Capitalism and the Death Drive

Author
Byung-Chul Han
Publisher
Polity
Year
2021
Collection
Work
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A person dies, but capital is forever. Byung-Chul Han argues that capitalism “rests on a negation of death,” which requires that everyone subject to it be as the undead: that is, in its refusal of death, capitalism renders everyone, and everything, lifeless. Within capitalism, Han locates the death drive in the ideology of transparency, in the “quantified self,” and in the self-exploitation and narcissism that lead inevitably to burnout, depression, and worse. There’s a glimmer of sunlight amid the despair, however, in Han’s description of philosophy as an attempt to imagine different ways of living. Because surely we cannot go on like this.

Reading notes

Self-exploiting workers

In an essay titled, “Why Revolution is Impossible Today,” Byung-Chul Han writes:

The system-preserving power of the disciplinary, industrial society was oppressive. Factory workers were brutally exploited by factory owners, and this violent exploitation prompted protest and resistance. In that situation, a revolution that would overturn the ruling relations of production was a possibility. In that system, it was clear who the oppressors, as well as the oppressed, were. There was a concrete opponent, a visible enemy who could serve as the target of resistance.

The neoliberal system of rule is structured in an altogether different fashion. The system-preserving power is no longer oppressive but seductive. It is no longer as clearly visible as it had been under the disciplinary regime. There is no longer a concrete opponent, no one who is taking away the freedom of the people, no oppressor to be resisted.

Out of the oppressed worker, neoliberalism creates the free entrepreneur, the entrepreneur of the self. Today, everyone is a self-exploiting worker in his own enterprise. Everyone is both master and slave. The class struggle has been transformed into an internal struggle against oneself. Those who fail blame themselves and feel ashamed. People see themselves, rather than society, as the problem.

Disciplinary power, attempting to control people by force, by subjecting them to a dense matrix of orders and prohibitions, is inefficient. Much more efficient is that technique of power that ensures that people subordinate themselves to the system of rule voluntarily.

Han, Capitalism and the Death Drive, page 16

Han has previously written about the “entrepreneur of the self” in The Burnout Society, which connects such self-exploitation to its inevitable outcome. The turn, here, is to note that what’s burned up is both the individual worker and the collective they might have belonged to. That is, when the worker absorbs the management ethos and becomes their own manager—when they see themselves as a project to be designed, branded, and marketed—they lose all sense of solidarity with other workers. Other workers become competitors instead of comrades. And everyone loses.