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Capital and the Erotic Life


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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