Psychopolitics. Byung-Chul Han

now is whether we need to redefine freedom – to reinvent it – in order to escape from the fatal dialectic that is changing freedom into coercion.

      Neoliberalism represents a highly efficient, indeed an intelligent, system for exploiting freedom. Everything that belongs to practices and expressive forms of liberty – emotion, play and communication – comes to be exploited. It is inefficient to exploit people against their will. Allo-exploitation yields scant returns. Only when freedom is exploited are returns maximized.

      It is interesting to note that Marx also defines freedom in terms of a successful relationship to others: ‘Only in community [with others does each] individual [have] the means of cultivating his gifts in all directions; only in the community, therefore, is personal freedom possible.’¹ From this perspective, being free means nothing other than self-realization with others. Freedom is synonymous with a working community (i.e., a successful one).

      For Marx, individual freedom represents a ruse – a trick of capital. ‘Free competition’, which is based on the idea of individual freedom, simply amounts to the ‘relation of capital to itself as another capital, i.e., the real conduct of capital as capital’.² Capital reproduces by entering into relations with itself as another form of Capital: through free competition. It copulates with the Other of itself by way of individual freedom. Capital grows inasmuch as people engage in free competition. Hereby, individual freedom amounts to servitude inasmuch as Capital lays hold of it and uses it for its own propagation. That is, Capital exploits individual freedom in order to breed: ‘It is not the individuals who are set free by free competition; it is, rather, capital which is set free.’³

      The freedom of Capital achieves self-realization by way of individual freedom. In the process, individuals degrade into the genital organs of Capital. Individual freedom lends it an ‘automatic’ subjectivity of its own, which spurs it to reproduce actively. In this way, Capital continuously ‘brings forth living offspring’.⁴ Today, individual freedom is taking on excessive forms; ultimately, this amounts to nothing other than the excess of Capital itself.

       The Dictatorship of Capital

      At a certain level of development, according to Marx, the forces of production (human labour, modes of work and the material means available) come into conflict with the dominant relations of production (conditions of ownership and domination). Contradiction arises because the forces of production never stop evolving. Thus, industrialization brings forth new forces of production that come into conflict with structures of ownership and government that still resemble feudal conditions. In turn, this contradiction entails social crises: pushes to change the relations of production. For Marx, the contradiction is to be eliminated by way of the proletariat’s struggle against the bourgeoisie – which will bring forth a communist social order.

      But counter to what Marx assumed, communist revolution cannot resolve the contradiction between forces of production and relations of production. The contradiction admits no dialectical Aufhebung. Capitalism can always escape into the future precisely because it harbours permanent and inherent contradiction. Accordingly, industrial capitalism has now mutated into neoliberalism and financial capitalism, which are implementing a post-industrial, immaterial mode of production – instead of turning into communism.

      As a mutant form of capitalism, neoliberalism transforms workers into entrepreneurs. It is not communist revolution that is now abolishing the allo-exploited working class – instead, neoliberalism is in the course of doing so. Today, everyone is an auto-exploiting labourer in his or her own enterprise. People are now master and slave in one. Even class struggle has transformed into an inner struggle against oneself.

      The cooperative ‘Multitude’ that Antonio Negri has exalted as the post-Marxist successor to the ‘proletariat’ does not describe the contemporary mode of production. Rather, conditions are defined by the solitude of an entrepreneur who is isolated and self-combating and practises auto-exploitation voluntarily. As such, it is a mistake to believe that the cooperative ‘Multitude’ will overthrow the parasitic ‘Empire’ and bring forth a communist social order. The Marxist scheme to which Negri adheres will prove to have been yet another illusion.

      In fact, no proletariat exists under the neoliberal regime at all. There is no working class being exploited by those who own the means of production. When production is immaterial, everyone already owns the means of production him- or herself. The neoliberal system is no longer a class system in the proper sense. It does not consist of classes that display mutual antagonism. This is what accounts for the system’s stability.

      Today, the distinction between proletariat and bourgeoisie no longer holds either. Literally, ‘proletarian’ means someone whose sole possessions are his or her children: self-production is restricted to biological reproduction. But now the illusion prevails that every person – as a project free to fashion him- or herself at will – is capable of unlimited self-production. This means that a ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’ is structurally impossible. Today, the Dictatorship of Capital rules over everyone.

      The neoliberal regime transforms allo-exploitation into auto-exploitation; this process affects all ‘classes’. Such classless self-exploitation – which was something utterly unknown to Marx – renders impossible any social revolution based on the difference between the exploiters, on the one hand, and the exploited, on the other. Indeed, given the auto-exploiting achievement-subject’s isolation, no political We is even possible that could rise up and undertake collective action.

      People who fail in the neoliberal achievement-society see themselves as responsible for their lot and feel shame instead of questioning society or the system. Herein lies the particular intelligence defining the neoliberal regime: no resistance to the system can emerge in the first place. In contrast, when allo-exploitation prevails, the exploited are still able to show solidarity and unite against those who exploit them. Such is the logic on which Marx’s idea of a ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’ is based. However, this vision presupposes that relations of repression and domination hold. Now, under the neoliberal regime of auto-exploitation, people are turning their aggression against themselves. This auto-aggressivity means that the exploited are not inclined to revolution so much as depression.

      In our world, we no longer work in order to satisfy our own needs. Instead, we work for Capital. Capital generates needs of its own; mistakenly, we perceive these needs as if they belonged to us. Capital therefore represents a new kind of transcendence, which entails a new form of subjectivation. We are being expelled from the sphere of lived immanence – where life relates to life instead of subjugating itself to external ends.

      Emancipation from a transcendent order – that is, an order grounded in religious premises – is the hallmark of modern politics. Only under modern conditions – when transcendental means of justification no longer possess any validity – is a genuine politics, the politicization of society as a whole, held to be possible. Now, norms of action are supposed to be subject to negotiation at every level: transcendence will yield to discourse immanent to society itself. Society, the reasoning goes, can construct itself anew, purely from within, on the basis of immanent properties. However, such freedom vanishes just as soon as Capital achieves the status of being a new transcendency – a new master. When this occurs, politics lapses into servitude again. It becomes the handmaiden of Capital.

      Do we really want to be free? Didn’t we invent God so we wouldn’t have to be free? Before God, we are all debtors: guilty (schuldig). But debt – guilt – destroys freedom. Today, politicians appeal to high debt rates to explain that their freedom to act is massively restricted. Free from debt – that is, wholly free – we would truly have to act. Perhaps we run up debts perpetually so we won’t need to do so – that is, so we won’t need to be free, or responsible. Don’t our debts prove that we don’t have the power to be free? Could it be that Capital is a new God, making us guilty and debt-ridden again? Walter Benjamin held that capitalism is a religion. As he put it, capitalism represents the ‘first case of a cult that creates guilt, not atonement’ (der erste Fall eines nicht entsühnenden, sondern verschuldenden