Capitalism and Sacrifice

Capitalism and Sacrifice, as theorized by McGowan across capitalism-and-desire-the-psyc-todd-mcgowan and todd-mcgowan-capitalism-and-desire-the-psychic-cost-of-free-markets-columbia-uni, names the structural-psychoanalytic claim that sacrifice is not an aberration or ethical deficit within capitalist social organization but its very engine of value and enjoyment. Drawing on Marx, Ricardo, Keynes, and Bataille through a Lacanian lens, McGowan argues that the production of value is inseparable from the violent expenditure of workers' bodies, consumers' desires, and even the capitalists' own compulsive self-denial—a sacrificial circuit that is simultaneously the condition of possibility for capitalist enjoyment and utterly excluded from capitalism's ideological self-understanding. The commodity form, in this reading, does not merely conceal labor (as in orthodox Marxist commodity fetishism) but conceals the more fundamental fact that enjoyment is constituted through loss: "sacrifice is the source of all value." Capitalism is therefore unique not in eliminating sacrifice but in multiplying it while rendering it invisible, allowing subjects to enjoy without consciously registering what that enjoyment costs.

The psychic mechanism that makes this concealment livable is fetishistic disavowal: capitalism "permits us to enjoy sacrifice while fetishistically disavowing it." The subject who enjoys an iPad knows at some level that its production involves suffering, yet functionally proceeds as if that knowledge were irrelevant. This is not mere hypocrisy but a structural feature of the capitalist enjoyment-apparatus: the sacrifice must remain present enough to generate value (since enjoyment is constituted through loss) but absent enough from ideology to sustain the fiction of utility, consent, and voluntary exchange. Bataille's counter-insight—that general economy is organized around expenditure rather than accumulation—is here partially endorsed but corrected: the vitalist ontology of excess misses that sacrifice's power lies not in biological exuberance but in its differentiating, structuring, creative function within the signifying economy of desire.

Within the argument of capitalism-and-desire-the-psyc-todd-mcgowan and its companion volume todd-mcgowan-capitalism-and-desire-the-psychic-cost-of-free-markets-columbia-uni, Capitalism and Sacrifice occupies a pivotal hinge between the economic and the psychoanalytic registers. It extends the canonical concept of Jouissance by specifying that jouissance under capitalism is always sacrificial in structure: the "too-much" enjoyment the subject derives from commodities is precisely the enjoyment of a loss — either one's own (the worker's bodily expenditure) or another's (the consumer's fetishistic appropriation of the worker's suffering). This aligns with the Lacanian principle that enjoyment is never simple pleasure but always involves the drive's satisfaction in a circuit of loss. The concept also extends Surplus-jouissance: where Lacan draws the homology between plus-de-jouir and Marxian surplus-value, McGowan deepens the analogy by arguing that sacrifice is the sacrificial-libidinal correlate of that extraction — the enjoyment-remainder that the capitalist system skims from the body is not abstract but concretely grounded in real violence.

The concept functions as a specification of Fetishistic Disavowal and Ideology as applied to the commodity form. Whereas the canonical account of fetishistic disavowal focuses on the subject's "I know very well, but nevertheless…" structure, McGowan's Capitalism and Sacrifice identifies the precise content of what is disavowed: not simply exploited labor in the abstract, but the sacrificial enjoyment-structure that underlies all value. This makes it a more radical claim than standard ideology critique — it is not enough to demystify the commodity, because the sacrifice is not hidden behind the commodity but is positively operative in the enjoyment it affords. The concept also implicates Fantasy (the frame that renders sacrificial reality bearable and desirable) and Objet petit a (the object-cause of desire that is always a remainder, a product of loss), positioning capitalist enjoyment as the fantasy-mediated pursuit of an object constituted by the very sacrifice that produces it.

Capitalism and Desire: The Psychic Cost of Free Markets (alt. ed.)Todd McGowan · 2016 (p.109)

Capitalism relies on the violent sacrifice of workers, consumers, and even capitalists themselves, and it uses this sacrifice to produce satisfied subjects. But this sacrifice can play no part in capitalism's ideological self-understanding.

The quote is theoretically loaded because it holds two incompatible functions of sacrifice in direct tension: sacrifice is simultaneously the productive engine ("uses this sacrifice to produce satisfied subjects") and the ideologically inadmissible ("can play no part in capitalism's ideological self-understanding"), which is precisely the structure of fetishistic disavowal writ at the systemic level. The phrase "satisfied subjects" is especially charged — it smuggles in the Lacanian claim that jouissance, not utility or rational preference, is what capitalism actually delivers, making the disavowal not an incidental cover-up but a structural necessity for the reproduction of capitalist enjoyment.