"Both pro- and anticapitalists, despite the ferocity of their disagreements, tend to concur that selfishness is essential to capitalism. In Infinite Greed, Adrian Johnston argues that this consensus is mistaken. Utilizing a theoretical synthesis of Marxism and psychoanalysis, Johnston reveals how the relentless pursuit of profits is not really about pandering to the acquisitiveness of single persons. Instead, capitalism's strange "infinite greed" demands that individuals sacrifice their pleasures, wellbeing, and even themselves so as to service inhuman capital itself. All capitalist subjects are compelled to obey capital's cold imperative to accumulate ever more of it in perpetuity and without limits-and also without regard for the consequences of this accumulation for everyone and everything else. Considering such contemporary crises as spiraling wealth inequality, leaving a steadily growing mass of humanity in wretched penury, as well as the profit-driven prospect of a looming ecological apocalypse, selfishness, as the rational self-interest of the numerical majority of individual persons, would dictate putting a stop to capitalism. Infinite Greed is distinctive in a number of respects. Whereas both the classical Freudian Marxism associated with the Frankfurt School as well as more recent Lacanian Marxisms, notably Slavoj Žižek's, and nonclassical European Marxisms such as those of Antonio Gramsci and Ernst Bloch, focus on such extra-economic dimensions as ideologies and cultural phenomena, this book pairs Freudian and Lacanian concepts with the economic heart of Marx's historical materialism. In particular, by bringing together the Marxian critique of political economy with psychoanalytic metapsychology, Adrian Johnston brings to light the complex intertwining of political and libidinal economies that keep us invested and complicit in perpetuating capitalism and its ills. Until today's leftists recenter their theory and practice on the largely and unwisely neglected terrain of the economy--on class struggle and related determinants of our politics and culture--our four-plus decades of political setbacks and defeats will continue unabated."
