Marx and the madness of capitalism
Our society produces schizophrenia, Part 4
[Painting by
]This is Part 4 of a four-part series introducing the psychoanalysis Deleuze and Guattari develop in their 1972 Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. See the previous three parts linked here:
“Everything in the system is insane,” Deleuze and Guattari declare, describing the capitalist social system as a whole. Every aspect of capitalism, even “the least operation, the least industrial or financial mechanism,” reveals “the insanity of the capitalist machine and the pathological character of its rationality.”[1] Marx points to this relation between the rationalization of capitalism and its madness when he describes the capitalist—who is “capital personified and endowed with consciousness and a will”—as “a rational miser,” whereas the miser is “merely a capitalist gone mad.”[2]
The system is mad through and through, every last industrial and financial operation. In Part 2 of this series, I wrote about the importance for Deleuze and Guattari of Marx’s law of the tendency for factors such as finance capital to counteract the tendency for the rate of profit to fall. Here, I’ll touch on the industrial side of their analysis.
They describe not only “schizos” but also “neurotics” as products of capitalist production. In Part 1, I explained that in Foucault’s view, pathological forms emerge as avenues of escape from real world socio-economic constraints and contradictions. The various forms of neurosis and psychosis are differentiated on the basis of their varying defenses against anxiety, defenses which are interruptions from the past, from complexes formed in responses to past anxiety, induced now in response to present ones.
With a similar lens, Deleuze and Guattari describe catatonic psychosis as an escape from "the system of social and psychic repression that fabricates neurotics.”[3] But what is this “the system of social and psychic repression”? How is neurosis manufactured in their view? Here, they point to a combination of repressions which operate within capitalist social production, from the workplace to the sites of reproduction in the household.
Haunted by Monsieur le Capital and Madame la Terre
Marx’s Capital: Vol 1 opens with a section on commodity production as a general, abstract conception of a market economy, of rational production in a market.[4] For example, Marx explains that in order for there to be a situation in which “objects may enter into relation with each other as commodities,” there must be a contractual legal relation, “whether as part of a developed legal system or not,” whereby the commodity owners “recognize each other as owners of private property.”[5]
However, Political Economic narratives which envision such a universal social form comprised of free-equal-rational exchanging producers at the historical starting point of capitalism—what Marx satirically describes as the “‘Eden of the rights of man and the citizen’”—are posited against the backdrop of a reality of the capitalist economy in which property relations are always already unequally distributed. [6] Hence, Marx describes less idyllic scene of when the capitalist and the worker leave the sphere of commodity exchange:
He who was previously a money-owner strides out in front as a capitalist; the possessor of labor-power follows as his worker. The one smirks self-importantly and is intent on business; the other is timid and holds back, like someone who has brought his own hide to market and now has nothing to expect but — a tanning.[7]
Marx often refers to the wage-worker as “free and rightless,” for while they are legally free to not sell their labor on the market, or to any specific capitalist, they are coerced to do so by the material condition of their lack of access to means of production.
Following Marx, Deleuze and Guattari write, “there has never been a humane, liberal, paternal, etc., capitalism.” They apply the same kind of insight in their critique of reductive versions of Freudian psychoanalysis, which tend to overly reduce desire to the familial abstraction of daddy-mommy-me, “the Oedipal triangle”:
There is no Oedipal triangle: Oedipus is always open in an open social field. Oedipus opens to the four winds, to the four corners of the social field […] It is strange that we had to wait for the dreams of colonized peoples in order to see that, on the vertices of the pseudo triangle, mommy was dancing with the missionary, daddy was being fucked by the tax collector, while the self was being beaten by a white man.[8]
Rather than seeing a rigid distinction between family and society, Deleuze and Guattari state that “[p]rivate persons are an illusion.” Individual personhoods are derived foremost socially, as derivatives of the functions assigned by the social reproduction process: “Father, mother, and child thus become the simulacrum of the images of capital (‘Mister Capital, Madame Earth’, and their child the Worker).”[9] Citing Marx in the opening of Anti-Oedipus, Deleuze and Guattari explain that structures formed on distinctions such as “man–nature, industry–nature, society–nature” and “production, distribution, consumption” presuppose capital and the division of labour, as well as a “false consciousness" or “delirium” of self and “supposedly fixed elements within an overall process.”[10] This delirium of fixed elements is what Marx describes in Capital: Vol. 3 as “the mystification of the capitalist mode of production:”
the bewitched, the distorted and upside-down world haunted by Monsieur le Capital and Madame la Terre, who are at the same time social characters and mere things ... this personification of things and reification of the relations of production, this religion of everyday life.[11]
Here, Marx critiques the Political Economists’ “economic trinity” of ground-rent, capital-profit and labour-wages, a rationality based in the disproportionality and apparent autonomy of the three sources of revenue. For Marx, the trinity should not obfuscate what is true of all modes of production: capitalism’s particular material conditions and the social relations they bear for individual reproduction are as much its presuppositions as they are its creations.[12]
“The formal autonomy” the three revenues develop is inseparable from labour “as purposive productive activity.” The means of labour as capital and the earth as landed property are material conditions of capitalist production, and their formal autonomy is “an immanently ingrown character that necessarily falls to them as elements of production.”[13] Mystification arises particularly by the personification of the three forms of revenue in the reproduction of everyday life and the basis of these personae in the disproportionate division of profit between them, creating the trio of particular personae incomparable in essence: the landowner, the capitalist, and the worker.[14]
According to Deleuze and Guattari, these elements and their inequality “by the order of classes” are subsequently represented within the family: “the form of social economic reproduction has already preformed the form of the material so as to engender, there where they are needed, the capitalist as a function derived from capital, and the worker as a function derived from labor capacity.”[15]
Capitalist reproduction thus results in the repression of the worker being “spread throughout all of production, instead of remaining localized in the system,” releasing upon society broadly “a fantastic death instinct that now permeates and crushes desire.”[16] Thus, the fabrication of neurosis which involves these mystifying, delirium-inducing processes of psychic repression actually begins in social production. As Deleuze and Guattari write, “social production is where social repression takes place.”[17]
The suppression of a whole world of productive drives and inclinations
In Marx’s history of the development of manufacture and large-scale industry, he explains how the worker is modified through division of labour into an appendage of the system and subjected to conditions with pathological levels of suppression.[18]
In manufacture, the worker’s “connection with the whole mechanism compels him to work with the regularity of a machine:”[19] “[i]t converts the worker into a crippled monstrosity [...] through the suppression of a whole world of productive drives and inclinations [...] the individual himself is divided up, and transformed into the automatic motor of a detail operation.”[20] Noting that “[s]ome crippling of body and mind is inseparable even from division of labour in society as a whole,” Marx theorizes that the “crippling” conditions of division of labour in manufacture are the cause of “industrial pathologies” or workers’ diseases.[21]
With the development of the factory system, the conditions at the sites of production are only intensified and expanded. The factory system creates “a more intensive and a more extensive exploitation of labour-power in all other spheres of production,” modifying the labouring class into a slave class.[22] Moreover, having become an appendage of the workshop, Marx explains, the worker is “branded” by the division of labour “as the property of capital:” “As the chosen people bore in their features the sign that they were the property of Jehovah, so the division of labour brands the manufacturing worker as the property of capital.”[23]
Even in the view of manufacturers, as Marx documents, a distinction is made simply between ‘two sorts of “machinery”: “both belong to the capitalist, but one stands in his factory, while the other is housed in cottages outside the factory at night-time and on Sundays. The one is inanimate, the other living.”[24]
Hence, Deleuze and Guattari write: “[t]here is no metaphor here: the factories are prisons, they do not resemble prisons, they are prisons.”[25]
How, for Deleuze and Guattari, does this process produce something like the death drive analyzed in cases of neurosis? If desire is a productive force at the heart of production, then it remains close to conditions of existence:
Desire always remains in close touch with the conditions of objective existence; it embraces them and follows them, shifts when they shift, and does not outlive them. For that reason it so often becomes the desire to die.[26]
Just as Marx found “industrial pathologies” documented in the medical journals of his day to be symptomatic of the “suppression of a whole world of productive drives and inclinations” found in manufacture and intensified in machine production, Deleuze and Guattari find that when “the conditions of objective existence” shift or face dissolution, often so too does desire.
Afterword: Unresolved social constraints and contradictions
How does this kind of analysis apply to work outside the factory? In his 1990 “Postscript on Societies of Control” Deleuze contrasts factory production—wherein the internal forces of a “body of men” are balanced between increasing productivity and diminishing wages—against the metaproduction of businesses, wherein wages are stabilized on the basis of relentless group rivalry: “a wonderful motivation that sets individuals against one another and sets itself up in each of them, dividing each within himself.”[27] (I’ve written about this in more depth previously).
This description of a motivation by group rivalry which “sets individuals against one another” and divides “each within himself,” fits squarely within the kinds of unresolved social issues which Foucault argues are the cause the pathological world of mental illness: a culture’s inability to resolve the contradictions of its own socio-economic relations—“[t]he social relations that determine a culture, in the form of competition, exploitation, group rivalry, or class struggle.”[28]
Of course, class struggle remains in this context as well. As Deleuze and Guattari make clear in the second volume of Capitalism and Schizophrenia (1980), whatever status this bureaucratic development within the division of labor seems to bear, it remains—as it does in the case of state capitalism—within the category of variable capital:
as long as the working class defines itself by an acquired status, or even by a theoretically conquered State, it appears only as ‘capital,’ a part of capital (variable capital), and does not leave the plan(e) of capital. At best, the plane becomes bureaucratic.[29]
Notes
[1]. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari (2009a [1977]) Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and
Schizophrenia, trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem and Helen R. Lane, (London:
Penguin), 373.
[2]. Marx, Capital: Vol. One (London: Penguin Books, 1990), 254.
[3]. Deleuze and Guattari, 136.
[4]. Jacques Bidet (2009) “New Interpretations of Capital,” in Jacques Bidet and Stathis Kouvelakis (eds), Critical Companion to Contemporary Marxism (Chicago: Haymarket Books), 380.
[5]. Marx, 178-9.
[6]. Bidet, 381.
[7]. Marx, 280.
[8]. Deleuze and Guattari, 95.
[9]. Ibid, 264.
[10]. Ibid, 3–4, 10.
[11]. Marx, Capital: Vol. 3 (London: Penguin Books, 1991), 969.
[12]. Ibid, 969.
[13]. Ibid, 964.
[14]. 968–9.
[15]. Deleuze and Guattari, 263.
[16]. Ibid, 262.
[17]. Ibid, 63.
[18]. Marx 1990, 480; 1991, 142–3
[19]. Marx 1990, 469.
[20]. Ibid, 481.
[21]. Ibid, 484.
[22]. Ibid, 572, 574.
[23]. Ibid, 482.
[24]. Ibid, 722.
[25]. Deleuze and Guattari, 374.
[26]. Ibid, 27.
[27]. Ibid, 179.
[28]. Michel Foucault, (2011 [1976]) Madness: The Invention of An Idea [previously published under the title Mental Illness and Personality], trans. Alan Sheridan, (New York: HarperCollins), 135.
[29]. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari (2009) A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 472 [parentheses original].