The capitalist unconscious names the structural convergence between psychoanalytic and economic processes. Both the unconscious and capitalism operate through the autonomy of the signifier, generating split subjects and surplus objects as necessary structural effects. This is not mere analogy. Marx and Freud discovered the same materialist logic operating across different domains: language and value both function as closed systems of pure difference producing real effects independently of conscious intention.
Samo Tomšić’s work establishes that Lacan undertook a “second return to Freud” in the late 1960s, moving beyond structuralist linguistics to incorporate Marx’s critique of political economy. This synthesis reveals psychoanalysis and Marxist critique as “conflictual sciences” grounded in the persistence of negativity rather than its foreclosure. Both operate through uncovering structural contradictions and logical paradoxes sustaining systems of domination.
The autonomy of the signifier
The autonomy of the signifier provides the foundational principle. Following Saussure, language operates through a cut between signifier and signified, creating an autonomous order of differences. This structural insight becomes crucial for understanding both linguistic and economic systems as systems of difference rather than systems grounded in stable referentiality.
The signifier’s autonomy means it produces effects independently of meaning or conscious intention. Language shapes subjects who speak it. Economic value determines social relations beyond individual awareness. Both operate as material forces despite their apparent immateriality.
Marx anticipated structuralism’s discovery through his analysis of the value form. Exchange-value functions autonomously from use-value, just as the signifier operates independently from the signified. Both create closed systems where elements gain meaning or value solely through differential relations to other elements.
Labour and the unconscious
Freud developed what can be termed a labour theory of the unconscious. The Interpretation of Dreams privileges “Traumarbeit” (dreamwork), establishing psychoanalysis as fundamentally concerned with labour processes rather than mere interpretation. Unconscious satisfaction involves work: condensation, displacement, considerations of representability, and secondary elaboration.
This labour is abstract labour stripped of concrete qualities. It operates without a psychological subject. The unconscious works without thinking, judging or calculating. Lacan identifies it as “the ideal worker,” knowledge that does not know itself.
The homology with capitalist production proves exact. Both involve labour abstracted from concrete particularity. Both generate surplus: surplus-value in economics, surplus-jouissance in psychoanalysis. Both split between production (labour-power, dreamwork) and representation (commodities, manifest dreams).
Jouissance and surplus-value
Jouissance converges Freudian libido with unconscious labour. It represents the object of unconscious production, paralleling surplus-value as the object of capitalist production. Both emerge as surplus on the background of structural impossibility rather than as fulfilment of pre-existing needs.
The drive differs fundamentally from desire. Desire operates metonymically, always failing to find its object and experiencing surplus as lack. The drive circulates and repeats, finding positive satisfaction through multiplication of objects. Capitalism mobilises drive structure rather than desire structure.
Jouissance has no corresponding need and relates to no quality. It represents pure surplus, pleasure as profit beyond usefulness. This distinguishes it from satisfaction of physiological requirements. Capitalism succeeds precisely by universalising this structure, making all satisfaction contaminated by surplus-jouissance.
Commodity fetishism and alienation
Marx’s analysis of commodity fetishism reveals how the autonomy of exchange-value produces necessary mystification. The commodity appears to possess value as intrinsic quality rather than as effect of social relations. This misunderstanding is objective, not subjective, following logically from how exchange actually operates.
Fetishism differs from simple false consciousness. It describes structural necessity rather than correctable error. The commodity form itself generates the appearance that value inheres in things. This parallels how the signifier’s autonomy generates the illusion that meaning resides in words.
Alienation under capitalism is constitutive rather than secondary. It does not distort some prior natural state. It produces capitalist subjectivity itself through the separation of workers from means of production and their reduction to abstract labour-power. This structural alienation parallels how linguistic alienation constitutes the speaking subject.
Primitive accumulation as ongoing process
Primitive accumulation functions as logical structure rather than merely historical origin. Marx’s account describes how capitalism requires ongoing reproduction of the separation between workers and means of production. This process continues in the present through debt relations and the commodification of previously non-commodified spheres.
The narrative of primitive accumulation operates as myth legitimating contemporary austerity. The tale of diligent capitalists and profligate workers justifies extractive policies. Yet the actual function is structural: primitive accumulation establishes the conditions for capitalist reproduction through generalised indebtedness.
National debt represents the cement of capitalism. Every citizen becomes debtor whilst financial institutions assume creditor positions. This transforms religious debt into quantified abstraction grounded in public credit. Debt binds subjects to economic imperatives more efficiently than direct coercion.
The proletariat as social symptom
Marx discovered the proletariat as social symptom. This differs from understanding workers as conscious revolutionary subjects. The proletariat emerges as the embodiment of capitalism’s structural contradictions, the living manifestation of the impossibility at the system’s heart.
The symptom appears only when symbolic networks operate autonomously with causal power over conscious subjects. Slavery and feudalism could not generate social symptoms because they relied on personal fetishisation rather than abstract universality. Only capitalism’s universalisation through the commodity form enables the symptom’s emergence.
The hysteric functions as Freud’s proletarian. Both occupy positions challenging dominant knowledge systems through their embodied resistance. The hysterical symptom refuses medical knowledge just as the proletarian position exposes political economy’s contradictions.
Capitalist discourse and foreclosure
Lacan’s theory of discourses formalises the inexistence of social relation. Four positions emerge through rotation of elements: master-signifier, knowledge, subject, and object. Capitalism represents a torsion of the master’s discourse rather than a separate fifth discourse.
This torsion accomplishes structural manipulation. It inverts positions of truth and agent, making subjects appear autonomous whilst trapping them in infinite circulation. The capitalist superego transforms prohibition into imperative: rather than forbidding jouissance, it commands “Enjoy!”
Capitalism forecloses castration, the symbolic operation producing split subjects. This differs from repression. Foreclosure eliminates the barrier between subject and jouissance, making enjoyment simultaneously compulsory and impossible. The result is generalised neurosis and the multiplication of pathologies.
Fictitious capital and self-fetishisation
Fictitious capital represents capitalism’s purest form. The formula M-M’ (money directly engendering more money) claims to establish direct relation between subject and object where none structurally exists. Interest-bearing capital appears as self-generating, money breeding money without productive mediation.
This constitutes self-fetishisation, capitalism’s ultimate obscenity. Capital presents itself as autonomous subject without symptomatic social embodiment. The fiction conceals how surplus-value actually derives from exploitation of labour-power.
Financial abstraction extends this logic. Derivatives, credit default swaps and algorithmic trading create layers of abstraction claiming to quantify and manage risk. These instruments mystify structural instabilities whilst presenting themselves as objective knowledge.
The university discourse
The university discourse represents capitalism’s cohabitant rather than its alternative. Organised around the imperative “keep on knowing,” it transforms subjects into quantified subjectivities serving market reproduction. Knowledge itself becomes commodified through credit systems and valorisation metrics.
The shift from Humboldtian ideals to Anglo-American credit points marks knowledge’s full integration into capital. Students become obliged to work on themselves, transforming education into production of labour-power amenable to market calculation. The university produces indebted subjects rather than critical thinkers.
This represents decentralised, anonymous domination. The master becomes invisible, operating through structural imperatives rather than personal authority. Small masters (experts, bureaucrats, managers) enforce systemic demands without embodying mastery themselves.
Psychoanalysis as exit
Psychoanalysis seeks “a way out of capitalist discourse.” This does not mean therapeutic adaptation or individual escape. It means engaging with the structural deadlocks that capitalism simultaneously produces and forecloses.
The analytic discourse inverts the university discourse. Rather than imposing knowledge, it works from the position of not-knowing. Rather than promising mastery, it confronts subjects with their own division and lack. This creates space for recognising how desire becomes colonised by capitalist imperatives.
However, psychoanalysis itself risks incorporation. When it functions as adaptation to existing orders, it reproduces capitalist subjectivity. Only psychoanalysis maintaining critical distance from normalisation can fulfil its subversive potential.
Connections to psychopolitics
The capitalist unconscious illuminates how psychopolitics operates. Neoliberal power exploits the entire psychic apparatus, mobilising unconscious mechanisms, capturing desire and transforming jouissance into productive force.
Emotional capitalism systematises the production of affects serving accumulation. Auto-exploitation emerges when subjects internalise capitalist imperatives, treating themselves as resources to optimise. Burnout results from the exhaustion of psychic capacities through total mobilisation.
Understanding these phenomena requires recognising how capitalism colonises the unconscious itself. The unconscious and economy share identical structural logic, both operating through the signifier’s autonomy and the production of surplus.
Political implications
The capitalist unconscious challenges both reformist and revolutionary fantasies. Reforms addressing surface inequalities leave structural logic intact. Revolutionary consciousness understood as positive knowledge reintroduces the subject of cognition that Marx and Freud displaced.
Genuine transformation requires engaging with structural contradictions rather than promising liberated futures. Neither sexual liberation nor proletarian consciousness can overcome capitalism if they remain within its discursive logic. The task becomes exposing how capitalist fetishism mystifies structural relations whilst simultaneously requiring those relations.
This demands what Lacan terms anti-politics: not rejection of politics but opposition to capitalist discourse’s appropriation of political language. It requires mobilising the pre-identitarian, non-individual subject of revolutionary politics rather than appealing to identity or representation.
The question of negativity
Both capitalism and modern science foreclose negativity whilst depending on it. They present themselves as positive, productive and complete. Yet they require the structural gaps and impossibilities they systematically conceal.
Labour-power represents the negativity at capitalism’s heart. It is the commodity that produces commodities, the source of value that cannot itself be valued adequately. This structural impossibility generates permanent crisis and antagonism.
The subject of the unconscious similarly embodies negativity as the decentred effect of the signifier. Recognising this negativity proves essential for political thought grounded in materialist critique.
Limits and openings
The analysis of the capitalist unconscious provides diagnostic tools rather than prescriptive solutions. It reveals how deeply capitalism structures subjective life, operating beneath conscious awareness through the very mechanisms of language and desire.
This recognition proves sobering. It eliminates naive optimism about easy exits or simple reversals. Yet it also identifies where capitalism remains unstable. The foreclosed negativity returns as symptom, crisis and structural antagonism.
Whether adequate practices of freedom can emerge from this understanding remains an open question. The capitalist unconscious names this paradoxical situation: transformation proves both necessary and difficult, requiring rigorous engagement with structural conditions.