Capital’s ultimate fantasy is eliminating workers and humans entirely

Evidence

Neoliberal austerity is at once a form of Sadism — in the technical, psychoanalytic sense, rather than the everyday, moralising sense — and corporate anorexia. What Sadism and anorexia have in common is the belief in the indestructibility of the fantasmatic body: no matter how much I cut, how much I punish, the body will survive… In the Sadist’s case, the fantasmatic body is the body of the endlessly humiliated Other; in the anorexic’s case, the fantasmatic body is, in a sense, their “own”. Yet the infinite elasticity of the fantastic body eventually comes up against the limits of the physical body. (Anorexia is the only mental illness that can directly kill you, but anorexics don’t want to die — they are engaged in an indefinite process of becoming-thinner which death actually interrupts.) It’s important to see how the capitalist fantasy necessarily oscillates between a punishing-without-end of an abjected fantasmatic body — where workers can be endlessly punished (restructured) and/or eliminated (cut) — and a belated recognition that the fantasmatic body depends on an actual, physically precarious body, with vulnerabilities and real limits. You could say that capital as such cannot recognise the collective worker-body as belonging to it; only communism can perform this integration. … The ultimate fantasy here — the ultimate fantasy of capital “itself” — is of cutting workers away altogether. Capital’s libidinal metaphysics is a kind of cosmic libertarianism: capital identifies itself as a force of unbounded energy, whose capacity for infinite accumulation is obstructed only by political contingencies. Soon, always soon, capital dreams, I will be free of the need for politics… and free of the need for humans too… (“…liquidate labor, liquidate stocks, liquidate farmers, liquidate real estate…”). Capital’s realised utopia would be a burned-out planet full of fully-automated factories turning out shit that no one wants to buy, with no one left to buy it anyway, because the conditions for the continued existence of these factories is the destruction of an environment humans can live in. — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk, 1972

Categorization

• XREF: Resonates with the reader’s earlier material on capitalist self-image and the Frankfort School critiques of instrumental reason, where capital’s rationalization ends by destroying the humans it purported to serve. — connects to: Capital expands by not paying workers for part of their labor — Clara E. Mattei, Escape from Capitalism, 104; Capital accumulation drives the profit rate down by reducing human labor per unit — Yanis Varoufakis, Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism, 1031; Capitalism simultaneously destroys and expands human potential — Alex Callinicos, Against Postmodernism: A Marxist…, 639 (+3 more)
• DEEPTHINKING: The move from sadism-vs-anorexia as twin refusals to recognize the physical limits of the fantasmatic body, to ‘capital cannot recognise the collective worker-body as belonging to it,’ is a paradigm-level synthesis.

Broader Connections

• Capital accumulation drives the profit rate down by reducing human labor per unit #expands (0.82) — Yanis Varoufakis, Technofeudalism, 1031
• Each robot per thousand workers measurably cuts employment and wages #exemplifies (0.80) — Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection, 859
• Capital is an abstract parasite that converts our living cooperation into dead labor #expands (0.78) — Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism, 33
• Capital expands by not paying workers for part of their labor #expands (0.75) — Clara E. Mattei, Escape from Capitalism, 104
• Capital co-opted workers’ own desire for liberation from Fordist routine #complicates (0.74) — Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism, 74
• Capitalism simultaneously destroys and expands human potential #qualifies (0.72) — Alex Callinicos, Against Postmodernism, 639