Capitalism, socialism and the master signifier

Or, who is the market?

I dedicate this blog to the memories of those 270 freedom-loving music fans who died at the Supernova music festival on October 7, 2023 in southern Israel near the Gaza border – dying for the other thing.

The caesura between inside and outside, and their formal opposition, which falls under the social sign of property and the psychological sign of the immanence of the family, make this traditional space into a closed transcendence.

Jean Baudrillard (1968), The System of Objects

“Feudalism is making a comeback, long after it was believed to have been deposited in the historical dustbin… as wealth in our postindustrial economy tends to be ever more concentrated in fewer hands. Societies are becoming more stratified, with decreasing chances of upward mobility for most of the population.”

Joel Kotkin (2020), The Coming of Neo Feudalism: A Warning to the Global Middle Class

“…since the market is linked to the master signifier, nothing is resolved by denouncing it in this way. For the market is no less linked to this signifier after the socialist revolution.”

Jacques Lacan (1969-70), Book XVII The Other Side of Psychoanalysis

The free market is not capitalism. Capitalism is a form of relative ownership sourced in feudalism. The free market is a discourse about objects and transactions. Underneath every capitalist system is a socialist assumption. Within the transaction around the object exists a social assumption of relative ownership. And behind any private ownership – including socialist ownership, as there is no ongoing ownership beyond the social order – exists a national security concern, which has the final say, regardless of how well-armed the property owner is, even if that property owner is a country.

Capitalism and socialism base relative property rights on feudalism, where social power centered around the social benefits of the ownership of land as such. Feudalistic social groups were broken down into at least three estates – the first estate, which consisted of the clergy, the second estate, which was the landed nobility, and the third estate, which was the peasantry and merchant class.

Ownership in capitalism is authorized retroactively, which is why “it works” and is subject to various exploitation through extraction, while ownership in socialism is continuously reauthorized through democratic processes, which is why it rarely works holistically and is subject to exploitation of resources by an authorized elite with the public’s putative interests in mind.

Capitalism and socialism are not culture. They are relative ownership strategies with cultural effects. The culture is feudalistic, reflected in the traditional family and the single-family home as perceived in suburban ecosystems. The suburb, with its endless battle against rezoning (“NIMBYism”) has effectively become a feudal lord, financed through the stock market, abnormal profits in certain well-guarded industries, and socially-employed burghers. So much for postmodernism.

Mercantilism is another culture – the culture of transactions based around an object. Either you do those well or you do not (do them). The shop as such is culture-less. The shop is the place where people practice mercantilism. The culture of the shop is the culture of object availability through a local transaction. The Internet was able to destroy the “shop” as such because the shop has no culture, because the culture of the shop is just the culture of the transaction, which can be completed in the negative space of the Internet. Amazon cannot make a shop work because the efficiency of its logistics around the transaction destroyed the necessity of object relations in the Real. The object, as a figment of symbolic and imaginary orders always already exists outside the Real anyway. This is the basic idea behind retail therapy – you get lost in the symbolic enjoyment of the object through its imaginary apprehensions.

Pricing has a culture related to the wager. The enjoyment of the salesperson is the enjoyment of the sale on the owner’s behalf. The salesman may get a cut of the owner’s surplus enjoyment of the transaction through the commission. The commission marks the salesperson’s trust with the businessowner.

The transaction is a socialist assumption anyway because the master signifier of the transaction marks the dominance of money on ownership claims. From an other to another other – money is the socialist object, not the object under transaction. The fungible object is the socialist one.

“Actual retail price” means the price that the buyer is willing to pay. There is no actual price, only an actual transaction. The price is a literal representation of a potential transaction. Price is symbolic. The transaction is an event under social conditions and constraints, marking the relationship between buyer and seller. That “everyone has their price” refers both to a subject-to-transaction and his objects. “Everyone has their price” means “someone knows your other objects well enough.”

You could say that shelter is the only need that is a gift of the father — and all needs are satisfied through the gift. The shelter is a womb. In the USA, the shelter is also a caravan, a shelter on wheels.

There is probably a relationship between breaking objects and castration anxiety. Since the use value and exchange value of the object exists somewhere between the subject in whose possession the object lies and the subject in whose desire the object manifests, their destruction by the subject expresses some sort of dissatisfaction over objective use value and preferred exchange value. Anxiety over use value and exchange value is patently related to the lack of the subject. Love hits different.

There is no sale. There is a transaction involving the exchange of an object or service for cash. The subject sees itself reflected in its objects. All subjects are just subjects, and objects are based around the sign – the index of this or that object in the symbolic order under imaginary constraints. If the object is not dirty, it is always already up for sale. A dirty object signals another owner, even if gone. A clean object is inventory.

Death and taxes are another way of saying “no” to the American. The opposite of “to love” is “to tax.” The opposite of tax is love. Do you tax love or love tax?

Health is like a tax. That one could believe they may tax the Earth without being taxed by the society of earthlings is a certain kind of megalomania. Love and tax are the sign above the gift.

I have this tendency to assume, largely because of the ascendance of the subject of scientific discourse after the European Enlightenment, that observation is objective. As if the meaning of one observation refers to the meaning of another observation. You see the observation of the object as the object itself. But the observation of the object is the effects of the subject on the object. The subject of science apologizes for accepting Nietzsche’s belief without evidence that “God is dead”, replacing ritual and custom with observation and conclusion, faith with material.

Sharing is something the subject comes to accept before it must. Why is it only the mother and the infant that must submit to sharing?