pass.

[Daniel · Rating 5 out of 5]

I'm a small baby when it comes to theory but this is wall-to-wall bangers. I find metaphysics hard to connect with because of its abstractions, but by applying Spinoza's theories to Marx and modern employer-employee relationships it becomes so applicable and tangible. Lots of juicy stuff to chew on.

[Theunknownkrakr · Rating 4 out of 5]

Merci Lordon pour cette lecture émancipatrice de Spinoza au XXIè siècle. Utile pour sortir des déboires du capitalisme et de sa forme néolibérale. Une étoile en moins pour l’élitisme de son langage (est-ce son rôle d’être accessible?, je ne sais pas non plus).

[Tynan Brooks]

Focusing on desire under (neoliberal) capitalism through Spinoza is certainly up my alley. I can't say I agree with Lordon's conclusion on exploitation, but the demand for new regimes of desire seems vital.