Drive of Capital

Abstract

Especially during the brief post-revolutionary period before the rise of Stalinism, certain thinkers in the Soviet milieu offered some attention-worthy reflections regarding Freud’s body of work. In particular, Luria and Vygotsky put forward thoughtful Marxism-informed assessments of the metapsychology and methodology of psychoanalysis. And strong cross-resonances are audible between these Soviet thinkers’ reflections and the early stages of Western Marxism’s rapprochement with Freud, starting in texts by Reich and Fenichel and continuing with the Frankfurt School, of whose members Marcuse arguably furnishes the most sophisticated and sustained engagement with analysis. In this essay, I argue that Luria, Vygotsky, Reich, Fenichel, and Marcuse share in common a fundamentally correct insight according to which the theory of drive (Trieb) is a load-bearing pillar for any psychoanalytic Marxism. Moreover, not only is the Freudian metapsychological concept of drive applicable to and productive of Marxism and its form(s) of materialism—echoing Lacan’s claim that Marx invented the symptom, I contend, here and elsewhere, that Marx’s mature critique of political economy already anticipates the later analytic idea of Trieb. In fact, I would go so far as to credit Marx with (also) being the inventor of the analytic drive (albeit avant la lettre).