What the Fuck is Going on? 7 How to ride capitalism’s death drive.

While many powerful people tell us that capitalism is the road to growth and progress, many of us see something else. Something that looks more like a death cult. Whether it is the rise of fascism or AI (or AI powered fascism), the collapse of welfare states, so corporate and wealth taxes don’t “threaten” growth, or collapsing the ecosystem to make more Labubus or something, the drive for ever-growing profit seems to have us hurtling towards one demise or another. Marx argued that capitalism can’t help but cause crises, and eventually this would lead to its end (with a little help from the revolutionary working class). But while that desirable outcome remains just beyond the horizon, it is worth thinking about how else to understand what the fuck is going on and how to survive whatever that is unfolding.

In 1920, Freud developed the concept of the death drive to understand why people kept doing things that caused them pain even though they knew they would. He argued it was a maladaptive defense mechanism in organic life that sought the stability of becoming inorganic (dead) again. Picking up Freud’s idea (and it’s for the forerunner in the work of Sabina Spielrein), we are going to see how this tendency to seek protection from the hardships of living tips over into self-destruction. Drawing on special guest Andreas Hjort Bundgaard’s work in uncovering the death drive of in Michel Foucault’s concept of biopolitics, Mark Fisher’s revision of the right-wing accelerationism of Nick Land, and Agvi Sakatopulous’ concept of “Exigent Sadism”, we are going to think about how to thrive and survive as we live through late capitalism’s death drive.
 
Bring your own worries along, and a pen and pad, and together we’ll take a little step closer to figuring out what the fuck is going on?

The workshop will be facilitated by Macon Holt, a cultural theorist and writer and the founder of Aesthetic Theory.