A review of Cold War Freud: Psychoanalysis in an age of catastrophes, by Dagmar Herzog

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Notes

1 The problem of slowing economic growth and the crisis of “late” capitalism has generated a vast literature (see for example Piketty 2013; Streeck 2016, 2017). A crisis of growth was anticipated in Marx’s prediction that technological progress and growing material abundance would eventually, in themselves, become factors that would undermine the psychology or “ideology” of markets (and by extension, the ideological justification for inequality as well) (Marx and Engels 1848; Marx 1859). People don't want to pay for stuff that becomes abundant, and it becomes harder and harder to justify wealth inequality when there appears to be enough for everyone. Marx predicted a slow-down in technological innovation as capitalists try to constrain or suppress innovations that threaten the scarcity that drives markets. Something like this actually seems to be happening. The emergence of cheap, effortless digital distribution of music, for example, caused a crisis and near collapse of the market for these goods. (Campaigns against “piracy” and attempts to restrict copying were meant to shore up the ideology of private ownership in the face of technologies that were beginning to hint at its obsolescence.) A similar thing has happened in the world of newspapers and journalism. It is not that consumers became kleptomaniacs, rather the psychology or “ideology” of scarcity that drives consumer markets starts to unravel as the real costs of production and distribution plummet. Similar and widespread problems are emerging in the face of advances in robotics and artificial intelligence in many sectors of the economy. In this analysis, neoliberalism develops in order to thwart the radical ideological and psychological changes that arise when premonitions of abundance (=slowing growth) begin to emerge. Technological progress—abundance—threatens markets and private ownership of the means of production in many sectors. (See Lanier 2010 for a discussion of the paradox in which the digital revolution under capitalism generates increasing inequality for artists, journalists, etc.; Graeber 2005, for the general slowdown in technical innovation; Streeck 2012 for market saturation—too much stuff—causing a crisis in growth.)