Capitalism bombards us with the image of our dissatisfaction. Challenging capitalism today doesn’t depend on focusing subjects on how dissatisfied they are with capitalist relations of production. This type of response plays into the hands of the capitalist system and the promise of a better future that it employs. This is the response that manifested itself in the nineteenth-century critique of capitalism’s injustice and in the twentieth-century critique of capitalism’s repressiveness. Despite the vast differences between these two lines of critique, they share an emphasis on the dissatisfaction that capitalism produces, and this line of attack does fully uncover capitalism’s real psychic appeal.
Though dissatisfaction with capitalism seems necessary for any critique of the system, dissatisfaction as such inheres within the capitalist economy. Capitalist subjects remain capitalist subjects because they see themselves as dissatisfied beings in pursuit of satisfaction and thereby misrecognize the satisfaction they have found. The critique of capitalism must begin out of our satisfaction with capitalism and not our dissatisfaction with it. But the capitalist system never avows this satisfaction. Recognizing it requires the most radical act today—that of interpretation.
It is important never to take a system at its word. This is especially true in the case of an economic or political system, in which the workings of the system aren’t self-evident to anyone. Even when leaders are caught revealing the machinations that take place behind the scenes, we should not assume that they are giving away the keys to the kingdom. Freud’s discovery of the unconscious implies that the subject knows what it’s doing but cannot articulate this knowledge. As a result, others, from the perspective of interpretation, have more insight into the subject’s designs than the subject itself. This is just as true for an economic or political system.
The secrets of every system are present in what the system says about itself, but these statements require interpretation. They cannot be taken at face value. This imperative to interpret exists for the analysts of capitalism, despite the system’s apparent obviousness. Capitalism deceives us as to its structure and appeal by laying its cards on the table. The proponents of capitalism readily avow that it speaks to our baser instincts, to human selfishness, and to the desire for more. The most extreme of these proponents translate selfishness into a virtue, but even those who don’t see how an inducement to selfishness among individuals might create a more prosperous and thus happier collective. Greedy individuals produce a wealthy and secure social order.
This interpretation of capitalism fails because it never interprets. It simply accepts how capitalists characterize themselves and how the laws of the system explicitly structure the economy. Within the capitalist system, self-interest seems pervasive, and the benefits of the pursuit of self-interest are plain for everyone to see. But the act of interpretation requires seeing what is hidden amid obviousness. What seems self-evident must itself become subject to interpretation, and this is what Marx does in the move from the first volume of Capital to the second.
In the first volume of Capital, Marx explores how capitalism views itself. He famously points out that capitalism operates according to a single imperative. In the place of any religious duty or Kant’s categorical imperative, capitalism proclaims, “Accumulate, accumulate! That is Moses and the prophets!”1 Even manual laborers who are just trying to survive must, according to this transcendental imperative, concern themselves with accumulation in order to survive and possibly prosper in the future. Capitalist subjects cannot get by simply by getting by but must always concern themselves with tomorrow. One always accumulates with an eye to future prosperity, but this capitalist imperative has a superegoic dimension to it, which means that one can never accumulate enough. The imperative to accumulate doesn’t permit capitalist subjects to feel as if they no longer have any need to accumulate. According to the morality of capitalism, too much is never enough.2
The first volume of Capital is an exploration of the dynamics of a system in which everyone tries to obey the imperative to accumulate. Though Marx is critical of this imperative, he doesn’t articulate an alternative. In this sense, he remains proximate to the defenders of capitalism. For the defenders of capitalism, accumulation is the first and last word. There is no other motivation for our action than accumulation or the advancement of self-interest. The structure of the capitalist economy itself seems to reveal the accuracy of this claim: it rewards those who try to accumulate and punishes those who refuse to engage in this activity.
But accumulation is only what capitalism and its defenders claim moves the system. It is not the real engine driving capitalism. It functions ideologically to blind us to the role that satisfaction has in structuring our subjectivity. Even when we are fully bent on accumulating, it is satisfaction that provides the basis for our accumulation. Capitalism survives because we find our accumulation satisfying, but our focus on accumulation at the expense of satisfaction short-circuits the recognition of this satisfaction. The political task today is to wrench satisfaction from the hold of accumulation by exposing the deception involved with accumulation.
The problem with the model of accumulation is that it hides its own manner of producing satisfaction. While the accumulating subject aims at obtaining the ultimate satisfaction in the future, this subject satisfies itself in the present through the sacrifices that it makes to obtain the object it seeks. Accumulation serves as a cover for sacrifice—the sacrifice of time, of energy, of resources, of freedom, and so on. In doing so, it obscures the role that loss plays in all satisfaction. We don’t find satisfaction in having or obtaining a privileged object through acts of accumulation but rather enjoy the object in its loss or absence. The sacrifice that accumulation demands provides satisfaction because it recreates our experience of loss, but no one who is bent on accumulation can recognize the role that loss plays.
Capitalism’s privileging of accumulation obscures the role that traumatic loss plays in our satisfaction. There is no satisfaction without loss. Or to put it in other terms, we are not subjects who might obtain a satisfying object but subjects who can find satisfaction only through the necessity of the object’s loss. Even when we are right next to someone we love, we enjoy what is absent in the beloved, not what is present: that part of the beloved that we can’t decipher. Capitalism’s success derives from shielding our psyches from this necessary loss and its intrinsic connection to our satisfaction. But we can recognize the disappointment that accompanies accumulation.
Whenever we accumulate enough to obtain what we desire, we inevitably find that this is not what we desire. This transformation of the object that occurs when we obtain it derives from the difference between the lost object that animates our desire and the actual objects of desire. No object of desire can ever be the lost object (which exists only insofar as it is lost), but we nonetheless inscribe this lost object within a series of empirical objects of desire that we pursue. Obtaining the object reveals the difference and thus produces disappointment and renewed pursuit of a new object of desire.
The functioning of capitalism depends on our mistaking the object of desire for the lost object. This inability to see the central role of the lost object in our desire creates subjects of accumulation who believe in the promises of the logic of accumulation. We invest ourselves psychically (and financially) in new commodities with the hope that they will provide the satisfaction that the previous commodity failed to provide, but no commodity can embody the lost object. Every object of desire and every commodity will fail. Capitalism thrives on this failure, and we can never escape its perpetual crises without recognizing this link. Only the turn from the logic of accumulation to the logic of satisfaction—with an acceptance of the lost status of the object—can move us beyond the crisis of capitalism.
Capitalism is not the worst economic system that the world has produced, and it is not the cause of all our woes. Its effects are not universally doleful. Capitalism has provided the economic background for a widespread easing in the struggle to survive, the creation of vast material wealth, the political emancipation of women, the elimination of serfdom, and so on. But its triumphs have exacted an incredible toll that we do not have to continue to pay.
The turn from accumulation to satisfaction portends the abolition of capitalism. Of course, the end of capitalism requires a political act, but a change in the psyche must inform this act. Satisfaction is traumatic, but the attempt to avoid this trauma merely results in its diffusion in the form of a crisis, not in its evasion. The attempt to bypass trauma inevitably leads back to it. The more we enrich ourselves in order to escape trauma, the more crises we produce.
This way of understanding the turn from accumulation to satisfaction finds support in an unexpected location, a place where Marx writes a single sentence that conveys the foundation of capitalism and the possibility for emancipation from it. In all of Marx’s writing on capitalism, there are innumerable insights into how capitalism plays on the psyche of those who fall under its spell. Marx hopes, of course, to break this spell, especially as it infects the proletariat. But Marx’s greatest insight into capitalism and its continued survival lies buried in an obscure part of his work, as if he wanted to enact formally the point he makes: it is through the banality of the everyday, not in the promised satisfaction of the future, that one discovers the sublime.
The second volume of Capital is not a page-turner. It lacks the narrative-like structure of the first volume and the astonishing theory of surplus value and profit developed in the third volume. The aridity of the work makes it impossible to anticipate the fact that this volume contains Marx’s most important formulation. The distance from the first volume of Capital to the second is immense because in the second Marx turns away from capitalism’s ideological self-conception that privileges accumulation. He comes to see that subjects do not act as they do in order to accumulate but in order to satisfy themselves.
With this insight, Marx uncovers the key to the third form of the critique of capitalism. The critique of capitalism begins with its injustice and moves to its repressiveness. But the decisive problem with capitalism is not the injustice that it produces or its repressiveness. It is our inability within the capitalist dynamic to recognize how we obtain satisfaction. As long as we remain capitalist subjects, we see ourselves as dissatisfied beings pursuing a future satisfaction. This satisfaction is embodied in the promise of the commodity.
In the second volume of Capital, Marx makes a statement that summarizes capitalism and the possibility of undermining it. It is a statement worthy of Freud after 1920, and yet he made it roughly fifty years in advance of Freud writing Beyond the Pleasure Principle. Marx says, “For capitalism is already essentially abolished once we assume that it is enjoyment that is the driving motive and not enrichment itself.”3 Here Marx understands that capitalism depends on a psychic investment in the promise of the future and that a sense of one’s satisfaction is incompatible with the continued survival of capitalism. This is his most profound statement and his most important legacy. Until we accept that the satisfaction of loss is our driving motive, we will remain the hostages of an economy of enrichment.