Primal Capital

Although the dynamics of capital are various, one dynamic is inescapably psychical. In this article, I argue in favor of a concept of what I call “primal capital,” in which capital is not only a “factor of production” but also consists of psychical processes. I proceed by way of reconstructing John Maynard Keynes’s account in The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money (1936) of the owner of capital’s “propensity to hoard.” Keynes presents a model of psychical conflict under epistemic conditions of uncertainty, in which the owners of capital are perpetually torn between hoarding capital in the money form and long-term investment in wealth-generating economic production. To develop the psychical content of capital, I explore resonances between Keynes’s account of hoarding and Freud’s account of obsessional neurosis.