"It's about work"--Alice. About a book called The Capitalist Unconscious.

[Mark Kohut]

Tomšič then extends the key argument of the book: that effects of
capitalist modes of production can be made visible and challenged through a
new approach to the unconscious and capitalism together. He uses Marxist
theory to argue that the modern state can be defined as a state in which
every citizen is placed in the position of the ‘debtor,’ so that we all
feel we ‘owe’ something back to the state, which in turn is placed in the
position of the ‘creditor.’ Tomšič’s analysis here strikes me as true both
practically (in a debt based society in which all use credit for student
loans, mortgages and shopping) and more abstractly (our constant feeling
that we ought to ‘give something back’ to society and to our employer).
Tomšič then joins this Marxist analysis with a Lacanian one, writing:

*The equivalent of the placement of the citizen in the position of the
debtor is the transformation of the subject into a quantifiable and
exploitable subjectivity, which is indebted in advance and is also produced
as such.*

Thus, the unconscious of each subject, each worker in capitalism, is
structured in this particular way by capitalism. Tomšič shows that the
Lacanian subject is not a natural or essential one that cannot be changed,
but one who is the *effect* or *symptom* of political and social
conditions. In short, capitalism has modified and changed the Lacanian
‘lacking’ subject into a new subject: the indebted subject. It has done
this to turn us into a labor force whose energy can be harnessed.
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