Mental illness has arguably been a major internal hurdle that individuals struggle to confront, whether through clinical treatment or lower-cost alternatives such as consulting religious figures (or even confronting God), engaging in reflective self-dialogue, or reacting against moralistic advice. Another option might be the externalization of depression onto objects (things, others, or one’s own life) through destructive acts.
The philosopher Mark Fisher chose a different path (before ultimately succumbing to the latter), namely identifying the structural causes of mental disorder, especially among increasingly disposable labouring populations (constantly confronted by others—human or machine—who are more efficient or replaceable). By contrast, Todd McGowan challenges the left’s basic causal premise that capitalism produces financial precarity and, consequently, mental suffering.
It is worthwhile to bring Fisher and McGowan into dialogue in order to recover the increasingly neglected problem of labour alienation and its effects on the human self today. That said, McGowan will be treated here as a secondary figure, in favour of Fisher, for explicitly partisan reasons.
Capital and Mental Disorder
The central claim of Fisher’s 2009 work Capitalist Realism can be summarized as follows: mental disorder is not a clinical issue per se, but a socio-political one. Against mainstream psychiatric discourse, Fisher argues that the medicalization of mental health isolates and depoliticizes these conditions, presenting them as atomistic individual hardships. In doing so, it misrepresents their causes and even commodifies them as sources of profit-making.
The root cause of widespread mental disorder, for Fisher, is capital itself—a quasi-metaphysical being that has, throughout history, drained human life in the service of economic production. As he writes:
“Capital is an abstract parasite, an insatiable vampire and zombie-maker; but the living flesh it converts into dead labour is ours, and the zombies it makes are us (Fisher, 2009: 15).”
In Marx’s terminology, “dead labour” refers to commodities, the lifeless products of human activity that embody value extracted from labour-power (time, energy, effort). Such material embodiment of ourselves is turned into capital by converting living labour (the active power of our daily work) into such dead things, by consuming us as its disposable materials for the sake of the reproduction of its life (Marx, 1990: 342). It perpetually grows by parasitizing and turning us into spiritless creatures, full-time zombies.
Capital is thus not merely a mixture of money, labour, and commodity but an apotheosized being capable to reproduce and augment itself with various means, either social or technical, either simple organization of works or complex automation, to generate wealth by assembling human and non-human materials. In this way, it appears as cooperation and the division of labour that are more and more mechanized with constant and rapid technological invention crushing outdated machineries and rusty human skills, making our work and life less or no longer valuable.
When working conditions are increasingly governed by the principles of flexibility and informality (having a decent and stable job seems to be a myth now), when the total subsumption of humans, material goods, and technologies into the capitalist zombie-making universe is the only thing that matters, what remains of us is almost like a sickening residue. Despite initially being a dead thing (money), capital is insanely endowed with consciousness and the will, with its own reason and law to exist, against any external authorities. In an inverted manner, capital drives us unconscious and will-less, mentally dull and ill. “The ‘mental health plague’ in capitalist societies,” says Fisher, “would suggest that, instead of being the only social system that works, capitalism is inherently dysfunctional, and that the cost of it appearing to work is very high (p. 19).” Fisher is not unreasonable to claim depression should be politically treated.
Painful Yet Pleasurable
In Capitalism and Desire: The Psychic Cost of Free Markets (2016), McGowan explores a different dimension of subjectivity within capitalist society. Drawing on Freud’s Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920), he argues that any attempt to cure mental illness would be doomed to fail, if the patients, however appeared to be depressed and inclined to be helped, actually find satisfaction in their suffering (akin to masochistic tendencies) and, hence, unconsciously refuse to be clinically treated. He goes further, arguing it is also the case to live under capitalism.
The apparent product packaging, he instantiates, is the enticing gate to enter the sublime world of commodity fetishism (McGowan, 2016: 223). With the product designed and marketed to stimulate compulsive buying, capitalism exploits the infinite deficiency of human desire, the longing for absolute substance, what he theorizes, in a Hegelian sense, as pure negativity, the never-ending quest for satisfaction that perpetually affirms and negates, buys and consumes, external objects that are disappointingly never identical with one’s self. This constitutes what Fisher calls depressive hedonia, the mental state in which one is not able to function but pursues pure pleasure.
Unlike Fisher, however, McGowan insists that we ought to avow satisfaction with capitalism, which promises but never allows the fulfilment of mental voids. All we need is simply to recognize what capitalism has already provided. That is to say we have had enough. “No revolution can transform dissatisfaction into satisfaction,” he said. With this, he comes up with the following remark.
“Capitalism is not the worst economic system that the world has produced, and it is not the cause of all our woes. Its effects are not universally doleful. Capitalism has provided the economic background for a widespread easing in the struggle to survive, the creation of vast material wealth, the political emancipation of women, the elimination of serfdom, and so on. But its triumphs have exacted an incredible toll that we do not have to continue to pay (McGowan, 2016: 242).”
With such framework, McGowan calls into question the long struggle of the radical left against capitalism, which has been preoccupied with the dissatisfaction to the existing system by revolting against capitalism’s economic megastructure. For him, the seemingly suffered masses, assumed as the product of capitalist repression by the left, might be just the hypocrite rabble that actually enjoys the very mental state in which they are immersed, a painful yet pleasurable feeling about their unfavourably precarious life. To rephrase this in a cynical manner, the crowd might constantly complain about their misery but without any perceived actual threat or danger, without knowing the real cause of their misery which might be themselves and, as a consequence, without actual action to challenge capitalism. What is to be tackled, he pleads, is the psycho-pathological dimension of satisfaction, the dependent attachment to the hazy dimension of the commodity object and the infinite refinement of what we consume, not the capitalist mode of production.
Such fancy bourgeois assertion is an old Hegelian song with Freudian overtones, a stripped-down version of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right (1991) minus the normative or juridical explication of the market and the social division of labour, of the spheres beyond the self. He seems to be engrossed in the question of contradiction and, by assembling Hegel and Freud, he comes up with something like this: the dissatisfaction that there is something essentially lacking in our economic life is actually a mental state that capitalism cunningly programs in our mind, unendingly chasing a never better enough life. To gratify his liberal impulse, McGowan loosely calls for public engagement, as opposed to the retreat to private sphere, by confronting the contradictory nature of satisfaction deemed as social by nature (in a vague manner).
Beyond Capitalist Realism?
Different as they might be, Fisher and McGowan indicate the capitalist system is not only about the appropriation of our labour-power; it is also about the annexation of our consciousness and freedom. To live and grow in a relatively decent and healthy manner, one needs freedom, not a bundle of formal rights on dead legal letters to do whatever one is allowed to do, but an ethical sphere that enable oneself to realize his or her capacity without any substantial constraints and relation of bondage.
Is it impossible to make such sphere not only politically non-repressive but also socially enabling in terms of the participation in and the access to the augmentation of resources in the market without wage labour and any forms of servitude (without being a commuting workforce of capital’s livestock)? What makes possible such impossibility is what Fisher called “capitalist realism,” a widespread sense about reality in which we live that makes us believe there is no possible alternatives beyond the prevailing economic system, that is, the capitalist mode of production.
With this, Fisher opens up the possibility to produce “what capitalism has been unable to satisfy”. “For example,” he proclaims, “the left should argue that it can deliver what neoliberalism signally failed to do: a massive reduction of bureaucracy (Fisher, 2009: 79).” He, moreover, proposes an interesting offer: the collectivization of the resources to treat mental illness and curative antagonism to reorganize the capitalist order. Rather than a mere lament over the domination of capital, this is a fairly practical lay-outing of how to make such abominable thing really dead as it is supposed to be.
Yet, putting capitalist realism aside, still our humble, puny, and miserable living conditions do not allow us to take such grandeur and costly projects seriously. We simply do not, and cannot, have a right to think and dream about such massive alternative system, not to mention realizing it. As capitalist slaves, we simply do not deserve such right. But wait a minute. Is that a capitalist realist expression?
References
Fisher, Mark. Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? Lanham: John Hunt Publishing, 2009.
Freud, Sigmund. Beyond the Pleasure Principle. Trans. James Strachey, in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. Vol. 24. London: Hogarth, 1955 (1920).
Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Fredrich. Elements of Philosophy of Right. Translated by H. B. Nisbet. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991.
Marx, Karl. Capital: A Critique of Political Economy. Vol. 1. Translated by Ben Fowkes. London: Penguin Books, 1990 (1976).
McGowan, Todd. Capitalism and Desire: The Psychic Cost of Free Markets. Columbia University Press, 2016.
