Freudian Marxism

Freudian Marxism, as theorized in McGowan's capitalism-and-desire-the-psyc-todd-mcgowan, names a broad tradition of twentieth-century leftist critique that supplements or replaces the classical Marxist critique of economic inequality with a critique of repression and constraint. Its principal figures — Otto Gross, Wilhelm Reich, Adorno, Marcuse, and the Frankfurt School more broadly — share the premise that capitalism injures subjects by imposing an excess of repression upon desire or libidinal life, and that emancipation would consist in lifting or reducing that repression. The political logic is thus restorationist: underneath the distorting pressure of capitalist repression lies a desire or libido whose release would constitute freedom. McGowan's first theoretical move is to demonstrate that this structure is not historically specific to its declared representatives but recurs across the entire arc of twentieth-century critique, including in Foucault's supposedly post-repression hypothesis framework. Even when Foucault appears to break with the repressive hypothesis, McGowan argues, the emancipatory logic of constraint-removal is preserved under different vocabulary, making Foucault structurally homologous to Gross — "a Freudian Marxist in disguise."

McGowan's second and more decisive move turns on Freud's own later theory against the tradition that bears his name. The compulsion to repeat — the death drive — reveals that subjects do not merely suffer repression but actively reproduce and derive satisfaction from loss and dissatisfaction themselves. Jouissance, in the Lacanian register, is not what capitalism steals from subjects but what subjects already extract from their own repetitive circuits of lack. This means that Freudian Marxism — including its Frankfurt School variant — operates with an early Freudian model (desire as seeking satisfaction, repression as the obstacle to it) that the later Freud already undermined. The political consequence is significant: a critique premised on removing imposed dissatisfaction cannot grasp a capitalism that captures subjects precisely through the satisfaction they take in dissatisfaction, and so Freudian Marxism unwittingly "buys the capitalist dream" by insisting that dissatisfaction is the problem rather than the mechanism of subjects' enjoyment.

Within capitalism-and-desire-the-psyc-todd-mcgowan, Freudian Marxism functions as the foil against which McGowan constructs his own Lacanian-inflected critique of capitalism. It is positioned as an extension of classical Marxist ideology critique that grafts a (specifically early) Freudian theory of repression onto the political-economic analysis of capitalism — producing a critique organized around the concept of Surplus Repression (Marcuse's term, cross-referenced here) as the capitalist excess over and above biologically necessary repression. The tradition inherits the Repressive Hypothesis (cross-referenced), which assumes that desire is naturally oriented toward satisfaction and that power operates chiefly by blocking that orientation. McGowan's argument is that Freudian Marxism thus misreads the structure of Desire and Jouissance: if desire is structurally constituted by lack (as Lacanian theory insists) rather than blocked from an originary fullness, then removing repression cannot produce emancipation. Moreover, insofar as Jouissance is the satisfaction the drive takes in its own repetitive circuit — including the repetition of loss — the subject's attachment to capitalism is not a symptom of too much repression but of too much enjoyment of dissatisfaction itself. Freudian Marxism also occupies a specific place relative to Ideology: by locating capitalism's hold in a repressive mechanism that distorts an underlying libidinal truth, it reproduces the structure of ideology-as-false-consciousness that Lacanian ideology critique (as in the cross-referenced concept) has already moved beyond. Sublimation and Singularity, by contrast, point toward the kind of critique McGowan wants to develop: one that accounts for the drive's satisfactions rather than simply lamenting their suppression.

Capitalism and Desire: The Psychic Cost of Free MarketsTodd McGowan · 2016 (p.32)

this new critique buys the capitalist dream with its insistence on dissatisfaction... this later Freud has had no place in the critique of capitalism as it was developed by traditional Freudian Marxism in the twentieth century.

The phrase "buys the capitalist dream with its insistence on dissatisfaction" is theoretically loaded because it reverses the polemical direction: it is the critical tradition itself — not capitalism's victims — that reproduces the capitalist logic by treating dissatisfaction as purely negative and remediable, while "this later Freud" (the death drive, compulsive repetition, jouissance-in-loss) names the theoretical resource that Freudian Marxism systematically excluded and that alone can account for why subjects stay attached to what makes them suffer.