In other words, addiction is that process which converts human pleasure into a kind of consumer dependency. We find it therefore unsuprising that consumer capitalism is the economic system in which addictions have diversified and awareness of addiction itself has become commonplace. To the extent that human action in capitalism is mostly directed at objects, it is a system that produces profoundly anti-social behavior not unlike addictive behavior. The addict's primary relationship with the addictive object mirrors the isolation caused by capitalism's emphasis on individualism and commodity consumption. It is in capitalism's interest to engender addictive dependency in its subjects to maintain itself and produce the illusion that there is no alternative.
Capitalist culture is in the habit of offering itself as the solution to everyone's problems.
Unhappy people are increasingly encouraged to purchase and consume a drug rather than change the social circumstances that create economic and mental depression. Bad Subjects has devoted this issue to the problems and cultures of addiction because we believe understanding capitalism as a kind of addictive sickness allows us to speculate about the possibility of a 'cure' or 'recovery' from it. Whereas the 'cure' of a drug like Prozac relies upon repeated acts of commodity consumption, we at Bad Subjects believe the solution to a capitalist system can only lie outside that system. Bad Subjects is our collective attempt at recovery from our addictions to capitalism and capitalist practices of consumption. Our recovery involves producing, as a group, critical ideas and narratives which we hope will lead to a genuine alteration in social consciousness.