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Published online: 18 October 2024
© The Author(s) under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Limited 2024
What is greed? This interesting and wide-ranging book takes us through some key debates with a red thread argument, that it is necessary to develop a form of psychoanalytic Marxism. In this project, and to take forward this agenda, it is often the questions that are more revealing than the actual answers. There are some heavy assumptions here about the universality of psychoanalytic descriptions of subjectivity and, towards the end of the book, some much heavier-going explication of Marxist economics. The economics is key to the argument, and Johnston holds to a particular political-theoretic tradition in Marxism that he defends with gusto, aiming to meld it with a particular tradition of work in psychoanalysis and Lacanian theory, so as to arrive at something he dubs ‘Lacano-Marxism’ (p. 1). So, there are two aspects to the issue of greed that Johnston wants to treat as different angles on the same thing, angles that are compatible, complementary even, potentially conjoined.
On the one hand, and this is a real contribution of the book, there is a focus on the structurally-embedded nature of ‘greed’ under capitalism, a second nature that then embeds itself in each singular subject, subjects us to it in such a way that it appears to rise up from within the self. The formula for this greed is given us by Marx to describe the capital flow from money (M) to the production of a commodity (C) and then, from sale of that commodity, to an enhanced form of money (M′). The circuit M-C-M′ is a critique of capitalism, for the ‘value’ that appears at the end of the circuit is there by virtue of the ‘surplus value’ that the capitalist has extracted from the labour of a worker, a worker who has been forced, under only-apparently free contract, to sell their labour power for a period of time and has, within that time, worked above and beyond what is necessary. That is time stolen