Capitalism and Desire: The Psychic Cost of Free Markets

by Todd McGowan

Defenders of the system claim that capitalism is a function of human nature—that there is a perfect overlap between capitalism and human nature—and thus that there exists no space from which one might criticize it.

Most of the attempts to understand how capitalism works have focused on its economic structure or on the social effects that it produces.

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.

Capitalism may have unleashed society’s productive forces to a hitherto unforeseeable extent, but this expansion of productivity brought with it vast differences in wealth.

The mere investment of capital received an almost infinitely greater reward than the hours of toil that produced this reward.

The inegalitarian nature of this exchange is admitted from the beginning.

Though capitalism doesn’t invent the concept of equality, it is the first economic system to include this concept within its mechanism of production.

Manuscripts, he laments the impossible bind that confronts the worker, for whom no amount of labor will pay off.

“The worker becomes all the poorer the more wealth he produces, the more his production increases in power and size. The worker becomes an ever cheaper commodity the more commodities he creates.”

The system is rigged against the worker: it rewards the capitalist, not the worker, for the extra productivity that the latter achieves.

But the injustice comes from the creative power of labor itself. In the act of laboring, workers don’t just produce enough to sustain themselves but rather an excess, and the capitalist capitalizes on this excess in the form of surplus value, which translates into profit.

As Marx comes to recognize, profit is theft. That is the acme of the egalitarian critique of capitalism, and this critique predominates into the beginning of the twentieth century.

As Michel Onfray rightly notes in his scathing account of Freud, he created “a viscerally pessimistic philosophy in virtue of which the worst is always certain.”

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.

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.

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.”

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.”

The problem isn’t the inequality involved with the appropriation of surplus value, but the unnecessary demand for surplus repression that creates a society of one-dimensional equals.11

As long as desire remains within the channels that capitalism provides for it, there is no possibility for satisfaction, just a false happiness that serves as the form of appearance for profound dissatisfaction.

Desire directed toward commodities is inherently repressed desire. Satisfaction requires breaking from the logic of the commodity altogether, and this becomes the hope for revolution.

Instead, the revolution would inaugurate a society where sublimation took the place of repression or where repression was no longer omnipresent.

Bodies and pleasures do not suffer from repression, according to Foucault, but power does stifle them.

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.

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.

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.

the capitalist system has the ability to incorporate every attack by integrating the attack into the system.

greenwashing for example — firms tapping into the growing environmental awareness of consumers, creating a market for products perceived as eco friendly while maintaining the fundamental structures of capitalism

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.

If one invests oneself in the promise of the future, through this gesture one accepts the basic rules of the capitalist game.

embracing this idea of a promising future aligns with the core tenets of capitalism such as individual agency and the pursuit of economic growth

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.

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.

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.

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.

implying that a more effective revolutionary act might involve recognizing and reshaping the inherent dynamics within capitalism, rather than seeking a radical break from the system

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?

The point of critique is not promissory, not futural, but wholly immanent.

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 measuring stick for critique is not the promise of a better future but capitalism’s underlying structure.

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.

Whereas the early Freud associated repression with unacceptable sexual desires, the later Freud linked it the subject’s intractable attachment to loss.

This forces Freud to distinguish between pleasure and satisfaction, and he concludes that satisfaction trumps pleasure.

the capitalist system is adept at stimulating desire but less effective at providing true satisfaction. this fuels a cycle of endless consumption in search of pleasure, however often tends to leave individuals in a state of continued desire and dissatisfaction

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.