Sacrifice as Source of Value

In McGowan's argument, "Sacrifice as Source of Value" names the thesis that the generative engine of capitalist value is not profit—understood as the rational accumulation of surplus—but sacrifice: the hidden expenditure of labor-power whose constitutive role must be structurally concealed for the commodity system to function. Profit appears as the telos of capitalism, but McGowan's theoretical move reverses this appearance: profit is the ideological surface effect, while sacrifice is the deeper, productive ground. This inversion follows a Lacanian logic: just as jouissance is never simply present but is always already structured by a prior loss, so too is capitalist value always already structured by a labor-expenditure that disappears into the commodity's exchange-value. The commodity presents itself as self-sufficient and desirable, concealing the sacrificial act that constituted it—a concealment accomplished through the mechanism of fetishistic disavowal.

The persistence of this mechanism "across all epochs of capitalist production" is crucial: sacrifice as source of value is not a contingent historical feature of early capitalism or a correctable distortion, but a structural constant. Consumer enjoyment of commodities—their capacity to function as objects of desire, as stand-ins for objet petit a—depends on this disavowal remaining operative. The subject "knows very well" (in Mannoni's formula) that labor sacrifice underlies every commodity, but acts as if the commodity's value were intrinsic, self-generated, or a function of market mechanism. The fetish (the commodity, the brand, the spectacle of exchange) installs itself as a veil over the sacrificial act, permitting jouissance to flow without the subject having to register the human cost that subtends it. Sacrifice, then, is not merely an economic category but a psychoanalytic-structural one: it names the constitutive loss whose disavowal is the condition of possibility for capitalist desire.

This concept appears in todd-mcgowan-capitalism-and-desire-the-psychic-cost-of-free-markets-columbia-uni and functions as a pivot around which McGowan's broader critique of capitalist ideology turns. It is most directly anchored in the cross-referenced concept of Fetishistic Disavowal: the concealment of sacrifice is not a cognitive error but a psychic structure—subjects maintain two incompatible orientations simultaneously, acknowledging labor exploitation at some level while acting within market relations as if it were irrelevant. McGowan thus extends fetishistic disavowal from its Freudian-Žižekian application in commodity fetishism into a more fundamental claim: it is not merely that the social relations of production are disavowed, but that the sacrificial act constitutive of value itself is what must be veiled.

The concept also deepens the cross-referenced framework of Ideology: by locating the source of value in sacrifice rather than profit, McGowan implies that capitalism's ideological operation is not simply a matter of false consciousness about prices or ownership, but a more primordial misrecognition of where value comes from. This connects to Jouissance and Surplus-jouissance: the enjoyment the consumer extracts from the commodity is structurally homologous to the surplus-value extracted from the worker's sacrificed labor, and both are organized around a constitutive loss. The commodity circulates as an Objet petit a—the cause of desire rather than its object—precisely because the sacrifice that produced it is rendered invisible, allowing it to appear as self-sufficient and magically desirable. Sacrifice as source of value is therefore not an isolated economic thesis but an articulation of how Appearance, Ideology, Fetishistic Disavowal, and Jouissance converge to sustain the capitalist social bond.

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

Sacrifice, as the source of value, has a far more fundamental role within capitalist society than profit, just as it does within every society.

The phrase "far more fundamental role… than profit" performs a structural inversion that is theoretically decisive: it demotes profit—capitalism's self-declared organizing principle—to a secondary, derivative appearance, and installs sacrifice as the hidden infrastructure of value. The universalizing clause "just as it does within every society" further strips the mechanism of its historical contingency, asserting that sacrifice-as-value is a trans-historical structural feature, not an artifact of one mode of production—aligning the claim with Lacan's insistence that the logic of loss and remainder (surplus-jouissance, objet petit a) is constitutive of the social bond as such.