Michael Downs on Psychoanalysis, Žižek and the Working Class

This episode is going to be different from prior episodes. Today we’re going to be talking about psychoanalysis. Marx esteemed scientific rationality. Many, including many socialists, reject psychoanalysis as a pseudoscience. I have my own questions, honestly. Nonetheless, there is a significant branch of Marxism grounded in Freudian psychoanalysis, including controversial yet influential thinkers like Louis Althusser and Slavoj Žižek.


On Today’s episode I asked Michael Downs to talk about his essay “Wage Labor and Jouissance, Why the Left Needs Žižek to Understand Workers”. Michael Downs is most famous for his theory blog The Dangerous Maybe. The Dangerous Maybe makes philosophers such as Žizek, Lacan, Marx and Heidegger intelligible to people with little to no background in theory. Michael Downs himself does not have a college degree, but his blog posts have been so respected that professors are assigning his them in their classrooms. In his essay “Wage Labor and Jouissance” he talks about some insights he has gotten from reading Žižek, insights that he believes socialists organizers should be aware of: we must meet workers where they are at. We will fail to bring about socialism if we force our values on the rest of the working class. Our job as organizers is to present them with the tools to take their own liberation into their own hands. This aligns with the socialist organizers from EWOC and the DSA National Labor Committee and other places that you have heard on this podcast.

• Michael Downs' theory blog The Dangerous Maybe.
• Michael Downs' essay “Wage Labor and Jouissance, Why the Left Needs Žižek to Understand Workers” in Underground Theory (2023).
• Downs’ courses on Žižek’s “For They Know Not What They Do”, and an Intro to Nick Land. 

Note: Downs' class on Nick Land is interesting because Land offers a critique of socialism, and yet he influenced some of today’s most important socialist thinkers, including Mark Fisher and Nick Srnicek.

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Transcript

Elton LK: You are listening to CLASS, an official podcast of the Democratic Socialists of America National Political Education Committee. My name is Elton LK. This episode is going to be different from prior episodes. Today we're gonna be talking about psychoanalysis. Marx, esteemed scientific rationality. Many, including many socialists, reject psychoanalysis as a pseudoscience.

I have my own questions, honestly. Nonetheless, there is a significant branch of Marxism grounded in Freudian psychoanalysis, including controversial, yet influential thinkers like Louis Althusser and Slavoj Žižek. On today's episode, I asked Michael Downs to talk about his essay, "Wage, Labor, and Jouissance, Why The Left Needs Žižek to Understand Workers.

Michael Downs is most famous for his theory blog the Dangerous Maybe. The Dangerous Maybe makes philosophers such as Žižek, Lacan, Marx, and Heiddeger intelligible to people with little to no background in theory. And as of recently, Michael Downs has also began teaching his own classes on Žižek, Nick Land and other thinkers. Michael Downs himself does not have a college degree, but his blog posts have been so respected that professors are assigning them in their classrooms. 

In his essay "Wage, Labor, and Jouissance", he talks about some insights he has gotten from reading Žižek Insights that he believes socialist organizers should be aware of.

We must meet workers where they are at. We will fail to bring about socialism if we force our values on the rest of the working class. Our job as organizers is to present workers with the tools that allow them to take their own liberation into their own hands. 

This aligns with the socialist organizers from EWOC and the DSA National Labor Commission and other places that you have heard on this podcast.

One last comment. Michael Downs's essay is published in a book in which one of my essays is also published,  as well as a number of thinkers that may or may not have any connection to the Democratic Socialists of America. I just want to be clear that this book is not endorsed by DSA.

With that, let's go to our guest, Michael Downs of the Dangerous Maybe.

So let's start with full disclosure. We're both published in a book called Underground Theory, and I loved your essay and wanted to have you on the podcast. What's the title of your essay, and can you talk about the book for a moment?

Michael Downs: Yeah, sure. So the essay is called Wage, Labor, and Jouissance, Why the Left Needs Zizek to Understand Workers. And we'll talk about what jouissance is in a minute. Um, but the book, yeah, Underground Theory. So, what we have here is a collection of essays, it's an anthology, and it's made up of working class thinkers, and some of the most well known philosophers and theorists who are world renowned. So we have Slavoj Žižek, Alenka Zupančič, Todd McGowan, uh, you have people like Norman Finkelstein in it, uh, Catherine Liu. I mean, even the, the McLuhan estate. Uh, even gave an unreleased essay by Marshall McLuhan to, to be published in it. And so really big names, uh, Chris Catrone's in it.

Um, I could keep going, but it's, it's, it's all these influential thinkers that have inspired people like you and me, but we're the working class intelligentisa. Right. We're the, we're the people who, um, aren't professional academics and yet. Each and every one of us in our own ways are trying to find paths towards making intellectual and theoretical contributions to philosophy, to political theory, critical theory, etc.

And so that's what this is all about, really, is working class thinkers getting to collaborate with some of the thinkers that They find to be incredibly inspiring and insightful. And it's really a unique thing that our mutual friend, Dave McKerracker, has pulled off here. You don't see volumes like this.

Uh, in fact, I, I really don't, I can't name one where you have people who are people like myself who basically have no, uh, institutional education. Um, I'm an autodidact, um, in a book with someone like Slavoj Zizek. So. It's a really cool project and, uh, I'm really proud to be a part of it, proud to be in there with you, I loved your essay on, uh, Vampire Castle and Mark Fisher and all that, so it's just a all around great thing to be a part of from my perspective.

Elton LK: Okay, so, there's a history of, uh, psychoanalytic Marxism. So what is the relevance of psychoanalytic concepts to politics and ideology? 

Michael Downs: Sure. So part of it is when we're thinking about large scale social movements, thinking about organizing people, um, understanding what's going on in society, I think it's essential for us to have the best possible interpretation of what it is to be human and and what motivates us that we can have, right?

And I think Lacanian psychoanalysis in particular gives us that. I think Jacques Lacan, um, French Freudian, I think he worked out the most detailed and elaborate theory of human subjectivity that's ever been worked out. And when it comes to politics, obviously politics are trying to mobilize people, but if we don't know what truly makes them tick, if we just rely on basic assumptions, um, we can very easily fail because we don't really know what's going on with them or how to appeal to them or how to mobilize them.

And so I think psychoanalysis gives us this great insight into what really makes us tick, which is Not the way we commonly think about ourselves, so psychoanalysis understands that we have an unconscious and this unconscious, the way it, it reasons the way it thinks, so to speak, isn't the way that we do at our conscious level problem solving, uh, self interest driven, egoic level, right? So, there's how we think about how we think, and how we desire, and then there's the actual ways we desire, the unconscious ways we think. And psychoanalysis is what gives us the key insights into all of that. And so I think that's the relevance to it.

And so, for example, I think a lot of the times, uh, leftists think that, oh, if we just tell people what's in their self interest, if we raise self, uh, class consciousness, then they'll act on the basis of that knowledge and organized in such a way as to change their situation, but we often find that that's not what people do.

And so that's what psychoanalysis can tell us is like, why do people, why do they seem to fight for their exploitation as if it was their freedom? Um, And, and the heart, the name of this is essentially death drive. We also refer to it as jouissance or enjoyment, but enjoyment for us as a technical term and, um, it shows us how human beings get enjoyment from self undermining themselves from self destructive behavior and that this is really the, the heart of what motivates us and it's not really trying to establish our, our well being, our safety, our equilibrium, uh, homeostasis, right? That's part of us. We do do that, but we're also doing this other thing that is moving towards disequilibrium, uh, self destruction, uh, You know, chaos, so to speak, and understanding that we have these two tendencies in us, I think is incredibly fruitful when it comes to trying to understand how to appeal to people, understanding how right wing politics appeals to people, how certain left politics.

And so it gives you a way of conceptualizing what's going on in various forms of politics and what we would call their libidinal dynamics, which is to say, what's the structure of the enjoyment going on here? And how does it differ amongst, say, anarchists or conservatives? Or fascists or communists, right?

You start to be able to see that there's different types of enjoyment and based on different types of fantasies and desires operative in these different forms of politics, and the more you get familiarized with them, the more you're able to go, ah, see, they're doing this. But if we did this, then that would do right.

And it's giving you more of an insight into how to appeal to people at more of an unconscious level. So, 

Elton LK: I mean, like, there are often times within politics where we as socialists see that, you know, a group of people, you know, working class or otherwise are defending the rights or defending the actions of, you know, billionaires because we're more invested- 

so we, we see that, um, you know, Trump or, or Elon Musk is behaving in a certain way. And you often find like people running to their defense on Twitter or whatever. How would you describe that?

Michael Downs: Sure. Well, there's two different ways to think about it. I mean, for me, what comes to mind first is that, This, I was hoping we would end up talking about the role of ideological fantasy, because I think that's crucial here.

So, fantasies for us, essentially, and this is again a technical meaning of the word that we get from Lacanian psychoanalysis. Fantasies tell us what the other wants us to be. Uh, it tells us what the other desires, right? So, we don't really know what other people desire. Desire is always a mystery. People can tell you they want X, Y, and Z.

And then if you go and you get them X, Y, and Z, you can tell they're dissatisfied. It's not perfect. It's not what they wanted. So even though you, you followed what they said to the letter, you absolutely were, were faithful to their demand. You find that their demand doesn't actually satisfy their desire.

And so. For children, especially when they're growing up, you want to be in your parents good graces. That means trying to be whatever it is that they desire. And this is the problem though, is that you learn very quickly that you can't figure this out. There's something incredibly enigmatic and mysterious about the other's desire.

And that's because the other themselves, they don't know straightforwardly what they desire. They are divided between conscious and unconscious. So I can't really even know for sure what I desire, right? So, um, if the other person doesn't know for sure what they desire, I mean, it's just a mystery, but you know that when you're a kid, your well being, your, your, your livelihood depends on, uh, making yourself the object of your parents desire and so this is this structure that gets put in place very on or very early on in our lives and the way to relieve the anxiety that comes with not knowing what you have to be in order to make the other person happy is a fantasy and what a fantasy is, is it basically tells you what you have to be In order to satisfy the other to satisfy the other person's desire.

And so we kids start dreaming up these little fantasy scenarios very early on, uh, about what they have to be. And the fantasy is, uh, is a form, um, Of anxiety relief, right? That's why we ended up becoming so invested in our fantasies because they ward off anxiety. They make the other person not so alien because you, you think you have their core desire figured out.

Of course. The fantasy is always just an interpretation of what the other person desires. It's not an objective answer So you haven't really figured it out. You're never going to figure it out But what you've done is figured out how to relieve your own anxiety in the face of the other by having some kind of Some kind of answer to go off of that basically shields you from their radical otherness, right?

Okay, but

Because fantasy does that we're incredibly invested in it. Um, One way to think about it is like fantasy is a shield. Um, a shield against the anxiety provoking, uh, enigma That is the other's desire, right? Okay, but So on the one hand, that's what fantasy does. It relieves anxiety for all the reasons we just said, but it also, it also fills in the lack in the other, which is it's technical jargon, right?

What we're really saying is the other is actually, you can, even if they're temporarily incomplete or, or desiring, they can be made whole, right? Which is to say. They're complete, they have a kind of harmonious being, right? And what we find is that even though this sounds abstract right now, it has practical importance when it comes to how ideology functions or how a given social order functions.

So for example, of course when we're young our parents are typically Uh the key figures in our life, but and that means that we we come up with little idiosyncratic fantasies about how to please Mom and dad right but there's these larger scale fantasies these societal fantasies Like what do I have to be in order to be liked loved appreciated desired By American society in general, right? There's, there's a way in which we, we go beyond mom and dad as particular little humans. Um, and we get to the social order itself, right? So we have to figure out what, what do I have to be like to be accepted by my world, by my society.

And so for America, uh, for example, some of the core fantasies are. Um, the work ethic, right? I have to be a hard worker. I have to work hard and earn what I have and that ensures that I'll be desired by the other. I'll be embraced by the other. I'll be loved. That's the way I ensure that I basically have a good life, right?

Same goes for the fantasy of the nuclear family. Um, you want to be, you want to have a good life within this society. You have to have. A nuclear family. So the point from our perspective is, look, you can say obviously there's issues with the work ethic. I think it's ideological, right? Um, and, and, and there's issues with the, the concept of the family too.

But if. If we don't respect how these fantasies structure people's very sense of self, uh, They're almost the anchors of their lives if we're flippantly dismissive or disrespectful of these fantasies um people take it as a great threat to themselves and This is something Like, I would say this almost as a warning to certain leftists, where it's like, yes, we can do theory and we can know that there's ideology in the work ethic, and we can know that there's issues with the nuclear family, right?

But if we just stab at these things, um, We alienate a whole bunch of people out there because these are not just abstract thoughts to them they are core fantasies that give them a sense of meaning give them a sense of um social mapping they this is Their lives basically are on the line when it comes to these kind of unconscious fantasies and so dealing with the ideology of the work ethic or dealing with the family requires nuance and finesse especially rhetorically to, uh, to navigate these things.

And so that's one of these lessons that psychoanalysis has taught me where, yeah, we can have. all kinds of political issues or ideological issues with certain institutions, but just trying to deconstruct them in the most rhetorically violent of ways isn't going to be productive for us building class unity, building social solidarity.

We have to understand that these people would typically call them values, right? But for us, I mean, they're even more fundamental than values. These fantasies are essential to the very sense of being of the person, to their very existence. And so an attack on these fantasies is an attack on the core of their being.

And that's why you get such strong reaction whenever these types of things are attacked. 

Elton LK: So specifically in your essay, You talk about the connection of enjoyment and wage labor. Yeah. Can you, and you've, you've been speaking to that, like, or hinting around at that, but can you speak to that more specifically?

Michael Downs: Yeah, sure. So, What I'm trying to do in the essay is kind of present the way I see enjoyment, and I should say this, right? Jouissance or enjoyment. For us, it's the same thing. We use them synonymously. Jouissance is the French word, and the reason we tend to use this French term is because enjoyment in English doesn't really carry the same self destructive or intense connotations that jouissance has in French.

So we make this big distinction between pleasure and enjoyment, but colloquially their enjoyment and pleasure are the same thing, right? And so for us, pleasure has to do with what we were talking about earlier, stability, safety, rationality, uh, well being, homeostasis, right? All of these things that help us, uh, Have calm, have us, uh, engage with each other in ways that are rational and flexible and all of that, right?

What Jouissance does is it's all, it's geared towards intensity, uh, the enjoyment and self destruction in excess. And, you know, surplus excitation in the body, right? Which that, that goes against rationality. It goes against, um, social cohesion in a lot of ways. What we find is there's this other dimension of society that thrives on this, but, um, which we, as odds is essentially what all societies prohibit.

Like every society has some sort of. Law code and the fundamental prohibition is the prohibition against jouissance which it boils down like a More like kid level to the prohibition against you can't do whatever you want whenever you want. However, you want it, right? There are rules of operation we do things In line with certain protocols and so you have to conform yourself To the ways that we operate and the kid experiences as a loss of something like I've lost some sort of fundamental enjoyment.

I've had to give it up and sacrifice it on the altar of, uh. social integration, right? Of, of the socialization process. And so we spend the rest of our lives feeling like we lack some key core element of ourselves. And this is really what moves desire, right? And we don't call it obviously enjoyment or jouissance.

These are the technical psychoanalytic terms, but there is this prevailing sense in us that no matter what I get, it just doesn't fill the void, right? And so, Nevertheless, even though we feel like we're always lacking, there's always little ways that we are actually getting enjoyment, that we are actually engaging in these kind of self destructive behaviors.

And what I do in the essay is kind of showcase the various types of enjoyment I've seen operating in my various jobs over the years. And so for example, um, for a while I was a bouncer at a, uh, Arcade bar a barcade and, and I should say every job the the employees. spontaneously generate these forms of enjoyment.

They're not imposed by the capitalists. The capitalists really don't have anything to do with this. It's bizarre to see this auto productive generation of built in enjoyment, right, of how there's a kind of collective ritual. We call this inherent transgression, which is to say there are forms of enjoyment that Even though society prohibits enjoyment, there's secret little forms of enjoyment that actually help to reproduce society.

And you're not really part of a social order, you're not a real member of the in group, unless you sin, to speak in theological terms, right? Unless you sin or you transgress in the specific way of the group. And so, Real group identity isn't in going, Oh, you guys believe this, that, and the other, I accept these principles.

Therefore I'm part of the group. No, no, no, no, no. This kind of official identification with the rules. Yeah. That's part of it. But the real identification is in how you break those rules together. Uh, how you violate these, uh, these principles. And, uh, this is Zizek's great insight, uh, which is his own original insight.

And so, yeah, he calls this inherent transgression. So at my, my barcade job, one of the, basically the nightly ritual was this. So it was all based around really super customer service. All the waitresses are super nice. All the bartenders are great, fun personalities. It's a really fun environment. Second, closing time comes around.

We lock the doors. The nightly ritual was All of the employees start to just brutally make fun of all the customers who annoyed them throughout the night and it just vicious Joking at the the expense of the customers and of course now the the the managers and especially the capitalists They would never Affirm this about the business at the, at the public level, right?

This has all got to be hush, hush, and it's, it's kept out of sight, but this is also part of the, the, the rituals of wage labor that workers have to engage in if you're going to be part of the group and if you're going to be able to maintain your position at the job, and so that, that was part of the ritual at the barcade.

Now I work in a warehouse. And the the inherent transgression there is different. It's not at the customer's expense. It's at each other's expense. It's, it's really, uh, brutal joking, uh, or, or ball breaking as we call it, right? Um, at each other's expense. And it's funny, again, the capitalists don't know about this.

They don't, they don't enforce it. They don't impose it. It's something that this space. spontaneously gives rise to itself. And so the point is, is understanding if you're interested in organizing workers, then you have to kind of reconcile yourself to the fact of, okay, there's going to be some obscene form of enjoyment that operates, that keeps the show running, right?

So this, this really It's a harsh, heartless form of joking at each other's expense. If somebody comes in there and they can't, if they can't do it or, or, or they want to make it an issue or whatever, they're just not going to be part of the group. And um, you have to be able to joke and, uh, joke about yourself, joke about the other, if you're going to be part of the group and that's the issue though, is that a lot of it, you know?

Um, It would be considered politically incorrect form of joking. And yet if, if somebody was to come in there and go, I want to organize workers and you guys are completely inappropriate and how you talk to each other, this is obscene. This all has to change. You immediately lose all of them because you, the point you have to meet them where they're at, which is in part reckoning with how they enjoy, right?

And anybody who workers who feel like you're a threat to their enjoyment. They immediately are going to hate you if, if they detect that you're a threat to it because it's what helps them get through the day. Right. That's part of this ritual is it's what helps the time go fast. It makes the shifts go by quickly.

And so if you're not participating in it, you're, you're part of the issue for the workers. So that was the insight I got is where it's like, okay, to understand how to Organized workers all this kind of worker solidarity It's also this ability to meet them where they're at and understand their form of enjoyment and not immediately uh consider them deplorables or something because uh, because they're not politically incorrect or They don't have certain sensibilities and I I think that is This really key insight when it comes to how we have to think about organizing workers It's not that this stuff is good.

I'm it's not that just like i'm I I was saying i'm not saying those fantasies are Good or don't need to be modified. But the psychoanalytic insight is even if these are problems Moralizing about them, or shouting about them, or trying to shame these people out of them is not going to be the way to deal with them, and in fact, it's going to make things worse.

As 

Elton LK: socialists, we want to stand with those who are marginalized and oppressed. The working class is, uh, uh, central. of that, that we want to build trust with the working class and, and organize the working class because strategically, they're the ones who actually have the power to fight back at capitalism.

So what I hear you saying is that we, through like the rank and file strategy, for example, may go into workplaces with this intention of telling the working class, like, it's in their best interest to fight, you know, come together in solidarity with each other as a class, as a self conscious working class.

Um, and that they are the only ones that can, um, stand up and, and fight, excuse me, and fight for their own struggle, their own liberation. Um, but. As we do that, we're bound to run into, um, people who are, you know, resistant to that in one way or another, or maybe, um, oppressing each other through, you know, using racial slurs or just You know, um, all kinds of things that we, um, recognize these days as being offensive and inappropriate in the workplace and yet, um, ends up being something that you've seen in your jobs.

And I will say that I've seen in my own workplaces as well. 

Michael Downs: Yeah. Yeah. And again, it's not, I mean, this is not an endorsement or celebration of it. It's, but it is, I'm trying to, I'm trying to highlight that this is something that a lot of your typical workers do, and I don't care about their, their race or their gender or their religion.

Right. This is something I find in workers of all different identities, right? They, they all do this, um, or at least most of them do this in some way, shape or form. And again, trying to just tell them, oh, you're just bad or you're You're inappropriate or you need to be shamed if, if that's the approach of the working class, you're going to lose 90 percent of the working class because they were talking about people who break their bodies for a living.

Okay. They don't, they, they don't, they, they view this kind of stuff as. Offensive to them because they do the essential labor. They do the jobs that nobody else wants to do. And for them, they would say this toughens you up and it does in a lot of it, it emotionally toughens you up and not, I would call it, it kind of makes you dead inside, but what it does is it makes them intolerant of.

What they consider to be these, these soft positions. They, they, they, they're sitting there going, we're breaking our bodies. We were scraping by, we, we have no economic security. The future has been canceled for them to talk like Mark Fisher and, Oh, but then you also want us to not talk certain ways and not joke, or, you know, they just are totally going to reject it.

And that's what I see. I mean, look, I, I work with people who vote Democrat and people who were vote Republican. And yet they all hate the politically correct stuff. It's one thing they both have in common that they themselves joke about. And so when I see these different people of different races, uh, different dispositions, all ranting about this and all joking about it, I'm sitting there just going, okay, well, if, if this is the dominant strategy of the left, then the left isn't, isn't going to get anywhere with the vast majority of the working class.

And that is this issue that I'm trying to address. Right? I'm trying to say we have to rethink how we go about having, uh, what our basic attitude or disposition is and simply going, Oh, somebody said something that's offensive. They're, they're canceled. They have to go away or they have to try to reform themselves from the ground up.

Um, it's just not going to work with the working class. And so I guess my paper, you can say is just trying to bring attention to this. This dynamic, um, between what, you know, what you talk about, uh, the PMC, right? The, the more educated liberal PMC types versus your vulgar, uh, brute working class types. And for us, I mean, when us, I mean, from this Lacanian perspective, we would say that the, it's the liberal educated PMC who are going to have to adjust.

Their approach if they want to be able to get anywhere with the working class They have to meet the working class where it's at and then go from there But if they're simply going no, we don't we're just fully We do not accept anything about your basic disposition And that's part of it. It's not even specific jokes.

I'm not for racial slurs or anything like that? Of course not. But this kind of like disposition, I think this is a core element of it, where just you have people who do not find certain things offensive. And again, that goes for all the various races, the men, women, doesn't matter. They just don't have this same sensibility in their disposition.

And, Anybody who brings that to the, the, the equation and acts like that's the moral high ground, and if you don't have that, then you're a bad person. Then you just lost again, the majority of the working class. And 

Elton LK: reading your essay also, I thought about how, when we say the working class, of course, we're talking about lots of different kinds of people who have lots of different kinds of attitudes.

I mean, you talk about two kinds of workplaces that you. Have been in, and you know, chances are that culturally they're quite different. And, um, part of what we're doing as socialists is trying to bring together. The working class and all of the different, you know, um, manifestations of what that working class looks like, recognizing that, um, we're going to have lots of, um, opinions and values that don't all fit together and yet there are things that bring us together, mostly the, uh, struggle to, you know, um, essentially create a classist society, but essentially, uh, to Yeah, at this point, I'm gonna wrap it up partially just because it says we've got less than a minute, um, but actually, um, I, I would like to record a couple more things, so let's just, um, jump out and, yeah, and then I think you'll have to, I think you'll be able to come back into the same meeting room that I link that I sent you before, um, but I have to officially close it out.

So I'm going to do that real quick and then I think I'll be 

Michael Downs: bad. Cool. 

Elton LK: There it is. Okay, it's recording. Cool. And okay, so how does capitalism feed off of our desire? 

Michael Downs: Oh, yeah. Okay. So I was saying how for us, uh, psychoanalytic theorists, we view desire as something that can never Be finally and fully satisfied right desire as such is lack it's to Lack at the very core of your being so to speak And uh, but we try to we try to satisfy the lack fill in the void in as many ways as possible Right, but the interesting thing is capitalism is the one mode of production that is fundamentally structured around Human desire, uh, and and the production of new desires, right?

That's what keeps the economy going. It has to keep selling us new commodities. That wasn't how it was in feudalism. That's not how it was in, um, ancient society or tribal societies. Um, they didn't, they didn't, the very structure of those modes of production were not based on the proliferation and creation of never ending new desires.

Capitalism with its onslaught of new commodities requires our desire almost as part of the material infrastructure itself, right? Like, there's ways you can think of human desire as Part of the very, uh, the economic base opposed to superstructure or anything like that. Um, because it's what keeps the commodity circulation cycle going, right?

And so that's the ideology. around desire in capitalism has to do with how capitalism is always at this subconscious level, unconscious level, trying to convince us that, oh, if you just get this commodity, or if you get the latest this or that or the other, You're going to have the whole package. You're going to, you're going to be ontologically complete, which is to say you're fully complete in your existence.

Uh, not lacking anything. And this is how traditional consumerism really worked. Um, was this promise of. Self fulfillment, you know, you complete me right the line from Jerry Maguire Well, that's what capitalism is whispering in our ears and saying you want to be complete Get the get the last commodity get the get the that final commodity That's going to be the thing that fills in the void once and for all and of course it's ideology because there is no Final commodity to this process.

No matter what you buy, no matter how much you have, you keep on chasing the next commodity and it's a never ending cycle because desire truly is, uh, a lack. It's something that can't be filled in. But that's what capitalism ideologically exploits to its own advantage to keep us buying, to keep us consuming and it's Nobody, I think, is, is better on the, the concept of desire than Lacan, and he's the one who, who realized, like, no, this thing is really, it's a, it's a, it's a structural negativity, and it goes back to what we were saying, where kids early on, whenever they're presented with prohibition, which is to say, they start to be initiated into the socialization process, they know that they're having to give up something, but the trick is, you don't really give up anything.

There's nothing like you don't really hand over. It's not like you cut your hand off and you hand it to, you know, the, the figure of law, you don't really cut anything off from yourself, but you retroactively are constituted as a subject as a person. Through this and so even though you didn't really lose anything The the sense of loss actually is what creates you as a desiring subject And so you can never get rid of it because you never really lost anything to begin with And so that the point is capitalism takes that and runs with it like no other mode of production has and uh Ideologically manipulates us on that basis.

And I mean, that's what advertising has always been about I mean, that's what the the show madman is so great at presenting is um the you know, you see these advertising guys who had this amazing talent at reading People's desire, right? What, what, what kind, what kind of ad do we have to concoct to really appeal to their, their, their longing for completion?

Right? And we know historically that a lot of those guys were, uh, well versed in Freud. And new psychoanalysis and used it, uh, to, uh, to manipulate the desire of consumers. And so I think if we, if we point is, if we want to understand how desire functions in capitalism and how, uh, capitalism, uh, exploits our desire.

We need to understand what desire is, and I think we get the best concept of that from Freudian, Lacanian psychoanalysis. Okay, 

Elton LK: and along, along those lines, so, why is the proletariat, and that is of course the working class, an ideological symptom? 

Michael Downs: Ah, yeah, okay. So, actually it was Lacan who said that uh, Karl Marx is the one who invented the symptom.

Now this is a odd claim, right? But, you know, and this is something Slavoj Zizek develops in the first chapter of his masterpiece, The Sublime Object of Ideology, which is, that's where I'm drawn from with this. But, um, the, the logic works like this. Okay. So when we stand back and we really ask ourselves what the psychoanalytic symptom is, is, and you can think about all kinds of neurotic examples.

So, there are people who actually have like obsessive compulsive disorder, um, where they compulsively wash their hands 200 times a day. And they just can't control it. It's something beyond their control. And they wash their hands to the point that they dry out and they crack and they're bloody. And so, this is something that traditional psychoanalysts would deal with and try to try to figure out what's going on with this symptom.

And Psychoanalysis will tell us that what's going on with it is, it's a manifestation, it's an expression of some greater unconscious deadlock, that something in the unconscious has glitched out, and it's this conflict that's been repressed, that's, that's unconscious, is finding a way to manifest itself in the form of the symptom.

And so, The point, however, is that for somebody who, who finds themselves out of nowhere, like having this compulsion to wash their hands 200 times a day, they feel like this is like an almost to use like a theological example again, they almost can say it's like demon possession, like some foreign invader has invaded their body.

And taking it over and they're like, uh, they've turned into a meat puppet and they're, they're, they're suffering from something that has its source and something foreign. And they would say, no, this, this has nothing to do with me. Some outside invader has, has somehow infiltrated me and is ruining my life.

Right. But the psychoanalytic insight is no. This thing that seems so foreign and other is actually a manifestation of the very core of your subjectivity, right? It has its source in you, not something external like a demon or whatever, right? Um, and so psychoanalysis through free association would attempt to rework the dynamics, um, give space for an interpretation that would relieve the symptom.

Uh, remember psychoanalysis is the talking cure. And so it would try to, alleviate this symptom through free association and that kind of thing. But, you know, how the hell does that relate to Karl Marx, right? Okay, so here's the logic. What Marx understood is that the proletariat, the, the, Working class wage labor is the symptom of capitalism itself and you go, well, okay, what does that mean?

Okay, this is it. So, on the one hand, the wage labor is absolutely essential to the core structure of capitalism. You do not have Capital accumulation, especially we're talking industrial form here without wage labor. We know the basics right wage labor. Um, there's, there's the production of surplus value the worker only works, uh, the necessary hours to reproduce themselves but in the shift in the working day.

They don't work just the necessary hours to reproduce their own value, right? They also have surplus value time. They, they, they, they work extra, uh, beyond what is essential for the reproduction of their own self. Uh, and this is where the structural exploitation lies, is in this, this weird, tricky thing where the worker is the commodity that actually is the one that produces value itself.

Right, as opposed to other commodities that simply have a value, but they're not the source of value, right? So because the wage labor is the commodity that is also the source of value we get this deadlock And so the point is without wage labor, you don't have capitalism You don't have capital accumulation surplus value the ways it operates in capitalism on the other the wage labor the proletariat is also the very thing that's the greatest threat to the functioning of Capitalism.

So on the one hand, it's its core constitutive element. It's its hard inner kernel. On the other, it is almost a radically external threat to the system. And so that's exactly like the symptom of compulsively Washingtonian. On the one hand, it's like this foreign invader that's ruined your life. On the other, its source is in you, are

your symptom, so to speak, right? And so this is where the logic of, uh, Psychoanalysis can help us understand society, which is to say, just as human beings are symptomal because we're split between conscious and unconscious, so too is society symptomal. And if we want to understand the core structure of any social order, we have to understand its key symptom.

Which is to say that thing that is both completely the, the inner constituting, the constitutive element of the social order, but also the thing that is in a weird sense, external to it and the greatest threat to it. And so this is why we use this word, uh, called extimacy, which is, uh, it's a neologism. You combine external.

So the symptom or the proletariat is extant to capital, which is to say it's what enables capital to be capital, but it's also the thing that can destroy capital and is from capital's perspective radically outside it. So, um, that's how Marx invented the symptom.

Elton LK: Excellent. So, uh, with that, thank you very much, uh, Michael Downs. Uh, glad to have you on the 

Michael Downs: podcast. Thank you. It's an honor. Thank you so much. Thank you.

Elton LK: This is Class, an official podcast of the Democratic Socialists of America National Political Education Committee. My name is Elton LK. Thank you to Casey Stikker, who deserves a big thanks for sound engineering and theme music. Thank you to Palmer Conrad, excuse me. Thank you to Palmer Conrad for editing.

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