Frédéric Lordon - Willing Slaves Of Capital: Spinoza And Marx On Desire

Capitalism keeps making itself contentious. Were it not at times such a repulsive spectacle, one could almost admire the audacity with which it tramples the main tenet of the very body of thought that it flaunts as its ideological reference; for it is indeed liberalism that commands, here in Kants formulation, to act in such a way that you treat humanity, whether in your own person or in the person of any other, always at the same time as an end and never simply as a means.

tienne de La Botie reminds us how the habit of serving leads to losing sight of the very condition of servitude. to convince the many to adopt their employers desires as if they were their own and to occupy themselves in their service.

Does this power a very strange one, upon reflection really belong to them? Thanks to Marx we are well aware that it does not. Rather, it is the effect of a particular configuration of social structures: the employment relation is the double separation of the workers from both the means of production and from its products. These structures, however, do not explain everything that takes place inside capitalist organisations, a task that belongs to the psychology and sociology of work. Rather than seeking to contribute to these distinctive disciplines, this book proposes a more abstract approach, although one which may hold some useful elements for them to draw on: to combine a structuralism of relations and an anthropology of passions Marx and Spinoza.

These two have certainly met, if only through their commentators. While they are not in complete agreement, their affinities are legion, or in any case sufficiently strong that bringing them together would not run the risk of producing nonsense. The temporal paradox is that, although Marx comes after Spinoza, it is Spinoza who can now help us fill the gaps in Marx. For identifying the structures of the capitalist mobilisation of employees does not tell us what these structures run on; that is to say, it does not tell us what, concretely, makes them effective not the ghost but the engine in the machine. The Spinozist answer is affects.

Social life is just another name for the collective passionate life. Of course, this life is organised through institutional forms that introduce considerable differences, but within which affects and forces of desire continue to be the primum mobile. Recognising their deeply structured character does not therefore preclude a re-examination of the employment question through the passions, thus asking afresh how capitals few succeed in making labours many work for them, and according to which regimes of mobilisation. On the contrary, returning to this question may even make it possible to find the common ground between disparate facts such as the following: employees go to work to avoid starving; their enjoyment as consumers compensates them to a greater or lesser extent for their taxing toil; some spend all their waking hours working, and appear satisfied; others enthusiastically join in the running of the company; then, one day, they rebel (or throw themselves out of the window).

For contemporary capitalism undeniably displays a much richer landscape of passions, with much stronger contrasts, than it did in Marxs time. Intent on retaining the centrality of the confrontation between the two monoliths of capital and labour, Marxism took a long time to acknowledge that fact, not without paying a certain price. Was not the credibility of the binary class scheme considerably damaged by the historical rise of the managers, those strange employees, materially on the side of labour but symbolically on the side of capital?manager is the very model for the kind of happy workforce that capitalism would like to create regardless of the manifest contradiction that simultaneously drives capitalism, in its neoliberal configuration, to also regress towards the most brutal forms of coercion. The idea of domination could not avoid being affected by this development; approached simplistically, it is unsettled by the spectacle of the happily dominated.

Countless works have grappled with this paradox, notably within the sociological tradition indebted to Pierre Bourdieu, whose concept of symbolic violence aimed precisely at thinking through the intersections of domination and consent. Nevertheless, the (conceptual) terrain of capitalist domination remains open: how can one make sense of this concept setting aside the cases where employees are downright (and actively) terrorised when many employees appear to do more than merely adapt to their job, find little to complain about in it, and at times appear to derive real satisfaction from it? But making the dominated happy so that they forget their domination is one of the oldest and most effective ruses of the art of ruling. Under the impact of the requirements of its new productive forms, and helped by the growing sophistication of its practices of governmentality, capitalism is on the road to achieving a domination that no longer shows the familiar face of the naked iron yoke.

Of course, the sociology of work did set out to peek behind the gleaming faade of the idea of consent and expose its shortcomings, but without always asking what should be the very first question: what exactly does consent mean? This question is worth asking, since by leaving the matter unresolved one risks seeing the facts of consent (where they exist) destabilise the concepts of exploitation, alienation, and domination, concepts that Marxist critique in particular relies upon as the trusted foundations of its intellectual toolkit. Each of these concepts is perturbed by the new, motivational managerial tendencies that promise fulfilment at work and self-realisation, and that appear at times to be winning the support of employees. Testifying to that destabilising effect is the relative conceptual impoverishment that, in the absence of anything better, leads to the persistent reappearance of that trite expression, voluntary servitude. While it is no doubt a suggestive oxymoron, its flaws those owing to the very fact that it is an oxymoron come to light as soon as it passes from poetry into theory (setting aside the eponymous work).