Money and the meaning of life: The fantasy of instant wealth

Introduction

Shannon Winnubst diagnoses neoliberalism in her 2015 book Way Too Cool: Selling out Race and Ethics. There Winnubst contends that the idea of work, or labor, has been supplanted by the fantasy of instant wealth.

Modern ontologies of the subject from Locke to Hegel rely heavily on the labor concept. Modern political philosophy unfolds from this concept. If Winnubst is right that the labor concept is eroding, the implications for the foundations of the modern self are enormous. So are the implications for social and political philosophy.

To the extent that Marx’s account is also reliant on the labor concept, the importance of his philosophy to our time should also be diminished. And yet, we find that Marx’s philosophy is more enduring and relevant than ever. To discover why, we will first have to describe the fantasy of instant wealth, and the kind of subjectivity it delineates. Only then will we be able to wind our way back to Marx to see how his philosophy anticipates and addresses those of us who are subject to the fantasy of instant wealth.

Instant wealth is instantaneous, monetary, and limitless

Is the meaning of life to get rich quick? That would certainly explain the way many people have lived in the shadow of a long modernity that promotes a constitutive fantasy: the fantasy of instant wealth.

The fantasy of instant wealth has three features, as the wealth fantasized about is instantaneous, monetary, and limitless. This section investigates each of these features in turn.

That the wealth called for by the fantasy is instantaneous is important. Hegel’s descriptions of the slow acquisition of mediated forms of wealth are not the stuff of this fantasy. The labor that Locke “mixes” is not the stuff of this fantasy (Locke, 1689, pp. 287-8). Mixing is a kind of mediation, and instantaneous wealth is unmediated, and so without content or history in both time and space.

The fantasy is a fantasy of immediacy. It repudiates the mediations that are a necessary feature of the labor concept, and so this feature of the fantasy’s structure can be seen as a reaction to the labor concept. I cannot have worked for the wealth: it must simply appear. As Winnubst points out, immediacy is precisely what separates the cool from the uncool (2015, p. 60). Instant wealth comes from an idea, one which springs spontaneously from a creative self who is able to break all of the normative laws of drudgery, bureaucracy, hierarchy, repetition, or patiently acquired skill.

Socially, the fantasy’s dominance also produces the need to painstakingly erase all the signs of one’s own labor. This can be easy to accomplish. It may have taken decades to think about an essay—and months to write it down—but one can make light of this labor to others, diminishing its true scope. Alternatively, the erasure of labor can be painstaking. Historian Anne McClintock makes the point elegantly in her 1995 study of Victorian England, where domestic work by nouveau riche bourgeois women, as she puts it, “had to be accompanied by the historically unprecedented labor of rendering invisible every sign of that labor” in order to confirm participation in a leisured or respectable class (McClintock, 1995, p. 162).

The demand to erase one’s labors is now greater than ever, as the absence of labor is a staple feature of the fantasy of instant wealth. Not only does making labor disappear become a mandate: it becomes an important new labor.

For the same reason, instant wealth can only take a monetary form. This is its second characteristic. Money elegantly abstracts from all content about how it was acquired, by whom, when, or for what. It abstracts from any object into which it might be realized: dangling the prospects of its universal equivalence tantalizingly before its possessor. Indeed, having wealth in money form allows me to allocate it many times over in my imagination before, ever disappointingly, having to do so in reality. This can even be exploited in reverse: intellectuals can be more readily recruited to university administrative events if they are asked to imagine their $200 honorarium as a single bottle of wine rather than as a contribution to daily medical or rent expenses.

The monetary form is the basis of a number of wonderful new discussions in Marxist theory and especially those of Christian Lotz (2014), Martha Campbell (2017) and Patrick Murray (2017). With crypto-currencies, change to the monetary form is again newly present to our minds.

These discussions interpret Marx’s basic point that money does and is nothing in itself, and yet it functions as a symbolic placeholder for everything. As he writes in the Grundrisse’s chapter on money, much of which is condensed and eliminated in Capital’s discussion of Commodity Fetishism:

Money satisfies every need, insofar as it can be exchanged for the desired object of every need, regardless of any particularity. The commodity possesses this property only through the mediation of money. Money possesses it directly in relation to all commodities, hence in relation to the whole world of wealth, to wealth as such. With money, general wealth is not only a form, but at the same time the content itself. The concept of wealth, so to speak, is realized, individualized in a particular object (1857-8, p. 218).

This is important, because in the fantasy of instant wealth, nothing and everything are sought, simultaneously: and this is what a monetary form enables. The more abstract the monetary form, the better it is at accomplishing this. Hence Marx’s later work moves on from talk of object and individuality, which becomes limiting as money enters more abstract forms, such as credit.

Thirdly, instant Wealth is also limitless Wealth. When you get money, its primary function is to make you want more money. The fantasy of instantaneous wealth, unmediated and so apparent only in the money form, is also a fantasy of limitless wealth. The fantasy of limitless wealth is not a fantasy of lack and then fulfillment, but instead a fantasy of insatiability. It does not obey the logic of desire, with its structure of lack and fulfilment. Instead, no fulfilment is possible.

For Marx, the development of human persons is the development of human needs. Agnes Heller (1976) drew our attention to the concept of need in Marx. Above in the passage about money from the Grundrisse, Marx is trying to describe the concepts of need and wealth once these have been overtaken and circumscribed by Capital. But in many other places Marx makes this circumscription very clear: by development of need, Marx certainly did not mean to encourage the fantasy of limitless wealth.

In fact, the fantasy of limitless wealth obscures enjoyment, development, and, ultimately, also human persons. The fantasy of limitless wealth is the fantasy of the hoarder in Capital, who “makes a sacrifice of the lusts of the flesh to his gold fetish” (Marx, 1887, p. 116).

The fantasy of limitless wealth may appear hedonistic, but is in fact ascetic in the extreme. As Stijn Vanheule puts it, “what the capitalist system produces are suppositions and fantasies of gratification, while in fact nobody enjoys” (2016, 4). Marcuse’s student William Leiss makes a similar point in The Limits to Satisfaction (1976). He then calls for the reinterpretation of needs and satisfaction as the first priority for social change in industrialized nations (1976, p. 126). On this account, our political failures are, preeminently, failures of the imagination, albeit failures of the imagination connected to powerful acts of violence.

Marxist theorists often emphasize the sufferings that accompany the most egregious examples of inadequate material wealth, as Engels does in his book about Manchester and the new poor law that replaced the Elizabethan in 1834 (1845). But what was once localised is now global. Furthermore, everyone suffers from capitalism. As Sean Sayers reminds us, it is unfortunate that the 1844 Manuscript breaks off just as Marx promises to discuss the negative effects of capitalism on the capitalist (2011, p. 28).

If there is an argument to be made that recruits the bourgeoisie to the cause, this is probably it. In fact, the fantasy of instant wealth ensures sufferings indifferent to class, especially the phenomenon of addiction. It also curtails freedom, and for everyone.

Addiction

Lacanian psychoanalyst and practicing psychiatrist Thomas Svolos gives a clinical vignette in his book Twenty-First Century Psychoanalysis. He has a patient, a successful professional who describes herself as addicted to benzodiazepine and alcohol (2017, p. 117). She attends one of those addiction recovery 12 step programs. She reports that the process has left her unsatisfied that anything has been resolved, and that trying to resolve it has led to the development of what she describes as an addiction to shopping. That is, the patient reports that her addictions can migrate from one kind of object to another.

At a bare minimum, then, Svolos notes, he could try to use the itinerant addiction structure to help patients trade out a more damaging addiction for a lesser one. However, a more effective theory could do better than this, and try to explain the itinerancy itself. To do so, it would need to look at the addiction structure, independent of any particular contents. No amount of research on the psychopharmacology of opioids on rats is going to help Svolos explain how his painkiller addict has, in seeking to treat this, become an enthusiastic shopper.

In his book, Svolos points out that addiction now functions as a privileged diagnosis, replacing its predecessors hysteria and phobia (2017, p. 139). Treatment is then segregated according to type of stupefying substance, and with it the opiate addicts are segregated from the shoppers who are segregated from the methamphetamine users who are segregated from the drinkers. Such segregation occludes the realization that the addiction form may not only or even primarily be driven by a stupefying substance, but by an underlying common factor of the addiction structure, no matter its object. Interested in methodology and its application to the clinic, Svolos calls this effort desegregation in the treatment of addiction (2017, pp. 233-8).

Svolos writes that both the prevalence of addiction and its migratory qualities might be related to the limits of pleasure created by consumer objects in the capitalist society. If he is correct, then the model of psychic structure that identifies the agent solely or primarily as a consumer of objects will repeatedly produce the addiction structure (2017, p. 238).

Repetitive consumption of pre-fabricated commodities will fail to produce the pleasures promised, and for two reasons. First, the planned obsolescence of any commodity means its satisfactions have been deliberately curtailed. There will be better, newer things. Second, and more fundamentally, the idea that a commodity could answer subjective dissatisfactions is itself a hoax, albeit a powerful one. And so, the subject reaches out for object after object, none of which is satisfying.

At exactly this point, a desegregated treatment of addiction winds its way back to Marx. But we must turn our attention to consumption rather than production in order to understand it. Lacan points out, in a Milan lecture in 1972, that the companion to surplus value, from the perspective of those who seek to produce profit, will be surplus jouissance, on the part of those who are required to produce surplus value by buying. ^[1] This is because profit comes only when there is a buyer, and so such buyers have to be formed. Such buyers are best formed when we hold that all subjective dissatisfaction can be remedied with a consumer object. This cultural habit functions as the unspoken premise of the fantasy of instant wealth.

Lacan’s “discourse of the capitalist” from the 1972 lecture helps us to understand the formation and function of this cultural habit. In this discourse, the experience of subjective division, indicated by a dollar sign, seeks a remedy for the subjective division in a consumer object S₁. But any S₁ is potentially replaced by an S₂: the newer and better commodity. This source of instability leads back again to the subjective dissatisfaction with which the formation began (Lacan, 1978, p. 33). The cycle is premised on the assumption that every division or discomfort has an answer, and that the answer comes in the form of a commodity. In the course of the cycle, the small discomfort is exaggerated, and the large discomfort masquerades as the small.

The discourse of the capitalist takes an earlier Lacanian model as its point of departure: the discourse of the master (1991, pp. 11-86). However, this earlier discourse meets with a block or impasse in its flow: not so with the discourse of the capitalist (1978, pp. 33). Lacan explains the operations of the discourse of the capitalist as follows: “the whole discourse run as if it were on wheels, it couldn’t run better, but for that reason it runs too fast, consuming itself and consuming itself better the faster it consumes itself” (1978, p. 36, my translation).

Lacan thus gives a picture of the consuming and addicted capitalist subject. Interestingly, this subject is a microcosm of what Marx scholars call the internal contradictions of capitalism: suicidal in the end, all of its tendencies in flagrant contradictions, driving towards its own death.

To return now to the implications for the consuming and addicted capitalist subject, as Stijn Vanheule explains, the discourse of the capitalist exploits desire by denying the structural quality of subjective division, suggesting that particular solutions for subjective division actually exist (2016, p. 7). Vanheule writes, “capitalist discourse actively cultivates the semblance of dissatisfaction, as well as a fantasy of self-sufficiency, completeness and vitality” (2016, p. 7). The fantasy of instant wealth is a fantasy enabled and composed by these two companion fantasies: the semblance of dissatisfaction as well as the fantasy of self-sufficiency, completeness, and vitality.

We can understand the discourse of the capitalist best, from Marx’s point of view, as an explanation of the alienated labor he outlines in his early work. Recall that the four moments are alienation from the object of labor, the activity of labor, from the collective and mindful creation of the destiny of the species, and from other humans. If I can get objects without labor, so much the better, since they are made the goal of all subjective striving. If all labor is a kind of suffering, I feel free only in not-labor, and so in occupying the position of buyer, not seller. In the discourse of the capitalist, the otherness of other people disappears entirely, and with it, both sex and our shared political life.

Addiction’s literal meaning is that I am spoken for, bound over to an object or experience. Insofar as I am unable to break its bonds or the discourse that structures them, I am alienated and unfree.

The curtailed freedoms of capitalist life

Capitalism curtails freedoms, while talking loudly about how it advances them. This is not a new idea. Sean Sayers makes it succinctly, and elegantly, when he writes, in his book on alienation from 2011: “even in the freest of liberal societies, individuality and liberty are limited by the alienation which is a pervasive feature of modern life” (p. 63). And by modern life, Sayers means capitalist life: he is not MacIntyre (1984) or Taylor (1989).

New philosophical interpretations of Marx, such as those of William Roberts, thus read Marx as a species of republicanism, linking Marx’s freedom project to the republicans who define freedom as non-domination (2016). ^[2]

Roberts’ book Marx’s Inferno: The Political Theory of Capital recently won the Issac Deutscher Memorial Prize like the works of Cohen (1978) and Hobsbawm (1996). Roberts argues that new forms of domination can spring up where they are least expected. They can even spring from the old forms of freedom. In addition, sufferings of the dominator and dominated are usefully linked in Robert’s work: the sufferings are profoundly epistemological and moral. Roberts names these sufferings succinctly when he defines the moral subjectivity of all capitalist subjects as a kind of akrasia. The fantasy of limitless wealth, then, is the fantasy of a subject doomed to akrasia.

Akrasia, a moral failing loosely understood as a weakness of will, has a long and pedigreed philosophical history that stretches from Aristotle to Davidson (1980). To say that capitalist subjects suffer from akratic, rather than false, consciousness is a thousand times more accurate—though, as we shall see, it also has its limitations.

Roberts’ akratic consciousness is not false: options are open to her, and she well knows what they are. But she chooses against the better of these options. She knows better but does it anyway.

It is not a question of finding what decisions in capitalism are subject to this logic. It is rather a question of finding what decisions in capitalism, if any, are not subject to this logic.

I know I should walk instead of drive to work. It is better for the environment and my body. I don’t do it.

In medicine, the doctor chooses a treatment for her patient: not the one she prefers, but the one that insurance will cover.

The boss doesn’t want to keep her workers after hours, but without this, the business will go under. No fools about the general state of the industry in which they work, workers themselves beg her to stay when the business is threatened. Even when it is not threatened, workers seek overtime hours in order to earn additional wages, and are tempted or forced to defect from collective bargaining strategies.

For some time now we have gotten the message about fossil fuels, and from a variety of sources, even if we initially missed Engels’s warnings in 1845 about the skies above Manchester. We summon various collective action responses, but the winning one is denial.

Note that is not only consumers and workers but also capitalists who are subject to akratic consciousness, since, as Roberts points out, the same akratic consciousness is behind both the imperative to exploit and the imperative to agitate for one’s own exploitation (2016, p. 125).

Note also that the akratic subject feels forced to choose wrongly: or, more accurately, unfree to choose rightly. Is the akratic, then, truly akratic, or does her reason simply point in two different directions simultaneously?

I excuse the walking choice with an appeal to the safety of the footpaths, and it is no small consideration. We can see the same pattern in the examples of the doctor and the boss.

At best we pretend we do not know, or, more commonly, enter the denial structure in which we know and do not know at the same time. And so fetish is not illusion; it is domination.

The domination is impersonal. The feeling of having one’s reason split in two directions, the feeling of being forced to choose the wrong path comes from no one in particular, but from the aggregate impersonal choices of the market or its externalities: unsafe roads, the insurance or fuel industries. We would be lucky if we were able to point a finger, even if it had to be at ourselves.

This impersonal domination is also why calling this state akrasia, while illuminating, is not entirely correct. Registering the error on the terrain of personal faults of virtue misses its structural element. Nonetheless, following Roberts in using akrasia as a tack through the false consciousness problem leaves open possibilities for action that are otherwise foreclosed. The decisive point is that I can still see how it might be otherwise: and, with this, can glimpse what kind of collective action change would be necessary in order to remove the source of the domination that sends me in the wrong direction. The akrasia recurs, but at a higher level, when I do not engage in this kind of collective action.

Conclusion: The fantasy of work

Work was always a fantasy. It is not so much labor but the fantasy of labor that operates in Locke, Hobbes, and Hegel. This fantasy has long been diagnosed and subject to powerful feminist and postcolonial critiques. Why the turf my servant has cut is mine is at issue; what kinds of labor are legible as labor is an issue; which kinds of labor are waged and which unwaged is a related issue; and we can thank Alfred Sohn-Rethel for highlighting the hierarchy that develops between manual and mental labors (1978).

The fantasy of instant wealth has a structural relationship to the work fantasy, since it has inherited some of its features from the function of the work fantasy in the modern, liberal tradition of political thought. This remains true even as the fantasy of instant wealth kills off its father. For the work fantasy also attempted to hold together the semblance of dissatisfaction with the fantasy of self-sufficiency, completeness, and vitality, and all on the background of domination.

Marx knows that labor is a fantasy, and this is especially apparent in his later work. Marx’s philosophy can be characterized, accurately, as a continual clarification of the labor concept he inherits from Hegel. There is labor and wage labor; division of labor and labor theories of value; concrete and abstract labor; and, finally, labor power. In the end he qualifies the labor concept in so many ways and repeats it so many times that its referent, as in a chant or prayer, simply melts away.

What remains is Marx’s idea of a wealth that is not the fantasy of instant wealth. Such wealth includes the freedoms, needs, persons, and communities that the fantasy of instant wealth forecloses. A powerful and concerted set of forces works to get us to adopt getting rich quick as the meaning of life: forces by which we will be duped in our search for non-akratic ways of living.