Capitalism and Desire: The Psychic Cost of Free Markets

Many Marxists, including Marx himself, see Hegel as the apogee of bourgeois thought. Georg Lukács, however, assigns this status to Kant and seeks to redeem Hegel on behalf of socialism. Lukács credits him with being the first to address himself seriously to the ramifications of the capitalist economy. In his description of Hegel’s materialist achievement, he states, “it is undoubtedly no accident that the man who completed the edifice of idealist dialectics was the only philosopher of the age to have made a serious attempt to get to grips with the economic structure of capitalist society.”¹ Though Lukács acknowledges that Hegel requires the corrective that Marx subsequently supplies, he sees in Hegel a great diagnostician of the logic of capitalism.² But what Lukács fails to notice is that Hegel doesn’t just provide a trenchant analysis of capitalist society. He already points beyond this society.

What makes Hegel the most important anticapitalist philosopher, inclusive of Marx, is his conception of infinity. Up to Kant and Fichte, philosophers could only formulate what Hegel calls the bad infinite (die schlechte Unendlichkeit).3 That is, they portray the infinite externally, as the inability to reach an endpoint. To this day, this is how we commonly think of infinity. The break that Hegel introduces—a break more philosophically significant than any other he authors—is that of the true infinite. The idea of true infinite enables Hegel to simultaneously avoid two pitfalls—the finitude of the closed world of traditional society and the infinite progress implicit in modernity.

The bad infinite, for Hegel, has no limit. Like the series of whole numbers, it simply keeps going and going without reaching an endpoint. The finite, in contrast, has an external limit that it can never surpass. Animal life, which always ends in death, is finite. The true infinite adopts the limit from the finite, but this limit does not come externally. Rather than escaping limitation, the true infinite limits itself, like the subject that confines itself to a single project out of a multitude of possibilities.⁴

In this sense, the true infinite is opposed to both the bad infinite that has no limit and the finite that has an external limit. For the true infinite, the limit emerges out of the infinite’s articulation of its infinitude. In the Science of Logic, Hegel offers a contrast between the bad and good versions of the infinite. He says, “The image of progression in infinity is the straight line; the infinite is only at the two limits of this line, and always only where the latter (which is existence) is not but transcends itself, and in its non-existence, that is, in the indeterminate. As true infinite, bent back upon itself, its image becomes the circle, the line that has reached itself, closed and wholly present, without beginning and end.”⁵ This idea of self-limitation or exclusion of its own limit allows Hegel to envision an alternative to capitalist modernity without regressing to the finite logic of traditional society. Though it occurs on the terrain of logic, it represents his great political breakthrough. His new version of infinity offers an alternative to capitalism that remains nonetheless within the spirit of modernity.

To understand how Hegel’s true infinite, which shares the structure of the subject as psychoanalysis conceives it, represents an alternative to the capitalist system, we must explore capitalism’s complex relationship to infinity. The infinite has a clear role in capitalist society. Capitalist economy predicates itself on the possibility of infinite growth, and any idea of an ultimate barrier—even the eventual heat death of the universe—disturbs the development the functioning of the capitalist economy, which depends on constant and unending expansion.⁶ There is an infinite capacity for economic expansion, and if capitalism encounters limitations on the earth, this will necessitate the financing of interstellar space travel.

Though the first efforts at space exploration were public ventures, funding for these missions was always tenuous. The seventh human trip to the Moon by Apollo 18 fell victim to financial exigencies and ended the era of public voyages to the Moon. It is almost undoubtedly the case that private space voyages will soon come to replace public ones, with the result that space will become a genuine site for the expansion of capitalism. The logic of capitalism and its inherent relation to the bad infinite lend it to the conquest of space.

The opposition between capitalist production and the entropy law becomes apparent in Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen’s The Entropy Law and the Economic Process. Georgescu-Roegen attempts to integrate the conclusions of entropy into economic theory, but he also recognizes that the act of capitalist production itself occurs in opposition to entropy and thus would in the last instance founder on it. He claims, “The dissipation of energy, as [the entropy law] proclaims, goes on automatically everywhere. This is precisely why the entropy reversal as seen in every line of production bears the indelible mark of purposive activity.”7 Capitalist production resists the tendency of energy to dissipate by using energy in a creative act. Capitalism struggles against the fundamental law of the natural world, despite an ideology that proclaims its natural status as an economic system.

Foregrounding the entropy law is antithetical to the basic functioning of capitalism. The system reproduces itself through an investment in a future that it cannot squarely face. The entropy law signals the limits of newness, and capitalism subsists on nothing but newness. Capitalist society would collapse in a static state. It constantly aims beyond itself and seeks new laborers, new commodities, and new markets. The development of corporations and even trade on the stock market depends on the implicit possibility of infinite expansion. In this sense, capitalism is both nonmessianic and nonapocalyptic. It can’t envision an interruption of chronological time in the manner of messianism or the end of time in the manner of apocalypticism. This is why thinkers like Walter Benjamin see in messianism a distinctly anticapitalist politics. But the political valence of apocalypticism is not so clear, despite the nonapocalyptic status of capitalism itself.

But no matter what attitude we adopt toward the end, capitalism as a system cannot continue to function in the face of an authentic and unsurpassable barrier. The barrier must remain receding in the distance rather than actually existing. Because it borrows its energy for today from the future, it requires an image of constant expansion in that future. To imagine an intractable barrier is to challenge the capitalist system, even if it ultimately integrates that challenge.

The capitalist system demands the idea of constant expansion as much as it relies on the fact of it. In The Road to Serfdom, F. A. Hayek gives voice to this fundamental tenet of capitalism with his expression of dismay for any intractable limits. He says, “Nothing makes conditions more unbearable than the knowledge that no effort of ours can change them; and even if we should never have the strength of mind to make the necessary sacrifice, the knowledge that we could escape if only we strove hard enough make many otherwise intolerable positions bearable.”8 Hayek accepts that we can imagine a limit, but he finds the idea nonetheless intolerable. The repulsion stems directly from the structure of capitalism itself, which accepts limits only in order to surpass them.

The capitalist bent on the accumulation of capital cannot pursue this endeavor while accepting the idea of an intractable limit. The accumulation of capital works insofar as one can envision its infinite expansion. The moment the capitalist foresees a future obstacle that would put an end to accumulation, she or he will turn to another form of accumulation (such as making a different product or investing in a new company). It is not simply the fact of a limit that derails the individual capitalist’s accumulation but the mere idea of this limit. One invests in future growth, not in present productivity, which is why firms downsize or outsource when they are still making huge profits. The firm’s survival depends on what it will do, not on what it is doing. This same dynamic exists on a systemic level as well.

One finds an expression of the insistence on constant expansion in almost every champion of capitalism. For instance, in his history of finance, Niall Ferguson contends, “There have been great reverses, contractions and dyings, to be sure. But not even the worst has set us permanently back. Though the line of financial history has a saw-tooth quality, its trajectory is unquestionably upwards.”9 Ferguson’s choice of the term upwards conjures an image of space exploration in order to continue the expansion after the Earth itself became exhausted. Thinking about capitalism requires the abandonment of the possibility of an endpoint or of a static point where relations of production have completely stabilized.

Capitalism has developed through an unprecedented growth of population, income, and production. It both feeds this growth and feeds off it. In The World Economy: A Millennial Perspective, Angus Maddison provides a quantitative chronicle of this growth. He claims that there was almost no growth in the first millennium of the modern era and very little in the second before the development of capitalism. But then a radical change takes place. After 1820—after capitalism installs itself as the world’s economic system—growth changes exponentially. According to Maddison, “Since 1820, world development has been much more dynamic. Per capita income rose more than eightfold, population more than fivefold.”10 This incredible rate of growth relative to prior epochs of human history is not just a contingent fact but rather the sine qua non of capitalism.

The need for population growth to accommodate the expansion of capital leads even some defenders of capitalism to worry about the capacity of the system to include the excess population that it fosters.¹¹ Capitalism demands an increasing population as both a labor force and a consumption force, but it also requires that there be too many laborers and too many consumers. Like capital itself, population expands to the point of instability rather than stability. In every aspect of capitalist society, expansion plays a central role because expansiveness inheres in the idea of capitalist production.¹² For most of its champions, this is its great virtue; for many of its detractors, this is its great defect. But no one disagrees that one cannot even think the capitalist system without the idea that infinite expansion is possible. To render capitalism finite would be to destroy it.¹³ On the level of microeconomics, we can see the same requirement.

The idea of unending progress governs corporate behavior, investor decisions, and consumer choices. It functions in all aspects of economic planning within the capitalist system, from family budgets to the policy decisions of international economic organizations. At no point can anyone accept the possibility of stagnation or shrinkage. The worker must earn more next year than this year; the company must predict more growth next year; and the nation’s gross domestic product must increase next year. These demands stem from the structure of the capitalist system, not from greedy individuals or corporations. Greed for more is integral to the process of growth and thus has a central place in this system.¹⁴

Though greed as a structural necessity brings with it many psychic difficulties, the prominence of the bad infinity relieves capitalist subjects of the burden of the true infinite. This psychic relief is an essential part of capitalism’s appeal. The bad infinite focuses the subject on the future and the possibility of a form of satisfaction that will never be realized. As capitalism was in its nascent moments, Blaise Pascal considered why turning our attention to the future would provide respite. He notes, “the present is usually painful. We hide it from our sight because it distresses us; and, if it is agreeable, we regret seeing it slip away. We try to support it with the future and think of arranging things we cannot control, for a time we have no certainty of reaching.”15 Pascal reveals here why we look to future accumulation rather than contenting ourselves with what we have. He diagnoses the logic of capitalism. But Pascal’s description of the present nonetheless highlights the form of satisfaction associated with the true infinite. It includes an awareness of loss, whereas the bad infinite associated with the future posits a definite separation between the dissatisfaction of loss and the experience of satisfaction.

Theoretical speculation about the goal of capitalist subjects inevitably invokes the bad infinite, even as the conception of this goal undergoes significant changes. For classical economists, subjects pursued wealth, whereas for neoclassical economists they pursued the satisfaction of their needs. In both cases the point is that the object is infinite. I always require more wealth, and I always have more needs to satisfy (or I can satisfy them more fully). Even though neoclassical economists base their calculations on needs, they assume that these needs are not finite. Though a particular desire is necessarily finite—I can only eat so many packages of M&Ms—desires themselves are not.

In this sense, the multitude of different desires solves the problem of the finitude of particular wants. Our particular wants can reach a saturation point, but another want will always emerge in its stead. In his Principles of Economics, Alfred Marshall makes clear this basic principle of capitalist economics. He says, “There is an endless variety of wants, but there is still a limit to each separate want.”16 Marshall is able to grant some finitude within the economic structure, but the bad infinite of perpetual increase trumps it. Particular wants are finite; wants as such are infinite. Later, Marshall describes the infinite of endless progress in more detail, noting, “On every side further openings are sure to offer themselves, all of which will tend to change the character of our social and industrial life, and to enable us to turn to account vast stores of capital in providing new gratifications and new ways of economizing effort by expending it in anticipation of distant wants.”¹⁷ The capitalist subject will never attain full satisfaction because it cannot satisfy or even anticipate its “distant wants.” The infinite of desire justifies the infinite of production and consumption.

The infinite can even manifest itself within particular desires. If we examine, for instance, the very particular desire for potato chips, the infinite reappears in response to this limited desire. Capitalist production continues to add new products—and aims to do so infinitely—in order to expand this desire. Thus, the consumer can choose from regular chips, wavy chips, sour cream and onion chips, wavy sour cream and onion chips, and so on. Just when one imagines it’s safe to return to the supermarket without finding a new form of potato chip, Lays invents the wavy, fat-free chip flavored with sea salt. Capitalism has the capacity to transform an apparently limited desire into an infinite one.

The infinite does not only reside in different desires but also in the subject’s overall project. The project is infinite because its ideal is clouded in obscurity. This obfuscation starts at the beginning of the attempt to understand capitalism and continues without any abatement today. In The Wealth of Nations, Adam Smith posits the existence of a “natural effort of every individual to better his own condition.”¹⁸ He assumes no limit to this process of betterment, and the ambiguity of the terms better and condition makes it impossible to say when the project might have reached its end. This ambiguity becomes exacerbated as the theorizing about capitalism and the satisfaction it produces expands on and breaks from Smith’s initial account. Even when later theorists of capitalism reject Smith’s understanding of why people do what they do, they accept his assumption of an infinite movement forward.¹⁹

Behavioral economics develops in response to the image of humans as beings who rationally pursue their aims. In launching this critique, however, behavioral economics remains on the same terrain as both rational choice theory and Adam Smith. It accepts that our desire is infinite even though it points out the ways that we irrationally sabotage the pursuit of our ends.20 Our irrationality in decision making actually provides more possibility for improvement in the project of realizing our desires, but this project itself has no limit as they conceive it. Even if we sabotage our goals through bouts of irrationality, this sabotage is only a disruption on the path to an infinite end, not the source of our satisfaction itself, which is what it would be if we thought in terms of the true infinite.²¹ Hegel’s true infinite, because it views us as fundamentally self-limiting beings, recognizes that satisfaction necessitates self-sabotage, which is to say, an internal limit.

Happiness economics takes as its starting point the behavioral position, and its focus on happiness represents the ultimate contemporary development of the bad infinite. Happiness economics isn’t wrong necessarily but simply provides the most recent expression of the central role that the bad infinite—the ideal of infinite progress—plays within capitalism. In this sense, it is just a new version of the same story. Nonetheless, proponents of happiness economics insist they are overturning the assumptions that have guided the history of economic research. We can see this belief manifest in Bruno Frey’s Happiness: A Revolution in Economics. The title itself bespeaks Frey’s belief about the radicality of happiness economics. According to Frey, “For a long time, economics has taken income as a suitable though incomplete proxy for human welfare. Happiness research shows that reported subjective well-being is a far better measure of individual welfare.”²² Though it may be the case that reports of happiness outstrip wealth as an indicator of well-being, it is nonetheless also true that the level of happiness always has room for improvement.²³

Just like income level, happiness level partakes of the bad infinite or the infinite that never encounters a limit. No matter how much happiness I have, I’m always looking for more, for additional and future ways of augmenting my happiness. Though the theorists of happiness take note of the failure of additional wealth to improve happiness after a certain point, they fail to see the precariousness and ambiguity of happiness itself as a standard. Whether capitalism relies on a desire for wealth or a desire for happiness, in either case it has a necessary attachment to an infinite and incessant progression.

The show constructs a parallel between Don’s advertising campaigns that illustrate happiness just in the future (and yet infinitely far away) and his personal life. Despite his professional success, Don constantly moves from illicit affair to illicit affair without finding any satisfaction in this series of liaisons. Even his marriage to another woman after his divorce fails to end his quest for more happiness. As Mad Men chronicles it, capitalism creates an ideal of success that makes it impossible to see the satisfaction that inheres in our failures.24

This depiction reaches its most straightforward statement toward the end of the show’s fifth season, when Don decides that he no longer wants to work at a middling advertiser with mid-level clients. Instead, he wants to persuade a major corporation to advertise with the agency. He has another partner arrange a pitch meeting with Dow Chemical, a corporation that has already assured Don that it will not advertise with his mediocre agency. The step requires Don to formulate a new type of pitch that will wow the most cynical capitalists.

When Don comes to the meeting, the viewer has no hint of what his pitch will be, but we typically witness Don generate an idea that speaks directly to the incipient desire of the consumer. Don surprises the spectator as often as he does the client, and these displays of ingenuity form a key part of the show’s appeal. But in this scene Don surprises both his interlocutors and us in a completely unprecedented way, not with a startling marketing strategy but with a proclamation about the nature of the psyche. In response to their claim that they already have 50 percent of the market, he tells the executives at Dow, “You don’t want most of it. You want all of it. And I won’t stop till you get all of it.” After making this particular appeal to the capitalist desire for more, Don turns to a philosophical claim that expresses perfectly the underlying capitalist imperative. He asks, “What is happiness? It’s a moment before you need more happiness.” Instead of pitching a particular commodity, Don lays bare the infinite logic of capitalism. As much as self-help manuals in the capitalist system preach the gospel of happiness, Don recognizes that happiness cannot be a lasting state. Within capitalism one must ever pursue more happiness, or else unhappiness will break out.

The identification of capitalism with the bad infinite produces a visceral form of resistance that asserts the claims of finitude. This type of argument is most prominent among environmentalists who see the natural world as a finite barrier to capitalist expansion. As a result, the strategy of many ecological movements is to challenge capitalism with the finitude of the natural world. This begins in earnest in 1962 with Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, a book that preaches the acceptance of limits on human activity. Carson contends that we must work not to transcend our natural world through capitalist innovation but to grasp that “nature is not so easily molded.”25 The natural world, according to Carson and many other ecological activists following in her wake, will resist our attempts to domesticate it, whether through the poisoning of necessary resources or the warming of the planet. The problem with this tack is that, because it presents an external limit, it provokes a capitalist response rather than obviating it. Capitalism views any external limit presented by the natural world as a barrier to be overcome, not as an absolute boundary.

One popular alternative in the ecological movement, Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger’s Break Through, tries to counter the narrative of the acceptance of human finitude proffered by earlier environmentalists like Carson and James Lovelock (in The Revenge of Gaia). Against this narrative, which they label “tragic,” they call for an optimistic ecology.26 At the end of their treatise, they ask those concerned about the current ecological crisis to have the courage to dream about large-scale transformative projects that would enable humanity to shatter the limits that have hitherto functioned as absolute boundaries for both thought and action.

Nordhaus and Shellenberger’s political program successfully escapes the lure of finitude that ensnares earlier environmentalists like Carson. They will not just erect another limit that capital will attempt to transcend. But their success is ultimately also what undermines this program. Rather than react against the logic of capitalism like the environmentalists they attack, they freely adopt this logic through their insistence on the wealth of possibilities for the future. In this sense, they produce an ecology even more in tune with the demands of capitalism.

An ecological alternative to capitalism must elude the Scylla of finitude and the Charybdis of the bad infinite, the Scylla of Rachel Carson and the Charybdis of Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger. Doing so requires reconceiving nature not as an external limit to capitalism nor as a site of infinite possibility but as the internal limit of human society. The social order requires the natural world in order to function, but the unpredictability of this world constantly throws off social progress. Whether it’s an earthquake in Lisbon, the eruption of Mt. Krakatoa, or widespread death of honeybees, nature has the capacity at any time to throw social productivity out of joint. But this limit—this unpredictability and violence of the natural world—can become an internal limit of the social order, the basis for a true infinite.²⁷ By starting with this unpredictability as the limit, social production would orient itself around addressing this limit without any possibility of ever transcending it.

But there is really nothing to separate Sandel’s position from that of MasterCard. In its very successful advertising campaign touting the ability of MasterCard to pay for almost everything, the company admits that there are some objects that have no price. Perhaps the most famous of these commercials depicts an elephant assembling a care package for his ailing keeper. The elephant takes a MasterCard to various stores, and as he purchases the supplies, a voiceover announces their cost. The voiceover says, “Hot soup: $4. Cold medicine: $11. Tissues: $1. Blanket: $24. Making it all better: priceless.” Just like Sandel, MasterCard is perfectly willing to grant that some elements of life cannot be figured in terms of the market. The company doesn’t just use the fantasy of a terrain outside the market to sell their product. Capitalism actually requires this barrier in order to constitute itself as infinitely expanding. What is priceless today, one can be sure, will have a price tomorrow, when something else will miraculously become priceless.

The link between Michael Sandel and MasterCard becomes even clearer when one moves beyond What Money Can’t Buy and examines Sandel’s involvement in massive open online courses (MOOCs). These courses represent an unprecedented expansion of capitalism into the university system and have the potential to unleash widespread privatization of higher education while transforming the majority of professors into the equivalent of glorified teaching assistants for a few luminaries like Sandel himself. For this reason, numerous other philosophers have directed sharp criticisms at Sandel. We should not see this as an inconsistency on Sandel’s part, but as a logical outgrowth of his attempt to set external limits on capitalism. It is just that in this case Sandel is the proponent both of the limit and the expansion beyond the limit. He stands for finitude in his book and the bad infinite in his teaching practice, and he illustrates nicely how compatible the two are.

As Anna Kornbluh points out, the attempt to limit capitalism testifies to an investment in capitalism’s bad infinite, even as it imagines itself responding to this structure. She says, “when capitalism is widely understood to be caused by our material desires, the corollary for moderating or controlling capitalism is to limit our desires.”29 But the call for limiting our desires—or limiting the encroaching of private enterprise on the public world—fails to see that desire always functions on the basis of a limit. This is Kornbluh’s ultimate point, and it points toward Hegel’s true infinite as the only viable response to capitalism’s bad infinite.

In this sense, moral philosophers like Sandel who insist on sustaining some terrain outside capitalist production are indispensible for the functioning of the capitalist system. This is not to say that Sandel is a capitalist stooge or a double agent planted by capitalist powers in the world of moral philosophy—though, given his involvement with MOOCs, one can’t be sure—but that the challenge to capitalism cannot occur through the attempt to limit the system. If capitalism requires a limit to transcend (which it does), every introduction of a new limit will be inherently self-defeating for the would-be limiter of the market’s reach. One must instead rethink the form that the limit takes.

By articulating the difference between the bad and the true infinite, Hegel anticipates the psychoanalytic understanding of how the subject satisfies itself. Though the subject consciously imagines itself making infinite progress toward its goal of total satisfaction, it never arrives at this goal because the totally satisfying object exists insofar as it is lost. When the subject successfully obtains the object that it seeks, this object ceases to embody the lost object. But capitalism promulgates images of the bad infinite and hides the inescapability of the true infinite. The concept of the true infinite was Hegel’s way, given the conceptual tools available to him at the time, of formulating the self-limiting structure of subjectivity.

By structuring our existence around the bad infinite and its ideal of constant movement forward, capitalism focuses all our despair on death and aging. Though human beings have always despaired in the face of death, capitalist society brings this despair to a head. The end of one’s individual existence implies a failure of growth, the keystone of the system. The imminence of our death and our inability to continue growing becomes the fundamental limit that we must confront. And it comes to us as an external limit. Unless we drive wildly on the wrong side of the highway or take eighty-five pills of Valium or eat Twinkies with abandon, most of us will not cause our own deaths. Though we work to find ways to prevent death or offset aging, we know that ultimately we will fail in these efforts. This is the cause of incredible despair for the subjects of capitalism.

This despair leads us to spend vast amounts of money on products that promise to help keep the body fit, hide signs of aging, or hold death off as long as possible.30 To be aging or dying is to betray the bad infinite, to cease to develop, which adds to the existential horror. Not only does one cease to exist, but one also feels guilty for succumbing to this cessation. One should have done more to stay young looking (like tanning) and to avoid death (like staying out of the sun). The imperative of infinite progress manifests most clearly in the anxiety produced by aging and death under capitalism.

Even though he is certainly an anticapitalist philosopher, one could not imagine Martin Heidegger constructing a philosophy around the problem of death prior to the capitalist epoch. According to the early Heidegger, death individualizes us and creates the possibility for authenticity because it is the one event that no one can do for us. While we talk, eat, and work following the model of others, no one can die in this way. Death brings an end to our possibilities and forces the recognition of our constitutive finitude. Its very unavoidability gives death its existential importance for Heidegger.³¹ Certainly, capitalist life helps people to elude this confrontation with death, and this is a large part of why Heidegger thinks of capitalist modernity as a grave danger. But this danger elevates the significance of death and its centrality. Though people died in traditional society, death was not yet an ontological scandal.

Death is certainly a problem of existence. But when one lives according to the demand of the bad infinite, the centrality of this problem becomes magnified and obfuscates other, more traumatic, problems, such as that of eternity. The problem of eternity, however one considers it, is more vexing than that of death. On the surface, this verdict seems absurd. We might understand it coming from God or some other eternal being, but coming from a human being it appears to reflect an inadequate understanding of the finitude of earthly existence. If subjects were simply finite beings, this objection would be a winning one. But we are burdened by the weight of our infinitude as well as our finitude. We are beings not only of infinite striving toward the future but also of the true infinite—an encircling of our own limit.

Unlike other animals, the subject, as Kierkegaard sees it, cannot simply die. As he puts it, “to be sick unto death is to be unable to die, yet not as if there were hope of life; no, the hopelessness is that there is not even the ultimate hope, death. When death is the greatest danger, we hope for life; but when we learn to know the even greater danger, we hope for death. When the danger is so great that death becomes the hope, then despair is the hopelessness of not even being able to die.”32 Despair is the result of an inability to find respite in death, of a confrontation with eternity. One need not have Kierkegaard’s belief in eternal life to recognize the nature of his insight here. He sees that the focus on death actually causes us to miss the real existential bind that ensnares us as subjects. We must find a reason to act, a passion to drive us, and no reason is given to us by the universe.

The eternal is the realm in which one must find a reason for acting in the world. Many of our actions have a motivation in finite exigencies—like the desire for food. But we need a reason to continue living and not simply to abandon ourselves to death. This is where we encounter the eternal. In eternity everything is possible, and nothing makes a lasting difference because no temporal constraints exist. There is an unlimited time to explore all alternatives. This eternity is constantly present for us when we confront the decision of our existence. We face the burden of having to act and to posit the cause of our own act. In this act, we take part in the true infinite with no assistance from external sources. But capitalism relieves us of this burden of the true infinite by translating the existential problem into a question of survival.³³

When Marx discusses the contradictions of capitalism, he is really describing the system as one of true infinitude. This becomes evident in the middle of the third volume of Capital, where he makes a famous proclamation about the limits of capitalism. He says, “The true barrier to capitalist production is capital itself.”34 The project of infinitely expanding the forces of production encounters the barrier of capital’s need to become profitable. A bit later, Marx contrasts capitalist means with the capitalist end, noting that “the means—the unrestricted development of the social forces of production—comes into persistent conflict with the restricted end, the valorization of the existing capital.”³⁵ The limit is not external to capitalism but the product of its own striving to transcend every limit. In the capitalist universe the logic of the bad infinite leads the system directly to the true infinite, and this infinite spells its failure. Marx is able to see this but then goes awry when he tries to imagine communism in response to this contradiction.

The problem with Marx’s conception of communist society derives from his investment in the capitalist bad infinite. In other words, Marx would have been a better revolutionary if he had remained a Hegelian. The revolution, as Marx sees it, would unleash the forces of production without any restriction at all from the mode of production, from capital’s need for self-valorization. This image of a future of unrestricted production jettisons the limit altogether. Instead of continually surpassing their limit (which is what occurs under capitalism), the forces of production would experience no limit at all. They would continue to grow unabated in concert with the growth of desire.

Marx’s image of a society without a limit errs not just due to its fantasmatic nature, as many critics claim. The problem with this vision of the future is that it is not fantasmatic enough. In an actual fantasy the subject does not just envision the complete evanescence of the limit and untrammeled access to the object. Instead, the fantasy introduces an external limit where none exists, thereby enabling the subject to enjoy the object through this barrier. Fantasy focuses on the loss of the object and then shows its reacquisition, but the loss has primacy, which is why only the last few minutes of Hollywood fantasies are devoted to the object’s reacquisition. By completely eliminating the barrier when it comes to imagining the economy of the future, Marx betrays his own critique of capitalism and the communist fantasy of escaping it.

To take an example from The Phenomenology of Spirit, Hegel insists that stoicism as a philosophy runs aground on its own internal obstacle. Stoicism preaches a retreat from the external world into the serenity of the self, but at the same time, it requires the hostile external world from which the stoic can execute a retreat. The unconscious focus of the stoic is on the external world that the stoic claims to disdain. The dialectical move out of stoicism, for Hegel, involves making the unconscious focus on the external world qua obstacle into the basis of a new philosophy—skepticism. The skeptic doesn’t retreat from the external world but calls its reality into question. In this way, the obstacle undergoes a dramatic transformation and becomes the center of the new philosophy.

If we follow Hegel’s line of thought about change, then we must rethink the relationship to the obstacle or limit that capitalism establishes. It cannot simply be a question of dispensing with this limit altogether. To try to do so is to fall into the capitalist trap, as Marx himself does, despite—or perhaps because of—his fervent anticapitalism. Capitalism demands the notion of the natural world as an external limit that it will constantly work to overcome, but it cannot integrate any limit as internal to its own functioning.36 This is what Hegel’s dialectic would demand. His version of communism or socialism would thus be significantly different from Marx’s.

Marx, as everyone who reads him knows, offers very little description of the nature of communist society. The most famous of these moments occurs in The German Ideology, when he and Engels pause during their opening diatribe against Ludwig Feuerbach to offer their vision of the postrevolutionary future. In their brief account of communist society, they portray a world in which limits do not exist. They claim that one will be able “to do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticise after dinner, just as I have a mind, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, shepherd or critic.”³⁷ Marx and Engels provide a description of how socialist society would strip away fixed social identity