Toward a Labour Theory of Negativity

by Anisha Sankar

Review: Infinite Greed: The Inhuman Selfishness of Capital by Adrian Johnston (New York, Columbia University Press, 2024), xi + 367 pp.

Against the conventional eschatology of the philosophy of history—according to which we will know either communism or the end of the world, insofar as these are distinguishable—Adrian Johnston returns to Marx’s critique of political economy to reconfigure the time and shape of capital as an ‘endlessly repeating loop’, indeed, a drive. It was Lacan who first credited Marx, rather than Freud, with the invention of the symptom avant la lettre. Lacan had observed the original subversion of Marx’s method to have exposed ‘the dimension of the semblance’ that mystifies social relations, as contained in the taxonomy of surplus value. Johnston takes up this insight to suggest that Marx was, in addition, the first inventor of the psychoanalytic notion of the drive. This claim identifies the drive in capitalism’s ‘unquenchable thirst for surplus value’ at work: the repetition compulsion of the M-C-M’ formula that chases ‘ever-more surplus value as a valueless end-that-is-no-end’ (xx).

Johnston presents a historical materialist theory of the drive that shows how Aristotle’s own comparison between narcissism—‘the love of self in excess’—and the ‘miser’s love of money’ is transposed by Marx to his account of greed’s role in reproducing capitalist mechanics. In the Grundrisse, Marx declares that the auri sacra fames (‘the accursed greed for gold’) becomes ‘a particular form of the drive’ that is unique to capitalist relations. The ‘mania for wealth’ turns on the historical development of the money form, which has ascended from its function as a universal mediator of exchange to the object of ‘greed, as such’.^[1] The mania for money presents a new kind of pathology; where the old miser’s treasure finds a correlation between his desire to hoard and the possibility of that treasure’s theft (as Adorno suggests in Minima Moralia: ‘the madness of the shabby skinflint had the redeeming feature that […] its passion could be stilled only in sacrifice and loss’^[2]), the capitalist’s mania is fixed on money that grows and mutates as interest bearing capital. For Johnston, this is not a claim about the inherent selfishness of capital, but rather—as Narcissus’ own fate foretells––its dependency on extorting sacrifice for the self-valorisation of value (219).

In this vein, Johnston’s argument critiques the general contention that capitalism depends on selfishness, a claim yoked to a counterpart for which communism depends on ‘altruism, renunciation, [or] sacrifice’. By flipping the equivalents, Johnston reiterates the ways that the logic of private property and the law of value extorts absolute sacrifice from worker and capitalist alike, who in ‘the depsychologized, structural envy of surplus value’ become ‘fungible, disposable bearers/personifications’ (150). This is posed alongside the implication that communism, on the other hand, would be in our best interests (rendered in a sort of utilitarian, per capita flourish: ‘the greatest good for the greatest number’ [xxi]). This is a distinction that allows Johnston to argue that surplus value abstracts (steals, extorts) from human life what should, presumably in his account (and perhaps this betrays a latent humanism at work), belong to us alone. The claim of the abstraction of value from labour-power can be found directly in Marx, who wrote that ‘Capital is dead labour which, vampire-like, lives only by sucking living labour, and lives the more, the more labour it sucks’.^[3] In fact, this is also where Marx explicitly theorises that tendency in the language of the drive: the capitalist, qua capitalist, ‘is only capital personified. […] But capital has one sole driving force, the drive [einen einzigen Lebenstrieb, den Trieb] to valorise itself, to create surplus-value’.^[4] Sometimes, this passage is translated with the use of ‘impulse’, which compels a return to Lacan’s distinction between ‘drive’ and ‘instinct’ (a distinction present too in Freud, though obscured by James Strachey’s translation of Trieb as ‘instinct’). ‘Drive’ brings Marx and Lacan together in its emphasis on the cultural-industrial content of its referent, rather than the avowedly physiological moment of the ‘instinct’: ‘Trieb gives you a kick in the arse, my friends’!^[5]

Johnston reconstructs the Marxist theory of the drive based on two fundamental features of capitalism: ‘first, infinitude/limitlessness and, second, automaticity/headlessness’ (124). That is to say, the telos of the M-C-M’ formulation is structurally oriented toward limitlessness, it is ‘the indefinite quantitative self-valorization of M functioning as capital proper’ (123). This movement—the infinite greed of the book’s premise—is characterised by Marx as an ‘automatic subject’ that renders the economic motor of capitalism with a libidinal charge.^[6] This puts Marx’s theory of the drive in proximity to a psychoanalytic theory of the subject insofar as the relationship between ‘the infrastructural and superstructural dimensions of social formations at the level of objective political economies mediate the structure of drive(s) at the level of subjective libidinal economies’ (107). Identifying the structure of the drive in Marx allows Johnston to argue that historical materialism is a ‘hybrid [of] political-and-libidinal economies’, a claim that is brought out of Marx best with reference to Lacan (4).

Johnston’s is thus a ‘Lacanian-informed return to the roots of Freudo-Marxism’ (93). The Lacanian inflection of this endeavour allows him to push through some of Freud’s own misunderstandings of communism and Bolshevism, revealed in passing criticisms of Marx and Lenin, which lead to Civilization and Discontent’s cynical declaration that ‘the Communists believe they have found a way of delivering us from this evil’.^[7] Here, Freud argues that the death drive would not be altered in any meaningful way by the abolition of private property; even further, that communism would ‘deprive the human love of aggression’ of its satisfaction. Interestingly, Freud’s criticisms encounter an impasse in his own work through ‘many vacillations and hesitations’ in his assessment of Marxism’s import for psychoanalysis. His critiques are often tempered by an enthusiasm for ‘the discovery of the far-reaching importance of economic relations’,^[8] which Johnston reads as a ‘marked ambivalence vis-à-vis Marxism’ (45). This ambivalence primes the Freudo-Marxist well to reconstruct the centrality of the economic sphere in Freud’s work, finding a productive resistance in Freud’s thinking about the relationship between ‘the untameable character of human nature’ and ‘social community’, to say nothing of the place of ‘Marxism’s revolutionary political-economic agenda’ (45). This suggests Freud’s doubt in relation to Marxism is precisely because he is unable to assimilate its conclusions—qua theory of history—into psychoanalysis. In order to synthesise Marxism and psychoanalysis, Johnston turns to Lacan, for whom there is always a more explicit ‘entwining of libidinal and political economies such that within a capitalist socioeconomic (and symbolic) order, the subject’s libidinal interests are mediated and inflected by the demands and dictates of the mode of production characterizing this trans-subjective enveloping order’ (75).

At this juncture, Johnston presents a formulation of the relationship between history and subject as such: ‘the rise of capitalist modernity brings about an extending and intensification of the constellations and kinetics Lacan associates with pulsion and/or désir’ (140). This approach preserves Marx’s historicism while maintaining what is irreducible about the libidinal phenomena that interest psychoanalysis, such that Johnston is able to avoid what he sees as the failure of earlier Freudo- or Lacano-Marxist attempts to ‘broker a marriage’ between Marxism and psychoanalysis (2). Johnston thus intervenes in the intellectual history of Freudo-Marxism. He draws a line of continuity between the pre-Lacanian early twentieth century Soviet psychologists Alexander Luria and Lev Vygotsky, and at the same time in the European context—a grouping Lacan taunts as the ‘sexo-leftists’—Wilhem Reich and Otto Fenichel and the first generation of the Frankfurt School, notably Herbert Marcuse (1, 95). This is followed through to more contemporary figures who have staked a claim in this tradition, including Samo Tomšič, Frederic Jameson, and Slavoj Žižek. For Johnston, the generalised tendency of these attempts to marry Marx and psychoanalysis over-emphasise the superstructural dimensions of capitalism (culture and ideology) in order to produce a theory of political-libidinal economy. Johnston’s critique of the primacy of superstructure helps, instead, to establish the stakes of what he calls an ‘infrastructural analysis’: against what he describes as Western Marxism’s fear of economic essentialism/determinism (he asks: What is capitalism if not ‘economically essentialist’? [278]), Johnston wagers that the economic should be the primary site of this endeavour, rather than the social, cultural or ideological registers in which psychoanalysis might find a more frictionless home.

Johnston is clear that ‘the consumption drives of libidinal economies are symptoms of the production drives of political economies (and, again, not the other way around)’ (103). One line of inquiry that furthers this argument is the converging, yet formally unintegrated approaches between Marxism and psychoanalysis on the question of money as a ‘self-cleaning fetish’. That money and the fetish are both key points of interest for Marx (qua the commodity fetish) and Lacan (qua the psychoanalytic concept of the fetish) is the starting point of this investigation: ‘Apropos the Marx-Lacan rapport in particular, one could say that what the signifier is for the Lacanian theory of the unconscious money qua universal equivalent is for the Marxian critique of political economy’ (160). In Marx, the commodity is a ‘fetish’ insofar as it takes on the mystical qualities that give the semblance of life to objecthood, when ‘relations between persons [are] translated into relations between things’ (171). This is a consequence of a set of mystifications that obfuscate the process by which this occurs (e.g. the wage), and results for Marx in ‘the most complete fetish [of] interest-bearing capital’ (171). Lacan will take this cue from Marx (if a little haphazardly) when he speaks of money as the ‘enigmatic […] fetish par excellence’; the relationship between the fetish and desire (‘libidinal economics’) is always one of displacement: the fetish is a substitute for the mother’s sex (her ‘impossible penis’). This is an association regulated by the universal signifier which yields a metonymic relation between fetish-objects, the way that ‘gold-qua-money is the signifier of desire’s inherent tendency to drift metonymically, restlessly, and ceaselessly from object to object’ (192).

It is unclear that Johnston’s side-by-side presentation of Marx and Lacan’s accounts of the fetish goes any further than the conclusion that the former provides the structural basis for the latter, insofar as the fetish ‘facilitate[s] repression-like obfuscating processes constitutive of a specifically capitalist socioeconomic unconscious’ (160). Perhaps that point is enough, but given Lacan’s own admission of this relationship between the fetish in psychoanalysis and the formulation already present in Marx, the claim could be theorised a little more effectively to address some of the questions raised by Johnston’s intermittent reference to his previous work, Prolegomena to Any Future Materialism. There, for instance, he argues that Lacan ‘introduces a tripartite schema of negatives’^[9]—privation, castration, and frustration—according to which the mother’s phallus is the primary absence that engenders the fetish. It follows, then, that absence is the centrifuge around which meaning (metonymy’s condition of possibility) coalesces. Fetishism ‘has nothing(ness) as its object’ (189). Johnston moves on (abruptly, through the association of veils and mystification) to discuss Marx on interest bearing capital (‘money breeding money’, a movement which turns around itself, ouroboros-like, since, as Aristotle had warned, ‘money doesn’t give birth’), but it stops short of pulling this association through to its logical conclusion: staying with the problem of negativity in relation to the question of value would compel serious engagement with existing Marxist theories of negativity. Chris Arthur for instance argues that a dialectic between value and negativity is present in Marx’s formulation of surplus value, insofar as ‘value is constituted through the dialectical overcoming (‘sublation’) of living labour, which is both negated and preserved (‘dead labour’) as its substance’.^[10] Value, in Arthur’s account, is a movement of negation (rather than repression, as Johnston suggests) that not only exploits labour but empties it of its content; if capital is labour’s primary negation, value is the double negative that follows. As such, Marx’s ‘spectral objectivity’ might be read according to something like a labour theory of negativity: value turns the substance of labour into nothing.

The book’s speculative turn comes, instead, in an argument for a ‘theologized economics’, which hints toward the supplement of negativity’s structuring capacity in relation to capitalism’s social forms. Without, however, making the stakes of this explicit, Johnston argues that the theological dimensions of capitalism (in which ‘capitalism functions as Lacan’s dark God, extorting sacrifices from everyone’ [219]) explains the ecstatic commitment that people have to their own surrender to the ‘God of profane economic infrastructure’ (218). The side-step to theology bypasses what might be most useful about the centrality of psychoanalysis to the project: for Lacan, the drive yokes pain and pleasure together under the grand schema of desire which, in Alenka Zupančič’s rendering, is constituted by the inaugural no! Reading desire and negativity together produces a limit to Johnston’s characterisation of sacrifice as pain (and selfishness as pleasure). This distinction eschews the problem of what we might call the sexual life of value: desire, like value, ‘gives form to a lack’.^[11] This would mean that selfishness is a sacrificial logic—a constitutive impossibility of the self—which produces the real contradiction of value’s engendering of the subject. This omission of a theory of desire finds Eros haunting the scene of value like a voyeur. Where Thanatos demands of the subject her contortion-toward-death at the place where geld, geiz, and geist––gold, avarice, and spirit—converge, the subject’s relation to desire in Infinite Greed remains yet to be theorised outside of its relation to consumption, insofar as struggle (and, no less, the figure of the worker) is largely evacuated in favour of the circuitry that configures the relationship between consumption and production. This consideration does not necessarily invalidate Johnston’s evaluation of the drive, but gestures toward an important supplement: a labour theory of negativity might deepen the economism of a historical materialist theory of the drive by explaining how value, desire, and lack converge to naturalise capitalism’s social forms: precisely why it will not die a natural death.

1. Karl Marx, Grundrisse: Foundations of the Crituqe of Political Economy (Rough Draft), trans. Martin Nicolaus (New York, Allen Lane, 1973), 133–34, 222–23. ↑

2. Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflections on a Damaged Life (London: Verso, 2005), 35. ↑

3. Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Volume One, trans. Ben Fowkes (London: Penguin Books, 1976), 342. ↑

4. Marx, Capital, 342. ↑

5. Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: W.W. Norton & Company: 1998), 49 ↑

6. Marx, Capital, Vol. One, 255. ↑

7. Sigmund Freud, Civilization and its Discontents, trans. Joan Riviere (New York: Jonathan Cape & Harrison Smith, 1930), 88. ↑

8. Sigmund Freud, ‘The Question of a Weltanschauung’ in The Freud Reader, ed. Peter Gay (New York, W. W. Norton & Company, 1989), 794. ↑

9. Adrian Johnston, Prolegomena to Any Future Materialism, vol. 2: A Weak Nature Alone (Evanston, Northwestern University Press, 2019), 204. ↑

10. Chris Arthur, ‘Value, Labour and Negativity’, Capital and Class 25:1(2001), 32. ↑

11. Alenka Zupančič, Let Them Rot (Belgium, Divided, 2023), 88. ↑