Capitalist Mode of Production

The "Capitalist Mode of Production," as theorized in this occurrence, designates not only the economic infrastructure through which commodities and surplus value are generated, but simultaneously the psychic infrastructure through which subjects and selves are produced. The key theoretical move in Kornbluh's reading of Fight Club is to collapse the conventional distinction between "base" (economic production) and "superstructure" (ideology, subjectivity, culture): the mode of production is also a mode of subjectivization. The psyche is not merely shaped by capitalism as an external influence; it is itself a product of the same structural logic that produces commodities and profits. Destruction of the self and destruction of capitalist relations are therefore not two separate projects but one — any genuine transformation of the economic mode of production must pass through, and simultaneously constitute, a transformation of how subjects are produced.

This formulation radicalizes the Marxist concept of alienation by giving it a Lacanian inflection. If, as classical Marxism holds, workers are alienated from the products of their labor and from their own species-being, Kornbluh's argument pushes further: the very selfhood of the subject — the ego, the psyche, the "self" as such — is itself a commodity-like product of the capitalist mode of production. This means the logic of capitalist production penetrates all the way to the structural level of subjectivity, and revolution cannot be merely economic but must be simultaneously psychic. The concept thus functions as a hinge between political economy and psychoanalytic theory of the subject.

This concept appears in anna-kornbluh-marxist-film-theory-and-fight-club-bloomsbury-academic-2019 (p. 142) as the organizing thesis of a Marxist-Lacanian reading of Fight Club. It sits at the intersection of several cross-referenced canonical concepts. Most directly, it extends and radicalizes Alienation: where Lacanian alienation names the structural loss entailed by entry into the signifying order of the Other, Kornbluh's "capitalist mode of production" specifies capitalism as the historically particular form that exploits and intensifies that structural opening. As Lacan himself warned, social exploitation takes its stand on the already-given alienation of the subject from jouissance — Kornbluh's move is to show how capitalism literalizes and multiplies that structure by making subjectivity itself a site of production.

The concept also engages Ideology, Imaginary, and Ego Ideal: if the psyche is produced like a commodity, then the Ego Ideal — the symbolic point from which the subject measures and sees itself — is itself ideologically constituted, a product of the same apparatus that produces profit. The cross-reference to Contradiction is equally salient: capitalism's simultaneous need to produce and destroy (value, bodies, selves) mirrors the Hegelian-Marxist insight that capitalism contains the condition of its own undoing — destruction is not external to production but internal to it. The references to Jouissance and Foreclosure further suggest that what is "foreclosed" or violently refused by capitalist subjectivization returns in the Real — in the film's imagery of self-destruction — as the eruption of what the system cannot symbolize.

Marxist Film Theory and Fight ClubAnna Kornbluh · 2019 (p.142)

Film as a medium can show us that the economic mode of production also works as a psychological mode of production—that our selves and psyches are just as much products as are commodities and profits.

The phrase "also works as a psychological mode of production" is theoretically loaded because it refuses the base/superstructure separation: production is not merely economic but ontological, manufacturing selves and psyches with the same structural logic it uses to manufacture "commodities and profits." This collapses the distance between political economy and psychoanalysis, making the subject not merely shaped by capitalism but constituted — produced — by it, which is what compels the argument that psychic self-destruction and politico-economic revolution must be simultaneous.