Infinite Greed: The Inhuman Selfishness of Capital

by Adrian Johnston

Selfishness is essential to capitalism—or so both advocates and opponents claim. In Infinite Greed, Adrian Johnston argues that this consensus is mistaken. Through a novel synthesis of Marxism and psychoanalysis, he reveals how the relentless pursuit of profits is not fundamentally animated by human acquisitiveness. Instead, capitalism’s strange “infinite greed” demands that individuals sacrifice their pleasures, their well-being, and even themselves to serve inhuman capital.

Johnston traces the mechanisms that compel capitalist subjects to obey the cold imperative to accumulate in perpetuity and without limits—and also without regard for the consequences for everyone and everything else. Facing crises such as spiraling wealth inequality and the profit-driven prospect of a looming ecological apocalypse, the rational self-interest of the majority would seem to dictate putting a stop to capitalist accumulation. By bringing together the Marxian critique of political economy with psychoanalytic metapsychology, Johnston shows why and how capitalism, rather than being responsive to people’s rationally selfish interests, disregards and overrides them instead.

Unlike previous syntheses of Marxism and psychoanalysis, Infinite Greed pairs Freudian and Lacanian concepts with the economic heart of Marx’s historical materialism. In so doing, Johnston brings to light the complex intertwining of political and libidinal economies keeping us invested and complicit in perpetuating capitalism and its ills.

Genres: Philosophy, Nonfiction, Psychoanalysis

392 pages, Hardcover

Published May 14, 2024

About the author

American philosopher. He is a Professor in the Department of Philosophy at the University of New Mexico at Albuquerque and a faculty member at the Emory Psychoanalytic Institute in Atlanta. Johnston’s books are guided by his “transcendental materialism,” which in sum calls for a materialist ontology that nevertheless does not reduce away the gap or figure that is human subjectivity.

Reviews

[Aung Sett Kyaw Min · Rating 2.5 out of 5]

I found the concluding section to be disappointing. One would expect Johnston to, for example, address the anti LTV claim that capital can accrue interest on its own without depending on labor, or elaborate on how specific modern financial instruments (such as derivatives) can be analyzed in terms of objects of a given species of drive whose genus is the M-C-M’ circuit, as a way of closing out the already bloated argument. Instead Johnston pivots to the specter of “economic determinism/reductionism” that has been haunting Marxian thought since the turn of the 20th century and attempts to exorcise it, to mixed results. As a consequence, the reader is treated to a 30 page literature review of the economism debate running through such illustrious names associated with Western Marxism as Korsch, Lukacs, Gramsci, Marcuse and Althusser. Here, Johnston advances what I take to be a shrewd claim that sometimes, it is objective reality itself (i.e. the capitalist mode of production) that determines and reduces elements of superstructure such as artistic and cultural expressions, into economic vectors. The laws of motion at work in capitalism really do constrain the range of possible superstructural expressions in a social formation wherein the capitalist mode of production is dominant or ascendant. Perhaps the former even govern and dictate the terms under which various phenomena typically associated with the ‘superstructure’ can develop. Therefore, in some cases, what is denounced as "economism" or “economic determinism/reductionism” is not a subjective error on the part of an individual critical theorist. However, while Johnston does an admirable job of defending a qualified version of economism, the conclusion as a whole seems disconnected from the main theses defended by Johnston in the preceding sections of the book. How does working out a feasible model of the causal and logical relationship between the material-economic base and idealist extra-material superstructure enrich our understanding of the M-C-M’ circuit as the drive whose goal and aim co-incide? Johnston does not tell us how.