Capitalist society is effectively
governed by capital, and is therefore driven by the implacable need of capital
to grow. Capital must accumulate, bring more and more of the world into its
clutches in the form of commodities, resources, human labor, and human desire
for what it produces. Since that is its one and only interest, it has no
concern for human or any other kind of life or for the conditions that sustain
life. Those who work for capital, who manage pieces of capital in the endless
process of investment, profit and growth, have sold their souls to capital in a
Faustian bargain for wealth and the power that wealth brings. What are the
fruits of this bargain, and what it would mean to undo it?
People who sell their souls to the
devil–i.e capital–become instruments
of capital. They reduce themselves to mere calculators of costs and benefits,
sworn to manipulate people and resources in whatever ways will increase the
return on investment. Regardless of any personal feelings they may have about
damage done to people, animals, or the biosphere, as practicing capitalists they
must work to advance the interests of their share of capital, and that includes
insisting that what they are doing is within their rights and is even good for
the world.
How, then, have they lost their souls when they do this? To have a soul
is to inhabit a living, loving, feeling, sensing, thinking, and caring body. It
means being sensitive and responsive to the world, especially to each other.
Most people start out as children with souls in this sense, and with the
capacity to expand, fine-tune, and take increasing pleasure in the world around
them and in their relationships with others. Art is one way we can enhance our
awareness and love of the world. It is this open and ever expanding sensitivity
to and empathy with people’s lives that is truncated by devoting oneself to
capital. The masters and servants of capital may retain human feelings and sensitivity to
friends and family, and even to works of art. It is in their role as
capitalists that they prune their souls down to pure economic calculation.
It’s not only the managers of
capital, those who take on the goals of capital as their own, whose souls are
truncated by capital. Capital strives to reduce all our desires to the desire
for money, and money is provided to those who successfully compete with each
other for the positions that capital makes available. That gives all of us
reason to regard the interests of our fellow human beings as antagonistic to
our own, limiting our empathy for them. (Capitalists exacerbate this antagonism
by emphasizing artificial differences like “race” and “immigrant” to prevent
working people from uniting against them.) At the same time, legions of people
work to help folks find common ground with others and thereby to retain their
souls—their connectedness to others.
Capital colonizes our souls by
offering us substitute satisfactions: the pleasures of buying and having. Instead
of enjoying our relations with the world and each other, we are led to imagine
that the latest, biggest, and shiniest gadget will satisfy our desires and
evoke the envy of our neighbors. So to the extent that our hopes and dreams
revolve around exciting new possessions and the money to buy them, our souls have been taken over by
capital. The desire to get and to have suffocate the pleasures of being and
doing – and loving.
What this means is that the
sensuous side of life, the erotic response to the world and to each other is
shackled by the requirements of life lived by the dictates of capital. The
erotic is confined to the kind of sex modeled for us in the media: pornography,
advertising, movies and TV. So the rest of life, including our work, becomes what
we must do regardless of our desires.
Erotic enjoyment, pared down to mere sex, is restricted to what little free
time we have after work, paying bills, childcare and keeping house are done.
Audre Lorde writes,
The
principle horror of any system which defines the good in terms of profit rather
than in terms of human need or which defines human need to the exclusion of the
psychic and emotional components of that need – the principle horror of such a
system is that it robs our work of its erotic value, its erotic power and life
appeal and fulfillment. Such a system reduces work to a travesty of necessities,
a duty by which we earn bread or oblivion for ourselves and those we love.[1]
Suppose for a moment that the
domination of our lives by capital is what has made work a painful necessity
and reduced what we can enjoy to commodified sex and the buying and owning of
commodities. If so, then imagine the result of being free from the necessity of wage labor and the competition for
money. What if we were united in a common social project of democratically
managing the human and natural resources for well-being and enjoyment of
everyone? What Lorde called “the erotic value… and power” of our work, indeed
of all of life, could be restored to us.
Herbert Marcuse’s 1955 book Eros and Civilization makes the case for
this possibility, drawing on, and critiquing Freud. “Under non-repressive
conditions,” he writes, “sexuality tends
to ‘grow into’ Eros—that is to say, toward self-sublimation in lasting and
expanding relations (including work relations) which serve to intensify and
enlarge instinctual satisfaction.”[2]
In other words, waiting for us over the horizon, beyond capitalism, lies a
world in which our deepest desires will be fulfilled as we work together to create
the world which fulfills those desires. Erotic experience is when we know for
sure that what we are doing right now is what we most want to be doing right now. That can happen in good sex. It can
happen when we are making or listening to music we really love, or in a great
conversation among people we feel at home with. Imagine that that was the way we felt most of the
time.
Coda:
Marx famously
describes communism as the society that can “inscribe on its banners ‘From each according to [their] ability,
to each according to [their] needs!'" It is natural for us to ask, How can we
trust those who receive everything they need to work according to their
ability? But such a society, Marx says, can emerge only “after labor has become
not only a means of life but life's prime want; after the productive forces
have also increased with the all-around development of the individual, and all
the springs of co-operative wealth flow more abundantly.” How could labor (or
more accurately, work) become “life’s prime want”? The answer lies in the overcoming
of the antagonism between necessity and pleasure, between work and play, freeing
us to take erotic pleasure in meeting our communal needs out of love for each
other.
[1] Audre Lorde, “The Use of
the Erotic: The Erotic as Power,” Sister
Outsider: Essays and Speeches, p. 55. Thanks to Frann Michele for bringing
this to my attention.
[2] Herbert Marcuse, Eros and Civilization: A Philosophical Inquiry
into Freud, p. 222.
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