Slaves to love: Marx, Spinoza and the surprising longevity of crisis capitalism:

Slaves to love: Marx, Spinoza and the surprising longevity of crisis capitalism Frederic Lordon Willing Slaves of Capital: Spinoza and Marx on Desire, Verso: London, 2014; 224 pp.: 9781781681602, 16.99 [pounds sterling] (pbk) Debates concerning the tendency of the working class to betray itself are a mainstay of Marxist scholarship. That this tendency can be all the more pronounced in times of financial tumult, however, runs contrary to its more rationalist explanations. Indeed, in the context of our own crisis, albeit with some notable exceptions, the preferred neoliberal pathway of bailouts for the rich and austerity for the rest has to date gone unchallenged. Over the course of the last decade, neoliberal planners and managers have gambled and lost to such an extent that they effectively compromised the material and psychological welfare of an entire generation. How have they been able to get away with it? Whereas Marxists agree that one of the central defining traits of capitalism is the compulsion it exerts over labour, agreement as to why the masses seem so content to accept this state of affairs is much less forthcoming. Eden, for example, complains in a recent book that Autonomist Marxists tend to assume a kind of democratic potential in the configuration of contemporary capital, offering therefore only a bright and 'jolly' interpretation of the possibilities of our time (2012:107). Pointing his finger specifically at Autonomists like Hardt and Negri, and Paulo Virno, Eden argues that one crucial tool missing from their repertoire of critical concepts is that of commodification. Focusing overly on the undemocratic manner in which digital-age capitalism captures the creative and emotional capacities of its workers, these scholars appear completely to miss the massive ideological force which propertied elites are able to deploy against labour, and the extent to which the latter are thus led to misrecognise themselves in the commodity form. If this argument is persuasive, it might be because the scholars targeted by this critique fail to give sufficient detail precisely as to why they believe this capture of valorising capacity should be our primary focus. While the title of Lordons book suggests a concern to engage Spinoza and Marx on equal terms, in fact the text is an effort to deploy a Spinozist reading of Marx in defense of this latter hypothesis. And on this score, the book is indeed an instructive insight, both into why the frequently joyful nature of activity in the hidden abode of contemporary production is something Marxists need to take seriously, and why the critique of the commodity form may actually belie some troubling intellectual commitments. A word is due here on the place of Spinoza in Lordon's argument. Conatus, one of the principle concepts of the latter's philosophical system, refers to the striving of each thing to sustain itself, according to the force or orientation of its existence. In terms of human existence, Lordon notes, conatus is 'the energy of desire' (p. 1). Human beings are creatures first and foremost of desire. And given that man is more or less free to pursue any number of objects of desire, the question of society is one therefore necessarily concerning the need for limitations on these possible objects. For without limits, or at least the aligning of social desires in common purpose, little by way of collective action can be accomplished. In terms of capitalist society, the concept of desire gives us an insight not so much into the structure of its political economy, founded in the employment relation, which separates workers both from means of production and its various products, but rather into the question of how this relation is sustained over time. In order to comprehend the former, Lordon suggests, Marx may be our most helpful guide. To grasp the latter, however, it is to Spinoza, and his 'anthropology of passions', that we must turn (p. …