Spinoza calls ‘conatus’ the effort by which ‘each thing, as far as it can by its own power, strives to persevere in its being.’

[...] Free enterprise, in the most general sense of the freedom to undertake – that is, in the sense of the conatus – is consequently nothing other than the freedom to desire and to set out in pursuit of one’s desire. That is why, outside the restrictions a society deems it appropriate to stipulate, free enterprise enjoys a kind of a priori obviousness. Noting the legitimacy of the production of material goods, the entrepreneurial lament – this time using the specifically capitalist meaning of the expression – repeatedly draws on this source in order to challenge any imposition of limits on ‘free enterprise’: ‘I have a desire that conforms to the division of labour and I am prevented from pursuing it.’ [...]

[...] Marx and Polanyi among others have amply shown how the conditions for proletarianisation emerged, notably through the enclosure of the commons. In the wake of that act of the most complete, organised immiseration, people were left with only one option, the sale of their undifferentiated labour-power.

It is tedious to have to repeat such trivial and obvious facts, yet necessary inasmuch as contemporary fictions, built on ‘work enrichment’, ‘participative management’, ‘employee empowerment’ and other programmes of ‘self-realisation’ are successfully erasing the memory of that original truth about the employment relation: that it is a relation of dependence, a relation between agents in which one holds the conditions for the material reproduction of the other, and that this is the permanent backdrop and the immoveable foundation for anything that unfolds on top of it. [...] all the incentives that the capitalist employment relation successively put on stage in order to enrich its scenery and elicit more refined interests in the workplace – interests such as advancement, socialising, ‘fulfilment’ – can collapse at any moment, leaving only the indestructible foundation of material dependence, a stark backdrop of menace hanging over life newly made bare.

Capitalism inherited this layering of markets that evolved over the long term. But it could only truly take form by closing off the last avenues of independent individual or (small-scale) collective production, thus raising material heteronomy to an unprecedented level.

[...] money, as the almost exclusive mediation of material strategies, ‘the digest of everything’, became the object of meta-desire – the obligatory gateway through which all other (market) desires must pass.

[...] currency the name of a certain social relation, and money the name of the desire to which this relation gives birth.

Michel Aglietta and André Orléan made the decisive contribution of refuting the substantial (intrinsic value) and the functional (convenient means of exchange) approaches to understanding currency, seeing it rather as a social relation, buttressed in institutions, and as complex as the social relation of capital. Currency is thus not a value in itself but the operator of value. Above all, it is fundamentally the effect of a collective belief in its efficacy as a means of repayment, since everyone justifies accepting the monetary sign by the fact that everyone else is equally and reciprocally willing to accept it. The production of this common acceptance of a sign, which is ultimately perfectly arbitrary since it lacks any intrinsic value, is the monetary question par excellence. This essentially fiduciary nature of currency, long occluded by the illusions of metallic fetishism, must be brought to light if one is to grasp that it has no substantial character and is fundamentally interpersonal – in other words, that at the scale of the whole society it is a social relation. Monetary institutions have no other function than to produce and reproduce that social relation of shared recognition and trust which, attached to some sign, establish it as a universally accepted means of payment. [...]

all the aporiae of the subjectivist metaphysics that feed contemporary individualistic thinking

[...] It is the social structures, in the case of employment, those of the capitalist relations of production, that configure desires and predetermine the strategies for attaining them. Within the structures of radical material heteronomy, the desire for persevering biologically-materially is narrowed down [déterminé] to the desire for money, which is in turn narrowed down to the desire to be employed.

[...] Spinoza proposes an altogether different mechanism of alienation: the real chains are those of our affects and desires. There is no such thing as voluntary servitude. There is only passionate servitude. That, however, is universal.

Subjectivist-individualist thought, built around the idea of free will as sovereign self-control, predictably rejects this verdict of radical heteronomy in toto and to its last breath.

[...] If we understand by ‘finance’ the full set of mechanisms that allow agents to (temporarily) spend more than they earn, it is the ability to access money in the non-wage form of finance that identifies the potential capitalist. The fundamental difference is that money as wages is accessed in the form of flow, namely, in quantities that allow for the short-term reproduction of labour-power but do not allow a glimpse beyond this limited horizon, whereas money as financing is accessed in the form of stock, namely, with the hope of crossing the critical threshold of the process of accumulation by self-sustaining valorisation (in which capital grows by itself, thanks to its capacity to extract surplus-value). Thus the capitalist has privileged access to money-capital, rather than simply to money.

with the hope of crossing the critical threshold of the process of accumulation by self-sustaining valorisation

[...] to use a ballistic metaphor, one needs a launcher to ‘launch’ a business. One needs an initial amount (of energy/start-up capital) in order to be propelled past the critical threshold – the capitalist equivalent of escape velocity. From this follows a fundamental inequality with respect to the social capacity of individuals to pursue a capitalist desire to do something. Only those who hold the monetary initiative in the form of a stock of money can devote themselves to a career that combines their material reproduction with doing what they want, sometimes even with the constitution of a fortune. The rest are held down by the gravitational pull of their mere reproduction, confined to the horizon of the basal desire, a desire that conditions everything but counts for nothing, because it is only the prerequisite for the pursuit of other desires deemed worthier of attainment. It is as if the true order of desire (from the point of view of individuals) only begins past the satisfaction of this basal desire, for which the only solution society offers is to be enlisted through employment.

crucially ex ante, in the form of the monetary advance (‘at the start’), namely, as a stock of money-capital, and not as an ex post remuneration for labour-power

A false antinomy (between ‘calculation’ and ‘affects’) par excellence

The reorientation of corporate governance towards maximizing shareholder value – namely, the demand from ‘above’ to extract a rate of return on net capital far beyond the prevailing norms of Fordist capitalism

The reorientation of corporate governance towards maximizing shareholder value – namely, the demand from ‘above’ to extract a rate of return on net capital far beyond the prevailing norms of Fordist capitalism

[...] As can be expected, agents – both collective and individual – caught up in relations of dependence and placed in situations where they are obliged to defend vital interests – economic survival for enterprises, keeping their jobs for employees – are driven to externalise the bulk of the effort required of them in any way they can, passing on the pressure to all those who depend on them. All of these structural facts – shareholder pressure, competition, labour market deregulation, managerial reforms of the organisation – have the effect of modifying the passionate situation of agents and the intensity with which they fight for their objects of desire. Violence therefore spreads along the chains of dependence within, as well as between, enterprises, freighted by radically raised stakes for all agents as a result of the intensification of ambient pressures, and according to the implacable logic that demands that the violence meted out be proportionate to the violence suffered.

the organisations fight in order to not disappear, which says something about the intensity with which they sometimes pursue their goals – the hypostasis of the organisations (‘they’) refers in fact, first of all, to the conatus of upper management.

[...] The justifications offered for contemporary transformations in employment practices – from longer work hours (‘it allows stores to open on Sundays’) to competition-enhancing deregulation (‘it lowers prices’) – always contrive to catch agents by ‘the joyful affects’ of consumption, appealing only to the consumer in them. [...] For the mediations that link each person’s wage-labour to his or her objects of consumption are so drawn-out and complex that everything works in favour of this disconnection, and very few make the link between the gains they receive as consumers and the additional burden they bear as employees – and this, crucially, because the consumed objects have been produced by others, who are anonymous and too far away for the yoke of their employment to enter the consumers’ consciousness and echo their own.

Alfred Müller-Armack, adviser to Ludwig Erhard and the thinker of ordoliberalism (which is the intellectual basis of the EU)

The angle α is the clinamen of the individual conatus, its spontaneous misalignment relative to the ends of the enterprise: α thus expresses the persistent heterogeneity of the conatus relative to the master-desire

commonplace edifying maxims – for example, top bosses who claim to be ‘as demanding of others as of themselves’, thus transmuting the projections of their own desire, made master-desire, into a moral virtue, and expressing in a blind adage of conative egocentricity the wish that others make that desire fully their own.

In terms of both quantitative (share of GDP, financial rate of return) and qualitative capture (mobilisation of employees), neoliberal capitalism tips into the delirium of the unlimited

Understood as the option to exit an asset market at any moment, an option made possible by the certainty of finding a counterparty (a buyer) and by a volume of activity that assures the absorption of the exit transaction (the sale of titles) by the market without significant price variations, liquidity is a promise of perfect reversibility offered to financial investors. [...] Keynes had already noted the fundamentally anti-social character of liquidity,39 as the refusal of any durable commitment and Desire’s desire to keep all options permanently open – namely, to never have to take the other into consideration. Perfect flexibility – the unilateral affirmation of a desire that engages knowing that it can disengage, that invests with the guarantee of being able to disinvest, and that hires in the knowledge that it can fire (at whim) – is the fantasy of an individualism pushed to its ultimate consequences, the imaginative flight of a whole era.

What the capitalist master-desire in the neoliberal era seeks is nothing less than the liquefaction of labour-power, making the overall size of the workforce into something fluid, reversible, and as easily adjustable as the components of a portfolio of financial assets, with the inevitable effect of creating a world of extreme uncertainty for enlistees.