Liberty and desire are capital’s own products, not its opposites.

Evidence

Now, free, virgin nature, without limits or territories, where each wanders at will, never existed, except in the imaginary of the dominant order, of which this nature is the equivalent mirror. We project (nature, desire, animality, rhizome … ) the very schema of deterritorialization that is that of the economic system and of capital as ideal savagery. Liberty is nowhere but in capital, it is what produced it, it is what deepens it. There is thus an exact correlation between the social legislation of value (urban, industrial, repressive, etc.) and the imaginary savagery one places in opposition to it: they are both “deterritorialized” and in each other’s image. Moreover, the radicality of “desire,” one sees this in current theories, increases at the same rate as civilized abstraction, not at all antagonistically, but absolutely according to the same movement, that of the same form always more decoded, more decentered, “freer,” which simultaneously envelops our real and our imaginary. Nature, liberty, desire, etc., do not even express a dream the opposite of capital, they directly translate the progress or the ravages of this culture, they even anticipate it, because they dream of total deterritorialization where the system never imposes anything but what is relative: the demand of “liberty” is never anything but going further than the system, but in the same direction. — Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, 460

Categorization

• XREF: Directly counterposes Jameson’s Marxist reading — where desire/liberty resist capital — by arguing they are capital’s mirror; key for the Baudrillard-vs-Jameson contrast. — connects to: Capital relates to society as sorcery and challenge, not contract. — Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, 59; Opposing capital on its own moral-rational terms serves it. — Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, 57; Genuine authority and freedom are mutually dependent, not opposed — Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, 572 (+3 more)
• SEED: An essay mapping how progressive ‘liberatory’ demands (nomadism, radical desire, deterritorialization) function as capital deepening itself, with contemporary tech-nomad and gig-work examples.

Broader Connections

• Power creates freedom, not the other way around. #complicates (0.80) — Ibram X. Kendi, Stamped from the Beginning, 273
• Genuine authority and freedom are mutually dependent, not opposed #expands (0.75) — Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, 572
• The Kantian ego is a product of material economic conditions, not a transcendental given #exemplifies (0.72) — Theodor W. Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 79