A Theory on Repression and the Capitalist Order

Abstract

This article introduces repressive hedonism, a theory explaining how late capitalism governs subjects not through the prohibition of pleasure, but through its compulsory performance. I argue that contemporary capitalism no longer governs primarily by suppressing pleasure, but by compelling its performance. Pleasure itself becomes labor, visibility becomes economic productivity, and sexuality, intimacy, and emotion become sites of extraction rather than liberation. This is the central claim around which the entire paper is organized.

This paper further argues that contemporary demands for sexual openness, emotional authenticity, and visible enjoyment function as mechanisms of economic extraction and political regulation rather than emancipation. To account for the historical emergence of this condition, the article develops the complementary concept of latent hedonism, describing how centuries of religious sexual repression produced the psychological dispositions of guilt, delayed gratification, and self-discipline that later became foundational to capitalist labor and consumer society. The article further examines the implications of repressive hedonism for feminist political economy, behavioral economics, environmental politics, and contemporary debates on gendered violence, arguing that the commodification of pleasure obscures enduring structures of domination while rendering intimacy, identity, and desire increasingly subject to capitalist imperatives. By reconceptualizing pleasure as a site of labor, governance, and accumulation, the theory offers a new framework for understanding the relationship between religion, capitalism, surveillance, and affect in the twenty-first century.