SACRIFICE BECOMING SECULAR
Capitalism doesn’t require the sacrifice of virgins. In contrast to most other modes of social organization, it has no specified rituals of sacrifice that it cannot do without. In this sense, there is a clear philosophical continuity between capitalism and the Enlightenment, which aims at overcoming the superstitious belief in the necessity for sacrifice. An ethic of utility shapes the structure of both capitalism and the Enlightenment, and it leads each to reject rituals of sacrifice as a massive waste of time and misuse of precious energy. In fact, capitalist theorists argue that the logic of capitalism includes a penalty for any residual sacrifice to which subjects adhere. Time spent attending the sacrifice of the latest virgin might be better used designing a way to fit more people inside an airplane in order to increase its efficiency. This ostensible preference for the useful over the sacred distinguishes capitalist modernity.
Nonetheless, there are points at which sacrifices become visible within capitalism. The most self-evident form of sacrifice in capitalist society lies in the “creative destruction” theorized first by Joseph Schumpeter. In his landmark work, Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy, Schumpeter argues, “This process of Creative Destruction is the essential fact about capitalism. It is what capitalism consists in and what every capitalist concern has got to live in.”1 Capitalism constantly sacrifices old mechanisms of production and old products for new ones, and this sacrificial procedure is the lifeblood of the capitalist system. But the problem with Schumpeter’s image of sacrifice is precisely his avoidance of the term sacrifice. Rather than emphasizing sacrifice, Schumpeter stresses destruction and creation. It is a wholly secular process, a process befitting capitalist modernity. One might argue that it is not really a case of sacrifice at all.2
For many social theorists, however, there is no getting around sacrifice and the sacred.3 Freud sees the collective sacrifice of individual enjoyment as the foundation of the social order itself, a foundation that subsequent sacrificial rituals commemorate and reaffirm. For René Girard, sacrifice puts an end to the exchange of retributive violence and thereby makes coexistence possible. Marcel Mauss, for his part, identifies sacrifice as the basis for the sense of obligation that holds groups together and creates cohesiveness. What these theorists (and all modern theorists of sacrifice) have in common is their effort to come to terms with the persistence of sacrifice in society after the onset of capitalism and the Enlightenment, both of which disdain it.
If we look closely at this disdain, however, its self-evident status becomes less certain. It is true that one need not slaughter a ram to fit in capitalist society—we would probably feel uncomfortable if someone attempted this method of social belonging—but sacrifice nonetheless plays an essential role for capitalism (as it does for the Enlightenment, which, as Hegel argues in The Phenomenology of Spirit, depends on the thoroughgoing sacrifice of the sensual world).4 Sacrifice appears in the workers’ sacrifice of their time for the production of the commodity, which profits the capitalist in the stead of the workers. It also appears in the act of consumption, where consumers sacrifice their wealth for commodities that they don’t need. Sacrifice manifests itself in a hidden form in the production and consumption of the commodity.
Rather than overcoming sacrifice, capitalism secularizes it. This is the essence of capitalism’s relation to sacrifice. Sacrifice survives within capitalism, though its form of appearance undergoes a complete overhaul. Sacrifice migrates from the transcendent site of the ritual into everyday life. This migration of sacrifice from the sacred realm to the everyday has the effect of rendering sacrifice common and simultaneously making it seem a thing of the past. Whereas sacrifice used to be confined to specific highly visible rituals, it now manifests itself in an almost invisible way in everyday activities. This migration is part of the genius of capitalism.5
The migration of sacrifice from the realm of specified rituals to the everyday world of producing and consuming commodities has the effect of obscuring the act of sacrifice. Overt sacrifice troubles the equilibrium of the modern subject, but it becomes completely acceptable in the hidden form that capitalism proffers. In capitalism, subjects can enjoy sacrifice while believing that they aren’t. We can enjoy sacrifice in and through its very invisibility when it becomes secular.
The secularization of sacrifice not only eliminates its visibility but also destroys its cohesive power. Public rituals of sacrifice have the effect of constituting or cementing the social bond by involving all subjects in the loss that occurs through sacrifice. Secularized sacrifice, on the other hand, is private sacrifice, and it enforces the privacy of the subject rather than opening the subject to the public. This is, as I argued earlier, the fundamental trajectory of capitalism itself: a path from public to private. As a result, capitalist subjects almost necessarily fail to see their own psychic investment in the public world. One lives in isolation, but this isolation is undergirded by an extensive social network that makes it possible. This public bond can only become visible when we recognize the inevitability and constitutive status of sacrifice. Seeing this is implicitly moving beyond the strictures of the capitalist economy.
But capitalism has a crucial role to play in the understanding of sacrifice. Despite the absence of sacrificial rituals within capitalist society, the connection between the demands of the capitalist system and sacrifice help to explain the centrality of sacrifice in every social order. It is only after sacrifice seems obsolete that it becomes comprehensible. Far from being actually marginalized within capitalism, sacrifice is essential to the creation of profit and to the desire to consume. Without the act of sacrifice, no capitalist would turn a profit, and no one would find the purchase of a commodity satisfying.
As capitalism makes plain, societies sacrifice because loss is the source of value.6 At first glance, this statement seems crazy. Of course, there are objects that have a value not mediated by loss, like the food and shelter necessary for us to survive. But seeing some objects as inherently valuable for their contribution to our survival assumes that the fundamental goal of our life is to perpetuate itself. This is the vitalist assumption that subtends the thought of every theorist who sets out to defend the social benefits of capitalism.7 But the assumption that there is a value in life itself or that life just aims at perpetuating itself is only an ideological assumption without any philosophical legitimacy. If one examines the physical universe—and especially if one accepts the Second Law of Thermodynamics—the notion that life or even energy aims at perpetuating itself becomes much less tenable. Its only possible legitimacy lies in the claims of biology, and if human animals don’t act like natural beings, this assumption loses its status as self-evident.
Furthermore, the belief that life itself has value is not at all present across different historical epochs and different societies. Hannah Arendt and Giorgio Agamben take great pains to illustrate that the Greeks of antiquity held animal life as valueless. According to Arendt, the Greeks believed that “what men share with all other forms of animal life was not considered to be human.”8 Anyone could survive, but value required engagement in the speculations of civic life. The contemporary belief that survival and prosperity are themselves unimpeachable values bespeaks not the real value of life itself but the victory of the capitalist system and the mode of thought that must support it.
As subjects of the signifier, we are no longer just living beings, and this is what ancient Greek society properly understood.9 The signifier cuts into the living body and implants a little piece of death in us. Our immediate instinctual needs for the presence of objects (like food and shelter) become desires mediated by the structure of loss. In contrast to the animal, the subject’s satisfaction will always depend on the absence of the object it enjoys. Even when an object is wholly present (like the BMW one drives), one’s satisfaction depends on what is absent (like the invisible others watching one drive the nice car).
We can see this at work in the satisfaction of basic needs: the speaking subject does not have sex just with another flesh and blood object but also with the fantasy of an object that isn’t there. Every actual partner substitutes for the lost object in the sex act. The subject of the signifier gets off on what isn’t there, not on what is (even when actually having sex rather than surfing the Internet for pornography). This is equally the case with eating. While eating a perfect slice of pizza, I ponder the piece of cake that I’ll have for dessert. And when I’m eating a bite of the cake, I anticipate the next one, which promises to be even tastier. Even if I immerse myself in the moment and devote myself entirely to the cake itself, the fleetingness of the experience—the way that absence haunts it—is essential to the satisfaction that it provides. This structure is the product of the signifier’s effect on the subject.10 For this subject, every actual and present object pales in comparison with the lost object, and sacrifice provides a way of creating this object and existing proximate to it. Societies privilege sacrifice out of a proper sense of sacrifice’s fecundity, a sense of its capacity for producing a satisfaction that would otherwise be impossible.
EVIL, BE THOU MY GOOD
Prior to capitalist modernity, one could look at the prevalence of sacrifice and chalk it up to the unenlightened state of society. People sacrificed because they simply weren’t all that smart. An absence of scientific knowledge about the nature of the universe, for instance, might have led people to believe that sacrificial rituals influenced the weather or brought God’s grace. After the Enlightenment, ignorance could no longer be the culprit. If sacrifice persisted, it must have appealed to the structure of subjectivity itself. This is borne out increasingly in today’s world as knowledge increases rather than decreases the tendency to sacrifice. Though some critics of capitalism cling to the idea of ideological manipulation as the source of the investment in capitalist sacrifice, this thesis seems difficult to accept given the prevalence of this investment.11
Capitalism thrives not because we are self-interested beings looking to get ahead in any way that we can but because we are looking for new ways to sacrifice ourselves. This propensity for sacrifice stems from a recognition that no satisfaction is possible without loss. Sacrifice does not exist just at the margins of capitalist society. It is omnipresent within capitalism and provides the key to its enduring popularity as an economic system. Sacrifice occurs when the worker creates the commodity and when the consumer buys it. The worker sacrifices time to produce the commodity, and the consumer sacrifices money to purchase it. Though the worker receives pay for this time and the consumer receives a commodity for this money, the pay is never equal to the value the worker creates, and the commodity is never equal to money the consumer gives for it. The satisfaction the capitalist receives from employing workers and the satisfaction the consumer receives from buying a commodity depends on the imbalance rather than the fairness of the exchange. But these imbalances are hidden within the capitalist structure. Capitalism employs sacrifice in the backroom.
Penetrating the invisibility of sacrifice within capitalism necessitates a look at the origin of profit. The commonsensical understanding of profit locates it in the oscillations of supply and demand. The capitalist profits by buying low and selling high, and if we focus on the stock market, this image of profit seems irrefutable. But this is an image that the first theorists of capitalism were careful to explode. The labor theory of value, as discovered by Adam Smith and developed by David Ricardo, locates value in the quantity of labor required to produce a commodity. Commodities that require a greater quantity of labor have more value than those that require less. The laws of supply and demand cover small variations in price, but labor time remains the source of value itself and will quickly outstrip the changes produced by these variations. The amount of labor invested in a product tells us how much we are willing to sacrifice for it. The more time someone will sacrifice to create a commodity, the more value it has. If no one will or has to work to produce something, capitalism ascribes no value at all to it.
This is true even of a commodity like gold, which seems to acquire its value simply from its scarcity. Ricardo insists that gold has its great value because of the labor time that it takes to mine, a time multiplied by its natural scarcity. Useful objects that require no labor to have—like air and water—have no value. In order to make water valuable, a capitalist must create the idea of its scarcity and then use labor time to produce it. This has, of course, occurred with bottled water, and the animated film The Lorax (Chris Renaud and Kyle Balda, 2012) envisions the same process happening with air. An inventive capitalist, Mr. O’Hare (Rob Riggle), aided by massive air pollution, convinces consumers that air is scarce and then hires workers to bottle it for sale. When watching, one laughs not at the ridiculousness but at the likelihood of the conceit. Any object can become a commodity as long as we can imagine a way to attach the sacrifice of labor time to its production.
The noxiousness of profit for Marx resides in its obfuscation of the workers’ sacrifice that creates the value of the commodity. The capitalist profits from a sacrifice and then hides this sacrifice. As Marx sees it, workers exchange their labor time for a wage, and this exchange does not involve exploitation. But exploitation enters into the relationship through the workers’ production of surplus value, the result of the excessive productivity of labor. If the exchange were just an even exchange—labor time for the production of the commodity—the capitalist would be left with no way to profit from it because no value would have been created. Value requires the act of sacrifice, and this is what occurs when labor produces surplus value. During the production of surplus value, workers sacrifice themselves for the profit of the capitalist. Marx’s revolutionary idea is that workers should enjoy the value that their sacrifice creates.
The essence of the capitalist system involves workers producing an excess that they give to the capitalist without any reimbursement. This is an act of sacrifice on the part of workers. Both capitalist economists and Marxists agree on this point. The different between them is that the former believe that the capitalist deserves to profit on the workers’ sacrifice because she or he has risked capital to start a company and in this way made the sacrifice possible in the first place, while the latter see the capitalist as an exploiter of another’s sacrifice (that rightly belongs to the one making it). In either case, sacrifice, even if that’s not what we call it, remains essential to the creation of value.
If one abandons the theory of surplus value and the labor theory of value, the sacrifice involved with labor does not disappear. In fact, even theories that don’t attempt to account for the creation of value, like the General Equilibrium Theory, nonetheless posit a form of calculated sacrifice made by the worker. The worker sacrifices time for money, and no amount of money can ever create time. As Lionel Robbins puts it in his discussion of economic choices, “The time at our disposal is limited. There are only twenty-four hours in the day. We have to choose between the different uses to which they may be put.”12 The time that the worker spends working is thus sacrificed time.
We can also see this devotion to the worker’s sacrifice in the behavior of contemporary industry. Capitalism is not content with granting workers a comfortable wage and making a sizable profit. Instead, it constantly seeks out new workers willing to work for less, thereby pitting workers in industrialized countries against those in economically marginalized ones. The capitalist economy drives workers to increasing sacrifices for the sake of profit, but profit is just an alibi for sacrifice. Sacrifice, as the source of value, has a far more fundamental role within capitalist society than profit, just as it does within every society.
This constant pressure to further the workers’ immiseration is not an accidental feature resulting from the actions of a few evil capitalists. It is endemic to the system itself. The struggle for greater and greater profit is the form of appearance of the struggle for more and more sacrifice. Brutal labor conditions in India are the sort of sacrifice that capitalism relies on to produce satisfying commodities. These working conditions are not anomalies of the capitalist system but rather its sacrificial blood and guts.
The enjoyment of the sacrifice embodied in the commodity depends on the obscurity of this sacrifice. If we know, for instance, that child laborers in a sweatshop worked eighteen hours a day to produce the shoes that we want to buy, they will seem less attractive. This is why, just as slaughterhouses are not located next to steakhouses, factories are not placed in the vicinity of shopping malls. This is also why the “Made in China” tag on garments is not prominently featured. We must be able not to know that the production of the commodity required sacrifice. The labor embodied in the commodity must remain hidden, though we must also maintain an unconscious awareness of it.
The consumer’s enjoyment of the worker’s sacrifice—the enjoyment of the value given to the commodity by the worker’s sacrifice of time—occurs through an act of fetishistic disavowal. For psychoanalysis, the fetish enables the subject to disavow the necessity of loss. It is a failure of knowing that implies another level of knowledge. In other words, fetishists don’t know that they know and work to ensure that they will never know this. The disavowal permits knowledge and ignorance to coexist. This coexistence is vital for the modern subject.
CONDITIONS OF THE WORKING CLASS IN THE CONGO
The sacrifice that capitalism demands from the working class is a constant that has not changed through the centuries. We take it as an article of faith that the sacrifices of the working class have lessened, but this faith requires an active ignorance of what is happening around the world today. Though working conditions in some industries and regions are appreciably better than they were at the beginning of the industrial revolution, there are also areas where conditions have clearly deteriorated. One would rather be a young woman toiling in garment manufacturing in the 1840s Manchester than a child mining coltan in the Congo in the 2000s.
Exploitative working conditions are not a contingent aspect of the capitalist system but a result of the form of sacrifice that it demands. If one capitalist refuses to sacrifice the lives of workers ruthlessly enough, another capitalist with less scruples will surely drive the former out of business.13 If we look at the situation of workers in Manchester, England, in the 1840s and compare this situation to that of workers in China or the Congo today, not only is it difficult to conclude that capitalism has progressed, but the reverse seems to be the case: the condition of the working class has for some worsened over the last 150 years.
Capital demands the maximum possible exploitation of labor—the highest possible quantity of work for the least possible pay—because increasing productivity while lessening cost is the only path toward augmenting accumulation. More accumulation leads to a richer future, which is the sole aim of the capitalist system. A richer future marks the fulfillment of the promise that animates capitalist production and consumption. The immiseration of workers is a means to this end. And yet, this immiseration—the sacrifice of workers’ lives—also provides the satisfaction that keeps the psychic investment in the capitalist system going. If capitalism could produce more efficiently without the workers’ sacrifice, it would not do so. Though consumers might protest against sweatshops and other horrific working conditions, their enjoyment of the commodities they purchase demands some sacrifice on the part of the workers who produce them. But consumers must be able not to know about it.
In the middle of the nineteenth century, this sacrifice was more visible, at least to some. Friedrich Engels sheds light on the travails of laborers under capitalism in his classic, The Condition of the Working Class in England. Engels begins this exposé by describing the absolute squalor in which the working class in Manchester lives and then he turns to an account of the factory conditions. The manufacture of fabrics and clothing exemplify these conditions at their worst.
The fabric industry found children best suited to the required labor and thus made use of them in order to maximize efficiency (and minimize pay). Engels chronicles a series of tasks and their nefarious effects on the children working on them. Those who thread needles, he argues, suffer the most. Engels states,
Most unwholesome of all is the work of the runners, who are usually children of 7, and even of 5 and 4, years old. Commissioner Grainger actually found one child of 2 years old employed at this work. Following a thread which is to be withdrawn by a needle from an intricate texture, is very bad for the eyes, especially when, as is usually the case, the work is continued fourteen to sixteen hours. In the least unfavourable case, aggravated nearsightedness follows; in the worst case, which is frequent enough, incurable blindness from amaurosis. But, apart from that, the children, in consequence of sitting perpetually bent up, become feeble, narrow-chested, and scrofulous from bad digestion.14
The children used in the manufacture of lace were economical and enabled capitalists to produce elegant clothes for women to wear. But the sacrifice of these children’s sight or their well-being is not just incidental to the value of what they produce.
The children’s sacrifice ensures that the lace is not simply commonplace and imbues it with a worth that it otherwise wouldn’t have, even if the women who wear it simultaneously decry the fate of these children. Lace created through the destruction of children’s lives has a value that leaves or flowers picked off the ground to adorn my clothing do not. If anyone can obtain a product without sacrifice, it has no value for the subject.
Of course, an examination of working conditions in England in the nineteenth century cannot be decisive for the whole of the capitalist epoch. After all, even a rabid apologist for capitalism today would admit that Engels (at least on this point) was correct and that working conditions were horrible. But this same proponent of capitalism would quickly add that the situation has changed, that the capitalist system always ameliorates the conditions of the working class, as well as the standard of living for the whole society. Thus, if one wants to counter this point and argue that the sacrifice of workers is essential to the capitalist system, it must persist in all systemic manifestations.
The England of today does not resemble the England that Engels describes. Working conditions there evince an exponential improvement since the middle of the nineteenth century. But horrible conditions have not disappeared. They have migrated and remain integral to capitalist production. Capital actively seeks out regions where it can exploit labor and develop working conditions on par with those in a nineteenth-century British lace factory.
In the contemporary capitalist landscape, it is easy to find systemic instances of what amounts to human sacrifice. The worst of these sacrifices do not occur in Manchester, England, but they are nonetheless pivotal to the operations of capital in England and other prosperous regions of capitalist society. If one examines the manufacture of electronics in today’s economy, the situation sounds akin to what Engels encountered. Even socially aware companies, if they want to remain competitive, must not just turn a blind eye to brutal exploitation of workers but must actively encourage it through their corporate policies.
Retailers such as Walmart play a decisive role in the horrible working conditions in countries such as China, India, and Vietnam. Walmart’s insistence on the lowest prices necessarily leads to worker mistreatment among its suppliers in nations with lax labor laws or enforcement. Suppliers operate with a slim profit margin and must keep labor costs (including spending on labor safety) to an absolute minimum. Workers end up in dismal conditions earning typically much less than 1 percent of the price of the inexpensive products sold at Walmart. But almost everyone who enters Walmart understands the cost of the store’s low prices (which is why many refuse to shop there). What is less obvious to consumers—yet even more significant—is similar or even more shocking horrors wrought by electronic companies that present themselves as socially responsible.
Apple is not Walmart. Steve Jobs is not Sam Walton. Though Jobs founded Apple in order to sell personal computers, his vision, like that of his fellow founders, went beyond simply making a profit. Apple envisioned changing the world and making lives better through its products. But even an enlightened company like Apple must sacrifice the lives of workers in order to produce iPods, iPads, and iPhones.15 This sacrifice occurs in two distinct phases during the production process—the mining of raw materials and the assembly of the various devices.
According to the Enough Project (a group fighting crimes against humanity), Apple was historically one of the worst culprits among electronic manufacturers who relied on minerals mined in the Congo.16 The four minerals that are most essential for electronic products include columbite-tantalite, or coltan (for tantalum), cassiterite (for tin), wolframite (for tungsten), and gold. Tantalum, tin, tungsten, and gold each play important roles in the functioning of electronic devices like the iPad and iPhone. Because the mines were under the control of various militia groups, they could enforce the most deplorable working conditions imaginable: forty-eight consecutive hours in unlit and gas-filled tunnels, child slave labor, rape of workers, death for the failure to achieve mining quotas, and so on.17
Civil war made this situation possible, but firms like Apple exploited and perpetuated the strife to obtain cheap elements for their commodities. This is why David Renton, David Seddon, and Leo Zeilig can claim that the war “was a human catastrophe linked to globalisation, profit and Western manipulation. The war was not simply an African affair, a regional war fought on Congolese territory. Behind the countries and the rebel groups involved in fighting it were Western companies and interests which played a crucial role in setting these forces into motion.”18 Despite the geographical distance that separates the retail outlets selling iPhones and the mines in the Congo, these two sites enjoy an intimate connection. The sacrifice of workers in the Congo is the condition of possibility for the consumer’s enjoyment of the iPhone, though this consumer must remain able to disavow any knowledge of this sacrifice.
Apple’s reliance on unimaginable mining conditions and civil war for the minerals that make up its products has ameliorated in recent years, thanks to groups like the Enough Project and the conflict mineral provision in the Dodd-Frank Act of 2010.19 But the company’s reliance on the extreme exploitation of workers continues at the assembly plants. The manufacture of iPads has led to great death and destruction in China, including worker suicides, plant explosions, and daily interaction with poisonous chemicals. One of Apple’s suppliers in China, Foxconn, ran into such a problem with worker suicides that it constructed netting around the factory to curb the practice and forced workers to sign pledges saying that they would not do themselves in while working at Foxconn.
The relation between Apple and the sacrifice of workers in China is indirect but clear. According to the New York Times, “Apple typically asks suppliers to specify how much each part costs, how many workers are needed and the size of their salaries. Executives want to know every financial detail. Afterward, Apple calculates how much it will pay for a part. Most suppliers are allows on the slimmest of profits. So suppliers often try to cut corners, replace expensive chemicals with less costly alternatives, or push their employees to work faster and longer.”20 In order to develop exciting new products that consumers can afford, Apple must act this way. If it doesn’t, another company will gladly take advantage of the possibility.21
No matter how much awareness rises among human rights groups and consumers, there will always be the equivalent of mines in the Congo and factories in China under the capitalist system. If labor becomes organized and powerful in China, the factories will—and already have—move to Vietnam or some other region where labor groups cannot check the demands of a major corporation. Capital seeks out vulnerable workers because their vulnerability holds the key to the creation of value. The most vulnerable workers create the most value for the capitalist.
The sacrifice of workers’ lives for the sake of an unnecessary commodity like the iPad does not detract from our ability to enjoy iPads. In fact, we cannot enjoy without some sacrifice—either of ourselves or of others—because sacrifice is the source of all value. We value objects through the loss that they embody. The psychic or financial cost of an object is inextricable from the worth that we assign to it. When we can obtain an object without any sacrifice, we will also freely part with it because we know we can simply obtain it again. This logic of sacrifice operates independently of the capitalist system, but capitalism permits us to enjoy sacrifice while fetishistically disavowing it. We can ensure that we are unaware that Congolese children labored in a pitch-black mine or that Chinese workers died in explosions for the sake of our iPads.
INVENTING FORMS OF WASTE
The onset of modernity makes the direct enjoyment of sacrifice impossible.22 The modern subject has to believe in its own commitment to utility and rationality, even in the face of its unconscious dependence on sacrifice. There is thus no going back to the sacrificial rituals of the past. But modernity continues to require sacrifice in order to satisfy its subjects, and the result of this confluence is the turn to fetishistic disavowal, which permits an unconscious satisfaction for modern consciousness. Only through the fetish can the modern consumer enjoy the miseries that produce the objects to be consumed.
The enjoyment of the commodity in contemporary capitalist society requires a delicate balancing act between ignorance and knowledge. On the one hand, the consumer must know that some sacrifice went into the making of the commodity, but on the other hand, the consumer must be able to claim ignorance about this sacrifice to avoid feelings of guilt. What renders us guilty is always our ignorance, not our knowledge. Our efforts to remain ignorant about coltan mines in the Congo reflect our complicity with the militias that run them. The consumer’s ignorance is not just the result of a lack of desire to know but of a genuine passion for ignorance.
The satisfaction in consumption doesn’t derive only from the sacrifice of the worker’s time to create the commodity. Working alongside this sacrifice is the consumer’s own sacrifice of money for an object that serves no useful function. There is no question that consumers enjoy purchasing commodities. Shopping is for many the top-rated leisure activity, and the lines outside stores during sales before the Christmas holidays around the world testify to the eagerness with which many consume.23 This satisfaction has an inverse relationship to the utility of what one buys. Buying gasoline to fuel one’s car is seldom arousing (despite the metaphorical similarity to sexual activity, down to the term pumping gas), but buying a new video game or seeing the newest Hollywood blockbuster often is. When we buy useful items that contribute to our self-interest, like broccoli or underwear, we experience the purchase as an act of exchange.24 We obtain a product in exchange for the labor time accumulated in our money. But when we buy useless or even self-destructive objects, like Oreos or wine, the purchase becomes an act of self-sacrifice in which we can take satisfaction. Almost everyone enjoys buying a fine wine more than stalks of broccoli. This is not an accident. When giving our money for the former, we can experience sacrifice instead of exchange, and this sacrifice is the basis of our capacity to enjoy.25
The spirit of sacrifice is also present among the most prosperous capitalists themselves. These figures spend almost all of their time in the service of accumulation, an accumulation that bears no relationship to utility. Even after they have accumulated enough capital for the grandchildren of their grandchildren, most capitalists continue to strive to accumulate even more. They don’t enjoy the free time they have earned because their enjoyment resides in the sacrifice of this time for the sake of ever more accumulation. The future prosperity of the capitalist’s descendants simply allows the sacrifice to take place with a good conscience. The capitalist’s desire to accumulate allows for the sacrifice of great amounts of time and energy for capital that will not provide much additional satisfaction for the capitalist.
From the marketing director of a small company to the owner of Microsoft, the capitalist spends more time on questions of accumulation than is necessary for the most comfortable life imaginable. This differentiates the ruling class in the capitalist system from the ruling class in all hitherto existing societies. Formerly, the ruling class used its position of mastery to avoid all forms of sacrifice. This class imposed terrible sacrifice on others in order to avoid experiencing sacrifice itself in the form of labor. Servants dedicated their lives to the ease of masters, and, though servitude certainly endures within a capitalist economy, mastery also becomes associated with sacrifice.
The sacrifice that the capitalist makes is all the more confusing for its senselessness. The capitalist sacrifices for more after already having enough and gives up time for minor profits. In his The Quintessence of Capitalism, Werner Sombart puzzles over the devotion that the capitalist shows toward economic activity. He asks, “What is to be said of the phenomenon that perfectly healthy, good-natured people, often enough with mental gifts above the average, should care for such a thing as economic activity? Not, mind you, because they regard it as a duty or as a necessary evil, but because they love it, because they have devoted themselves to it with heart and soul, with mind and body!”26 Capitalists devote themselves to economic activity because they enjoy it, and this enjoyment, as Sombart hints at without explicitly stating it, depends on the sacrifice that occurs when one preoccupies oneself with economic activity. The banality of economic activity is not an argument against it but the ultimate argument for it. One can sacrifice one’s life for nothing and in this way find a satisfaction that would otherwise be impossible.
Sombart’s statement underlines the insignificance that defines the capitalist’s sacrifice. Whereas workers sacrifice for the sake of their survival, capitalists sacrifice their free time for the sake of a few pennies added to an already large fortune. Just as in the sphere of consumption, sacrifice in production has the greatest appeal when it has the least utility, and this is where capitalism’s unique psychic attraction lies. Capitalism provides innumerable opportunities for subjects to sacrifice their time and resources for what is socially and personally useless. Spending one’s days scanning the reports from the stock market offers much more satisfaction than building a shelter for the homeless. The utility of the latter activity detracts from the satisfaction that it offers, while the former has the thrill of smoking a cigarette without its carcinogenic quality.
The most important insight into the part that sacrifice plays in capitalism comes from John Maynard Keynes. In his effort to think through solutions to the crises of capitalism, Keynes discovers that wasteful or sacrificial spending actually creates more wealth than productive spending. The problem with productive spending, Keynes argues, is that it can always reach a point of abundance where it will cause a crisis. If a company invests in food production and makes plenty of food available, the demand will lessen and lessen, and the prospects for future growth will disappear altogether. This will have the effect of dampening investment in the company, even if the time of abundance lies well in the future. Abundance is an investment killer, as Keynes correctly sees. If a company produces enough tables, they will cut into the demand for their product and thus scare off potential investors. Today’s success portends tomorrow’s failure when one is dealing with a useful commodity, like roads and tables.27
Capital investment depends on the prospect of future increases in consumption, and this is impossible with useful commodities. According to Keynes, “New capital-investment can only take place in excess of current capital-disinvestment if future expenditure on consumption is expected to increase. Each time we secure to-day’s equilibrium by increased investment we are aggravating the difficulty of securing equilibrium to-morrow.”28 It is not the fact of future abundance (and thus overproduction) that leads to crisis but the expectation of this result. There is only one way to avoid this deadlock, and Keynes makes it into the central plank of his response to the Great Depression.
Keynes arrives at the idea that wasteful spending avoids the deadlock of future abundance. Unlike useful spending, wasteful spending—acts of pure sacrifice of money—have no future prospect of abundance. Spending on war will never result in abundance because the demand is infinite. One can keep fighting wars until there is no one left to fight—and, even then, one can continue to produce useless weapons by imagining the emergence of future enemies. In the same way, investment in gold mining wastes resources without any prospect of cutting into demand. The appeal of wasteful spending lies in its inability to satiate a demand and thus in its infinite status. It puts people to work without the prospect of their work eliminating its own utility through overproduction.29
When they perform useful labor, workers are digging their own graves, pushing toward a state of abundance when they will no longer be necessary. Ironically, the act of actually digging graves frees workers from this dilemma. Keynes explains the prosperity of ancient Egypt by noting the immense resources that they directed toward the completely unproductive act of building large tombs for the dead. This kind of inexhaustible domain provides an avenue for constant economic growth. As Keynes puts it, “Two pyramids…are twice as good as one; but not so two railways from London to York.”30 Even useful public spending programs run into the problem of future abundance, which is why nothing solves an economic crisis like a war.31
Keynes puts the final nail in the coffin of the capitalist myth of utility, but capitalist economists—even Keynesians—continue to cling to this myth till this day. Without the idea that capitalism adequately provides for human needs, one could not remain a believer in the capitalist system. Keynes’s own attachment to the system grew out of the fantasy that one could permanently stave off crisis by accepting small growth. He thought, to put it in the terms of psychoanalysis, that keeping to the reality principle and avoiding the pleasure principle would keep the system’s self-destructiveness at bay. But this is an illusion. No amount of compromise can eliminate the drive for sacrifice. Once Keynes shows the vacuity of capitalist claims to utility, there is no going back, despite his personal effort to do so.
Nonetheless, capitalist ideology depends on the idea of utility. Utility is the sacred cow of the theory of capitalism. The fact that capitalism avoids unnecessary sacrifice is the basis of most theories of capitalist economics. For instance, as general equilibrium theorist Léon Walras notes, “Only useful things limited in quantity can be produced by industry.”32 If a commodity were useless, industry would have no incentive to produce it because no consumer would take an interest in purchasing it. This schema of complete utility leaves no room for sacrifice—and certainly no room for the ritualized unnecessary sacrifice that populates precapitalist societies.33
The justification for the violence of the free market derives from its ability to supply society with the goods that it needs to reproduce itself and to grow. Critics of capitalism point out the failures of capitalism on this count: it doesn’t provide enough shelter, enough food, or enough pleasure for everyone to survive and prosper. Capitalism’s ruthless insistence on profitability ensures that many needs will be left unfulfilled. But the problem with this emphasis on capitalism’s utility goes much further. It devotes enormous resources to products that are socially unnecessary and even incredibly destructive.
If we think about some of the major industries of today, the falsity of capitalism’s commitment to social utility becomes evident. Enormous resources are devoted to weapons, sports teams, cigarettes, alcohol, and luxury cars—just to name a few areas of production with no evident social benefit. In fact, if we think about the industries to which capitalism devotes most of its resources, social utility does not come out well at all, and it seems as if capitalism serves the reproduction of society very reluctantly.
This becomes completely clear if we look at the companies dedicated to the most socially essential product—the food industry. Makers of food, which is the basis of social reproduction, today spend an inordinate amount of time transforming food into a socially destructive product. Rather than simply growing healthy food and distributing it to stores where people could purchase it, food companies create an almost infinite number of products designed to lure the consumer into purchasing something destructive. They prefer to sell Cheetos to bananas because there is more sacrifice—and thus more profit—in the former. If corporations serve social utility, its importance is always secondary to the creation of a destructive new desire, like the desire for junk food.
Desires do not preexist the product that arrives on the market to sate them. The product and the desiring consumer form in a dialectic relation with each other: the commodity speaks to the possibility of a desire in the consumer, and if it speaks successfully, the desire will form. This is a process that Marx uncovers in the Grundrisse. He notes, “Production not only supplies a material for the need, but it also supplies a need for the material…. The need which consumption feels for the object is created by the perception of it. The object of art—like every other product—creates a public which is sensitive to art and enjoys beauty. Production thus not only creates an object for the subject, but also a subject for the object.”34 Here Marx attributes all creative power to the producer, and if this were the case, there would be no possibility of a failed commodity.35 But he does grasp the essential role that the production of commodities plays in creating its own market, which is what political economists like Smith and Ricardo don’t comprehend. Capitalists are not trying to create socially useful products but rather products that foment socially useless desires.
The apologists for capitalism get around this argument against capitalism’s self-justification by redefining the term utility in a tautological way. Capitalism doesn’t have to provide what we define as socially useful; what is socially useful is socially useful because capitalism provides it. As David Ricardo, the inventor of this idea, puts it, “If a commodity were in no way useful—in other words, if it could in no way contribute to our gratification—it would be destitute of exchangeable value, however scarce it might be, or whatever quantity of labour might be necessary to procure it.”36 Our acts of consumption themselves respond to the exigencies of utility, and any commodity that doesn’t speak to our “gratification” will go unsold. That is to say, there is no such thing as a superfluous need or what Marx identifies as the creation of needs. If an industry can create a market for a commodity, the incipient need for this commodity must have already existed in consumers.
The brilliance of Ricardo’s formulation has stood the test of time, and we should have a proper appreciation for it. Prominent defenders of capitalism in the twentieth century, like F. A. Hayek and Milton Friedman, continued to reason like this in order to justify the ways of capitalism to humanity. Ricardo’s logic cannot be countered because it is perfectly circular: capitalism gratifies human desires, but it is only through the free market that we can know those desires. Ricardo never articulates the nature of human desires prior to their fulfillment, which renders his solution so elegant and utterly irrefutable. From this perspective, any attempt to argue for an alternative would ipso facto represent a loss of touch with desire as such. Though Ricardo’s argument is irrefutable, it does rest on the vitalist assumption that desire is natural, that it emerges out of life itself. According to this assumption, we simply cannot be made to desire what we don’t already desire.
This vitalism founds capitalist ideology, but it founders when it runs into the problem of sacrifice. According to vitalist thesis, sacrifice must be the result of some type of deception—either people being deceived or deceiving themselves. The vitalist analysis thus consists of denouncing those responsible for this deception, those who coerce others into accepting the negation of life. In A Thousand Plateaus, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari place the blame on the figure of the priest.37 Anyone who insists on the necessity of sacrifice and lack, like the psychoanalyst or the Hegelian philosopher, occupies, according to Deleuze and Guattari, the position of the priest and contributes to the denial of desire.
But what neither Deleuze and Guattari nor the defenders of capitalism can explain is how the denial of desire emerges as a possibility. If there is only life, and sacrifice comes as a monstrous deviation from life, the vitalist cannot explain what enables this deviation to occur. In other words, life must already negate itself—being must be self-negating—in order for subjects to have the capacity for sacrificing themselves. There must be a space within life for sacrifice in order for priests to come along and convince people to sacrifice themselves. The victims are either somewhat invested in their own victimization or completely stupid, and even this stupidity would have to receive a philosophical reckoning.
Despite its conceptual beauty, Ricardo’s vision of a closed loop between capitalism and desire must be rejected for its failure to account for the origin of desire. The test of capitalism as an economic system is not that it meets all the needs that appear within it, since this is one it can’t fail. The test is rather whether or not capitalism can permit the avowal of the satisfaction that it produces. This is a test that capitalism does in fact fail. Capitalism relies on the violent sacrifice of workers, consumers, and even capitalists themselves, and it uses this sacrifice to produce satisfied subjects. But this sacrifice can play no part in capitalism’s ideological self-understanding. In response to this failure to make sacrifice explicit, reactionary alternatives to capitalism have proliferated. These alternatives seek a system in which they can rediscover the sacrifice that capitalism appears to deny to us. The first thinker to focus the critique of capitalism on its failure with regard to sacrifice was Georges Bataille, an anticapitalist apostle of sacrifice.
HIDDEN ENJOYMENT AND ITS VICISSITUDES
Bataille was also the first thinker to identify sacrifice with enjoyment. His critique of capitalism focuses on its turn away from sacrifice and thus from the possibility for a true satisfaction. In his riposte to the assumptions of political economists like Smith and Ricardo, Bataille locates satisfaction not in accumulation of goods but in their sacrifice. Since sacrifice functions as our basic mode of satisfying ourselves, capitalism represents an ontological retreat and an abandonment of our mode of enjoyment. Bataille notes, “The practice of sacrifice has today fallen into disuse and yet it has been, due to its universality, a human action more significant than any other. Independently of each other, different peoples invented different forms of sacrifice, with the goal of answering a need as inevitable as hunger. It is therefore not astonishing that the necessity of satisfying such a need, under the conditions of present-day life, leads an isolated man into disconnected and even stupid behavior.”38 Capitalism has failed us, Bataille claims, through its marginalization of sacrifice. In his own life, Bataille attempted to struggle against this evacuation of sacrifice, even once going so far as to spread the rumor that he had been involved in a human sacrifice.39
The problem with Bataille, however, is that his theory of sacrifice is grounded in an ontology of excess energy. We enjoy sacrifice because we are burdened with too much energy: there is enjoyment in the diminution of this burden. But Bataille never explains how this excess arises and how we obtain it. In this way, he misses the creative power of sacrifice, its capacity to form something out of nothing. We don’t begin with too much but with undifferentiated being, and sacrifice enables us to differentiate, to create a value where none otherwise exists. It is the creative power of sacrifice that generates its appeal.
In terms of his analysis of capitalism, Bataille’s emphasis on the impoverishment of sacrifice leads him astray. He mistakes the secularization of sacrifice for its evanescence, and this error leads him to underestimate capitalism’s appeal. If sacrifice was “a need as inevitable as hunger” as he says, capitalism could not endure while turning away from it. The invisibility of sacrifice is not its disuse but its multiplication. But Bataille nonetheless captures the experience of the capitalist subject reacting to the hiddenness of sacrifice in the capitalist world. His thought functions not so much as a critical analysis of capitalist society but as a phenomenology of capitalist life, a life that hides its dependence on sacrifice.
The hiddenness of sacrifice often produces outbursts of sacrifice that attempt to compensate for its apparent absence. The secularization of sacrifice creates the image of a world in which all objects are equal and thus one in which no object has any value. Where everything has a price, nothing is worth anything. Outbursts of sacrifice occur most prominently with contemporary terrorists. The true terrorist is the one who is not fighting for a particular ethnic or nationalist cause but rather struggling against capitalist modernity. This figure finds the absence of visible sacrifice in modernity suffocating. Modern subjects appear to exist without any sacrificial demands: they can display their bodies openly, watch obscene films, and even engage publicly in overtly sexualized behavior. They seem to enjoy in lieu of sacrificing, and the terrorist aims at reintroducing sacrifice into this abyss.
The terrorist always sacrifices others and often sacrifices herself or himself to create value in the monotony of the modern world. Though terrorism involves destruction, it is always also creation. The terrorist tries to gives existence a value that it seems to have lost. But this judgment on the part of the terrorist reflects a failure to recognize how the capitalist system actually functions.
It is true that the tedium of capitalist existence appears valueless. But this is just the result of the transmutation of sacrifice performed by capitalism, not its absence. Capitalism’s secularization of sacrifice actually multiplies its frequency in the social order. Though no one in capitalist society cuts out the beating heart of a sacrificial victim, nuclear warheads, elaborate churches, and slaughterhouses testify to the persistence of sacrifice. And unlike the Aztecs and the Mayans, modern subjects have lost the alibi of ignorance, which makes the presence of sacrifice within capitalism so instructive.
Because sacrifice becomes less explicit and more integrated into everyday life under capitalism, subjects often fail to see its presence and seek out more direct forms of sacrifice out of a sense of dissatisfaction with modernity. This is the dissatisfaction that produces terrorist attacks, fundamentalist revivals, and bungee jumpers. The reactionaries that take up these activities are the direct result of capitalism’s ideological commitment to utility. They sacrifice themselves in senseless activities to proclaim their disgust with utility and their adherence to something of value. But the hatred of capitalism’s universe of utility reflects a failure to diagnose that universe and its mobilization of sacrifice.
To hate capitalist modernity for the abandonment of sacrifice and the desecration of value is to accept capitalist ideology at face value. Though capitalist ideology professes that capitalism is the most efficient economic system because it is the most responsive to human needs and eliminates the unnecessary sacrifices of time and energy that haunt other economic systems, sacrifice remains the sine qua non of capitalism, just as it was for earlier economies. But responses like terrorism, fundamentalism, and bungee jumping themselves play a part in furthering this ideology as well. They work to convince us that capitalism does really eliminate sacrifice and simply gratify needs by implicitly criticizing it for doing so. Their failure to see capitalist sacrifice helps to render it more invisible. But the answer to these reactionary positions should be an analysis of capitalism’s structural similarity to them.
One must only look and see in order to become aware of the ubiquity of sacrifice in the capitalist economy. The moments of satisfaction that capitalism offers are themselves replete with sacrifice, but the system shields us from confronting it. As a result, we accept the capitalist myth that sacrifice belongs to a prior epoch, and either we accommodate ourselves to this world or violently revolt against it. But this violent revolt rests on a fundamental misunderstanding of how capitalism sustains itself. One need not turn to terrorism in order to rediscover the spirit of sacrifice. This spirit has never left. Every act that we perform in the capitalist system involves us in forms of sacrifice, even if the system renders them invisible. Instead of flying a plane into a building, all one need do to experience the most violent sacrifice is to buy a new iPhone.