No scale-up and the thesis of their links are wrong. Economic systems don’t have psyches.

Those who challenge the efficiency explanation generally do so because they start from an opposite interpretation of capitalism’s nature. These authors tend to emphasize the elements of irrationality in the capitalist process and in the belief system of its actors that work in favor of its perpetuation. Capitalism is thought to be sustained by the self-estrangement it produces, by the repression (or stimulation) of desire, by irrational expectations, and more generally by its capacity to interact with the actors’ emotional sphere. Contributions to this interpretation come from currents of philosophy and social theory variously related to Critical Theory or poststructuralism. All of them share the idea that capitalism appropriates certain human needs and turns them to its advantage. Capitalism therefore persists either because of the power and seduction it exerts over people’s minds or because of the way it appeals to deep needs. We could call this broad perspective the “social unconscious thesis.”

Critical Theory combines Freud and Marx, not the later Marx but the earlier humanist Marx who had reflected, in the “Paris Manuscripts,” on the psychological mechanisms of alienation.45 Indeed, the concept of alienation is at the heart of Erich Fromm’s attempt to psychoanalyze twentieth-century capitalist society and his idea that capitalist subjects, estranged from themselves, lose all connection with their “true needs” and embrace the senseless logic of the machine that enslaves them.46 Another version, unquestionably indebted to Freud’s analysis of “uneasiness in civilization,” is that capitalism obtains conformity from its subjects through the repression of desire. They live surrounded by things but are unable to recognize their “true desires,” whose satisfaction alone would lead them to a meaningful life. This repression affects all the actors of the capitalist process indiscriminately, regardless of their role, and hence of their relationship with capital. This is an idea that, with Marcuse’s Eros and Civilization (1955), marked the transition from the critique of capitalism as a critique of inequality to the critique of capitalism as a critique of repression, the kind of discourse that would inform the counterculture of the 1960s. This vision is irreparably linked to an era in which social conflict was reduced to a minimum. Since it was thought that the economic problems of capitalism had been solved, one could afford the luxury of moralizing about capitalist society. As such, it appears dated today. But beyond this, its main weakness as a theory of capitalist reproduction is that it does not explain what the causes of the success of alienation are or who are the agents of repression. Capitalism may be a diabolical machine, but it has no autonomous agency. This defect has not been remedied by recent work in the same vein, where the focus is shifted from the (natural) desires that capitalism represses to the (artificial) ones that it feeds—so the drive to consume and to accumulate is explained by the continuous and illusory quest for “a more complete satisfaction.”47 The most promising recent contribution to critical sociology’s understanding of capitalist reproduction comes from Jens Beckert’s concept of “fictional expectations.” Beckert claims that capitalism creates a regime of “secular enchantment,” which keeps actors enmeshed in its cogs thanks to the continuous, albeit unrealistic, expectations it fuels.48 Beckert certainly captures an important element. However, when he moves on to identifying the factors that keep this machine of illusions in motion, these turn out to be the institutional elements of competition and credit, which leaves open the problem of the material and cultural structures underpinning them, not to mention the question of the relationship between these structures.

Poststructuralist interpretations—a galaxy that goes from Foucault to Deleuze to Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri—differ from critical-theoretical approaches in that they solve the problem of agency by denying that contemporary capitalism has a manipulative power (power, in Foucauldian terms, is immanent in the structures of subjectivity, not externally imposed). At the micro level, poststructuralism underlines the compatibility of capitalism with the emotional structure of modern social actors who subject themselves to voluntary enslavement, drawing from it emotional satisfaction. This leads to curious claims, such as, for example, that “capitalism capitalizes on our inability to locate the sources of our anxiety and enjoins us to address our trauma by passing its effects on to others, thereby elaborating, intensifying, and widening the competitive imperatives of capitalist networks.”49 What “anxiety”? What “trauma”? one may wonder. Possibly the angst that results from the loss of traditional forms of attachment. Modernity becomes a convenient black box with which to explain the birth and evolution of the capitalist social character, in the same way as the gradual shift of modernity toward postmodernity heralds the character’s future redemption. Modernity and postmodernity are therefore used as conceptual passe-partouts—tautological and ultimately meaningless. At the macro level, the biopolitical reorganization of power and its deterritorialization, which Hardt and Negri call “Empire,” does away with the modern regime of disciplinary power, thus generating a potential for liberation.50 For them, as for Deleuze and Guattari, the crisis of disciplinary power, as well as its dissolution into introjected mechanisms of control, “disrupts the linear and totalitarian figure of capitalist development. . . . Resistances are no longer marginal but active in the center of a society that opens up in networks; the individual points are singularized in a thousand plateaus.”51 This makes them dream about the construction of a global “counter-Empire” by global desertion and coordinated acts of sabotaging.

The most serious responsibility of poststructuralism is to make assumptions about the cultural sphere, and to claim for the symbolic a space independent from the material conditions of existence, without having an organic concept of culture, and indeed rejecting it with contempt, as if one could understand a foreign language without knowing its grammar.52 Its denial of any order and rationality in reality, as reflected in its verbal obfuscations, hides confusion and logical contradictions. Capitalist reproduction cannot be understood without investigating the cultural sphere, but at the same time this undertaking requires a rigorous concept of culture.