Postcapitalist Desire

We come across yet another paradox, in the sense that capitalism sets the infrastructure or the structure for something which goes beyond capitalism. Hence, we can reconcile the paradox that is the pervasiveness and ubiquity of capital on one hand with the advent of “post-capitalism” in the postmodern age on the other hand. And the main reason for why this change or transformation even occurs in the character and nature of capitalism is because desire is “immanent” to capital. To borrow from one post-capitalist expert, there is “a new world that is about to break out of this monolithic, dreary, grey, boring control system.” He added: “And that is what happened!”

All of the aforementioned also reinforces the point about how desire is “immanent” to capital. The expert said:

“From my point of view, what I think is interesting about this…is the way in which it suggests there is a problem of desire in terms of capital. The thing about the Cold War imagery – what it’s suggesting is there is no real desire for…Or rather, there is only desire for capitalism. The Communist world, like IBM, and the then dominant corporate capitalist world, is boring and dreary, and that’s an objection to it! The new capitalist world won’t be like that. The new capitalist world will be about desire in a way that the Communist world won’t be.”

But consider what it took in order to get to what one would consider as the world of “postcapitalist desire.” We had to experience the boring and dreary Soviet experience for ourselves over the course of the last two decades or so in order to conceive of this “new world” in which “postcapitalist desire” is “immanent.” And as mentioned before, the issue is not capital itself. If we were to free ourselves from what is “immanent” to capital, then capital itself is of secondary importance, and capital becomes a tangential issue. But given that even the “proletariat” is bound to what is “immanent” to capital, it follows that postcapitalist desire has to be reconciled with capital one way or another. There is a paradox that must ultimately be reconciled. But in terms of the basic narrative which one can decipher behind the “Antifa” types and the “Occupy Wall Street” types, the postcapitalist expert wrote:

“There’s a narrative behind it, which is a story about desire. These protestors have the products of advanced capitalism, therefore…it’s not only that they’re hypocrites, it’s that they don’t really want what they say they want. They don’t really want a wealth beyond capitalism. What they want is all of the fruits of capitalism – and ultimately that’s why capitalism will win. They may claim, ethically, that they want to live in a different world but libidinally, at the level of desire, they are committed to living within the current capitalist world.” 

But then again, given the “libidinal infrastructure” which capitalism sets, capitalism transforms and in turn sets something which goes beyond capital. The paradox is that given that there is something which is “immanent” to capital, whatever it is that is immanent to capital – namely, desire – will lead us to a truth or a reality that goes beyond capital. The question of whether we should stick to the mainstream capitalist economy or move towards a “community economy” with “Universal Basic Income” (UBI) and other social benefits and services will not really lead to an answer or solution as to how we can overcome what is essentially a “capitalist dystopia.” Paradoxically, what is central to post-capitalism is what is “immanent” to capital itself, and given that what is immanent to capital goes beyond capital, the result or the outcome is that capitalism sets the infrastructure or structure for something which goes beyond itself. In turn, this sets us into uncharted territory and uncertainty.