Boisterous Demands
Søren Mau’s Mute Compulsion
MIMI HOWARD
By shadowy impulse, capitalism compels us to want things we ought not to, and do things we do not want to. In Minima Moralia, Theodor Adorno took it upon himself to describe the situation we are stuck in with characteristically spring-loaded severity: “Those who no longer see or have anything else to love,” he wrote, deadpan, “fall victim to the love of stone walls and barred windows.” Perversion is not without purpose. Our desire for domination arises “in order to be able to endure the horror of the world,” or (we might say now) as a coping mechanism for dealing with life under capitalism and its interminable weight. It is part, Adorno said, of the “humiliation of adaptation” that helps us “ascribe the wish to reality and meaning to nonsense of compulsion.” Both the wish and compulsion act as something like the connective tissue that realizes—substantiates, externalizes, makes meaningful—our inner desires while fine-tuning them into lockstep with capitalism’s best interests. These adaptations accumulate, and, soon enough, “a humanity emerges that hungers for the compulsion [Zwang] and restriction imposed by the absurd persistence of domination.”[1] Stockholm syndrome swells ever outward, loses its particularity, becomes universal.
In the 1970s, West German Marxists began to approach compulsion and domination slantingly, from the direction of a critique of the value-form (Wertformkritik). Adorno’s students Hans-Georg Backhaus and Helmut Reichelt (responsible for establishing what’s known as Neue Marx-Lektüre), generated an understanding of abstract social domination as something like the logical conclusion of commodity fetishism. Their discovery, like many, was nearly stumbled upon—the byproduct of granular readings of the opening sections of Capital: Volume 1, especially chapter 1, sections 3 and 4. Their approach to Marx, his ingenious if fragmentary theory of value, centered around the insight that value is not simply activated in exchange, but exists as an abstract mediator of social relations. It is the “abstract objectiveness” according to which workers compulsively sell their labor power—an ever-looming, quasi-metaphysical precondition. Reading Marx through Adorno, concerning themselves with the dialectical presentation of value, value-form theorists came to understand the autonomous nature of workers’ capitulation to capital—love of stone walls and barred windows—as a consequence of capitalism’s malevolent, ridiculous invention of value as labor’s form of appearance.
Compulsion bursts forth from the value-form.
Michael Heinrich, Germany’s revered Marxologist, has more recently coalesced the insights of NML into a notion of impersonal domination (unpersönliche Herrschaft).[2] The idea also hinges on an expanded theory of commodity fetishism. In much the same way that objects appear vivified, and social relations thingified, so too do our own compulsive tendencies toward self-domination become an essential part of Marx’s presentation of fetishism. “When Marx speaks of persons as the personification of economic categories,” Heinrich explains, “he only draws this conclusion from the existence of impersonal, objective relations of domination.” Impersonal domination is contained in value’s demand that workers must participate in capital’s reproduction—or, “adapt to the necessities and compulsions [Notwendigkeiten und Zwänge] of the capitalist mode of production if they want to survive economically, no matter whether they like these compulsions or not.” The political upshot is that market socialism, or any such attempt to rejig the distributional apparatus, is manifestly incomplete if not delusory. Capitalism cannot cease to exist until a stake is swung down into its zombie heart, and value abolished. Until that fateful day, we saunter around ruled by forces that are distinctly not our own, which we are nonetheless indispensable in producing. Compulsion bursts forth from the value-form.
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The roughhewn way capital chisels out individual behavior has been relatively sidelined within these theories of abstract domination, until very recently. In Søren Mau’s Mute Compulsion: The Economic Power of Capital (New York: Verso, 2023), the author seeks to overturn the mossy rocks left un-turned by these more parochial, Marxological approaches. He argues that the processes through which workers come to participate in their own domination are in fact central to formulating a comprehensive theory of capital. The book, based upon Mau’s doctoral dissertation—and now translated into English from German—is titled after a slim, suggestive sentence in the culminating pages of Capital, vol. 1, where Marx claims that “the mute compulsion [stummer Zwang] of economic relations seals the domination of the capitalist over the worker.”[3] The same phrase is also discussed in a few different texts by Heinrich, from whom Mau has evidently taken the baton, and sprinted into value-form theory’s vaporous horizon line.
In contrast to early capitalism, when enclosure, primitive accumulation, and other explicitly violent techniques cleared the way for capital’s expansion, with “mute compulsion” Marx alluded to the presence of a more diffuse domination that is primarily at work in later stages of capitalism. In the “fully developed” form of capital’s organization of production, “extra- economic violence is still of course used,” Marx explained (and Mau quotes), “but only in exceptional cases.” Marx argued that this nonviolent, day-to-day dependence upon capital “springs from the conditions of production themselves” (not, as will be important for Mau and other theorists of the value-form, from class domination), and secures the power of capital over the worker “in perpetuity.” Capital’s regime of violence, per this account, transitions into a peaceful reign over the totality of the conditions of existence, compelling workers and capitalists alike to obey—not unlike paranoiacs or neurotics—detached, impersonal forces. We are no longer “under” capitalism but within it, becoming it.
Mau takes mute compulsion as a point of departure for theorizing the existence of what he calls economic power. In contrast to a long line of Marxist ideology theorists (from “Wilhelm Reich through Antonio Gramsci and Louis Althusser to Slavoj Žižek”), he is unconcerned with participating in a theoretical conversation about the so-called violence/ideology couplet. This couplet would be at work, for example, in Althusser’s theory of ideology where capitalism is understood to be “reproduced by the ideological and the repressive state apparatuses” that “directly address the subject” by forcing them to think or do certain things. Instead, the aim is to see how, building off the back of Heinrich’s presentation of “impersonal domination,” the dependency of workers upon capitalism is already located within, integral to, the value-form— present as a seedling at the origins of Marx’s theory of capital. As distinct from ideology, Mau’s idea of mute compulsion is then about how power indirectly addresses capitalist and worker alike, and has to do with a form of domination that “transcends class.” For Mau, in other words, sharpening a notion of economic power is a way of theoretically locating this form of obedience within the conditions of production, and thereby within “the economic,” rather than within a political framework of exploitation.
Though Mau repeatedly critiques (as Marx did) classical sociology and traditional political economy for the assumption of a free-floating “economic sphere,” one wonders if that same idea is not reconfigured here in the notion of a power that is specifically economic, indirect, nonviolent, and distinguished from a notion of power that is political, direct, and violent. (Heide Gerstenberger’s Impersonal Power, for example, is a tour de force of Marxist state theory—and an touchstone for Heinrich—that historically tracks the depersonalization and diffusion of political rule.) The book’s conceptual rigor is sometimes further confused when Mau calls mute compulsion a form of “social domination” or “social logic,” slipping and sliding between the two categories (which would be fine if he didn’t insist on a notion of distinctly economic power). The relation of mute compulsion to economic power is itself a bit uncertain: Is the former derived from the latter, or merely a poetic restatement of its fundamental force? With a bit of reworking, and attention to the tension in the very idea of the “extra-economic” in Marx’s writing, all of this would not be so troublesome, but Mau is a bit undercurious about the integrity of the book’s central concept. Perhaps due to these tensions and instabilities, he concedes, diplomatically, that one could only arrive at a “full theory of the power of capital” by integrating his own “theory of the economic power of capital with theories of ideology and violence.”
This necessary partiality allows Mau to venture beyond the bounds of the Marx-Engels Gesamtausgabe. In contrast to the insular efforts of the NML readings, he happily enlists other theorists to help him in the task of conceiving of economic power. Primarily, Mau finds a theoretical forebearer in Foucault and in his notion of biopolitics. This reconjuring of Foucault as principal partner to Marx is surprising not only given the whiff of anachronism that accompanies any mention of biopolitics in a post-Occupy world (as well as its association with the fallen figure of Agamben), nor simply for Foucault’s supposed incompatibly with Marxism, but also because—as will be discussed—there are other fellow travelers better equipped to assist with the theoretical fleshing out of an idea of compulsion. While Mau notes the aporias inherent in Foucault’s notion of biopolitics, namely its inability to answer the question of “why workers show up at the factory gates,” he nonetheless finds biopolitics useful for thinking about power without “deducing every concrete instance of domination from the rule of the bourgeoisie”—in other words, helpful in rescuing a more general sense of domination from the too prevalent notion of class domination. (That class domination recedes from the theoretical accounts of Marxists writing in social democracies with relatively robust welfare states and lower levels of inequality makes some kind of sense, conjecturally speaking.) By summoning Foucault’s assistance, Mau seeks to redress a long line of Marxist literature that does little to think about how “capital moulds the labour process on its most minute levels.”
To determine how capital molds the labor process—and social reproduction—on more minute, more Foucauldian levels, Mau tracks economic power through several roughly thematic zones: social reproduction, class, the deskilling of labor, logistics, and agriculture. Before rising to the surface of these thematic chapters, we begin on the far more preparatory, subterranean planes of part 1, in which the social ontology of capital, the human body, and metabolism with nature are examined. The connection to the task at hand, an understanding of economic power, is sometimes obscured amid esoteric discussions of the special meaning of human bipedality for the development of tools. Mau takes an anthropological tack to fleshing out a theory of compulsion, beginning on a nearly cellular level. This is, nevertheless, necessary for grounding his argument given that, unusually for proponents of value-form criticism, Mau has sought to combine a social ontology with an examination of value’s transformation into a real abstraction that comes to officiate over social life. Amounting from all of this, I would argue, is less a triumphant reunion of Foucault and Marx than a critical revival of Marxism’s humanist strand and its reconciliation with value-form theory—indeed, one of the most interesting and creative attempts to theoretically revive, and critique, Marxist humanism in recent memory.
Restoring a warily humanist outlook to Marxism allows Mau to think through—in a mainly preparatory way—the generalized constraints capital puts on human beings. Much of the book’s ingenuity lies in Mau’s claim that some minimal notion of the human being is essential to understanding why capital can insert itself into the process of social reproduction. The bulk of this analysis occurs in chapter 6. In contrast to the classical exploitation model of traditional or “worldview” Marxism, and drawing on his earlier examination of the social ontology of capital, Mau explains that “the human body implies a certain porosity and flexibility in its metabolism with the rest of nature” and—with reference to a winding discussion of the human body and tools—argues that this porosity corresponds to a natural cleavage between humans and nature. Mau’s identification of this gap forms the basis of the book’s main, to my mind very original, contention that “fundamental condition of the capitalist mode of production” consists in “the radical separation between life and its conditions, which allows capital to insert itself as the mediator between them.” Having been separated from the conditions of living, workers are (in the words of Marx, sounding much like Agamben) “bare living labour capacity”—mere potentiality—and in a state of dependency upon capital, to which they “owe their future.” It is only through capital that the individual can live.
A series of important conclusions follow from Mau’s discovery of the protobiopolitical split between life and its conditions. The power of capital, he writes, “does not just prevent the worker from following their will (although it often does that),” it also constrains the “way in which they can actually follow that will.” We are not in control of our wills, wishes, wants. Capital lays the grooves along which our desires can travel, distorts the present on behalf of past and future by figuring surplus labor as an eternal imperative. In this way, “capital,” Mau explains, is a “debt relation.” Or, as Marx put it: “by means of the appropriation of ongoing labor [capital] has already at the same time appropriated future labour.” We are born into an economic indebtedness to capital that is both intractable and incidental. “The debt incurred by the worker at birth,” Mau writes, “is thus a kind of transcendental debt” that fixes us to capital, and is necessary for the very possibility of surplus labor; the debt created by economic power is an enduring “promise to pay” that binds generations of workers together across history. This notion of indebtedness is crucial to Mau’s notion of a diffuse, impersonal power: the transformation of the world’s inhabitants into “transcendentally indebted workers,” he explains, binds them to “capital as such,” rather than a particular capitalist.
These intolerable conditions—the total, blanketed application of impersonal power—are intimately related to the notion of “real subsumption”—a central fixation for Neue-Marx Lektüre, as well as Endnotes and other ultraleft readers of Marx. In contrast to formal subsumption of labor to the logic of capital, whereby capital appropriates the labor process but not the structure or organization of production (Mau points out that this was often the case, until quite recently, with agriculture), real subsumption refers to the appropriation of the social conditions of labor: everything in the labor process has become exposed to capital’s design from the use of mass-produced feed to the appearance of a grotesquely inflated chicken at the grocery store. But in insisting upon the universality of impersonal social domination (via the totalizing ambitions of real subsumption), it is almost as if some Marxists have also universalized impersonality itself, thrown the baby out with the bathwater. That is to say, in forming a rebuttal to romantic Marxist theories of the worker as the protagonist of world history, the object of economic power’s rule—the human being—has conversely become hazy, indistinct, and rather uninteresting.
One of the striking tensions in Mau’s book is that, despite hard-won efforts to return a notion of the human to Marxism, he too remains fairly uninterested in spelling out the way humans are subjected to economic power. He is a bit more interested in how capitalism tends toward total eclipse. Or, as he puts it at a later moment, in a chapter on surplus populations: many other discussions “focus on its causes and its negative impacts on proletarian lives . . . I am interested in something else, namely the fact that [the creation of surplus populations] increases the power of capital.” In choosing to prop a theory of economic power up according to the relatively depersonalizing coordinates of Wertformkritik, it is possible that Mau’s book is locked into circling around mute compulsion, theorizing its existence but never—despite a gallant turn to anthropology—locating its human content, never landing upon an account of the ways in which we are manifestly compelled by capital.
This need not necessarily be the case. Even if the object of domination is no longer a worker with a particular set of characteristics and capacities (a protagonist, as more traditional Marxists would have it), it does not mean that they—we—are uninterpretable, or that the negation of our desires through the mechanism of capital’s mute compulsion is without substantive significance (or meaning, as Adorno said) for Marxism. What Mau’s book permits us to do, but does not itself quite attempt, is to think more specifically about the ways that the social totality is limned by the total conditions of “impersonal” and “anonymous” power, and the consequences that stem from the most fundamental blockade to personal and universal flourishing: capital. If, as per Marx, humanity’s relation to capital is a “relation of compulsion [Zwangsverhältnis] not based on personal relations of domination and dependency,” then a detailed account of compulsion, and its tendency toward diffusion, might need serious attention.
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Heinrich himself has recognized that impersonal domination might be in need of a more robust theory of the subject—a better account of what domination does to us, or what it might mean. Doubts remain, however, about how such an approach might be made compatible with a reading of Capital’s logical categories. “Since the 1920s,” Heinrich recites, “a combination of Marx’s critique of economics with psychoanalysis has been attempted in ever new variants . . . [H]owever, it must be asked whether it is at all possible on a conceptual-categorical level to bring the respective approaches together with the critique of political economy.” Psychoanalysis, more than value-form criticism, more than traditional Marxism, has been preoccupied with the task of interpreting compulsion and supplying some kind of understanding, or at least an account, of its meaning. While Marxists of the NML tradition under-stand that compulsion is derived from capital’s invention of value, they cannot seem to produce a concept of it that accounts for its human content, details its effects, or sees particular manifestations of compulsion as meaningful and warranting description.
On the other hand, psychoanalysis has a concept of compulsion, and a deep history of detailing its content, but does not quite know how to articulate its relation to economic life. It has been relatively unable to link up the abstract rule of value to the obedience of abstract forces, or understand the way capital shapes—or at least sketches out—the contours of compulsive behavior. Pace Heinrich, what if these mutual blind spots were overlaid to arrive not at a synthetic, nor merely companionable form of Freudo-Marxism, but at an account of compulsion as a possible “conceptual-categorical” key that links psychoanalysis to a critique of political economy? Taking up the cue of Mau’s partiality and theoretical open-mindedness to other exogenous traditions, a concept of compulsion might be cobbled together by returning to the collaborative approaches of the 1920s and the mid-century, in which different configurations of Freudo-Marxism were attempted, though having detoured through the insights gained into impersonal domination from NML.
The first comprehensive study of compulsive behavior is found in Freud’s early, infamous case history of compulsive neurosis (Zwangsneurose), in his treatment of Ernst Lanzer, aka the Rat Man. Lanzer’s compulsive behavior is laden with references to debt and inheritance. (Just as Mau claims workers inherit capital’s transcendental debt that acts as an ultimate constraint on desire, so too does Lanzer lose his sense of agency to swirling scenarios of indebtedness and inheritance.) Born around 1878, Lanzer fell in love with a lower-class woman, Gisela Adler, and then wished that his father would soon die, so that he would come into an inheritance large enough to consider marrying her. His father died a mere six months later. Though he does come into a fairly large inheritance, Lanzer does not marry Gisela Adler (at least until a few years later). Instead, his father’s death supplies him with evidence of the fact that wishes could come true. The situation that finally brings him to seek help, and leads him to Freud, is a knock-on effect of this belief: an unpaid debt has come to form the phobic centerpiece of his continued compulsive behavior (which is, in some sense, a kind of wish deferred, or turned inside out: a hope that Y will not happen if you do X).
While participating in army maneuvers one summer, Lanzer develops a mounting, consequential obsession with paying someone back for the delivery of his pince-nez. The result of this obsession is a compulsive effort to crisscross the Austrian countryside in baroque and needless configurations so that he can pay it back (to the wrong person). Executing an impressive series of interpretive pirouettes, Freud tethers his patient’s compulsion to two main hitching posts: the unpaid debts the Rat Man’s father’s incurred as a gambler (Spielratte), which the patient has symbolically inherited alongside his actual inheritance; and the infamous punishment recounted to the Rat Man by an army captain in which rats (Ratten) are forced down a criminal’s anus. When that same captain tells Lanzer that he must pay someone back for the delivery of the pince-nez, like a psychic bang, Ratten come to be associated with Raten, installments of a payment, and the Rat Man begins to fear his (dead) father and love interest will be subjected to the gruesome rat punishment, should he not pay his debt back. This association makes itself fully apparent when, after Freud tells the patient of his treatment fee, the Rat Man replies, “So many florins, so many rats.” “In this way,” Freud realizes, “rats came to have the meaning of ‘money’”—that other most vulgar thing.
The associational flint that ignites the Rat Man’s compulsive behavior is explained flippantly by Freud in the following way: “It was almost as if Fate, when the captain told him his story, had been putting him through an association test: she had called out a ‘complex stimulus-word’, and he had reacted to it with his obsessional idea.” Fate is a bit unsatisfying. Even according to Freud’s own description, it seems there is something particular about the economic drift of compulsive behavior—the ways in which money, debt, and class set our life’s limits, delineate our horizons—that is inbuilt within the concept, and behavior, of compulsion itself. Freud defines compulsion (Zwang) as an attempt to correct “the intolerable conditions of inhibition” that mark our mental lives. (Adorno, too, thought of compulsion as a palliative.) Is there not something substantial—real, material—smuggled into the concept here? From where do such inhibitions derive, besides the whims of Fate?
According to Freud, compulsion is manifest in forms of thinking, behavior, and activity that arise from the latent conditions of inhibition and contradiction that crosshatch our psychic landscapes. It seems likely that these conditions of contradiction have some gauzy connection to the world as organized by the value-form—inhibition par excellence, as some Marxists might put it. The case history itself, as a genre, therefore provides a kind of rickety testimony of compulsion’s omnipresence and its relation to capital as an ur-contradiction. After all, Lanzer is anything but mute about his debt compulsion; he speaks it into the consulting room, offers up explanations, goes around in circles in search of reason. He recognizes that his curtailed actions, the constrained behavior he witlessly enacts, have a kind of meaning. In Lanzer’s attempt to compulsively hold up his end of a fictitious, yet all-encompassing, bargain, he reconfigures—and lays patently bare—the obscene way that relations of debt shoot through our livelihoods, and orders them according to the logic of a preordained notion of value.
In one of his glosses on Marx’s fateful phrase, Heinrich notes that “‘mute compulsion’ remains mute only as long as the prevailing rules of property and contract are accepted.” In the case of looting, or destruction of property, compulsion is no longer silent; and this is why, Heinrich supposes, the state must always step in at this point in full force. In addition to plunder, a complexified case history, one that details capital’s intertwinement with compulsion and vice versa, might be another, more subterranean route toward amping up the volume. Crowbarring open the window unbolted by Mau’s foray into a humanism that remains close to Capital, the case history offers an occasion, a place, to expand Marxism’s care for, and attention to, humanity’s self-defeating behavior. By accepting the meaning that compulsion creates (however wrongheaded, irrational, self-defeating), and understanding that meaning as significant to a critique of political economy, we might come to see how value takes hold of desire’s logic and twists it around, giving ourselves the slim chance to wrest ourselves back from its grip—to fall out of love with stone walls, and into it with new, different things.
[1] Translations slightly adapted from Adorno’s Minima Moralia: Reflections on a Damaged Life (New York: Verso, 2005), § 61 and § 80.
[2] In his early writings, Backhaus was in fact more wary of a notion of impersonal or abstract power. See Hans-Georg Backhaus, “On the Dialectics of the Value-Form,” Thesis Eleven 1, no. 99 (1980): 115.
[3] Discussed in Heinrich, “Individuum, Personifikation und unpersönliche Herrschaft in Marx,” 25–26; and Michael Heinrich, An Introduction to the Three Volumes of Marx’s Capital (New York: Monthly Review, 2004), 206.