Then Lyotard comes along with Libidinal Economy and introduces libidinal materialism — which early Land explicitly called himself, by the way. He's interested in completely erasing the top-down, condescending leftist idea that "no one can really want this shit capital is throwing at them; this has to all be false consciousness, and we've gotta fix everyone, returning them to a more natural precapitalist mode of desiring." He defends the idea that we really do enjoy the shit capital is giving us; we really want it. That's part of how it maintains its control over us, but there's no going back, undoing these evinced desires: the only way out is through. The book is a sort of darkly humorous and libidinally charged poetic attempt to make you see what even Marx appears to see sometimes: the awesome, insane power and productive capability of capitalism, and the allure of the desires it produces in us.
Lyotard later called it his "evil book," and it lost him a lot of friends, because ultimately it seemed to him and his friends that he went too far in his libidinal investment in capital, like Saruman studying evil too deeply leading to him becoming much like Sauron himself; but nevertheless it's an incredibly written book and a stark wakeup call to those who think the solution the left must pursue is one that involves libidinal disinvestment, a retreat from desire, a "redeeming" of people's desires, a denial of the seductiveness of capital.
Moreover, the book's greater project, beyond this core argument — the in-depth tracing of how desire is produced, transformed, passed from person to person, creating flows and feedback loops, is important to understanding how we are controlled and, more importantly, constructed by the flows of libido around us.
For a taste of Lyotard's project, see:
"Why political intellectuals, do you incline towards the proletariat? In commiseration for what? I realize that a proletarian would hate you, you have no hatred because you are bourgeois, privileged, smooth-skinned types, but also because you dare not say that the only important thing there is to say, that one can enjoy swallowing the shit of capital, its materials, its metal bars, its polystyrene, its books, its sausage pâtés, swallowing tonnes of it till you burst – and because instead of saying this, which is also what happens in the desires of those who work with their hands, arses and heads, ah, you become a leader of men, what a leader of pimps, you lean forward and divulge: ah, but that’s alienation, it isn’t pretty, hang on, we’ll save you from it, we will work to liberate you from this wicked affection for servitude, we will give you dignity. And in this way you situate yourselves on the most despicable side, the moralistic side where you desire that our capitalized’s desire be totally ignored, brought to a standstill, you are like priests with sinners, our servile intensities frighten you, you have to tell yourselves: how they must suffer to endure that! And of course we suffer, we the capitalized, but this does not mean that we do not enjoy, nor that what you think you can offer us as a remedy – for what? – does not disgust us, even more. We abhor therapeutics and its vaseline, we prefer to burst under the quantitative excesses that you judge the most stupid. And don’t wait for our spontaneity to rise up in revolt either." (LE 116)
And:
"The English unemployed did not have to become workers to survive, they – hang on tight and spit on me – enjoyed the hysterical, masochistic, whatever exhaustion it was of hanging on in the mines, in the foundries, in the factories, in hell, they enjoyed it, enjoyed the mad destruction of their organic body which was indeed imposed upon them, they enjoyed the decomposition of their personal identity, the identity that the peasant tradition had constructed for them… enjoyed the dissolutions of their families and villages, and enjoyed the new monstrous anonymity of the suburbs and the pubs in morning and evening. (LE 111)"