#title Cannabis Communism: The Politics of Consciousness
#author Anders Maybeck
#date July 2021
#uid cannabiscommunismthepoliticsofconsciousness
#source https://cannabiscommunism.wordpress.com/410-2/
#lang en
#pubdate 2023-08-01T16:42:30
#teaser What is this utopian motif “Cannabis Communism”? Does the Actionist International actually exist? Who is this New Man called the Funk Punk? What is avant-punk? What is peace punk? And what is the characteristic difference between the Funk Punk, and the Solar Punk, the Bio Punk, the Cyberpunk, etc.? And what are the implications of the development of a politics of consciousness? The Funk Punk is a fellow traveler. Upon insistence he too will admit that he is not just a Hippie, but also a Yippie, that he dreams of a Cannabis Communism. He too speaks about the experience of ego-death, the collective unconscious, and synchronicity. He too speaks of being a survivor of psychiatric hegemony. He too speaks of Trotsky and the Spanish Civil War. He too speaks about the Black Lives Matter protests, street barricades, pepper balls and rubber bullets, and graffiti. Avant-punks, funk punks, peace punks. “How can we make a class act like a work of art?” Perhaps it is rather a return to the avant-garde, rather than the vanguard. The condition of the impossibility of the avant-garde is its very possibility - the possibility of a revolution of everyday life. A specter is haunting the counterculture - the specter of Cannabis Communism. Every revolution must resurrect the ghosts of all past failed revolutions. Just as there is no such thing as Situationism, there is no such thing as Actionism. Actionism is not a political philosophy, nor a metaphysics. It is an ethico-aesthetics - a politics of consciousness. Actionism is the ethico- aesthetics of equality and dehierarchization. But as Hardt and Negri proclaim, “We are not anarchists, but communists”. If the aim of Actionism as an ethico-aesthetics is in the spirit of a personal mythology, then music is resistance, poetry is resistance. And there exists a political unconscious. But what ethics? And what aesthetics? If art, music, philosophy, literature, and cinema are all forms of resistance, then the inspiration for artistic and musical territorialities are material, which returns us to the Marxist dialectic. The “Marxist problematic” directly deals with a “politics of consciousness” and in Marx’s ‘1844 Manuscripts’ he provides an outline for a basic phenomenology of consciousness. Then the experimental aesthetics of Ever Since Darwin aims to converge on three forms of musical resistance: (1) avant-punk, (2) funk punk, and (3) peace punk. For Marx, self-consciousness refers to the truth of self-certainty, the relativity of consciousness in terms of its independence or dependence on social structures, and the certainty of truth and reason. Avant-punk represents the impossibility of society as such, the impossibility of the contradiction of class antagonism, what Marx calls the “Self-alienated Spirit” as the false consciousness imposed by the hegemony of the capitalist bourgeoisie. Funk punk represents the nomadic utopianism of the jam band scene, such that at the shows, on Shakedown Street, and at the campgrounds, diverse, transitory, and autonomous communities are created, the specter of Cannabis Communism. Peace punk represents the ethics of Cannabis Communism, the return of 1960s counterculture and Marxism like a ghost from the past. Marx divides the Geist or the species-essence into the “True Spirit” which deals with ethicality, the “Spirit certain of itself” which deals with morality.
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<strong>Cannabis Communism: The Politics of Consciousness - by Anders Maybeck</strong>

<strong>Table of Contents</strong>

 - Cannabis Communism: The Politics of Consciousness

     - The Geneaology of Acid Communism

     - An Acid Marxism?

     - Also Sprach the Funk Punk...

     - Acid Casualties, 'Schizo-Culture', and Psychiatric Hegemony

     - Funk Punk and the Poetics of Chaos

     - The Politics of Consciousness

     - Unding and Endziel: Postscript on Unitary Urbanism

 - Political Subjectivity and New Materialism

     - "Meet the new boss, same as the old boss"

     - History and Subjectivity

     - Capitalist Realism and Post-Capitalist Desire

     - The Signifier in the Institution

     - "Nobody goes mad through wanting to"

 - It's Not My Fault if Reality Is Marxist

     - The Marxist Problematic

     - Conflict Theory and Class Consciousness

     - Feudalism and Historical Materialism

     - Capitalism and Socialism

     - Lenin and Philosophy

 - The Revenge of Freud: On the Liberation of Mental Illness

     - The Revenge of Freud

     - The Perspective of Anti-Psychaitry

     - Freud and Beyond

     - Politics and Psychotherapy

     - The End of Analysis

<strong>Ch. 1 - Cannabis Communism: The Politics of Consciousness</strong>

<em>Introduction - The Genealogy of Acid Communism</em>

Acid communism. Psychedelic socialism. The freak Left. What do these terms mean? The Youth International Party, with a red star and a marijuana leaf on its flag, formed in 1967, a youth-oriented countercultural revolutionary party, who ran a pig, Pigasus the Immortal as its presidential candidate, and the campaign of Hunter S. Thompson for Sheriff of Pitkin County, Colorado in 1970, on the “Freak Power” ticket, whose logo for Gonzo journalism and his Sheriff campaign was the “Gonzo fist” which interestingly has 6-fingers and is holding a peyote button; these examples better embody than any others the fusion of revolutionary libertarian socialist politics with the counterculture of the 1960s.

Mark Fisher, forefather of the “Acid Communism” project, committed suicide in 2017. In ‘Capitalist Realism’ he included a discussion of mental health in terms of the dominating hegemony of capitalism, his personal mental health struggles, and the effects of capitalism on individuality. He argued that the revitalization of democratic socialism and libertarian communism as alternatives to contemporary neoliberal capitalism had to move beyond the politics of anti-capitalism to a politics of post- capitalism that would recognize that the destruction of the organized left was predicated on the failure of this movement to come to terms with the cultural divergence of 1960s counterculture from the political mainstream. Furthermore, he warned of the transition from anti-statism to anti-politics in postmodernity. His argument, however, was that even in the midst of a total economic and ecological catastrophe, that the very functioning of the neoliberal ideology as hegemonic negates the forms of class struggle that challenge capitalist realism. In ‘Capitalist Realism’, the second chapter is called “What if you held a protest and everyone came?”. He goes on to argue that neoliberalism since the 1960s has maintained its system of dominance but in our contemporary era of technological acceleration, it has changed form: into a “more desperate, even faux-melancholic edge”. His main thesis is that the “strategy” of neoliberalism is not to condemn anti-capitalist protest, but instead present the idea that there is no viable alternative to capitalism - i.e. capitalist realism.

At the time of his death, he was working on a book entitled ‘Acid Communism: On Post-Capitalist Desire’ which reimagined leftist politics in terms of the legacy of 1960s counterculture as returning like a ghost from the past. In his 2014 book ‘Ghosts of My Life’ he popularized Derrida’s concept of “hauntology” which continues into the introduction of ‘Acid
<br>
Communism’ (published online and in the posthumous collection of his writings called ‘k-punk: The Collected and Unpublished Writings of Mark Fisher’). Mark Fisher uses “hauntology” to explore the historical phenomenon and musical aesthetic of the return of the past in terms of a temporal disjunction, a paradox of postmodernity where culture both recycles “retro” aesthetics yet is unable to escape old cultural forms. Throughout all his works, he analyzes politics through popular culture, situating him as a philosopher of aesthetics, music journalist, and a cultural and critical theorist. In ‘Capitalist Realism’, he also conceives of modern neoliberal capitalism as consisting of a “business ontology” where everything is run like a business, even health care and education. There, he also draws on Louis Althusser’s conception of ideology as “the reproduction of the means of production”, understood by the subtitle of the work ‘Is There No Alternative?’.

The second forefather of the ‘Acid Communism’ project was a friend of Mark Fisher’s named Jeremy Gilbert. The two writers were in communication with each other around the time of Mark Fisher’s death. In an article published on OpenDemocracy, “Psychedelic Socialism”, he noted that after reading Mark Fisher’s introduction, he noticed that it contained ideas that he had been working on himself in different forms, and although he wasn’t cited, more than half of the references were books that he had recommended Fisher read. After Fisher’s death, his students at Goldsmiths College invited Gilbert to speak at the late writer and professor’s master’s program class “Post-Capitalist Desire”. Gilbert traces the origin of the term ‘Acid Communism’ to an article published in The Guardian that referred to anti-psychiatrist R.D. Laing as an “acid Marxist” who encouraged the use of LSD. It is also notable in explaining the origin of the idea of ‘Acid Communism’ that in 2007 in the book ‘Counterculture Through the Ages’ by Ken Goffman and Dan Joy, the term “The Freak Left” was coined. In some ways, Gilbert notes, the discussion of psychedelia in relation to grassroots political movements, constituted some of the literal examples for ‘Acid Communism’. Also, music journalist Simon Reynolds, author of ‘Retromania: Pop Culture’s Addiction to Its Own Past’, helped define the concept of “hauntology” as it relates to music. Co-founder and co-host of the Chapo Trap House podcast Matt Christman has also utilized the term “Acid Marxism”.

<em>Part I - An Acid Marxism?</em>

The 1960s was defined by the emergence of the New Left, the civil rights movement, anti-Vietnam War protests, environmentalism, the anti-nuclear movement, second-wave feminism, the gay rights movement; as well as the rise of middle class drug culture, beats, mods, hippies, and of course psychedelia. The focus of this analysis, based on the basic idea of Mark Fisher’s posthumous introduction to his unfinished ‘Acid Communism’, we see through the lens of Jacques Derrida’s concept of hauntology (e.g. the idolization of Ché Guevara during Occupy Wall Street) of the “slow cancelation of the future”, and the persistence of cultural elements that return like a ghost from the past, and Fisher’s unpublished book attempted to advance a solution to the earlier outline of ‘Capitalist Realism’ through the excavation of Marxism and 1960s counterculture to return to the cultural revolution of the 1960s in the vein of the reality of hauntology such that we see both Derrida’s original idea of the atemporal historicity of Marxism to haunt Western culture, as well as Fredric Jameson’s famous dictum “Always historicize!”. Marx’s critique of political economy is both a philosophy of praxis and a science of class struggle that is always applicable in discourse to criticize capitalism as the monolith of political economy that seems to always only get more advanced as history progresses; so how can we speak of progress? Marx’s historical materialism is the very essence of progress; we cannot concede to the fashionable concept of “accelerationism”. While Marx himself thought that the capitalism of the 19th century was almost at its point of implosion, and we have heard this same refrain all throughout history, so though accelerationism is here rejected, we can conceptualize Derrida’s hauntology as relevant in the sense that Walter Benjamin conceptualized revolution as the awakening of the dead of past revolutions; will the ghost of the 1960s return?

The 1960s was definitely a paradigm shift, a new zeitgeist, a cultural revolution, and also a new episteme; Foucault argued in his 1966 book ‘The Order of Things’ that every historical period has underlying epistemic assumptions, or ways of thinking, which determine what is truth and what is acceptable discourse about a subject. Hegel once said that artistic creations, by their very nature, reflect the culture of the time in which it is created, however he intends to make clear that the philosophy of art and the theory of art are more descriptive of the style of the art at hand than pure historicism. But Hegel is still a historicist par excellence; though Marx in his ‘Thesis on Fauerbach’ incorporates his view on intersubjectivity within the methods of historical and dialectical materialism by defining revolutionary practice as resulting from “human activity”, the conscious changing of circumstances, or “self-change”, arguing that “the educator must himself be educated”, and early theorists associated with the emergence of Western Marxism, such as Georg Lukacs, Karl Korsch, and Antonio Gramsci, posited a return to the historicism of Hegel defining class consciousness as a necessary product of the historical epoch that creates it, rejecting the view that Marxism is an objective atemporal science, though with the rise of structural Marxism during the 1970s, with theorists such as Louis Althusser and Nicos Poulantzas, they would reaffirm again that Marxism can be viewed an objective science.

There is no doubt that the class consciousness among the counterculture in the 1960s was a beacon of hope at achieving a future socialist society, the New Left began to demand new civil and political rights, gender equity, gay rights, abortion rights, and drug policy reforms; this was all in response to the traditional Marxist left which some argue was focused on class struggle as the exclusive engine of social change, though others saw the New Left as a continuation of traditional leftist objectives. As an example, during this time the word “liberal” was used pejoratively to refer to Democrats who were on the right-wing of the Democratic establishment, as most members of the New Left considered themselves socialists, Marxists, or anarchists, and at the scene of the 1968 Democratic National Convention, which was the split of the New Left with the nomination of Hubert Humphrey for president, many Democrats revolted.

“If you go around carrying pictures of Chairman Mao, you ain’t gonna make it with anyone anyhow” sang John Lennon in the Beatles’ 1968 song ‘Revolution’. Yet Mao himself was a genuine hero for the revolutionary actions of the Black Panther Party, and on March 5, 1971, the Grateful Dead would play a benefit concert for the Black Panthers in Oakland as a birthday celebration for Huey P. Newton. 1968 saw huge protests and riots all across Europe and the United States. As far as the thesis here is to use both cultural and political examples from the 1960s to describe the reemergence of cultural artifacts in contemporary society, to use an example was the meme “Chairman Obamao” or “Chairman Maobama” on the surface to smear Obama as a communist, but functioning in a more particular way, such that it represents the ideological divergence in the 21st century between Chinese communism and the legacy of Barack Obama in the United States.

When Mark Fisher published ‘Capitalist Realism’ in 2009, after the election of Barack Obama and in the midst of the recovery from the 2008 recession, he stated his theory that in the U.S. capitalism had taken root in American values so strongly that as Slavoj Zizek said in the book ‘Mapping Ideology’, “it seems easier to imagine the ‘end of the world’ than a far more modest change in the mode of production, as if liberal capitalism is the ‘real’ that will somehow survive even under conditions of a global ecological catastrophe”. Marxists such as Zizek have gone as far as to call themselves “closet Fukuyamaists”, referring to the 1992 book “The End of History and the Last Man”. While Barack Obama ran his campaign on the promise of “hope” and “change”, very little actual progress was made during his two terms to reform the policies of the Bush administration, and in 2020 when Vice President Joe Biden ran for president against Donald Trump, at an event for wealthy donors at the Carlyle Hotel in Manhattan only shortly after appearing at the Poor People’s Campaign Presidential Forum, he made a different promise, “No one’s standard of living will change, nothing would fundamentally change” if he was elected, and that he would not “demonize” the rich. During Barack Obama’s presidency, for example, he deported more illegal immigrants than the Bush administration, setting the stage for Donald Trump to demonize immigrants in his 2016 campaign. Obama extended the Bush tax cuts, gave large handouts to multi-billion dollar corporations, compromised on the Affordable Care Act, ordered an increase in troops in Afghanistan and Iraq, approved military intervention in Lybia, and more. Thomas Frank writes, “When the left party in a system severs its bonds to working people - when it dedicates itself to the concerns of a particular slice of high-achieving affluent people - issues of work and income inequality will inevitably fade from its list of concerns.”

While Mark Fisher was a brilliant theorist of culture and aesthetics, his work lacks historical context in envisioning what communism would and should look like (although this may be his point!). Consequently, it is difficult to view his works as a coherent political philosophy, and hence, his philosophy is often associated with accelerationism, whether accurately or not. For example, a question comes up in one of his lectures; a student asks him to provide a historical example of what post- capitalism (a term Fisher preferred to anti-capitalism) looks like in practice. The easy answer that the student provides was that Yugoslavia under Tito had elements of workers’ self-management, but Fisher goes on the say something absurd - he asks the student, “how is giving a share of a company to the workers any different than privatization?” Another student then provides the real definition of post-capitalism: “social ownership of the means of production”. If from a historical materialist standpoint, social ownership of the means of production is not the goal of communism - and it is, and Marx and Engels made this extremely clear - then, post-capitalism becomes a declaration of post-leftism, which for us Marxists is an absurdity.

<em>Part II - The Actionist Manifesto</em>

What is this utopian motif “Cannabis Communism”? Does the Actionist International actually exist? Who is this New Man called the Funk Punk? What is avant-punk? What is peace punk? And what is the characteristic difference between the Funk Punk, and the Solar Punk, the Bio Punk, the Cyberpunk, etc.? And what are the implications of the development of a politics of consciousness? The Funk Punk is a fellow traveler. Upon insistence he too will admit that he is not just a Hippie, but also a Yippie, that he dreams of a Cannabis Communism. He too speaks about the experience of ego-death, the collective unconscious, and synchronicity. He too speaks of being a survivor of psychiatric hegemony. He too speaks of Trotsky and the Spanish Civil War. He too speaks about the Black Lives Matter protests, street barricades, pepper balls and rubber bullets, and graffiti.

Avant-punks, funk punks, peace punks. “How can we make a class act like a work of art?” Perhaps it is rather a return to the avant-garde, rather than the vanguard. The condition of the impossibility of the avant-garde is its very possibility - the possibility of a revolution of everyday life.

A specter is haunting the counterculture - the specter of Cannabis Communism. Every revolution must resurrect the ghosts of all past failed revolutions. Just as there is no such thing as Situationism, there is no such thing as Actionism. Actionism is not a political philosophy, nor a metaphysics. It is an ethico-aesthetics - a politics of consciousness. Actionism is the ethico- aesthetics of equality and dehierarchization. But as Hardt and Negri proclaim, “We are not anarchists, but communists”.

If the aim of Actionism as an ethico-aesthetics is in the spirit of a personal mythology, then music is resistance, poetry is resistance. And there exists a political unconscious. But what ethics? And what aesthetics? If art, music, philosophy, literature, and cinema are all forms of resistance, then the inspiration for artistic and musical territorialities are material, which returns us to the Marxist dialectic. The “Marxist problematic” directly deals with a “politics of consciousness” and in Marx’s ‘1844 Manuscripts’ he provides an outline for a basic phenomenology of consciousness. Then the experimental aesthetics of Ever Since Darwin aims to converge on three forms of musical resistance: (1) avant-punk, (2) funk punk, and (3) peace punk. For Marx, self-consciousness refers to the truth of self-certainty, the relativity of consciousness in terms of its independence or dependence on social structures, and the certainty of truth and reason. Avant-punk represents the impossibility of society as such, the impossibility of the contradiction of class antagonism, what Marx calls the “Self-alienated Spirit” as the false consciousness imposed by the hegemony of the capitalist bourgeoisie. Funk punk represents the nomadic utopianism of the jam band scene, such that at the shows, on Shakedown Street, and at the campgrounds, diverse, transitory, and autonomous communities are created, the specter of Cannabis Communism. Peace punk represents the ethics of Cannabis Communism, the return of 1960s counterculture and Marxism like a ghost from the past. Marx divides the Geist or the species-essence into the “True Spirit” which deals with ethicality, the “Spirit certain of itself” which deals with morality.

Thus, the goals of the Actionist International are threefold: (1) the continuation of Ever Since Darwin and the creation of new musical territorialities with innovation, autonomy, and heteronomy, with the surrealists emphasis on the full potential creative expression of the unconscious mind, (2) to challenge psychiatric hegemony in an era when the constraints of global capitalism maintain an oppressive force upon those with mental illness, whereby it may be possible to reach a point of collectivity; but the question remains, how will society achieve through politics and economics a social order that models the natural collective tendencies of humanity to fight the constraints of the death instinct and intends to dehierarchize the mental health system to a point where clients and clinicians are indistinguishable? And how is possible to enact a “revenge of Freud” such that we can overturn the hegemony of behaviorism and bio-psychiatry, change the erroneous monicker “behavioral health” (a poster on Reddit replied to a post of mine saying “The term [behavioral health] sounds like bad monkeys who are attacking people. It doesn’t even sound like health care for a human”), and return to the treatment of mental health, and (3) to develop a “politics of consciousness” by which we can realize class consciousness, achieve humanist freedom through equality and dehierarchization, and “traverse the radical fantasy” of the underlying unconscious effects of ideology and the drive that circuits around the sublime object of ideology. In the Althusserian sense of ideology as a material force, Zizek argues, ideology is virtual in the sense that it is “ideal but nonetheless real”, and has Real, Symbolic, and Imaginary dimensions. Althusser stages the primal scene of ideology as interpellation; “Hey You!” yells the police officer to a man on the street. Actionism aims at developing a theory of Meta-Marxism: both a critical theory but also as a paradigm that represents the possibilities of the multitude, without any explicit prescription, to change the given circumstances of economic and political exploitation and coercion to arrive at a truly egalitarian society, an unstoppable movement of class struggle, that leads towards new forms of social, political, and economic rationalities, subjectivities, and organizations of power. As societies of control are constantly accelerating in complexity, we must resist this acceleration, overcoding, and stratification of flows by following nomadic intensities to create situations of political action that in all their force resist segregation in the process of destratification. Then, permanent revolution, and therefore Actionism, are diametrically opposed to any form of accelerationism. The dialectic of chaos/complexity and reductionism is the methodological problem in the study of social complexity, systems theory, and chaos theory. I say that this is a “problem” and not a “problematic” because what I consider the “Marxist problematic” to be is the false consciousness and alienation of ideology as it exists to reinforce cultural hegemony. Yet with the increasing rationalization of society and globalization and the ever-increasing complexity of social networks as an effect of technology, we find ourselves even more concretely within the domain of ideological mystification and crystallization, where class consciousness is replaced with cynicism.

So what of this Nietzschean New Man that is the Funk Punk? Is it true as Lacan claims, that “Revolutionary aspirations have only one possibility: always to end up in the discourse of the master. Experience has proven this. What you aspire to as revolutionaries is a master. You will have one!”? Foucault asks, “How does one keep from being fascist, even (especially) when one believes oneself to be a revolutionary militant?” Should the Actionist himself denounce this master’s discourse? Mark Bracher clarifies the role of each of Lacan’s ‘Four Discourses’ in terms of the social bond that they represent in political and theoretical discourse: the master governs, the university educates, the hysteric protests, and the analyst revolutionizes. While putting aside any form of egoistic anarchism, social anarchism therefore must reconcile with the will to power and the eternal recurrence of the master’s discourse. But as communists we support the proletarian semi-state such that we can transform the state apparatus to a dictatorship of the masses, and the inevitable ‘withering away of the state’ is said to follow. And in this transition which Marx said could be “nothing other than the revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat”, Nietzsche’s ‘affirmation of life’ is once again affirmed; he described it as follows: “...and if our soul has trembled with happiness and sounded like a harp string just once, all eternity was needed to produce this one event - and in this single moment of affirmation all eternity was called good, redeemed, justified, and affirmed.” As the Frankfurt School believed that ideology is the principle obstacle to human liberation, and if the ‘discourse of the master’ is the ideological par excellence, is it then true that revolutionary political discourse always ends up reaffirming the dominance of the master’s discourse in new social formations?

Slavoj Zizek in ‘Mapping Ideology’ provides a warning for the forms of speculative utopianism in the context of the impossibility of resolving the class antagonisms and achieving social harmony, when he says “it seems easier to imagine the ‘end of the world’ than a far more modest change in the mode of production, as if liberal capitalism is the ‘real’ that will somehow survive even under conditions of a global ecological catastrophe”. Then, Mark Fisher’s ‘Capitalist Realism’ offers a way forward: “Emancipatory politics must always destroy the appearance of a ‘natural order’, must reveal what is presented as necessary and inevitable to be a mere contingency, just as it must make what was previously deemed to be impossible seem attainable.” On the 1999 Seattle World Trade Organization protests, David Graeber said, “When protesters in Seattle chanted “this is what democracy looks like”, they meant to be taken literally...This is why all the condescending remarks about the movement being dominated by a bunch of dumb kids with no coherent ideology completely missed the mark. The diversity was a function of the decentralized form of organization, and this organization was the movement’s ideology.” So why have I decided to write on this utopianism, as a mode of social state, that I call Cannabis Communism, and what Mark Fisher meant by “Acid Communism”? I am very little interested in utopian socialism qua Saint-Simon, Fourier, or Robert Owen. However, as Fredric Jameson writes in ‘An American Utopia’, “Fourier’s notion of harmony expresses the conviction that no matter how frustrated and unfulfilled, no matter how neurotic, hysterical, or compulsive, there will always be a collective combination in which the individual bearer of the sad passion in question, of the desperate or antisocial loner, the anorexic or bulimic of desire, the manic convert to ever new and equally unfulfillable hobbies and pastimes, will find relief.”

Actionism must proceed by means of the promotion of political literacy and the contemporary reevaluation of Marxist texts, a form of psycho-education that links networks of power to the individual’s experiences and allows them to overcome the oppressive and scarce conditions of existence under capitalism, including class-based or intersectional discrimination. Actionism aims at a historical and political form of psycho-education. Often this in practice takes the form of an autodidactism, if only because of the hegemony of the neoliberal consensus at state universities that always presents a logical positivist and usually capitalist standpoint, without enough professors dissenting and teaching critical theory or Marxian economics, for example. For a literary example that shows both the dominance of the neoliberal consensus at universities, as well as psychiatric hegemony in the case of college psychology programs, which is the dominance of applied behavior analysis and other forms of behaviorism in academia: In Chaim Potok’s 1967 novel ‘The Chosen’, Danny has an interest in psychoanalysis, learns German and reads Freud, and wants to become a psychologist someday, but when he starts college he is disappointed by the experimental psychology paradigm of the psychology program at his university, which doesn’t teach psychoanalytic theory. This leaves him uninterested in the material taught in his classes, him having preferred Freudian psychoanalysis to experimental psychology, though his professor tells him to continue on and study clinical psychology in graduate school, and he goes on to apply to doctorate programs in clinical psychology at the end of the novel.1

But what prevents the Gonzo ramblings of the Funk Punk from rather becoming a narrative of paranoid fiction? Is he (or she) not the most sublime hysteric? What are the implications of this “revenge of Freud”? And what is the role of psychiatric hegemony in the perpetuation of the dominant ideology of neoliberalism and furthermore what is meant by this term? Fredric Jameson’s ‘An American Utopia’ presents us with a vision of tyrannical military and psychiatric hegemony, whereby there is forced conscription into a “Universal Army” and where there is complete and total psychiatric hegemony in the form of the State withering away into some sort of “enormous group therapy” called the “Psychoanalytic Placement Bureau”. This is then the fictional manifestation of Thomas Szasz’s worst fears about the mental health industry combining with the State into an overbearing and oppressive apparatus of social control and conformity. As the Situationists observed that many men have walked the line between individualism and collectivism2, many therapists during their training have walked the line between the now heterodox forms of psychoanalysis and psychodynamic psychotherapy and the psychiatric hegemony of the paradigm that emerged in the late 20th century with the dominance of behaviorism and bio-psychiatry3. In the sense of the vision of psychiatric hegemony that Jameson provides, quite a dystopian project really, the reality is much the opposite. It is not psychoanalysis that we need to fear over-reaching the State, but the dominant therapeutic modality that combines bio-psychiatry with behaviorism.

<em>Part III - Also sprach the Funk Punk...</em>

”What is funk punk?” asks the Peace Punk. The Funk Punk replies, “It’s peace without the junk! Parallel to smoking the skunk! It’s funk magic! Where’d the passion go? But please now leave me peace with static.” A fellow traveler organized a party with Ever Since Darwin playing in the basement, a funk fiesta, voices downed out. “I’ll give you something to talk about”, the fellow traveler says. “Everybody’s dancing, 5’s if you’re a freshman”, but someone else suggests, “This ain’t no funky reggae party, 5 dollars at the door.” Then someone else proclaims, “It’s a punky reggae party!”.

The Funk Punk is a New Man. The Funk Punk has read the Helping Friendly book. “Read the fucking book” he tells others. He too is “practically extinct from doing things smart people don’t do”, and he “keeps on drinking too”. Around the campfire, Tennessee Jed proclaims “I feel I never told you the story of the ghost”. He speaks of the ghost of Jerry Garcia following him on his “long journey home” from the West Coast. He had traveled across the country to meet up with his ex-girlfriend, but when he got there, she threw him out of the house and he had to sleep in the backyard. Cannabis Communism is “the story of the ghost” - the ghost of all past failed revolutions, the specter of Marx, and the return of the very real apparition of 1960s counterculture, punk, and the jam band scene. Runaway Jim remembers when Phish changed “The Divided Sky” into “Divided Sky”, and he too shouts to the sky, “Divided Sky, the wind blows high”.

The Funk Punk stole a copy of Abbie Hoffman’s ‘Steal This Book!’, as well as a copy of System Of A Down’s “Steal This Album!”, but gave it to a local constructivist artist friend. He was never much of a metalhead. In high school, he laughed about the reaction of a conservative woman to the Beatles playing their infamous rooftop concert in the film ‘Let It Be’, he laughed about the scene in The Grateful Dead Movie when a crazy dancer sings “back to back, chicken shack” along with “U.S. Blues”, he laughed about Yoko Ono making animal noises, not “more cowbell”, but “John, we need to make more animal noises!”, he laughed about another crazy dancer at a free Rusted Root concert that danced like a “banana man” without the banana suit. The Funk Punk begins to read ‘Steal This Book’...”Smoking dope and hanging up Che’s picture is no more a commitment than drinking milk and collecting postage stamps”. “Then I too am a Cannabis communist!” he then exclaims.

The Funk Punk learned “Also sprach Zarathustra” on guitar, he always refers to the song as “2001”. He has read only parts of Thus Spoke Zarathustra by Friedrich Nietzsche, although never really identified with its philosophy, because how exactly can one reconcile Marx and Nietzsche? Though he read ‘A Thousand Plateaus’ almost in its entirety, and he remembers hearing about how the members of The Phish School of Philosophy threw copies of both ‘A Thousand Plateaus’ and ‘Thus Spoke Zarathustra’ on stage during the 2013 New Years run at MSG. It could be said that these are both works of theory- fiction - so why not attempt here to write in the style of a theory-fiction or a meta-fiction (and a poetics of chaos)? Doesn’t this “poetics of chaos” necessarily invoke Nietzsche’s ethico-aesthetic dialectic of the forces of nature on the creation of works of art and music that he calls “Apollonian and Dionysian”? Order, disorder, drug hoarder, the faceless boarder’s lifetime solider, he’s only getting older, they gave him the cold shoulder, now it’s solider versus soldier, he’s holding her closer to the poster girl poser, lovers, haters, politicians, musicians, breaking traditions, this is our religion, disaster multiplied, can I look you in the eyes?, I’ve only fantasized, it’s incredible how fast time flies by. The Funk Punk then is a tragic hero of the jam band scene and late capitalist postmodernity - wait for your symptoms to surface, it won’t be tonight, I can’t even see the end of the tunnel, where is the light?, total destruction and losing brain function, safety first, dollar bills in the hundreds, size up your supply, your master’s secret has eyes, friends in tie-dye always reply, sour dough or sour diesel?, my brain is splattered on an easel...5 On one hand, a poetics of chaos in its “Apollonian” inspiration, represents artistic and musical works that harness the principle of individuation, harmony, progress, clarity, and logic, and on the other hand, a poetics of chaos in dialectic of those forces that are “Apollonian”, are those forces of creativity which Nietzsche calls “Dionysian”, emotion, intoxication, unity, disorder, and ecstasy.

The Funk Punk has traversed nomadic musical potentialities and temporal territorialities, he follows the nomos in opposition to the polis and the logos, fixed identifiable shows and festivals determine paths. Perhaps musical improvisation can provide a general model for the rich complexity of the social milieu, for molecules of resistance, multiplicities that resist the perpetuation of the hegemony of the state-form and capitalism. “There ain’t no party like a ditch party”. In 2013, The Ditch itself was elected Mayor of moe.down. Mikhail Bakhtin’s ‘Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics’ advances the conception of “the carnivalization of literature”, which he claims involves the mock crowning and subsequent de-crowning of a “carnival king”: “The crowning implies the de-crowning, and the de-crowning implies a new crowning.”

Around the campfire, the Funk Punk gets into a conversation about psychedelic and progressive rock: 801’s cover of the Beatles’ “T.N.K. (Tomorrow Never Knows)”; the “June 1, 1974” album by Kevin Ayers, John Cale, Brian Eno, and Nico; Soft Machine, named after the William S. Burroughs novel; Spacemen 3 with their mantra from “Playing With Fire”, “Love. Suicide. Accuracy. Revolution. Purity.”; “The Psychedelic Sounds of the 13th Floor Elevators”; Can’s album ‘Tago Mago’; “Tried So Hard” by Gong; “Peace Loving Man” by Blossom Toes. As the Funk Punk and the fellow travelers drive out of the campgrounds, a young woman falls asleep in the back seat of the car, and sleep-talks about “Primus...” What about The Lennon Claypool Delirium? Have we yet discussed the intimacy of Sean Lennon and Charlotte Kemp Muhl’s Ghost of a Saber Toothed Tiger? And of course, what about Oysterhead? Did the young woman’s dream contain similar associations? In fact, after listening to Jerry Garcia Band for a couple days, he had a wonderful dream where him and an attractive black woman were singing “How Sweet It Is (To Be Loved By You)” together. He dreams of lecturing at a conference at a university, and a comrade once told him, “You should speak at a philosophy of mind conference!”

<em>Part IV - Acid Casualties, ‘Schizo-Culture’, and Psychiatric Hegemony</em>

The classic notion of the “acid casualty” which comes from stories such as that of Syd Barrett, founding member of Pink Floyd who for a period of time took LSD on a near- daily basis, and afterwards his mental condition would deteriorate, such that his band members said that he would stand on stage and play the same note over and over again. Barrett released two solo albums in 1970 with the help of his former bandmates, but ultimately spent the rest of his life living in his mother’s basement and abandoning his music career, though he continued painting until the end of his life. And while never releasing any more music, he lived a relatively long life, not dying until 2006 at age 60 from pancreatic cancer. Upon Syd Barrett’s death, David Gilmour called him “the madcap genius” referencing the first of his two 1970 solo albums called ‘The Madcap Laughs’, with his second simply being titled ‘Barrett’. In 1979, when Pink Floyd would release “The Wall”, it was a rock opera based on the intersection of politics and mental health. This motif of “The Wall” that the main character Pink builds up in his own mind represents his isolation and mental illness. On the second to last track on the album, ‘The Trial’, they chant “Tear down the wall!”. In the song

‘Mother’, they sing “Mama’s gonna help build a wall”. In ‘Another Brick in the Wall (Part 2)’ they sing “All in all, it was all just, bricks in the wall”. In

the two parts ‘In The Flesh?’ and ‘In The Flesh’, they sings about fascism as famously depicted by the infamous dictator in the film version of “The Wall”, who is actually Pink himself, who orders “jews”, “coons”, and “queers” to “get up against the wall”. The film also chronicles Pink’s father dying fighting for the British in World War II. Another so-called “acid casualty” was Brian Wilson from the Beach Boys, who experimented with psychedelics himself (describing it as “a very religious experience”) and later developed psychosis, struggling with mental illness all his life, but often described as a genius as well. He is still alive and making music, and was depicted in the 2014 film “Love & Mercy” which chronicled Brian Wilson’s struggle with mental illness, and the tyrannical reign of his personal psychiatrist.

American punk band The Ramones were included in the 1975 ‘Schizo-Culture’ conference where the lyrics to their hit “Teenage Lobotomy” was printed along with a cartoon of a doctor ripping a woman’s brain out; the Ramones were well- known for their songs about mental illness also including “Gimmie Gimmie Shock Treatment”, “Psycho Therapy”, “I Wanna Be Well”, and “Gone Mental”. In 1993, the Ramones released the album “Acid Eaters”, playing covers from the 60s including Jefferson Airplane’s “Somebody to Love”, The Who’s “Substitute”, Love’s “7 and 7 Is”, Bob Dylan’s “My Back Pages, The Rolling Stone’s “Out of Time”, and more.

Anti-psychiatry, a term first used by David Cooper in 1967 in ‘Psychiatry and Anti-Psychiatry’, was a psychiatric reform movement represented by a multitude of individuals that redefined psychopathology, questioned the concept of normality, criticized psychiatry as a tool of social control and political abuse, criticized the power of the pharmaceutical industry, and challenged the use of involuntary commitment and electroconvulsive therapy. In addition, most members of the movement saw mental illness as a reaction to societal distress rather than a biologically-grounded disease pathology, or the medicalization of normality. Starting in the 1960s, there existed a worldwide trend of deinstitutionalization of people with mental illness from institutions into the community. But David Cooper coins another term in 1975 in ‘Schizo-Culture’: “non- psychiatry”, as rather than a subversive element of psychiatry itself, it was the absence of psychiatric coercion altogether, a pure state of being not invaded and infiltrated by psychiatric treatment (i.e. Freud’s transference neurosis, about which Wilhelm Reich says can literally replace the neurosis itself). In this essay, as the prominent anti-psychiatrists were known to do, David Cooper speaks strongly; “Modern psychiatry as the pseudo-medical action of detecting faulty ways of living lives and the technique of their categorization and their correction...” In the namesake work of anti-psychiatry, David Cooper’s 1967 ‘Psychiatry and Anti-Psychiatry’ he writes about the violence that comes into play in psychiatry; clearly this is not the type of violence as a madman “hitting people on the heads with hammers” he says, but is the subtle violence of psychiatry itself that the so-called “sane ones” perpetuate against those not conforming to normality in the psychiatric setting.

R. D. Laing in his book on schizophrenia, ‘The Divided Self’, devotes a chapter to the experience of “self-consciousness” by psychotic individuals, this is clearly a different concept than self-transcendence. While in Lacanian diagnostics, an individual can move from the disorganization of schizophrenia to the systematized delusion of paranoia, or vice versa, a psychotic cannot become structurally a neurotic, or vice versa. R. D. Laing was British, and ‘The Divided Self’ which was written by R. D. Laing when he was only 27 years old, hit the United States in 1962 when anti-psychiatry was a burgeoning movement across the globe, he both developed an existential-phenomenological account of schizophrenia, and also questioned the empirical foundations of the diagnosis. Some like Thomas Szasz would disavow entirely the concept of schizophrenia as a faulty diagnosis polluted by politics, but R. D. Laing saw it as a distinct existential mode of experience of certain individuals. However, his analysis moved far beyond the characterization of schizophrenia as simply consisting of hallucinations and delusions, R. D. Laing uses his own case studies with schizophrenic patients to illustrate the complex nature of the experience of individuals diagnosed with schizophrenia. While his main description of schizophrenic phenomenology goes by the category of “ontological insecurity”, I will return to his description of “self-consciousness”. While one study described self-transcendence, on one hand, as related to an increased sense of connection with other living beings, the environment, and a higher power, spiritual, paranormal, or religious beliefs, and an absorption in fantasy, R. D. Laing describes “self- consciousness” as “an awareness of oneself by oneself” and “an awareness of oneself as the object of someone else’s observation”. In a different chapter in ‘The Divided Self’ entitled “The inner self in the schizoid position”, he compares the split between phantasy and reality in schizophrenia. He writes, “the person who does not act in reality and only acts in phantasy becomes himself unreal”. In addition to unconscious phantasy, he also considers the role of depersonalization and derealization as a split between the self and the body (hence, the term ‘disembodied self’).

<em>Part V - Funk Punk and The Poetics of Chaos</em>

The musicology of this notion of an ethico-aesthetics called Funk Punk, is a style that is interweaved with many different genres of music, including post-punk, avant-punk, avant-funk, neo-psychedelia, and post-rock. The politics of consciousness behind the ethico-aesthetics of Funk Punk can be equated with the slogan “Music Is Resistance”, so then when we again ask the questions, “What ethics?” and “What aesthetics?”, we can affirmatively answer with “The ethics of punk, and the aesthetics of funk”. But what if we reverse this distinction, and perhaps instead say “the ethics of funk, and the aesthetics of punk”? Some of the influences and examples of early “proto-punk” bands includes The Velvet Underground who were considered the first “underground” band, the style of garage rock was exemplified by MC5, and the acid rock of the 13th Floor Elevators who were called by music critic Michael Hann the “toughest, angriest garage rockers”, although this really should be said instead about the MC5 with their politics-laden live album ‘Kick Out The Jams’, but The 13th Floor Elevators were the first to use the adjective “psychedelic” in an album title with their album ‘The Psychedelic Sounds of the 13th Floor Elevators’. So then, if we find the roots of punk rock in acid rock, then isn’t the quality of post-punk a return to proto-punk in a way? And wasn’t this creative movement always a continuation of what can be called the underground, or bohemian? What differentiated the punk philosophy from the hippie philosophy? What is for certain is that both provide an ethico-aesthetic paradigm - ‘The impossibility of the avant-garde is its very possibility - the possibility of a revolution of everyday life’...I repeated this line to a drummer who at the open mic began his performance by drumming on the stage and the microphone stands, then moving to a hand drum, before playing a solo on the drum set, at which point I left to smoke (I sometimes skip the Grateful Dead’s drum segments as well) but he seemed enthused by this piece of wisdom. “Philosophy, nothing but philosophy. A bastard line.” - “In fact, Deleuze and Guattari would probably be more inclined to call philosophy music with content than music a rarefied form of philosophy.”

We find that in our postmodern era, with Mark Fisher’s concept of the lost futures of the “radical chic”, we find both the sedimentation of the counterculture into the political mainstream (such that we sometimes may say “It seems as if everyone’s a Deadhead!”), and the diffusion of radical leftist politics from the music scene, and that when politics is integrated into the jam band scene for example, such as “Deadheads For Obama” or Phish’s support for Bernie Sanders, the music scene as one of the only ways to escape ideology, leaves us ever more in its grips. In the way that strangely non- music bars are more likely to enforce the old “no religion or politics at the dinner table” policy than music bars, Trey Anastasio said in a 2016 interview, “I try really hard to keep my mouth shut when it comes to politics”, even invoking an Orwellian ‘1984’ term saying that he doesn’t want the band to be the “thought police” to say that people at shows are entitled to freedom of speech and therefore are free to discuss politics. In Baudrillard’s semiotic terms, cultural artifacts have both “symbolic value” and “sign value”, both the music and objects exchanged on Shakedown Street, or “the lot”, such as t-shirts, pins, stickers, etc. and in the sense of the Situationist détournement, popular logos are often altered to make reference to a certain song or lyrics. But also jam band motifs have often been recuperated, such as Phish’s song “Wilson”, which starts out with the play-and-response “Wilson chant”, as it was used by the Seattle Seahawks as a rallying cry for quarterback Russell Wilson, although this was at the suggestion of Trey.

Take my 2014 single “Canada” for example, a song that I feel embodies the style of Funk Punk, and of course my two parts “Funk Punk (Attic)” and “Funk Punk (Basement)” from my 2020 album “The Diplomat”. And what I say is what I do, and what I do is what I say, anarchy in the U.S.A. The notion of an ethico-aesthetics implies that behind all music or poetry is a guiding political philosophy stemming from the political unconscious - hardcore punk better embodies this any other genre of music. The Dead Kennedys for example with their 1980 album “Fresh Fruit for Rotting Vegetables” whose songs are based on an anarchist philosophy and take the form of a poetics of chaos. Back in December 2014, I rushed to finish recording and release my first solo album “Chaos”. In the title track I start out singing, Dine with the Republicans, or dine with the Democrats and another lyric goes sidelines like mimes who sponsored autocrats. As a friend of mine pointed out, the album combined “lo-fi distorted guitar with spoken word poetry”. In the song “Waiting Room”, Fugazi sings “I’m planning a big surprise/I’m gonna fight for what I wanna be”. When I was in about 7th grade, my Grandma went to FYE and asked an employee, “My grandson likes Blink-182 and Green Day, what’s a good album to buy him?” The employee suggested none other than Fugazi’s “13 Songs”. By the time I reached my junior year of high school, I became heavily into jam bands such as Phish and the Grateful Dead, with our band that I played drums in breaking up that year as well, and especially my senior year when I was working at a local pizzeria and met this fry-cook who introduced me to the Disco Biscuits, I made the leap of faith from punk to jam bands.

In a certain sense, my Mom was a new waver. She told me about a night club she used to go to that was split between punk and disco, and her and her friends would move back and forth between both sides of the club. One time, my Mom saw a The Clash record for sale, and excitedly bought it. When we were on the way home, she played the CD, simply called ’The Singles’. It started out with the song “White Riot”, to which when she heard it was repulsed, saying “I don’t think we need a white riot”. She had recounted the race riots in Miami where she stayed for a summer and found herself terrified by the riot and tried to leave the city. Then, she told me of when she looked out of the back seat of her friend’s car as they were leaving the city and saw a black girl that looked as equally terrified as she did, and when they made eye contact she felt extremely relieved. Ultimately, she gave me The Clash’s ‘The Singles’ CD, but she was completely wrong about the politics of The Clash (Minor Threat’s “Guilty of Being White” also has prompted ambiguous interpretations). In actuality, Joe Strummer was a committed socialist and in 1978 The Clash played the Rock Against Racism concert. The song “Spanish Bombs” off “London Calling” (the cover featured Paul Simonon smashing a guitar), for example, is about the Spanish Civil War, and has Strummer singing, “they sang the red flag, the wore the black one”. Another line from the song references “trenches full of poets”, and as Giannina Braschi said, “Poets and anarchists are always the first to go. Where? To the front line. Wherever it is.”

<em>Part VI - The Politics of Consciousness</em>

The hippie movement acted as a “great refusal” - “turn on, tune in, drop out” goes the famous retort provided to the psychedelic counterculture by fugitive psychologist Timothy Leary. The term actually originates from when Leary had lunch with media theorist Marshall McLuhan and he began singing to the tune of a Pepsi commercial: “Psychedelics hit the spot, five hundred micrograms, that’s a lot” and “Tune in, turn on, and drop out”, of which Leary changed the order of the words to “Turn on, tune in, drop out”, and then eventually to “Drop out, turn on, drop in”. In Leary’s autobiography, he explains the meaning given to the phrase: “Turn on” referred to becoming “sensitive to the many and various levels of consciousness and the specific triggers engaging them”. “Tune in” meant to “interact harmoniously with the world around you”. “Drop out” then suggested this very notion of this “great refusal” of the counterculture. Similarly, in contemporary critical theory, Slavoj Zizek has popularized the line from one of Herman Melville’s short stories, “Bartleby, the Scrivener: A Story of Wall Street”, where protagonist Bartleby, at first an obedient and productive employee, begins to respond to all of his boss’ requests with “I would prefer not to”. So then how do we reconcile Actionism based on anti-capitalist practice, to the extent that Lacan’s “discourse of the analyst” is considered the revolutionizing discourse, with Bartleby’s doing nothing and the refrain “I would prefer not to”? In a way, this great refusal of work, the notion of anti-work, this doing nothing, achieves the effect of doing something in the sense that the great refusal is actually a revolutionizing act in itself. So then what is this authentic and ethical act that gives “Actionism” its name?6 “Freedom is what we sell, it’s not free from what I can tell”7. From involving yourself in the music scene and going to see live music to playing music yourself, “Music Is Resistance”, it is revolutionary practice (such as practicing an instrument). One time at band practice, Trey Anastasio posted a quote on the wall of Phish’s practice space for the other band members to read; it said “the beginning and end of all philosophy is freedom”, a quote by Fredrich Wilhelm Joseph von Schelling from 1809. Social action consists of deliberation and decision, explanation and rationality, responsibility, perception, and the problem of mental causation. In the Lacanian sense, to quote Zizek, “An act accomplishes what, within the given symbolic universe, appears to be ‘impossible’, yet it changes the conditions so that it creates retroactively the conditions of its own possibility”, and that the Act “is therefore not “abyssal” in the sense of an irrational gesture that eludes all rational criteria; it can and should be judged by universal rational criteria, the point is only that it changes (re-creates) the very criteria by which it should be judged...it does more than intervene in reality in the sense of “having actual consequences” - it redefines what counts as reality”. As Sartre claimed, “there is freedom only in a situation, and there is a situation only through freedom”. For example, the contingency of the Russian Revolution, the foundation of the Non-Aligned Movement by Tito, Lacan’s dissolution of the EFP, etc. In another example, Antigone’s refusal to bury her brother without a proper funeral. In the sense of Marxism as a “great refusal”, following Hegel’s dialectical concept of of the “negation of a negation”, materialist dialectics reveals how the order of the symbolic exists as a “non-all, incomplete; it opens up the void for which the Symbolic stands in”.

In France during the 1960s, Jacques Lacan was the preeminent psychoanalyst, but Carl Jung with his influence on Zen practitioner Alan Watts, and psychonaut Terence McKenna, the founder of analytical psychology was influential in the rise of the popularity of Eastern philosophy and religion in the West during the 1960s. Jung studied several different religions including Christianity, Hinduism, Buddhism, Gnosticism, Taoism, and other traditions, but considered himself primarily a pantheist. Jung observed that all religions had one belief about the self in common, namely the process of “individuation”, which simply means a form of self-actualization by which a sense of self emerges from the undifferentiated unconscious, integrating over time into a well-functioning totality. When asked whether he believed in God in an interview, he replied, “I do not need to believe. I know.” This was a sharp difference from the radical atheistic materialism of Sigmund Freud. Jung and Freud broke with each other in 1913 after the publication of Jung’s ‘Psychology of the Unconscious’, republished in 1952 as ‘Symbols of Transformation’. In this work, Jung develops a theory about the prodromal stages of schizophrenia, as Jung may have recognized that he was on the verge of a psychotic break. That same year that he broke with Freud due to Freud’s refusal to consider the ideas of ‘Psychology of the Unconscious’ and Jung’s reformulation of the drives and the concept of libido, nevertheless at age 38, Jung experienced what he called a “horrible confrontation with the unconscious”, where he saw visions and heard voice, yet though it worried him, he would sometimes in private attempt to induce his hallucinations and record what he heard or saw. This was how Jung came up with the concept of “active imagination”, a concept that had earlier been embraced by post-Renaissance Theosophy, which Jung developed as a meditation technique by which one actively and creatively uses one’s imagination.

What the hippie movement embraced (with the use of LSD, meditation, yoga, etc.) were the notions of “self-transcendence” and “consciousness raising”. We already see a problem with the sociology of knowledge imbedded in transcendence itself (i.e. Kant’s categorical imperative, or Hegel’s absolute spirit) but I follow Zizek in both transcendental materialist analysis, and when he says that Buddhism in its Western incarnation is the perfect machine (or rather “Wheel”) for capitalism to function effectively; according to Zizek, Western Buddhism “functions as [capitalism’s] perfect ideological supplement”. In the critique of ideology, there exists according to the materialist construction of metaphysics, a constitutive “class consciousness” which drives history forward and acts as the subjective element of the class struggle. Zizek figures that ,“If Max Weber were alive today, he would definitely write a second, supplementary, volume to his ‘Protestant Ethic’, entitled ‘The Taoist Ethic and the Spirit of Global Capitalism’. Beats such as Gary Snyder, however, used a synthesis of Buddhist thought to encourage social and political activism. His concept of “The Wild” embodies this notion of a poetics of chaos, in the sense that if we apply Cornelius Castoriadis’ social constructionism to artistic works, there is a preliminary chaos or nothingness linked to the imaginary that allows the artist to express their creativity, and that this “world out of chaos” in Ancient Greek cosmogony was what allowed them to develop democratic political institutions.

However, does not the religion of Buddhism with its phantasmal spirit of the hungry ghost not take on a conceptual dimension that is essentially hauntological? And aren’t these hungry ghosts, described in Tibetan Buddhism as having “mouths the size of a needle’s eye and a stomach the size of a mountain”, a metaphor for people’s futility in attempting to fulfill their illusory physical desires? And isn’t this very notion of Buddhist desire (the hungry ghost being essentially saturated with unfulfillable desire) completely in line with the spirit of global capitalism? And how does the Western Buddhist with their practice of meditation and either their asceticism or indulgence in relation to desire, provide the very framework for a desire that resists taking the form of a post-capitalist desire? Similarly, a Bible verse given by Jesus says that “It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, than for a rich man to go to heaven”. And also the popular phrase, “It’s like finding a needle in a haystack”. As the story goes in the song “The Golden Path” by The Chemical Brothers featuring The Flaming Lips, after the narrator of the song is confronted “by mysterious specter” who tells him that he is dead, “confused and wondering, of how I came to die”, then he is confronted by “a powerful demon force”, to which he proclaims, “I said help me Lord, I’ve found myself in some kind of hell”, and sings “But I did not believe in a Heaven and Hell, world in opposites kind of reality”, and the song ends with the lyrics “Please forgive me, I never meant to hurt you”. In the concept advanced by Zizek with his comparison of the Buddhist prayer wheel to the function of ideology, such that when one writes a prayer, attaches it to the wheel, and then spins the wheel, though we nonetheless do not believe that a divine karma as the Other behind the Other is answering our prayers, when we spin the wheel, nonetheless the ritual believes for us. This concept which Zizek often refers to as interpassivity, such as the laugh-track (also called “canned laughter”) in a sitcom where we either do not have to laugh because the laugh-track laughs for us, or we laugh along with the laugh-track, or perhaps laugh without the laugh track; it can produce hilarious results to apply a laugh track to a horror movie like ‘The Shining’, and equally as funny if one is to watch a sitcom like ‘Friends’ missing the laugh-track. This concept of interpassivity can also be applied to the act of voting in democracy, where while we do not ourselves believe that our vote counts, that we are making a difference, etc. the ritual of voting believes for us when we fill out the ballot and then put it into the electronic machine that counts the votes.

<em>Part VII - Unding and Endziel: Postscript on Unitary Urbanism</em>

To the question “Is the Funk Punk an urbanist?”, we can reply with the affirmative, but surely an urbanist like the Situationists were unitary urbanists. At this point, the primitivist, egoist or individualist anarchist may say, “Surely you can’t be serious that you’re an urbanist”...to which we can answer with the quote from the 1970 film ‘Airplane!’, “I am serious, but don’t call me Shirley.” As I heard an older woman who was leading the group say during a debate at my first of only two Workers’ World Party meetings, she dictated a piece of conventional wisdom - “Do you really want to live on a hippie commune without any toilet paper?”, to which a trans woman responded with a story about living in a housing cooperative where they would have organizational meetings that lasted over 3 hours. Yet, I was overcome with the “harsh Leninist superego” (a term used by Mark Fisher in “Acid Communism”). Someone told me to read Engels’ ‘On Authority’ and quoted him by saying that “revolution is the most authoritarian act there is”, that in supporting all forms of anti-imperialism they supported the government of North Korea, that we would have to read more Marx and Lenin before having a formal debate about Stalin. They said I must be an anarchist with my ideas about grassroots and prefigurative politics, my support for the right of refusal-of-work, and my description of the Soviet Union as state capitalism after Lenin disbanded the trade unions and the workers’ councils.

This utopian motif of Cannabis Communism, as a mode of social state, can be thought of in terms of a unitary urbanism, in the sense of an ideal city, autonomous and transitory communities inspired by live music, and the “great refusal” of the 1960s. Actionism as a theory of Meta-Marxism that is directly opposed to accelerationism, is not a type of futurism, nor a type of primitivism, but is a speculative utopianism, a utopian impulse, or a utopian gesture - think John Lennon and Yoko Ono’s bed-ins for peace, their well-received press conference where they invented Bagism as a satirization of prejudice and stereotyping, and the founding of their conceptual micro-nation Nutopia whose white flag represented the surrender to peace and love; think the Yippies with their New Nation concept and its opposite The Pig Empire, pie-throwing, smoke-ins, and the running of a pig, Pigasus the Immortal for president, and then later running “Nobody for President”, and their attempt to add a “None of the Above” option on the ballot; think Hunter S. Thompson with his Gonzo poetics of chaos, and his 1970 campaign for Sheriff of Pitkin County, Colorado on the “Freak Power” ticket.

Cannabis Communism represents the hauntological potentiality for social change that is embodied in the “great refusal” of the counterculture. Actionism represents the multitude of the revolutionary sensibilities of countercultural institutions - an anti-capitalist politics of consciousness that teaches mutual aid, resists psychiatric hegemony, acts as a form of philosophical psycho-education, and the building of countercultural institutions that resist segregation in all its repressive forms and establishes food co-ops, underground newspapers and zines, free clinics, artist collectives, free stores, pirate radio, bootleg recording and public-access television, squatting, free schools, etc.8 But also the potentialities of the new social movements, and the expressive individuality of the Funk Punk. Therefore, we can approach Murray Bookchin’s outright rejection of what he called “lifestyle anarchism” from a different perspective. While his criticisms are valid in reference to egoist or individualist anarchism, the ethico-aesthetics of Funk Punk in this sense of an expressive individuality is in reference to individuation, in the way that it can one argued that both anarchism and Marxism strive for the greatest possible amount of liberty for the population, and the assertion that only the transition to the socialist mode of production can bring about a free and egalitarian society.

Dan Chodorkoff discusses in his work ‘The Anthropology of Utopia’ the often corrupt practices in community development. In his discussion, what is to be argued against is the concept of the delivery of services to a needy population by professionals. “The War on Poverty” of the liberal definition has failed. Bureaucratic interventions are not the correct methodology for going about community development. Chodorkoff’s idea of community development, needfully incorporates the same levels of analysis, education, health care, housing, nutrition, economic opportunity, etc., but it is the function of the community organizing itself that should spur the community development projects, rather than “expert” bureaucrats with “resources”. Nor can we reduce community development to the “trickle down” effect which can only lead to more exploitation, domination, and disintegration. He says “urban renewal” through city planning “has an equally dismal record.” This is the expectation that designs can create community; community development, he argues, is not a design problem and this way of thinking represents a technocratic mentality. What is at stake here is the status and power of grassroots community development; school boards, planning boards, and programs in housing and job training all play their part. For social ecology, community development means a holistic approach integrating all facets of a community’s life: social, political, economic, artistic, ethical, and spiritual dimensions must be seen as a whole. “How can the face-to-face primary ties that characterized pre- bureaucratic societies be recreated in the context of contemporary community?” The holistic approach of social ecology substantially includes an emphasis on the arts: music, literature, poetry, murals, and drama can foster a unique identity for a community. But also cultural traditions, myths, folklore, spiritual beliefs, cosmology, ritual forms, political associations, technical skills and knowledge are extremely important. While economic development alone may have possibly disintegrative side-effects on a community (e.g. gentrification), the concern of social ecology on holism, takes extra- economic factors into account as important components ignored by traditional development approaches.

In a speech given by Murray Bookchin in 1978, he states, “I’ve got some hot news - I’m not a futurist. I’m not a futurist at all. I’m a utopian. I want to see this word revived.” Then, we must demand the impossible - and this means to demand to reclaim the 'right to the city’ as a co-created space. As the crowds chanted during the Black Lives Matter protests against police brutality, “Whose streets? Our streets.”. This notion of the ‘right to the city’ intends to in Henri Lefebvre’s terms reclaim the the subjectivity of social space in terms of citizenship9, “transform urban space into “a meeting point for building collective life”, and as it is described by David Harvey, “it is a right to change ourselves by changing the city”, a common right rather than an individual right since the process of urbanization depends on “the exercise of collective power to reshape the processes of urbanization”. Unitary urbanism’s call for a “revolution of everyday life”, and its predecessor Henri Lefebvre’s “critique of everyday life” deals directly with the existential problem of boredom, and envisions with the production of social space - if for music, time is the canvas, the temporality of music contributes to the production of social space in the sense that live music always occurs at a given place and time - the antidote to boredom in urban life.

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<strong>Ch. 2 - Political Subjectivity and New Materialism</strong>

<em>Part I - “Meet the new boss, same as the old boss”</em>

The delineation of a political ontology depends on the construction of a theory of political subjectivity. Contemporary philosophers inspired by Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, and Slavoj Zizek, including Ian Parker, Todd McGowan, and Yannis Stavrakakis have made ground in the emergence of a Lacanian psychoanalytic political theory, the formulation of a social ontology of political subjectivity based on language and discourse. Rather than a phenomenology, certain post-Marxist political theorists develop a post-phenomenology, focusing on the interpretive structures of experience through speech and language. If a psychoanalytic approach to political subjectivity is to be embarked on, what is important to take into account are the concepts of the political unconscious and its stratification, ideology as a specific mode of enjoyment or jouissance, and the ideological fantasy that stages the desire of the subject in relation to the Other, sustaining the subject at the level of his vanishing desire, and enabling the subject to sustain his desire.

Crucial to developing a post-phenomenological account of political discourse and political subjectivity, is in the relation of intersubjectivity to objectivity, truth and value. In political discourse, it is impossible to escape ideology, to not be subjected to it, and more so, there is a semblance of universality (i.e. absolute knowledge, categorical imperative) that provides the a priori terrain (of material conditions) for ideological subjectivization. Althusser gave four definitions of ideology: “ideology as the reproduction of the means of production”, “ideology has no history”, “ideology as a material force”, and “ideology as the Imaginary relation to the Real conditions of existence”. While Althusser was a structural determinist, in his theory of the subjectivity of ideology, influenced by Lacan, language is what allows us to experience consciousness subjectively, using the term “interpellation” to describe the process by which subjectivization occurs, creating a political identity for the subject.

If we are speaking of political subjectivity as a specific mode of identity-formation, new social movements depend on identity-claims, Laclau argues, however these identities (never reducible to identification) are always incomplete, such that this ‘failure of identity’, the negativity at the heart of identity, is exactly what allows social movements to politically articulate their demands in a space that is open-ended and democratic, a dislocation in the formation of political identities that is crucial to the project of hegemony itself. But what is this theory of hegemony, as Laclau and Mouffe see it, which necessitates the superstructure’s dominance over the base material relations and conditions of society? And should we follow Marxist orthodoxy in reversing this theory of structural causality? When they speak of hegemony they are essentially referring to a linguistically constructed system of power relations, such that there is no necessary relationship between reality and its symbolization. So why must we then speak of “the critique of ideology” instead of “ideology as such”, to return to Zizek? In a Hegelian argument he says that universality is the structuring apparatus of all political subjectivity, such that "the negative condition of all political articulation is ‘universal’”, not an agonistic account of democracy where forms of universality are brought in to a “productive and ultimately irresolvable conflict with each other”. While Laclau and Mouffe are anti-foundationalists, rejecting any a priori given or categorical imperative for universality, which should be self-evident, Habermas’ deliberative account of radical democracy seeks to establish a “discourse ethics” based on “communicative rationality” and “communicative action” which situates itself based on “a pre-established universality as the presupposition of the speech act, a universality which is said to pertain to the ‘rational’ feature of ‘man’, a substantive conception of universality which equates it with a knowable and predictable determination, and a procedural form which presumes that the political field is constituted by rational actors”. Laclau and Mouffe argue, “The incomplete character of every totality necessarily leads us to abandon, as a terrain of analysis, the premise of ‘society’ as a sutured and self-defined totality. ‘Society is not a valid object of discourse. There is no single underlying principle fixing - and hence constituting - the whole field of differences. The irresolvable interiority/exteriority tension is the condition of any social practice...”

Post-Marxism, rather than orthodox Marxism’s claim that administrative institutions in the transition to communism will lose their political character (i.e. the withering away of the state), as well as the dominance of the base over the superstructure, for post-Marxists either for pragmatic, utilitarian, or perhaps opportunist reasons, argue (but as did Lenin) that the political link in a participatory democracy is constitutive of the social bond, such that Zizek says that he doesn’t want to live in a society where the smallest details of public policy are endlessly debated (a consequence of Habermas’ “deliberative democracy”), but rather that there should be an invisible yet efficient bureaucratic apparatus that takes care of matters of public policy - as such he declares “a plea for a return to bureaucratic socialism”. Yet if we define this bureaucratic apparatus of state socialism as Zizek does, as “a depoliticized and competent administrative apparatus”, perhaps the project of proletarian hegemony, what Lenin called the “proletarian semi-state after the proletarian revolution” establishing a semi- direct democracy such as that in Rojava, what if proletarian hegemony does in fact give way to a revolutionary situation where administrative institutions lose their political character and exist as a form of post-hegemony?

To apply discourse analysis to the functioning of the bureaucracy that arose in the Soviet Union as the “New Class” in relation to the working class, the bureaucracy in the sense that Marx used the term “general intellect” of expert-knowledge, where the proletariat as the “universal class” are in the process of the hegemonic articulation of class consciousness through the fact that (such as in Hegel’s master-slave dialectic) they are in the process of achieving self-consciousness through the “chain of knowledge” that they apply to their work, formal education, etc. Such that the general intellect constitutes a “chain of knowledge” based on “symbolic efficiency”, where the bureaucratic apparatus acts as a “master- signifier” and a “subject-supposed-to-know”, Zizek argues that under Stalinism, the Soviet Union and its bureaucracy was the “pure form of the University Discourse”, in a similar vein, he argues that Stalin rather than benefitting from an “excessive cult of personality”, on the other hand, did not present himself as a master, but as a servant to people, “the exemplary subject-supposed-to-know” of “bureaucratic-party Knowledge”. But Zizek goes on to say that Stalinism in actuality was plagued not by too massive of a state bureaucracy, but on the contrary, it lacked an efficient enough bureaucracy, which instead of being fused with Communist Party needed to be clearly separated from the party for it to become autonomous, lose its political character, and therefore represent the proletariat as the “universal class”.

If we are to speak about this problem of the Master-Slave dialectic, that it apparently always reaffirms itself (even in revolution), then we must argue that the economic transition to socialism can only be brought about by means of the proletariat seizing political power for their own ends, and that it is impossible within the hegemony of advanced capitalism to put an end to the state-form, and rather will argue along the lines of Lenin’s formula in ‘The State and Revolution’ (1917) that while we must abolish the bourgeois State apparatus to put an end to the hegemony of the bourgeoisie, but we cannot abolish the state-form without the necessary organization of the working class in exercising political power through workers’ councils in the form of the dictatorship of the proletariat (which is to be seen as the “dictatorship of the masses”). Lenin writes “The state is a product and a manifestation of the <em>irreconcilability</em> of class antagonisms. The state arises where, when and insofar as class antagonisms objectively <em>cannot</em> be reconciled. And conversely, the existence of the state proves that the class antagonisms are irreconcilable.” He goes on, “The proletariat seizes state power and turns the means of production into state property to begin with. But thereby it abolishes itself as the proletariat, abolishes all class distinctions and class antagonisms, and abolishes also the state as state.” He concludes, “in speaking of the state “withering away”...Engels refers quite clearly and definitely to the period <em>after</em> “the state has taken possession of the means of production in the name of the whole of society”, that is <em>after</em> the socialist revolution.”

<em>Part II - History and Subjectivity</em>

Hegel formulated subjectivity in the context of a historical narrative by means of the dialectical contradictions that come about when one acts or even thinks; Karl Marx says that “men make their own history, but they do not make it just as they please; they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves, but under given circumstances directly encountered and inherited from the past.” This view apprehends the philosophy of causality as economically deterministic, not yet bringing up the question of social complexity, but situating the “historical subject” in a given system of laws, culture, the economic mode of production, and geography. Sometimes reformists argue that revolutions often only have temporary effects (such as the French Revolution developing into the return to the autocratic ‘ancien régime’ of Napoleon, whom Hegel called “the world-spirit on horseback”), however this is the very reason that dialectics can be applied to the concept of revolution, because where contradictions act as antagonisms, their dialectical resolution or synthesis functions in the way that Althusser said “Ideology has no history”, that it is a subjective construct of the interpellated subject, while hegemony is what functions with objectivity. Moreover, dialectical philosophy explains why in the face of the absolute inevitability of revolution, especially when the technology of society reaches a certain point of development, which itself acts as a contradiction, how the capitalist axiomatic can be maintained in the face of all these contradictions under capitalism (relations, mode, and means of production), dialectics allows us to see how historical classes such as the bourgeoisie can maintain power even in a system that is democratic.

However, what of transcendental subjectivity? And is there a necessity today to believe in it? Hegel writes of the “spirit of reason”, and while speaking from an idealist point of view, which is to be rejected and take Marx’s materialism as the basis for the transcendental as Zizek does, as well as taking into account the unconscious of Freud, and Lacan’s notion of the “barred subject”, Hegel was also a determinist when it came to history, who thought that the dialectical “spirit” was the main process that governed the evolution of the collective will of humanity. However in a sharp contrast to Hegel, Marx does not believe that history has reached its end point, with petty bourgeois constitutional freedom and property rights as the ideal and goal of history, and instead believed in the inevitable outbreak of revolution under capitalism, when the system reaches its breaking point, and argues for communism as the abolition of private property and a society based on common ownership.

Althusser denies that there is any such thing as a “historical subject”, such that he rejects Hegelian philosophy and the “Spirit of Reason” which guides humanity, but takes an anti-humanist view of the historical evolution of advanced capitalism towards communism, and therefore historical materialism for Althusser is an understanding of the operations of the different ideological state apparatuses, and an understanding of opportunities that they present for social change and class struggle, and a belief in “structural causality” in which each individual productive process or element plays a part in the complexly structured whole, but none of which is reducible to the cause of others (i.e. overdetermination). Does historical materialism imply anti-humanism as Althusser contends? Does historical materialism imply historicism as thinkers as wide as Lukacs, Gramsci, and Sartre have argued? And does this form of historicism imply humanism after all?

The Paris Commune holds a key to the historical materialist hypothesis that we have been wondering about. If it is true that the material world, the infrastructure, forms its very own dialectical contradictions in the face of existence itself, where the praxis that develops out of events of human activity is dialectically reflective of the economy and commodity production itself; in the Paris Commune of 1871 we see that the solution of the socialist mode of production (resolving the contradiction of private ownership) finds its way completely naturally from the localized contradictions and syntheses that drive history forward along the path towards socialism. Historical materialism needs to be a supplement to history but not to replace history itself. Therefore, whether the debate is about universalism, formalism, or foundationalism, class struggle finds its way into the equation, and communism is a universal, not a particular, that formalist logic is inherent in post- structuralism but must be overcome, and anti-foundationalism can be seen as an ideology that goes too far in rejecting historical and dialectical materialism, as Laclau and Mouffe do.

Why then was it a unique idea that the base was dominant over the superstructure? We are not economic determinists, and do not conceive of a teleological relationship between the base and the superstructure, where one determines the other, as social complexity is self-evident that nothing exists in a vacuum, that human activity is the correlate subjective affect, that while public policy and academic political science would analyze the rationality or pragmatism of such a system, this is idealism, and we might as well be speaking of territorialized assemblages epistemologically if not just to grasp the idea of social complexity, but to make a case for transcendental materialism as the basic theory of subjectivity that best describes our current philosophical impasse. Badiou comments that Deleuze and Guattari’s ‘A Thousand Plateaus’, especially evident by the conclusion, is just as homogenous as a “One” as it is heterogeneous as an “Absolute” (concepts that will need clarification include the rhizome, strata, territory, assemblages, and abstract machines). What value does post-structuralism offer that other theories do not in an analysis that explores post-Marxist political thought, and rejects neoclassical economics as a dishonest description of political economy, though taking a critical stance towards Laclau and Mouffe’s final hypothesis of radical democracy as a rejection of historical materialism, which was their basic intellectual project, which bases itself as a series of contingencies that need constant resolution within the theory that the proletariat in a modern sense may no longer be the revolutionary class, that a multitude of political actors can make up the populist movements that progresses history forward towards societal change within the confines of liberal democracy. Remember, Lenin clarifies in ‘The State and Revolution’ that the ‘withering away’ of the state only refers to the proletarian semi-state, and that in the case of a capitalist system of government, the state must be “smashed” or overthrown, and that the proletarian semi-state is to be built in its ashes. The ‘withering away’ of the proletarian semi-state however, has not shown to be an objective law of historical development, and as a result Marxists such as Slavoj Zizek have gone as far as to call themselves “closet Fukuyamaists”. This is almost what Laclau and Mouffe are concerned with in their theory of populism and radical democracy, and what Murray Bookchin understood as the need for the theory and praxis of libertarian municipalism and social ecology.

What do Bookchin’s and Laclau’s respective intellectual projects tell us about the state of historiography? What may be less (or more) controversial is the need for a “people’s history” but a thorough study of any people’s history will show us that ‘class struggle’ is the primary contradiction of any capitalist society and struggles such as feminism and anti-racism fall within economic struggles. Surely people throughout history have been marginalized due to their race, religion, ethnicity, gender, or sexual orientation. But I will still make the point, that all these struggles can be universalized in the form of class struggle; this is what I disagree with Laclau on, and also disagree with Bookchin on. Murray Bookchin in his essay “Listen, Marxist!” denounced “The Myth of the Proletariat”, arguing that the role of the proletariat in revolutionary struggle had been neutralized and “co-opted into capitalism”.

A look at state university curriculum in areas of study such as political science and economics in the United States already reveals the privileging of a certain body of thought, namely positivism, and the neoliberal consensus, over that of critical theory; with education as only one form of hegemony, a meta-analysis of university curriculum proves that at least in academia, hegemony is a political force that is alive and well within our institutions. By choosing which information (along with the mass media) is taught and which isn’t, privileging one localized narrative over another, shows the hegemony of one body of thought over another, that dominates capitalism and puts forward a capitalist ideology instead of a socialist one; that as Althusser understood the function of ‘ideology’ to be “the reproduction of the means of production”. Labor produces the commodity, but ideology as the “reproduction of the means of the production” acts as a literal “material force” showing the collective unconscious as exhibiting not only hegemony, but arriving at a “point de caption” of universality so that the established order (i.e. the status quo) is reproduced unconsciously such as professors deciding which information will be disseminated, and which will be ignored, establishing hegemony. And the university system is among the most not least “free” institutions in capitalist society. But what must be grasped if we are to arrive at a transcendental materialist understanding is that due to the conditions of the economy and the specific relationship of the individual to labor and commodities, we see the true meaning of the difference between “formal freedom” and “actual freedom”, and some freedoms such as the freedom to sell one’s labor on the open market (or starve), must be specifically rejected if we are to create a society that is “actually free”, for “actual freedom” is the freedom from labor, from coercion, and from exploitation.

Why have I decided to write on utopianism? I am very little interested in utopian socialism qua Saint-Simon, Fourier, or Robert Owen. Marx’s materialist conception of history, and the assertion based on scientific socialism that communism naturally follows from capitalism, is on the very basis of class struggle corresponding the concrete historical modes of production that present themselves throughout history, and is not in any way a form of utopian socialism, such as the stance that we can only build socialism by means of the working class actually taking political power. Yet as Zizek says he is somewhat of a “closet Fukuyamaist”, such that post-Marxists such as Laclau and Mouffe have endorsed a form of left- populism called radical democracy that negates the possibility of the withering away of the state from the proletarian semi- state, and furthermore declaring the impossibility of breaking outside of liberal capitalism, and therefore arguing that class antagonism has a permanent role in society (Zizek argues that the real “permanent revolution” is capitalism itself) although Stalin and Mao were (in a very different way from Laclau and Mouffe) also notorious revisionists in the sense that they also thought that class antagonism had a permanent role in society (and therefore also negating “the withering away of the state”), but representing totalitarianism rather than Social-Democracy. Nevertheless, the symptom of the revolutionary transformation from capitalism that Rosa Luxemburg said was the destruction of the proletarian revolution from inside the revolutionary party itself, therefore defending a multi-party system (albeit a dictatorship of the proletariat), in a rejection of Leninist vanguardism.

But as is discussed endlessly in political philosophy, the concept of the “end of history” and the realization of Hegel’s dialectical “Absolute Spirit”, though it is unclear whether he meant this as a certainty or a possibility, represents in the postmodern condition a definitive dialectical transformation (or sublation) that has transformed the epistemic assumptions that underly capitalism, such that we have evolved in many countries to a state where there is an ever-increasing complexity of what Foucault called “technologies of control” (as a transition from the previous social mode of the “disciplinary society”), though Marx thought increasing technological innovation would be a liberating force, the manifest class antagonisms of late capitalism, and the possibility of a corresponding resolution under socialism (though Lenin said “under socialism there will be the absence of antagonisms, but not the absence of contradictions”), are in most places of the world tightly controlled by the hegemony of the bourgeoisie class, or equally as repressive under Stalinism by the “New Class” of bureaucrats that surely weren’t the realization of the “New Man” that Soviet psychologist Lev Vygotsky spoke of, but in Nietzschean terms a “Last Man” and not an “Ubermensch”, who represents the archetypal nihilist who is able to destroy but not to build. In contrast, Vygotsky’s “New Man” resembles what was later called positive psychology which focuses on “the good life” and the “pursuit of happiness”. Isn’t the idea of utopia, however fictional, supposed to resemble the ultimate aim of political philosophy? Rather than utopia, the way that Marxism formulates the Endziel of the “free association of producers” or “upper-stage communism”, is always with reference to history as class struggle. But then, isn’t every attempt to build a perfect society necessarily destined to fail, such that our efforts to change society for the better always are destined to end up in totalitarianism? Or in Zizek’s terms, “totalitarian laughter”, such that it is in the cynicism towards the dominant order, that in some cases reinforces it (such as political memes and conspiracy theories), and false consciousness, from the abandonment of the critical-ideological truth procedure, but also because of our naivité towards the impossible-real kernel of the sublime object of ideology, which Zizek compares to the latent and manifest content in dreams that Freud talked about, where such that Lacan realized when we penetrate the secret of the real kernel of ideology it ends in resistance, but that we paradoxically always maintain a distance or a transgression towards the dominant ideology, which reinforces itself through ideological cynicism.

<em>Part III - Capitalist Realism and Post-Capitalist Desire</em>

In his book ‘Capitalism and Desire: The Psychic Cost of Free Markets’, Todd McGowan argues that the reproduction of capitalism and the resulting capital accumulation functions so effectively precisely because “it mimics the structure of our desire while hiding the trauma that the system inflicts upon it”. He defines the death drive, the thanatos, as the driving force of capitalist reproduction that works as “an impetus to return to an originally traumatic and constitutive loss”, such that capitalism functions on the lack in the lost object (i.e. repetition), yet in the way that Wilhelm Reich theorized of the death instinct as “the masses desiring their own repression”, the capitalist subject (the agent of Lacan’s ‘Discourse of the Capitalist’) derives a form of satisfaction from capitalism, even as it deprives them of their freedom. Following Marx’s concept of “false consciousness”, McGowan argues, “[The problem] is not that capitalism fails to satisfy but that it doesn’t enable its subjects to recognize where their own satisfaction lies.” He goes on to explain that capitalism causes the subject to “cling feverishly to the image of their own dissatisfaction and thus to the promise...of a way to escape this dissatisfaction through either the accumulation of capital or the acquisition of the commodity”. McGowan also argues that the sacrifices because of capitalism that the subject is forced to make, such as having to sell their labor on the open market, produces “an object that exists only insofar as it is lost”. The death drive is what causes the rational subject to act in self-sacrifice or self- sabotage, such that since once the object is attained, it ceases to be the object, as a result, the subject must continually repeat the sacrificial act that produced the object.

There is a clever chapter title by Zizek in ‘Hegemony, Contingency, Universality’ titled “Class Struggle or Postmodernism? Yes Please!” As Derrida has already been mentioned here before it may be implicit so far that in this analysis of historicity and historiography through a Marxist lens, postmodernism and post-structuralism were direct products of the 1960s, which is a reference point for Mark Fisher’s ‘Acid Communism’. In regards to Zizek’s chapter title, postmodernity must as he argues “return to Marx’s critique of political economy” and that the “Communist Idea” is the only solution to the violence, exploitation and coercion of neoliberal capitalist nation-states. As the present is just as much the focus here as the past, we see a return with the millennial generation to the revolutionary potential that emerged in the 1960s with the students of the New Left (for example, with 70 percent of millennials saying that they would vote for a “socialist” president). And in refrain, the millennial generation seem to have begun to use the word “liberal” pejoratively again (as well as the popular phrase “OK boomer”), representing a shift towards democratic socialism among a large amount of the millennial population; we are experiencing a generational shift (that perhaps before his death Mark Fisher was aware of). This is clearly a testament to Zizek’s insistence that we do not live in a post-ideological era, and rather that ideology is as foundational as ever.

Zizek, on the topic of liberal modernity’s ultimate lack of a “transcendent guarantee, of total jouissance” (in his discussion of fantasy), he lists three methods to cope politically with this negativity: utopian, democratic, and post-democratic. Democracy, according to Zizek, is the political equivalent of “traversing the fantasy” as it “institutionalizes the lack itself by creating the space for political antagonisms”. Post-Democracy, which is the postmodern condition of apolitical consumerist fantasy, tries to neutralize negativity. Finally, the utopian fantasy (which Zizek asserts is primarily totalitarian or fundamentalist) creates the conditions for the elimination of the negativity in absolute jouissance. Stavrakakis’ book ‘The Lacanian Left’ which criticizes Zizek as interpreting Lacanian psychoanalysis through the politics of disavowal, argues essentially that the category of “democratic freedom” is the solution to the negativity of jouissance in the political sphere because it takes up the notion of Other jouissance, as the expression of antagonisms under liberal capitalism, operates “to detach the objet petit a from the signifier of the lack in the Other...to detach (anti-democratic and post-democratic) fantasy from the democratic institutionalization of lack, making possible the access to a partial enjoyment beyond fantasy.”

The first philosopher to develop the concept of the (capitalized) big Other, referred to simply as the Other, was Hegel, who said that the existence of this “constitutive Other”, was the entity that acted as the counterpart that is required for defining the Self. Later phenomenologists such as Husserl and Sartre applied this dialectic of intersubjectivity to describe the psychological phenomenon that makes up the person’s perception and consciousness, which orients the world for the subject and its appearance alters how the world is perceived. Lacan formulates that “the unconscious is the discourse of the Other”. The non-capitalized other, for Lacan refers to a reflection and projection of the ego as simultaneously the counterpart and the specular image, entirely inscribed in the Imaginary order. The big Other alternatively refers to the symbolic dimension of intersubjectivity in the form of a radical alterity which unlike the other of the imaginary is actually another real subject and at the same time “unassimilable uniqueness”, yet cannot be assimilated through identification. The big Other represents the symbolic dimension of language and the law.

If “traversing the radical fantasy” is the ultimate ethical act, it remains viable only because of the ongoing practices and beliefs of the subject. The traversal of fantasy is an “active, practical intervention in the political world”. “Traversing the fantasy” is different from everyday speech and action in that it challenges the “framing sociopolitical parameters”, “touches the Real”, and as Foucault maintained, there is an ontology of utterances as pure language events, “not elements of a structure, not attributes of subjects who utter them, but events which emerge, function within a field, and disappear.”

<em>Part IV - The Signifier in the Institution</em>

According the Marxist theory of the State, the State apparatus functions as a “machine of repression”, which enables the ruling classes to ensure their domination over the working class using the police, the prisons, the courts and the military. The State apparatus has long been described as a “machine” by Hegelians and Marxists alike. As quoted by Marcuse in ‘Reason and Revolution’, in 1796 Hegel writes, “I shall demonstrate that, just as there is no idea of a machine, there is no idea of the State, for the State is something mechanical. Only that which is an object of freedom may be called an idea. We must, therefore, transcend the State. For every State is bound to treat free men as cogs in a machine. And this is precisely what it should not do; hence, the State must perish.” It is important to note that the function of the State has no meaning except as a function of ‘State power’. The State apparatus and State power must be distinguished so that while one is the mechanical framework of this ‘machine of repression’, State power is the vested degree of hegemony of such an ideological system of domination. Class struggle concerns itself with State power as such, and the ruling class exploits and subjugates the working class using the machine of the State apparatus.

If ideology is to be thought of as “an instrument of social reproduction”, then cultural hegemony is the theory of superstructure that describes the dominant forces and mechanisms that determine the functioning of the hegemonic ruling ideology. From this standpoint, Gramsci realized that the cultural norms of a society are not natural, but are social constructs developed by an idealist ruling class that intends to make the status quo appear inevitable. Cultural hegemony, in Gramsci’s definition, is the “domination of a culturally diverse society by the ruling class who manipulate the culture of that society - the beliefs, explanations, perceptions, values, and mores - so that their imposed, ruling-class worldview becomes the accepted cultural norm”. The social forces at work in hegemonic ideological systems describe the interaction between various assemblages. Assemblage theory describes the component parts that make up every institution in society including religious institutions, the educational system, the family, the legal system, trade unions, the press, radio and television, sporting events, political meetings, art shows, scientific debates, libraries, parades and cultural traditions. Each has its own unique role in transmitting ideology and has its corresponding component parts that allow it to function as an ideological state apparatus. In sociological terms, if the collective hegemonic articulation of the dominant ideology can be thought of as an episteme - the framing parameters of reasoning, discerning truth, and value-judgements in a given society. Then ideology in the form of interpellation can be thought of as a doxa - or a common belief or popular opinion. But this is an oversimplification. The human brain is constantly forming mental representations and cognitive mappings forming a conceptual system, often representing a cognitive bias. There exists conventional wisdom, cultural and social movements, different lifestyles and presuppositions. People are influenced by their academic endeavors, propaganda, the media and the internet, the polarization of attitudes, collective and primary narcissism, stereotypes, mass consumerism, and the notion of social progress. In formulating a theory of ideology that moves beyond an analysis rooted in individual psychology, we must think of ideology in terms of social structures that are determinant of concrete material relations in production. It is not to be said that the individual “has” an ideology, but rather that the individual corresponds with a given set of circumstances and material relations that allow ideology to be interpellated from the individual. Ideology then is a collective social force (as a false consciousness) that subjugates the proletariat to the demands of a ruling class. Francis Fukuyama famously declared “the end of history” as capitalist production, that socialism was a transient ideal that perished after the fall of the Berlin Wall, yet with the modern neoliberal State increasingly concentrating wealth in the hands of the capitalist class, we see increasing forms of protest and grassroots organizing. Although Marx thought that the material conditions under capitalism would become so unbearable for the working class that they would have no choice but to rise up in revolution, reformism and the neoliberal ideology intends exactly to keep these proletarians “at bay” with nominal wage increases, social reforms, etc. Advanced capitalism becomes so rooted in the culture of a society that revolution eventually becomes impossible and there exists a very complex set of mechanisms for controlling the ideological discourse of a society. It seems that Marx was incorrect in his assumption that revolution would most likely happen in developed capitalist countries, as revolution after World War I happened mostly in underdeveloped countries. He was right that people would rise up and rebel against their material circumstances but this appeared more likely to happen in underdeveloped countries rather than those designated later by the Frankfurt School as ‘advanced capitalism’.

In the sense of the psyche as a holistic system, the manifestation of a multiplicity of significances in a multi-layered associationist system that is the brain, and the reciprocality and retroactivity of speech acts and social interactions that are intersubjective (being-in-the-world), what is at stake here in the development of a post-phenomenology of political subjectivity? What are the implications of this structuralist paradigm that puts language and discourse first and foremost, focusing on the ego and its role in ideological interpellation? And what does it mean to speak of a philosophical anthropology? The school of thought of Western Marxism best exemplifies these methods in the study of political subjectivity - for example, Herbert Marcuse’s ‘Eros and Civilization’, Ernest Mandel’s ‘The Marxist Theory of Alienation’, Gyorgy Lukacs’, ‘History and Class Consciousness’, Cornelius Castoriadis’ ‘The Imaginary Institution of Society’, Karl Mannheim’s ‘Ideology and Utopia’, Joseph Gabel’s ‘False Consciousness: An Essay on Reification’, Theodor Adorno’s ‘Dialectic of Enlightenment’, Erich Fromm’s ‘The Sane Society’. I will attempt to elucidate this notion of the role of the signifier in the institution, and explain how social stratification in the sociological and philosophical sense relates to the Freudian notion of the stratification of the ego and the unconscious, in the contexts of social mobility, social complexity, globalization, racial and gender hierarchies, and of course the category of class.

The Freudian discovery of the unconscious necessitates us to think about the resistances of the ego that arise from the deconstruction of the the layers of stratified unconscious in psychoanalysis, the “dynamics of ideation” that present themselves most clearly in the resistance to the basic rule of free association. Freud was the first to speak of this “dynamics of ideation” with the conceptualization of the ego and its resistances as a defense, and used the archaeological metaphor of strata to describe the metapsychology of the process by which traumatic memories are expelled to the unconscious by means of repression as a function of the ego. In ‘Studies On Hysteria’ (1895), Sigmund Freud writes, “This procedure was one of clearing away the pathogenic psychical material layer by layer, and we liked to compare it with the technique of excavating a buried city.” This is also the work where Freud first uses the terms “the dynamics of ideation” and “stratification”. In ‘Studies on Hysteria’ Freud claimed that the stratification of the unconscious manifests itself in psychoanalytic treatment in three ways: First, a reverse linear chronology in the form of memory-traces. Second, a concentric stratification around the pathogenic nucleus, where resistance increases as one gets closer to the nucleus. And third, dynamic stratification, which follows thought contents, where the trajectory takes the form of a zig-zag that goes from the surface to the deep strata and back up again. In ‘The Ego and the Id’ (1923) he expanded the concept of stratification to apply it to the structure of the ego in addition to the structure of the unconscious. Freud seeing the need to convey the unconscious to consciousness, the failure of which results in the aggressive drive producing a repetition compulsion whereby in a disguised form the circumstances of traumatic encounters are relived by the subject, and therefore psychoanalytic treatment must “fill the gaps in memory” and “allow the patient to remember correctly”. Yet, Lacan claims that to look into the “depths” of the unconscious for the meaning of the symptom is to evade actual understanding of the contents of the unconscious. Following his assertion that the psyche produces contents that are both unanalyzable (namely, the sinthome) and analyzable contents (like the transference neurosis), arguing that the notion of the existence of directly observable “surface phenomena” is only theoretical and going as far as to say that the “relations of understanding”, the sensus commune of psychiatry, is always only an ideal relation. The analyst early on in treatment can only induce positive transference to the extent that they embody the “subject-supposed-to-know” for the analysand, though they are fully aware of the fact that they actually lack the knowledge that the analysand attributes to them.

As post-structuralism inverted Saussure’s sign model, putting the signifier in the dominant position over the signified, such as Lacan’s dictums “the unconscious is structured like a language” and “the unconscious is the discourse of the Other”, therefore it is possible to find meaning in a meaningless world, but Lacan himself would likely question such a simplistic view of meaning. First, he viewed the function of interpretation in psychoanalytic technique as rather than to find a “hidden meaning” (called the “decoding method”), he argued that the goal of interpretation was to disrupt meaning, also arguing that the discourse of the analyst thrives on the difference between meaning and meaninglessness. In the sense of analysis

leading to a “loss of being” by the analyst, and consequently, the “subjective destitution” of the analysand, psychoanalysis would lead the individual to realize that their traumatic encounters have no deeper meaning, and that they were ultimately contingent. If ‘the Real’ that Lacan spoke of is the limit to symbolization, what is the precise difference between meaning as such and what Lacan called “signification”? While the illusion of fixed meaning, when the signifier is tied to the signified, exists in the unconscious as what Lacan calls a “quilting point” or pointe de capiton, even when signifieds are produced, they constantly are subject to “slippage”, or the unstable relationship between the signifier and signified, the barred subject. Therefore, signification is in the register of the Imaginary order, while meaning is located in the Symbolic order. However, signification exists both as metaphor and metonymy. Signification is metonymic because “signification always refers to another signification”, and metaphorical because it involves crossing the bar between the signifier and the signified, “the passage of the signifier into the signified”.

<em>Part V - “Nobody goes mad through wanting to”</em>

Schizoanalyis grew out of the institutional psychotherapy movement (later called institutional analysis) that started in the 1950s at the Saint-Alban Clinic by Francois Tosquelles, Frantz Fanon, and Jean Oury, a French psychiatric reform movement and approach to group psychotherapy influenced by Marxism and Lacanian psychoanalysis. Institutional psychotherapy essentially argued that there was structural linkage between the psyche and the social, that politics has direct psychic effects, and therefore that psychiatry should be a subversive politically-oriented discipline. Jean Oury would, in 1952, continue the practice of institutional psychotherapy at the La Borde Clinic, where Felix Guattari worked until his death. Similar to anti-psychiatry in its institutional critique, institutional psychotherapy differed in the sense that they argued psychosis is not merely a social construct, but is the real effect of power on the individual. In Fanon’s terms, the goal was to to de-colonize the psychosomatic structures that exert an enormous influence on individual suffering. Jean Oury defined the approach as, “the attempt to fight, every day, against that which can turn the collective whole towards a concentrationist or segregationist structure.” Tosquelles, as part of the movement, published a book called ‘The Psychopathology of Lived Experience’ which revived the Hippocratic notion of the “medic-philosopher”, and spoke in similar terms to Fanon when he said that psychiatry must “proceed by “disoccupation”. Additionally, Georges Canguilhem authored the 1966 book ‘The Normal and the Pathological’, which argued against the prevailing biological or neurological explanations of psychopathology, and instead relied on psychoanalysis, but criticized its orientation towards treating the neurotic patient, rather than the psychotic patient, for whom repression, symptoms, language, and transference operated differently. Institutional psychotherapy saw Marx and Freud as complementary figures in application of politics to psychoanalysis.

Lacan distinguished himself as a psychoanalyst with his inclusion of structural linguistics in psychoanalysis, realizing the need to approach the subject among a network of signifiers that make up their internal experience. Felix Guattari readily understood this, and with his collaboration with Deleuze in ‘Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia’, embarked on the construction of philosophical territories for the schizophrenic consciousness. The philosophy of the post-structuralists understood that the schizophrenic mind was fundamentally different than that of the neurotic. Linguistically, Chomsky’s linguistic trees, according to Deleuze and Guattari are incompatible with the experience of schizophrenia, which resemble “arborescence” more than “rhizomes”. Post-structuralism as a linguistic movement used madness as its very starting point in the analysis of language, which goes back to primitive societies and how they developed their traditions of language. Lacan coined the term “schizography” to describe the study of texts written by psychotic authors; in ‘Anti-Oedipus’, Deleuze and Guattari describe the schizophrenic’s relation to language as follows: “The arbitrary nature of the thing designated, the subordination of the signified, the transcendence of the despotic signifier, and finally, its consecutive decomposition into minimal elements within a field of immanence uncovered by the withdrawal of the despot - all this is evidence that writing belongs to imperial despotic representation.” In ‘Anti-Oedipus’, Deleuze and Guattari reference many authors whose works demonstrate “schizography” or had schizophrenia themself, including notably Antonin Artaud, Daniel Paul Schreber, Samuel Beckett, Henry Miller, and Marcel Proust.

Deleuze and Guattari, Fredric Jameson, and Jean Baudrillard have all spoken of the postmodern subject, the postmodern condition, or postmodernity in general, as manifesting a schizophrenic process of cultural reproduction (what D&G would call “deterritorialization”), but unlike D&G who would see the schizophrenic escape or “line of flight” as having revolutionary and anti-fascist potential, Jameson and Baudrillard would conceptualize schizophrenia instead as a casualty of late capitalist postmodernity. While D&G see the schizophrenic as “rebellious, counter-cultural, transcendent, or even bizarre” (Woods), Jameson and Baudrillard would see schizophrenia as a “historically specific form of subjective disintegration”. Nonetheless, they have all diagnosed the postmodern subject as schizophrenic. The generalized subjective experience of postmodernity can be seen as in the postmodern aesthetic to be of a schizophrenic process of deterritorialization, as a process of cultural imperialism. This divergence is between seeing schizophrenia as a liberatory process of reaching the limit of capitalism, the deterritorialized face of the despot, or as a crippling, paranoid, disorganized, false consciousness of the generalized postmodern condition. Joseph Gabel based on his “sociologism”, modeled social pathology by applying sociopolitical history at the analytic level, where the spatializing-reificational aspect of the perception of reality overcomes the temporalizing-historical aspect, which is the “common denominator” of economic and political alienation, which manifests itself as “morbid rationalism”, a non-dialectical, reified, axiological consciousness that coincides with schizophrenia, as well as ideology with its “theoretical crystallization”. “Collective egocentrism” dichotomizes and dissociates the axiological totality, resulting in a devaluation of the contents of experience. False consciousness is the alienated axiological consciousness that “fails to appreciate or obscures the autonomous axio-dialectical quality of reality”.

If we are to develop a non-alienated psychiatric practice, which models the collective tendencies of humanity against the hegemony of false consciousness, in a social, political, historical analysis, the totality of human interactions is a vast network which finds its form in the Lacanian formula “the unconscious is the discourse of the Other”, such that the superego is actually a group superego, we learn through our thrownness in the social field the internalized norms and values of the culture, but to which the most fundamental element is the totality of fundamental human relations that exist in relation to the subject of analysis and discourse, so that every identity is discursively created. The ‘rhetoric of therapy’ in its application of a diagnosis on the patient, and its agent, the diagnostically-minded therapist, while the patient may leave the session with unresolved childhood conflicts, the therapist imposes on them all the stories that go along with their diagnosis: “chemical imbalances, lifelong duration, the need to “comply” with treatment”, and leaving them with a stigmatized label with which they are expected to identify, and ignoring the recovery model of mental disorders and the social model of disability for the medical model, by which the reduction of the subject to a disease process, or a genetic or neurological abnormality, needs to be reconsidered in the context of the family, the clinic, the welfare state, the culture, etc.

If postmodernity is subject to a schizophrenic process of cultural reproduction, then where lies the neurotic dialectic of desire in hysteria that has constituted modern capitalist production since its inception? For Lacan, the psychoanalytic act itself which sets the transference in motion, is only correctly applied when it has the effect of the hysterization of the analysand, producing a structurally controlled hysteria within the conditions of the psychoanalytic session. Jacques-Alain Miller argues that the contemporary practice of psychotherapy, in opposition to psychoanalysis, does the exact opposite: in psychotherapy it is the obsessionization of the client that constitutes the guiding force of the therapeutic practice. And finally, to return to the subject of the schizophrenic process of postmodernity, what did Deleuze and Guattari mean when they spoke of the schizophrenization of psychoanalysis? Precisely the fact that in order to arrive at a practice of psychoanalysis that has its basis in the historical, social, and political analysis of the social production of desire, we must expand our concept of the historical subject beyond the doors of the analyst’s office, beyond the doors of the institution, to arrive at a formal analysis of the subject’s position in relation to their history and the social field.

Deleuze and Guattari argue that every paranoiac delirium is at once an investment in the social field (“every delirium is first of all the investment of a field that is social, economic, political, cultural, racial and racist, pedagogical, and religious”), and secondly, that familial investments, “result solely from the application or the reduction of the social investments.” Therefore, in the family, the father retains primacy in relation to the child, such that the father and child are simultaneously invested in the social field, whereby the communications of the autoproduction of the unconscious submits itself to the coding and axiomatics (i.e. the capitalist axiomatic) of the social field and the despotic signifier. For D&G, schizophrenia is a productive process (deriving from the processual theory of schizophrenia set out by Harry Stack Sullivan in his 1962 book ’Schizophrenia as a Human Process’, and the same year, the concept was explored by Joseph Gabel in his book ‘False Consciousness: An Essay on Reification’, both preceded by the 1933 book by Eugene Minkowski entitled ‘Lived Time: Phenomenological and Psychopathological Studies’), based on “breakdowns and breakthroughs” of this process, a recording process on what D&G call the “body without organs” (the model for clinical schizophrenia), where an always oscillating machinic unconscious between the poles of ‘nomadism’ and ‘segregation’ (‘schizophrenia’ and ‘paranoia’), or alternatively, the coexistence of both investments, either returns the schizophrenic to a loss of reality and an autistic state, or has revolutionary potential in liberating the flows of desire from the paranoiac fascist investments in the unconscious, and process here can be seen as praxis. In Gabel’s theory of schizophrenia, he describes the psychopathology of the disorder as “socio-pathological parallelism”, which he uses to develop a “Marxist theory of consciousness”, where he follows Henri Lefebvre in saying, “The drama of alienation is dialectical”, where a “de-dialecticization” of cognitive functions shows the parallel between psychopathology and Marx’s idea of false consciousness (or reified consciousness). He describes (using a term from Minkowski) a “morbid rationalism” which supports the ruling class, due to a loss of the dialectical quality of thought.

<strong>Ch. 3 - It's Not My Fault If Reality Is Marxist</strong>

<em><strong>Introduction - The Marxist Problematic</strong></em>

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Such that Margaret Thatcher declared, “There is no alternative”, the hegemony of advanced capitalism has placed us more than ever within the miserable confines of market fundamentalism, exploding inequality, mass incarceration, globalization, environmental degradation, the influence of corporations over government, the rise of financial speculation, and imperialism. So then what is the role that cultural hegemony plays in the dominance and perpetuation of the capitalist system? Is hegemony still a viable category for understanding political domination? While the original idea of social contract meant that the population reserves the right to resist the tyranny of the government, the “consent of the governed” as in Hume’s terms, leads to the neutralization of class struggle, and we are experiencing a hauntological “slow cancellation of the future” and the corresponding “end of history” where resistance becomes impossible. To what extent have traditional power relations based on coercion and discipline been replaced by with the “consent of the governed” so that subjects become passive and can no longer resist the system that enslaves and alienates them? To what extent has the original idea of the social contract become superfluous to the bourgeoisie, where they rather govern based on <em>consent of the oppressed</em>? To what extent has the increasing social complexity of postmodernity given rise to a more technocratic and complex network of power relations based on biopower and governmentality, where at the micropolitical level there exist many “technologies of control” by which class struggle is diverted from its aim at establishing egalitarianism into forms of domination?

The focus here will be to outline the philosophical and theoretical differences in the various Marxist schools of thought, but to adhere to Fredric Jameson’s famous dictum, “Always historicize!”. Western Marxism represents a wide range of philosophical and sociological viewpoints on Marxist theory, that after the October Revolution, broke from the dogmatic interpretation of Marxism-Leninism that dominated in the Soviet Union; in contrast, they placed a greater emphasis on the philosophical and subjective aspects of Marxism found in the works of the early Marx, alongside the influence Marxist humanism, Hegelian Marxism, Freudo-Marxism, and council communism, and the eventual emergence of analytical Marxism and the critical theory of the Frankfurt School. In 1931, Stalin settled the long-standing debate in the Soviet Union between the “dialecticians” and the “mechanists”, by declaring dialectical materialism to be the official philosophy in the Soviet Union. Lenin in ‘Materialism and Empirico-Criticism’ claims to have developed a middle-ground between the economic determinism of the later Marx, and the historicism of the early Marx. Earlier, with the emergence of Western Marxism in western and central Europe, with the publication of Georg Lukacs’ ‘History and Class Consciousness’ and Karl Korsch’s ‘Marxism and Philosophy’, during the 5th Comintern Congress, Grigory Zinoviev condemned both works as “revisionism”. Lukacs would subject himself to self-criticism, in response, because of his belief that to be a member of the revolutionary party was the first priority of any Marxist. Stalin even blocked the distribution of Marx’s ‘Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844’ due to its incomplete break with German idealism.

Wider than the debate between “dialecticians” and “mechanists” in the Soviet Union, causing a rupture among Western Marxists, later with Althusser diverging from Gramsci and Lukacs on the notion of the proletariat as the subject of history, a Hegelian reading of Marx akin to Hegel’s “Absolute Spirit”, he rather than conceiving of a historical subject, identifies the point of subjectivization as an <em>Absolute Subject.</em> This represents the divide between the “economic determinism” of Althusser, and the “absolute historicism” of Gramsci and Lukacs. What unites both trends in the Marxist analysis of historicity, or rather historiography, is the foundation of both theories in Marx and Engel’s dialectical materialism, which characterizes the Marxist method. However, while the historicists rejected the classical distinction between historical materialism and dialectical materialism, describing both as theories of the laws of historical development, Althusser identifies historical materialism as a “science of history”, and dialectical materialism as the “theory of scientific practice”. While for Gramsci or Lukacs, Marxism is the “philosophy of praxis”, for Althusser’s scientistic structural reductionism based on structural causality and overdetermination, rejecting the belief in revolutionary spontaneity of Marxists such as Rosa Luxemburg; Althusser based on structuralism argues with his structural Marxism, as many later post-structuralists would argue, that the subject of history was structurally de-centered, basically because there exists a de-centered structure. Therefore, for Althusser, “The Marxist totality, however, is never separable in this way from the elements that constitute it, as each is the conditions of existence of all the others”, with one element in the structure being dominant, determination “in the last instance”. In contrast to economic determinism in Althusser’s sense, Gramsci considered his political philosophy an “absolute historicism” and an “absolute humanism”, compared to the avowed anti-humanism of Althusser that arose directly in response to Marxist humanism.

The possibility of a libertarian socialist movement achieving its goals is in most of the world tight within the grips of capitalist hegemony. I will refer to this condition of post-modernity using Deleuze’s term: the <em>capitalist axiomatic</em> which I find preferable to Mark Fisher’s “capitalist realism”. The modest existence of a handful of successful libertarian socialist movements in the 20th century does not at first appear to attest to the Marxist metanarrative that socialism will naturally arise from the contradictions of capitalist modernity. Instead, globalized capitalism seems greater than ever ingrained into the tradition of Enlightenment reason. However, rather than taking the stance of anti-foundationalism, as many post-Marxists have, I intend to defend historical and dialectical materialism as a realistic description of the nature of class struggle, but while expanding the Marxist dialectic to include the analysis of the <em>discursive</em> aspects of identity formation, and furthermore extrapolate the concept of cultural hegemony to describe how the capitalist class consolidates itself as a ruling class even under the conditions of democracy. Whether Marxism is to be defined as by Gramsci as a “philosophy of praxis”, or by Althusser as a “science of class struggle”, populism as a form of post-Marxist revisionism is a symptom of capitalist modernity, and not its solution. Therefore, in the sense of dialectical materialism, the proletariat in its social position, can be maintained as by Marx as the “universal class” that represents the interests of the whole of society, rather than the need for a reformulation of the proletariat, as in populism and social democracy, as needing to employ a class collaborationist strategy in order to constitute a hegemonic bloc.

The question of whether libertarian socialism is <em>possible</em> is clearly obvious in the example of Rojava. Why must certain Marxists criticize Rojava or not see it as the full realization of their vision? It is not a bureaucratic form of socialism since it comprises of direct democratic institutions that federate upwards, with instant recall as an option for delegations, and doesn’t have any state ownership, instead it has cooperative ownership. So what remains of what can be called a State, although the Rojava Revolution never went through a state socialist period and instead transformed the North and East Syrian territory directly to a proletarian semi-state, based on democratic confederalism, inspired by Bookchin’s libertarian municipalism. Because we see libertarian socialism in practice, only the naive or the opportunist can claim that libertarian socialism is in any way an oxymoron and therefore is impossible to achieve. Instead, I would argue that it is a libertarian <em>capitalism</em> that is impossible to achieve, such that capitalism cannot reproduce its conditions of existence without a powerful State to justify the existence of the free market. While we haven’t seen any sort of Nozick-style minarchist state or lassaiz- faire capitalism yet anywhere in history, the history of anarchism is saturated with examples of libertarian socialism functioning in practice and therefore attests to the validity of the school of thought of libertarian socialism.

The advantage of the application of structuralism to Marxism, as displayed in the works of Poulantzas and Althusser, with the view that “a word or concept cannot be considered in isolation; it only exists in the theoretical or ideological framework in which it is used” is the clear delineation of a dialectical materialism where contradictions that are resolved in the “negation of the negation”, first constitute a “problematic”; not a worldview, but the <em>sublime object of ideology</em> itself. This is what Marx refers to as “commodity fetishism”, generalized as the Marxist theory of reification, resulting in social alienation, which constitutes the base or structure of society. The ideological superstructure that arises from the base and its contradictions, the means of production and the relations of production, which make up the mode of production, is manifested by the ideological hegemony of the bourgeoisie, but as dialectical materialism shows, the ideological superstructure is determined by the base material relations of society, but still reciprocally the base is overdetermined by the superstructure. Speaking of the “Marxist problematic” (the very essence of Marxism) was what Marx meant when he compares class-in-itself with class- for-itself; this is what makes Marxism a critical theory for-itself as class struggle and the manifestation of class consciousness, whether as a “philosophy of praxis” or a “science of history”, and class-in-itself as the relations of production between the proletariat and the means of production; class-for-itself actively opposes or fights against the hegemony of capitalism and the bourgeoisie, in order to change the material conditions of the masses.

Zizek’s ‘The Sublime Object of Ideology’ begins with the chapter “How Did Marx Invent The Symptom?”; he traces the idea of a symptomatic analysis of social conditions to a time before Freud’s micro-dialectical analysis of the “symptom” in psychoanalysis. What Marxist dialectics presents, seen by Althusser as the basis for what can be reconstructed only by a “symptomatic reading” of Marxism, is the form of the “Marxist problematic”. The two facets of class previously discussed, class-in-itself and class-for-itself, referring to two different modes of stratification, the first which is the common relation to the means of production that constitutes social stratification as the objective economic relation of the proletariat in regards to labor, money, and commodities, that constitutes a class with objective interests, the second is the class consciousness of the proletariat (or alternatively, the false consciousness imposed by the bourgeoisie) that exists as a horizon of theoretical and ideological reasoning which makes it possible for the proletariat to achieve self-consciousness, take a scientific approach towards class struggle, and therefore engage in socialist praxis.

Jurgen Habermas poses an important question for social philosophy: “should we try to hold on to the intentions of the Enlightenment, feeble as they may be, or should we declare the entire project of modernity a lost cause?” Whereas in the mid-20th century, capitalism faced an immanent threat to its sovereignty from Marxist communism as a growing movement, the late-20th century saw the fall of most of the communist states (which was much more than “an experiment” but was a real challenge to the existing global order), regardless of the opposition by more anti-authoritarian Marxists, anarchists, and left communists, who all considered the Soviet Union to have abandoned its revolutionary roots in favor of state capitalism. For what Marx envisioned as communism, was in his later years, based off the experience of the Paris Commune, which was a form of <em>libertarian communism</em>, albeit a “dictatorship of the proletariat” where the working class truly held political power for the first time, and exercised this power through workers’ councils as to create a new governance based on freedom and equality through the abolition of private property.

If Marx thought that increasing technological innovation would be liberating force of production, inevitably leading to the downfall of capitalism and the triumph of proletarian revolutions across the globe, how can in the wake of the increasing rationalization of society can capitalism have become ever more integrated into daily life without any alternative? How exactly did the social movements of the 1960s, which in France coincided with the rise of post-structuralist theory and the theorization of the postmodern condition in light of the May 1968 general strike and student movement, enact a shift in cultural perspective by which part of the population militantly demanded change to the social and political order with the New Left and the new social movements, and also with the “great refusal” of the alternative lifestyles of the countercultural movement as modern incarnations of bohemianism, mainly the hippie movement? How did the 1980s and the Reagan administration lead to the consolidation of capitalism, the early 1990s to the fall of the Berlin Wall, and then the George W. Bush presidency of the early 2000s, represent a totalizing force of neoliberal globalization that resulted in the pacification of the working class, that ultimately adhered to neoliberalism as the dominant ideology? This periodization was obviously subject to many “cycles of resistance”, but nonetheless failed to mount an actual challenge to capitalism.

For Gramsci, the essence of the Marxist problematic is the question of which class maintains hegemony in the form of State power, and which class is subjugated. Laclau and Mouffe, instead of taking the step, for example, of Adorno, who developed a “negative dialectics” based on the inherent contradictions of the capitalist system as the “negation of the negation”, Laclau and Mouffe use the term “agonism” in a dialectic with “antagonism”, to argue that democracy as a political system can only exist as open-ended, where class conflict is seen as having a permeant role in society and there is no potential for resolving class conflict except by establishing a system where people can “accept and channel” the positivity that arises from relations which are at first antagonistic. In order to defend against dialectical materialism’s appropriation in this form of “agnostic democracy”, such that Lenin stated, “under socialism there will be the absence of antagonisms, but not the absence of contradictions”, therefore antagonisms can be resolved in what is referred to (which can act as an organizing principle of the overall Marxist problematic) as deliberative or participatory democracy and economics (as a supplement to the classical conception of industrial or economic democracy). But without giving primacy to the economic over the political, the economy is the site of society which actually defines the living standards of the population, and therefore for the superstructure to change, the dominant ideology, we must first change the base. However, prefigurative economics is only one struggle in the subordination of the economic to the political (“the trade unions to the party”) such that we must actually try to arrive at system of dual power which is in its very nature political, but yet implements direct democracy in the form of counter- institutions such as credit unions, cooperatives, syndicates, and above all, worker’s councils.

To refer to Mao’s dialectical concept of the “antagonistic contradiction” where he theorized that class conflict was unresolvable and therefore for the proletariat to rise up to the position of ruling class necessitated the dictatorship of the proletariat (which bases itself on Soviet democracy), similarly Laclau and Mouffe negate Marx’s concept of “the withering away of the state”. Prior to Mao, Stalin also negated the orthodox Marxist concept of “the withering away of the state”, as well as proletarian internationalism and permanent revolution which Trotskyism championed. The theory of hegemony as post-Marxism conceives of it is in its historicist aspect a return to Hegel, such as how Lenin (who did use the concept of hegemony in his writings) said, “under socialism there will be the absence of antagonisms, but not the absence of contradictions”, a theory clearly opposed to Mao’s “antagonistic contradiction” or Stalin’s “aggravation of class struggle under socialism”. Lenin advocated a theory of proletarian revolution in three stages: the “smashing” of the bourgeois State, the building of a proletarian semi-state “in its ashes” (Marx said “the proletariat cannot simply lay hold of the ready-made State machinery, and wield it for its own purposes”), and finally “the withering away of the state”.

The theory of revolution appearing in Lenin’s 1917 ‘The State and Revolution’ which was directly informed by the Russian Revolution, has been called by Noam Chomsky “Lenin’s most libertarian work”. Yet, Marxism-Leninism has often come into conflict with more anti-authoritarian social movements and political parties; Trotsky’s Left opposition and the Fourth International, argued as did Luxemburg, for multi-party governance but retained the form of the dictatorship of the proletariat, which was in Luxemburg’s terms, meant to expand democracy rather than limit it, and in this sense the proletarian dictatorship referred to the hegemony that unlike the “dictatorship of bourgeoisie”, established itself as the hegemony of the whole of the proletarian class, whereby democracy in the literal sense of “rule by many” would be realized and carried out, as opposed to the “dictatorship of the party” and vanguardism, however, the Comintern would support the formation of multi-party multi-class “people’s democracy” to combat the rise of fascism.

<strong>Part I - Conflict Theory and Class Consciousness</strong>

Marx compares the idea of false consciousness to that of class consciousness, defined as “the awareness of the working class that they have the ability to act in their own best interests”. Marx identifies the superstructure with the bourgeois State and describes the ruling class ideology as a false consciousness, anything that covers or masks the true potential of the revolutionary working class. Marxism is better suited to be discussed as a category of social and historical analysis for the reason that it takes a historical reality of the progression of capitalism to socialism to be the historical narrative of class consciousness. Alan Badiou philosophizes of the possibility of the emergence of a ‘proletarian ideology’ as central to the aim of Marxism. As Zizek discusses in his paper “Repeating Lenin”, Marxism can not be thought of in terms of “true” but rather in ideological discourse as to what is “right”. Marx distinguishes between two different types of class: class-in-itself and class- for-itself. The former being the relation of the individual to the means of production, and the latter being “a social stratum organized in active pursuit of its own interests”. Badiou develops a theory of ideology based on three functions: repetition, totalization, and placement. The first is the repetition of givens in a series of representations. The second consists of legitimizing the theoretical imaginary by means of a unifying pressure. The third interpellates both individuals and concepts into the domain of ideology.

The realization of class consciousness by the proletariat (such as how Gramsci recognizes the existence of a “collective consciousness” under the sway of cultural hegemony), what results in the advent of a communist revolution, and the reason that Marxism can be defined (as by Gramsci) as a “philosophy of praxis” or the “science of class struggle”, is the process of social action by which an individual or a collective can actively change the political and economic conditions of the culture in which they live. Just as Marx wrote, “Philosophers have hitherto only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it”, and Weber spoke of a theory of social action, the Marxist interpretation of history and class consciousness asserts the primacy of praxis over theory in Marx’s social ontology. Marx argues that there is a reciprocal relationship between the base and the superstructure, however the base is the determinant of the superstructure in the “last instance” for the reason that praxis is aligned with the base, rather than the false consciousness of the dominant ideas of society (i.e. the superstructure). Therefore even if the nature of everyday practice is conditioned by the dominant ideology, the proletarian ideology acts as a material force where praxis is the active changing of the base material relations through class struggle, while the dominant ideology acts to reproduce the mode of production of capitalist society, therefore constituting the dialectic of political discourse as the resolution of the contradiction of private property. Raymond Williams writes, “So, we have to say that when we talk of ‘the base’, we are talking of a process, and not a state.” Marx asserted the dominance of the base over the superstructure in ’A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy’ (1859), where he writes, “In the social production of their existence, humans inevitably enter into definite relations, which are independent of their will, namely relations of production appropriate to a given stage in the development of their material forces of production. The totality of these relations of production constitutes the economic structure of society, the real foundation, on which arises a legal and political superstructure and to which correspond definite forms of social consciousness. The mode of production of material life conditions the general process of social, political and intellectual life. <em>It is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but their social existence that determines their consciousness.</em>” However Marx also wrote in the ‘Thesis on Fauerbach’ (1845), “The materialist doctrine that men are products of circumstances and upbringing, and that, therefore, changed men are products of changed circumstances and changed upbringing, forgets that it is men who change circumstances and that the educator must himself be educated...The coincidence of the changing of circumstances and of human activity and self-change can be conceived and rationally understood only as <em>revolutionary practice.</em>”

The fundamental conflict in capitalist society is between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat. This is the basic conflict in conflict theory because the bourgeoisie mercilessly exploit the proletariat as the owners of large factories who apply surplus value exploitation to the wages of the proletariat as a means to generate massive profits off the labor of working men and women. With the rise of finance capitalism, the “owners” of a company are now “invisible shareholders” who do not labor to produce the products but participate in the game of financial capital to exploit the workers into producing in a system of surplus value exploitation. Primitive accumulation and modern industrialization has led to rise of the bourgeoisie as a social class who are primarily concerned with the concentration of capital and the value of their property. Marx saw this bourgeoisie class as the “financial intermediary” between the landlords who owned the property of the serfs during feudalism and the serfs themselves. He saw this rise of the new middle class (merchants, bankers, entrepreneurs) as the beginning of a new historical era in which no longer would serfs be tied to the land, but their labor would be freely exploited on an open market, with a changing economy based on rapid technological advances and industrialization. In Russia, the Emancipation Reform of 1861 freed the serfs, from their condition under which unlike the slave, who could be sold or bought, the unfree serf could only be sold with the land he or she was “attached to”.

Besides the fundamental conflict between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie, a few other different classes are discussed by Marx and Engels. One class in particular of note that is discussed is the <em>lumpenproletariat.</em> In Marxist class analysis it is seen as a class that is devoid of acting in its own best interests because it lacks class consciousness. Seen as the “underclass”, a class even below the traditional proletariat, the lumpenproletariat includes criminals, vagabonds, prostitutes, and other low class individuals. Although Marx, Lenin and Trotsky dismissed the revolutionary potential of the lumpenproletariat, anarchists have praised the social class as a kind of “actually existing anarchism”. Mao also felt that it was possible to harness the potential of the lumpenproletariat.

The second question at hand is whether the peasant class, living in rural settlements with an economy different than that of urban areas, would be included in the proletariat. The traditional Marxist definition says “no”, putting the peasant class in a class position of its own. The rural and post-industrialized settings are seen as different classes because they are different ways of life, ways of living, and different cultures. These different cultures arise from a different economic infrastructure and work relations, or a different means of production. The peasant class, as noted by Marx, produces its means of existence through an exchange with nature, rather than an intercourse with society. The peasant family being primarily self-sufficient lacks the interdependence and communication seen in the proletariat. However, several historical examples such as the peasant class in Vietnam or China attest to the revolutionary potential of the peasant classes in overthrowing capitalism. While after the 1949 revolution in China, anarchism was seen to be a fringe if not dead ideology, though with a modest history in China, the peasantry were more willing to associate with interests of Marxism-Leninism-Maoism in China, compared to the Socialist Revolutionary dissenters in the Soviet Union who would share power for a few months with the Bolsheviks after the February Revolution only to be thrown from power by the Bolsheviks that October. The SRs were a party that, agrarian in nature, represented the class interests of the peasant population, the farmers, or the rural population. Seeing the disunity of the proletariat and peasant classes under Soviet ascendence, Mao made it a point to fully incorporate the theory of both the proletariat and peasant classes into the official vanguard ideology.

Then the third class of note, the petty bourgeoisie, is an often misunderstood class in conflict theory. While it is apparent that the petty bourgeoise are active participants in the projection of the bourgeois ideology, at the workplace and consequently at home, to what extent are they to be seen as enemies of the working class in conflict theory? One main distinction that differentiates the petty bourgeoisie from the bourgeoisie themselves is that they work alongside their workers, meaning that while surplus value is applied to the wages of the laborers, the petty bourgeoisie participate in the labor at hand. It would be a mistake to assume that because the petty bourgeoisie mixes private property with family labor, that it represents a solution to the class struggle. Instead, the demands of the petty bourgeoisie in their political practice has been strictly limited, such as the demand for progressive taxation and the creation of credit unions. The petty bourgeoisie typically holds the values of entrepreneurship, self-help, individualism, family, and a careful acquisition of resources. Marx designates the petty bourgeoisie as a “transition class” which he said along with the small-landowning peasants, are in the process of disappearing as capitalism develops.

Marx identified alienation as a symptom of the capitalist order. The first type of alienation was alienation from the product of labor itself, the surplus value of goods produced. The second is alienation from the labor process or the act of production, a dissatisfaction with one’s own labor standards, conditions or management, resulting in a commodity fetishist economy where labor relationships are treated as economic instead of social. The final type of alienation identified by Marx was the idea of alienation from ones species-essence, or the diversion of their true human potential into a demand for labor. Marx says, “Money is the alienated essence of man’s work and existence, this essence dominates him and he worships it”. According to R. D. Laing, “Alienation as our present destiny is achieved only by outrageous violence perpetrated by human beings on human beings.” If violence is inherent in the capitalist system, if exploitation that takes the form of surplus value is a systemic contradiction in the capitalist system, then we can see how this violence finds its way to streets through crime and poverty. Crime becomes a direct result of the anger and systemic violence of the capitalist system itself. But what does it mean to be alienated from ones surroundings? For Marx, the essential being of man is fundamentally external to the work conditions that man must toil in to survive. “The worker, therefore, feels himself only outside his work, and feels beside himself in his work. He is at home when he is not working, and when he is working he is not at home. His work therefore is not voluntary, but coerced; it is forced labor. It is therefore not the satisfaction of a need, but only a means for satisfying needs external to it” (Marx). When Marx says that labor is forced or coerced he means to say that within the capitalist system, to survive means being forced to sell ones labor to an employer for wages.

<em>Part II - Feudalism and Historical Materialism</em>

The major basis for Marx’s materialist conception of history was that the “playing out” of history was the result of the material conditions of existence, this includes the relations of production (was the laborer a slave, a serf, a proletarian?) and the means of the production (the degree to which technological development has influenced the society), which together make up the mode of production. Therefore, the mode of production determines the historical situation <em>a priori</em> according to the theory of historical materialism. Why then must we as libertarian socialists situate ourselves in line with the Marxist conception of history? Marx’s conception of communism preceded anarchist communism with anarchist communism not developing until after Marx was dead. Mutualism was the dominant school of anarchist thought vis-a-vis Pierre-Joseph Proudhon with whom Marx was actually acquainted and who also based his economic theory on the labor theory of value, as the basis for a mutualist economy with the existence of regional mutual-credit banks. And while Marx preferred referring to what is today known as state socialism as lower-stage communism, and stateless communism as higher-stage communism, so as Marxists it makes the difference between communism and socialism irrelevant, as ‘socialism’ only refers to the phase of state socialism or semi-state socialism, it can be used here in this analysis to designate lower-stage communism as Marx understood it. There is certainly a lot to be learned from Marxism as libertarian socialists, as Rosa Luxemburg understood.

According to the theory of historical materialism, if feudalism (the dominant economic system in Europe from about 1000 AD to 1500 AD) is seen as an objective step in the historical process by way of class struggle, regarding the evolution of the mode of production, then can it be followed that capitalism is to be seen as a more advanced mode of production in historical development than feudalism, a necessary stage to pass through before feudalism can become socialism. It can be shown that while feudalism was a complex hierarchy of organization that included serfs, peasants, craftsmen, farmers, merchants, knights, vassals, nobles, and the absolute monarchy, on the other hand, capitalism (as theorized by Marx) tends to evolve to have its own hierarchy where a rapidly disappearing petty bourgeoisie at the mercy of monopoly capital, is in the midst of a bitter class struggle between the proletariat and the consolidated but small percentage of bourgeoisie owners (which developed out of the merchant class). Therefore, the socialist mode of production (equal relations of production and public or cooperatively owned means of production, yet the existence of a State apparatus in a transitionary form, withering away) is the necessary step in resolving the internal contradictions caused by the contradiction between the ruling class ideology and the class consciousness of the proletariat, and the contradiction between the material conditions of the working class and that of the bourgeoisie. It is shown through Lenin’s analysis of Engels’ writings in ’The State and Revolution’ that while the capitalist State, impossible in its current form to transition into a communist society, must be “crushed” through revolution, and the proletariat must seize State power for their own ends in establishing the transitionary “dictatorship of the proletariat”, which will eventually ‘wither away’ into a stateless classless communist society in the absence of class contradictions.

If a communist society is the end goal of history, as Marxism teaches that to arrive at communism, a socialist stage of development must be gone through, just as a capitalist stage of development is necessary to go through from feudalism to achieve socialism, since the working class is invested in the material conditions of their existence, there is a determined element of class struggle and a horizon of class consciousness that exists. Not only were there existing peasants’ communes in the middle ages that resembled the socialist mode of production, as well as guilds that acted as early workers’ associations, but also that the main contradiction of feudalism lies in the ownership of the land by vassals and nobles, and the serfs and peasants who are forced to work for these feudal lords, and that class consciousness is a historical phenomenon that coincides with the freedom of the workers to have ownership over their own means of production. In the middle classes of feudalism (merchants, artisans), it can be seen that feudalism takes on a capitalist character, and lays the groundwork for the emergence of the bourgeoisie class in the succeeding capitalist economies of Europe.

In regards to the two-stage theory of history, it must be realized that feudal economies, semi-fedual economies, the Asiatic mode of production, early capitalism, colonialism, and state monopoly capitalism, are all legitimate stages of historical development, with the first three being considered by Marx as forms of feudalism and the second three being considered by Lenin to be forms of capitalism. Respectively, these are the basic stages of the development that have happened historically, though if a two-stage theory is to be accepted, why are these sub-stages not continuous? Rather it may have, in that case, to be accepted that the simplified notion of feudalism and capitalism (whichever sub-stage of history it is in) are the distinctly objective stages which history goes through, and the sub-stages are the different characters manifested by the historical conditions of the given society. The class struggle, while universal, cannot be universalized in character among different societies comparatively for the reason that the material and political conditions of the position of the workers in relation to the economy and the government are based on the unique historical developments and struggles that lead to adoption of various constitutions, common law systems of government, and bourgeois-democratic revolutions.

Ernesto Laclau defines the basic components of Frank’s theory of feudalism:
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1. The historical conditions of one place and time in history cannot be universalized to fit into a mould that would describe every society’s historical development across every historical development, therefore each country must apprehend class struggle in a way unique to its historical situation.
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2. Underdevelopment in a post-colonial global economy cannot be attributed solely to the historical conditions of the country at hand, but must be understood as the interaction of developed countries with those underdeveloped countries. It must also be noted that the developed countries were never underdeveloped themselves, but rather undeveloped, as underdevelopment takes on meaning under colonialism and imperialism only.
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3. During the last few centuries, there is not a single geographical location that has not come under the penetrative influence of colonialism, rejecting any sort of dualism between coexisting feudal and capitalist structures, even if rural agriculture resembles feudalism in certain ways.
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4. The satellite regions which are most closely in contact with the urban centers are the most exploited and underdeveloped regions due to the intrusion of monopoly capital on rural settlements.
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5. It is rejected that the Marxist two-stage theory should assume that the capitalist sectors (to finish the bourgeois- democratic revolution) need to penetrate themselves into the rural underdeveloped regions which would only result in the monopolistic appropriation of the countryside by capitalist exploiters.

When medieval communes emerged in the 11th century as a sort of utopian socialist commune, they emerged as a form of protection from warfare between lawless nobles who in disregard to the monarchies, intended to attack and conquer towns to expand their reach and power over land. From the 12th century to the 16th century, medieval communes became very widespread especially in Italy where they turned into city-states based on partial democracy, and in Germany where they turned into ‘free cities’ which were independent from local nobility. The medieval communes of Europe showed a glimmer of class consciousness on the part of the peasant class during feudalism, but the reason that they could not themselves engage in ‘permanent revolution’ was because the powerful monarchies of their societies lead them to take a spontaneous utopian rather than an organized scientific praxis of full-scale socialist revolution. As historical materialism takes the stance that it is the material contradictions of a society that leads to the continuing class struggle for the resolution of class conflict, it may be irrelevant historically of whether political economy had been developed yet to a point of theorizing the nature of a socialist economy when discussing the medieval commune.

<em>Part III - Capitalism and Socialism</em>

Marx’s 1875 formula: “from each according to their ability, to each according to their needs”, is the basis for scientific socialism. What is justified here, and why libertarian socialists must read Marx, is that the scientific foundation of a critique of political economy has already been developed, if not only exposed as a self-evident historical necessity of equality. Jean- Paul Sartre considers the materialist philosophy of Marx and Engels to be “unthinkable in the sense of an <em>Unding,</em> a thought which cannot stand the test of mere thought, since it is a naturalistic, pre-critical, pre-Kantian, pre-Hegelian metaphysic...the function of a Platonic ‘myth’ which helps proletarians to be revolutionaries.” When the Soviet Union adopted this maxim in their constitution as “to each according to his work” as following the customary wage payment system, instead of “to each according to his need”, Trotsky called it “this inwardly contradictory, not to say nonsensical, formula”. However, in ‘The Revolution Betrayed’ he seems to defend the concept of “to each according to his work” saying that the economy of Russia cannot directly transition to communism, but must pass through a transitionary stage in the development of the productive forces. In Marxian economics, the relations of production must complement the level of the development of the productive forces, so as to say that in the level of economic development of advanced capitalism (e.g. United States, Europe), the productive forces become fully developed and the revolution can only take one form. Those Stalinists that say “he who does not work, neither shall he eat”, is from a libertarian standpoint against the right of refusal of work. As libertarian socialists, we fully believe that labor should be voluntary and that most people would in practice work, with a minority using their refusal-of-work right, people should be given to along Marx’s formula “to each according to need” and all organizational or work-based relations should be voluntary, such as certain examples of federalism and confederalism.

Moreover, the workers’ council is the indispensable condition for political hegemony by the proletariat, so people would be highly politically involved as a basic condition of their existence, and would as so work if able (“from each according to his ability”) - does this federalism based on Soviet democracy contradict Marx’s formula, exposing Marx as an authoritarian? The goal of Marxism is to create the situation in which the maximum amount of liberty is given to the population - but the situation with liberty and freedom is complex and not seen in any way similar to right-libertarians who says that private property ownership is a right (we see property as theft). Property ownership is not a liberty in the state of nature and instead is a form of exploitation and coercion. But with a society based on Soviet democracy as discussed, the amount of participation and <em>power</em> that the individual would have over his or her surroundings would constitute decisions being made on a local level, with the existence of proletarian hegemony. Karl Marx writes in ‘Critique of the Gotha Program’, “Between capitalist and communist society there lies the period of the revolutionary transformation of one into the other. Corresponding to this is also a political transition period in which the state can be nothing but <em>the revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat.</em>” The dictatorship of the proletariat is the necessary stage in historical evolution after capitalism; Marx’s concept however is not necessarily to be equated with the <em>dictatorship of the party</em> that Leninists represent, but instead theorized as the <em>dictatorship of the masses,</em> i.e. Soviet democracy. It is not the question of some theoretical middle-ground between anarchy and the State, for as communists, we support direct (Soviet) democracy wholeheartedly, but as Marxists, we define the State as the ideological apparatus of the ruling class. Hence, the crucial importance of the dictatorship of the proletariat means the effective rising up of the proletariat to the position of the ruling class.

The marginal nature of Rosa Luxemburg’s political philosophy has been noted as possibly due to its vagueness and ambiguity (Stanley Aronowitz called it “generalized democracy in an unarticulated form”), but for those who venture into her political thought, a paradigmatic conception of communism can be found. Although she criticized the authoritarian nature of the Russian October Revolution as “dictatorship”, she nonetheless continued to call for the “dictatorship of the proletariat” in Germany. Like Trotskyism, she argued for multi-party socialist governance, saying famously, “Freedom only for the supporters of the government, only for the members of a party - however numerous they may be - is no freedom at all. Freedom is always the freedom of the one who thinks differently.” In her opposition to Bolshevik communism, she is known as saying, “Without general elections, without unrestricted freedom of press and assembly, without a free struggle of opinion, life dies out in every public institution, becomes a mere semblance of life, in which only the bureaucracy remains as the active element...a dictatorship, to be sure, not the dictatorship of the proletariat but only the dictatorship of a handful of politicians...”

Lenin in his 1917 ’The State and Revolution’ clarifies the role of revolution and the withering away of the state in Marxist theory: “As a matter of fact, Engels speaks here about the proletarian revolution “abolishing” the <em>bourgeois</em> state, while the words about the state withering away refer to the remnants of the <em>proletarian</em> state <em>after</em> the socialist revolution. According to Engels the bourgeois state does not “wither away” but is <em>“abolished”</em> by the proletariat in the course of the revolution. What withers away after this revolution is the proletarian state or semi-state.” Marx stated, “the working class cannot simply lay hold of the ready-made state machinery, and wield it for its own purposes.” Therefore, the new proletarian state must be <em>built from the ashes</em> of the bourgeois state that was abolished during the course of the socialist revolution - into a new form of organization.

It has been written that in the course of revolution, whether anarchist or communist, economic and administrative institutions will lose their political character. Whether this transition occurs “in a single stroke” or by means of the ‘withering away of the state’, labor and political relations become voluntary in the stage of historical materialism known as upper-stage communism, also known as the “free association of producers”. Once private property is abolished, and I will be clear here in differentiating between the proletarian semi-state and the free association of producers, in the former exists forms of social ownership consisting of collective or cooperative ownership (i.e. a market economy may still exist in a post-capitalist form, but these labor relations imply an individual stake in a collective unit of production), but the final form of ownership is common ownership (as in the collective ownership of the commons) in the form of a communist society. Under upper-stage communism (what Marxists see as the “end of history”), is the complete dissolution of the nation-state into localized political bodies such as collectives, communes, municipalities, cooperatives, commons, or syndicates. The defining characteristic of the stateless classless society is its reliance on complete and total direct democracy (or consensus decision-making), where every man and woman are equal in a literal political sense.

In contrast to democratic socialists who say that voluntary labor relations and political association can come about gradually through reforms; this is nearly impossible as history has shown that these liberal-democratic nations develop into advanced capitalism. But there is a tendency historically for Marxist-Leninist revolutions to develop into state capitalism rather than socialism; then in this situation the transition to communism is equally impossible. Libertarian Marxism offers a way out - the creation of workers’ councils which operate under direct democracy to seize the means of production and establish workers’ control over the economy, i.e. workers’ self-management and workplace democracy. Understanding that the continued existence of the state apparatus directs socialist society towards state capitalism, i.e. all property managed by the state - this is not then, a form of socialism, as libertarian Marxists argue, and as Trotsky well understood, he used the terms <em>degenerated workers’ state</em> and <em>deformed workers’ state,</em> that tend to divert the course of history towards either totalitarian political systems or exploitative and scarce social configurations (i.e. barracks communism). In both the Soviet Union and China, a state capitalist system emerged from what were authentic revolutionary situations. But Trotsky (as Trotskyism is a form of Leninism, still supporting vanguardism and democratic centralism), claimed that the early Soviet state was a genuine workers’ democracy, through Lenin, up until Stalin’s consolidation of power. Trotsky claimed that the “dictatorship of the bureaucracy” under Stalin was a degenerated workers’ state (deformed workers’ states referred to the Eastern European Soviet Republics and China), that was unstable and would inevitably collapse into either capitalism or socialism, and while it was based on collectivized means of production, but where the working class doesn’t actually hold political power. Therefore, since the USSR contained a planned socialist economy with a mixture of cooperative and public or state ownership, the problem for Trotsky was the rising level of bureaucratization and the alienation of the working class from political participation.

As far as the early Soviet state was truly a socialist economy with the socialist mode of production, the policies of Lenin can be split into two periods: War Communism and the New Economic Policy (NEP). While under War Communism, private enterprise was completely forbidden, under the NEP businesses with less than 20 workers were allowed. All land had been nationalized (i.e. there was no such thing as private land ownership) by the Decree On Land, and finalized by the 1922 Land Code. Under War Communism, not only was all the surplus production of the peasants bought by the state, but money came to be replaced with the barter system and a system of coupons. During the NEP, a stable monetary system was again introduced, but still all large and medium-sized enterprises were owned by the state. What changed during the NEP was that now the peasants were allowed to sell their surplus product (at a state-regulated price), though the peasants now paid taxes, and were encouraged to join state-owned farms (<em>Sovkhozes)</em> in which they worked for a fixed wage like the factory workers. Trotsky’s “degenerated workers’ state” differed from his “deformed workers’ state”, in the that in the former in the experience of the Russian Revolution, there was the establishment of a genuine workers’ democracy (that degenerated not into state capitalism, since the Soviet economy had the socialist mode of production, but the political power of the proletariat was replaced by an unaccountable bureaucratic elite, a “new class”).

<em>Part IV - Lenin and Philosophy</em>

Lenin considered himself very much an orthodox Marxist, as we can remember that it was Stalin and Trotsky who synthesized Marxism-Leninism in their own forms. Lenin rails in his 1902 pamphlet ‘What Is To Be Done?’ about the slogan “freedom of criticism”, which he says in the face of Marx’s theoretical contributions to political science (i.e. the aptly considered objective historical truths exposed by Marx and Engels), many of the so-called opportunists reject Marx’s historical/dialectical materialism, reject the class conflict between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat as the basic contradiction of capitalism, or the notion of conflict theory altogether, deny the process of proletarianization under capitalism, deny the concept of political parties needing an “ultimate aim”, and the denial of the antithesis between liberalism and socialism; these concepts are all refuted by various opportunists in the name a class collaborationist version of social

democracy. Marx emerged as one of the first purveyors of the politico-economic-historical critique of capitalism. Therefore, opportunism in its ideological forms amounts to a “critique of a critique”, such that its logic is not based the major historical-dialectical contradiction that Marx first described: the thesis of communism, with its antithesis being capitalism, and the synthesis being the transitionary period of the revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat which raises the working class to the position of the ruling class, creating a semi-state that automatically begins to whither away and which allows for democratic control over the means of production, distributing goods “according to need”, giving equal shares of social dividends to each worker, establishing mass democracy.

With his strikingly characteristic sarcasm, Lenin ridicules the phrase that parliamentarianism has become “politically obsolete”. He says, “Perhaps there is already a Soviet republic in Germany? It does not look like it! How, then, canone speak of “reversion”?” And he clarifies by negating another error, “the era of bourgeois parliamentarianism is over, and the era of the proletarian dictatorship has begun.” He makes the point that this is clearly not true when applying the “yardstick of history” and that the class struggle must be on the basis of <em>capitalism</em>. And most strongly, Lenin says “parliamentarianism in Germany has not <em>yet</em> politically outlived itself, that participation in parliamentary elections and in the struggle on the parliamentary rostrum is <em>obligatory</em> on the party of the revolutionary proletariat <em>specifically</em> for the purpose of educating the backward strata of <em>its own class,</em> and for the purpose of awakening and enlightening the undeveloped, downtrodden, and ignorant rural <em>masses.</em>” In the same vein, he defends the role of trade unions in the proletarian struggle, and says the German Left is misguided by refusing to participate in trade unions which they deem “reactionary”. He explains the role of the trade unions in Soviet Russia: “the dictatorship is exercised by the proletariat organized in the Soviets; the proletariat is guided by the Communist Party of Bolsheviks...all the directing bodies of the vast majority of the unions...are made up of Communists and carry out all the directives of the Party. Thus, on the whole, we have a formally non-communist, flexible and relatively wide and very powerful proletarian apparatus, by means of which the Party is closely linked up with the <em>class</em> and the <em>masses</em>, and by means of which under the leadership of the Party, the <em>class dictatorship</em> is exercised.”

On bourgeois revolution, Lenin, on one hand, makes clear that the bourgeois interests are what are effectively realized in such a bourgeois-democratic revolution, not the demands of the proletarian population. However, Lenin also states, “a bourgeois revolution is in the highest degree advantageous to the proletariat”. Though Lenin characterizes the bourgeois- democratic revolution and the role of the bourgeoisie as that it “betrays the cause of liberty, that the bourgeoisie is incapable of being consistently democratic...to take place more slowly, more gradually, more cautiously, less resolutely, by means of reforms and not by means of revolution.” However, Lenin sees capitalism to reach its breaking point in modernity in the stage of imperialism, though some societies may go through revolution during the colonial or early capitalist stage, or during the feudal or semi-feudal stage of development such as Russia or China. Marx had thought that the most technologically advanced societies would be the ones to ignite in revolution, such as Germany (Germany almost went communist in 1918), but the successful revolutions in China and Russia happened in underdeveloped conditions. Maybe these underdeveloped conditions inherent to semi-feudal societies is what makes them weak as a centralized State apparatus. The Frankfurt School often wrote about how difficult it was during advanced capitalism to achieve a proletarian revolution; Gramsci called this ‘cultural hegemony’.

Lenin makes a good point here; “the more forceful the spontaneous movement, the greater would be the need to supplement and direct it with organized, planned party-activity”. However, his overall justification is unsatisfactory, while misunderstanding the dialectical relationship between spontaneity and organization, he attributes the need for party- organization so as the proletariat do not defeat their own cause through ignorance, opening the way for counter-revolution. Rosa Luxemburg, however, felt that it wasn’t within a revolutionary party that the revolution would be safeguarded, but that the potential for counter-revolution existed within the revolutionary movement itself, and that rather than the goal being to establish a party dictatorship, she feared the emergence of a party dictatorship in Germany as counter to the cause of the proletariat, and that instead what should be established is the dictatorship of the masses, which is a more authentic interpretation of Marx’s dictatorship of the proletariat, one that defines this very ruling class state apparatus of the proletariat as ruling class, to be mass democracy. Lenin’s main argument is that the political struggle be fought for side-by-side with the economic struggle. Lenin argues, “Class political consciousness can be brought to the workers <em>only from without,</em> that is, only from outside the economic struggle, from outside the sphere of relations between workers and employers.” Lenin says it is not enough as some opportunists have stated, “to lend the economic struggle a political character”.

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The Leninist practice of democratic centralism, which is a part of the wider theory of the vanguard Party which is part of the wider theory of the dictatorship of the proletariat, is understood most simply as “freedom of discussion, unity of action”. This dealt with the problem of party members continuing to propagandize or otherwise work against the outcome of a motion decided by the Party, however preceding this is a free and open democratic debate. On the other hand, the Left communist idea of ‘organic centralism’ seeks to both harness and oppose ‘fractionism’ in all its forms, but Bordiga’s ‘organic centralism’ is an inferior theory to Lenin’s ‘democratic centralism’ and Bordiga creates a system where the rank-and-file no longer need to be consulted about decisions as there is an invariable program of communism supported by the Party. Libertarian Marxists see democratic centralism as a party-organization, but not as the irreducible “dictatorship of the Party” theoretically, and instead argue for a “dictatorship of the masses” meaning that the working class are authentically raised to the position of ruling class. What of a libertarian response to the supposed necessity of the vanguard party and democratic centralism? First I will concede on a few points. Lenin’s main argument is that if there is a scientific basis to political science outlined by Marx and Engels, then only one ideology can be dominant - namely the ideology of Marxism. However, it increasingly appears throughout history that each revolutionary situation needs to adapt to the local, national, and international conditions that determine the revolutionary situation as such. Another point I will concede on is that the party-oriented struggle has been more <em>efficacious</em> in gaining political power, but these parties have largely been authoritarian. What we libertarian socialists strive for is that power centers will be localized, autonomous, municipal, within a system of federalism. Theoretically, because Engel’s demand for the theoretical struggle is a pragmatic demand, the events that make up a revolution usually occur spontaneously; the opening phases of the French Revolution of 1789, the revolutions of 1848, the Paris Commune, the 1905 revolution in Russia, the overthrow of the Czar in 1917, the Hungarian revolution of 1956, and the French general strike of May 1968. These all occurred spontaneously; as in Bookchin’s words “a period of ferment explodes spontaneously into a mass upsurge”. But do we accept the arguments from certain autonomists and anarchists that the party-struggle is counter to our interests as libertarians? Certainly not, as a multi-party democracy has as such been established in Rojava. The German Revolution of 1918-1919 showed how multiple parties could share power in a revolutionary situation, such as did the SPD and the USPD, and the eventual forming of the Spartacus League.

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<strong>Ch. 4 - The Revenge of Freud: On The Liberation of Mental Illness</strong>

<em>Part I - The Revenge of Freud</em>

The mental health system is exactly where the ruling class wants it. A neoliberal political system needed a neoliberal form of therapy for the elites of capitalist society to continue their ideological subjection of the lowest strata of the working class, unemployed and lumpenproletariat. This imposed behaviorist worldview takes the form of an intra-personal therapeutics rather than a social, political, or historical analysis of the conditions which lead to the alienation of the individual in their unique social context. The institutionalization of cognitive-behavioral therapy within psychotherapy is directly opposed to any sort of political program for the liberation of the mentally ill, has no political basis whatsoever, and can hardly be called a “social science” by any stretch of the imagination.

Abandoning key psychoanalytic concepts such as unconscious motivations, the transference neurosis, repression, and the ego’s defensive operations, we can only use terms like “irrational thinking”, “cognitive deficiencies”, and “cognitive distortions” to describe the needs of the client. These terms assume that there is a version of “reality” that can be unproblematically adapted to and which stands as an objective measure of health. To understand why cognitive-behavioral therapy is incompatible with any sort of structural change, just look at CBT’s cognitive triad where “negative thoughts about the world” lead to “negative thoughts about the future” which lead to “negative thoughts about the self”. Not only is this relationship not clearly causal, but if political ideology leads to negative thoughts, then we have effectively eliminated any form of resistance against the conditions which enslave us.

A disturbing number of psychiatrists align themselves too closely with prevailing alienation and invalidation that society imposes upon the patient in the psychiatric setting. This well-intentioned act of betrayal refuses to engage in critical awareness, becoming engulfed by the day-to-day indoctrination in the hospital or psychiatric clinic. A great number of people do not go into psychiatric treatment willingly, and those who do are often disillusioned, especially those seeking a form of spiritual guidance13. David Cooper notes that psychiatric treatment imposes a paradox: on one hand the patient is expected to conform to the passive identity of being a patient, while on the other hand, every act, statement, and experience of the person is ruled invalid according to the “rules of the game” established by his family, and later by the psychiatrist, nurse, therapist, etc. Within capitalist society there ranges forms of control from “insinuated degradation”, to exclusion from certain schools and jobs, to total invalidation, to mass extermination. The public conscience however is so strong that it demands an excuse for such forms of exclusion.

When Deleuze and Guattari shook the foundations of psychoanalysis with their criticism of Freud in the 1972 ‘Anti- Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia’, they had little idea that the paradigm that would come to dominate psychotherapy in the 21st century would be that of a far worse adversary, behavioral modification. The very idea of behavioral modification completely invalidates or denies the existence of the complex inner world of the individual in their unique social context, the social dimensions of existence exerting an affect on the individual and the reciprocal relationship between the environment and psyche, as well as ignore the importance of past experiences in general; this would all be abandoned for the cognitive- behavioral focus on the then and now. It has been written in biographical accounts of Aaron Beck14, the founder of cognitive- behavioral therapy, that he had no mental illness himself, had no bad memories, had no traumatic experiences, and when he trained as a psychoanalyst, ignored these basic teachings, and instead theorized concepts such as automatic negative thoughts which existed only here in the present moment. Moreover, it is not an easy task to teach someone to think differently, instead Freud’s metapsychology consists of catharsis, resolving dynamic conflicts, making structural changes to one’s environment, and to find an outlet for psychic energy15. While CBT follows the lead of ego psychology and speaks of the “adaptation” of the individual to “reality”, Lacan says that psychoanalysis is the “exact opposite” of anything to proceeds by adaptation16.

Cognitive-behavioral therapy’s psychopathology is centered around the failure of the individual to engage in “reality- testing”. Lacan spoke of the Real as that which defies signification, and according to Lacan, language fails to function as a transparent medium for the flawless communication of intersubjectivity, the Real of excessive jouissance continually threatens to disrupt the balances and compromises between the reality principle and the pleasure principle by overriding the superego and the mediating structure of representations; structuring subjectivity contains intrinsic impasses, contradictions, and instabilities. However, Lacan speaks of the point de caption at which the signifier and the signified are united at an “anchoring point”; he says that in the normal individual exists several of these anchoring points at which reality is subjectively constituted and the signifier stops the otherwise endless movement of signification, producing the necessary illusion of fixed meaning.

The pitfalls of the cognitive-behavioral paradigm are much more pernicious than simply rejecting the basis of Freudian psychoanalysis, such as swapping the basic rule of free association for structured sessions. From a sociopolitical perspective, CBT is brainwashing an entire generation of people to believe that they have no power over problematic social conditions in their lives. Psychoanalysis is meant to be a subversive discipline, meant to challenge existing power structures that dominate a person’s well-being and encourage them to take social action so that they can overcome oppression that they experience.

Perhaps Freud’s greatest contribution to psychiatry, the unveiling of the unconscious, is grossly simplified by the cognitive-behavioral technique, the unconscious meaning to them simply “thoughts or actions that are below our conscious awareness”, a complete debasement of the actually existing metapsychological topology of the human psyche, and a further rejection of existing dynamic conflicts which manifest themselves. Cognitive-behavioral therapy specifically teaches that negative emotional states do not actually arise either from the dynamic conflicts of the unconscious or alternatively “negative activating experiences” but are due to irrational or negative beliefs about the self. How can cognitive-behavioral therapists be so blatantly deceiving and nullify the entire sociological idea of social context or the existence of the unconscious? It almost resembles the Orwellian notion of “doublespeak”.

The reality of the situation we are facing is that involuntary mental health treatment is the norm of society, and in a large number of cases people are committed by their families against their will. Therefore, many individuals have no choice but to “go along” with mental health treatment. While most diagnosed individuals are not criminals, the county jails are the largest providers of mental health treatment in the country; this fact allows us to speculate that it is the conditions of oppression that lead to pathological consequences. How many of these individuals did not need medications before they were institutionalized? The same sort of paradox can be seen with those held in mental hospitals involuntarily, where the institution itself creates a form of negative transference that often enrages the patient to the point that they act out and are placed in restraints or forcibly given medication. These patients which may be agreeable outside the mental hospital, suddenly become extremely disagreeable inside the mental hospital. And finally, the family situation exerts an enormous influence of the individual.

We are also experiencing a great revolt against the forms of biopsychiatry which tell us that we have “chemical imbalances” in our brains. Wilhelm Reich and Lacan both understood that whole societies have pathologies and unlike Freud, they believed in no form of normalcy, saying that neurosis (as opposed to psychosis) was the most normal form of mental structure that exists. Foucault realizes the many forms of power, and anarchism has since long before revolted against all forms of power, authority, exploitation, domination, hierarchy, etc. How can we create a critical public consciousness based on forms of universality, which allows people on the individual level to greatest realize their true human potential, their existential life-project, and an end to their suffering?

The neoliberal mental health system has proved inadequate in treating the vast pathology of society in many ways. First of all, involuntary hospitalizations are completely unethical and hordes of people are deemed “a threat to themself or others”, roughed up by the security staff, held against their will, possibly taken in by the police or their family; we must always give people the option of staying at a hospital voluntarily. The 1960s saw a cultural revolution across China, Europe, and the United States, and with the mental health clinics at La Borde, Kingsley Hall, and Villa 21, it shows that it is possible in a revolutionary sense to change the existing forms of control that the mental health system propagates, as isolated as these examples are.

What we need is a revitalization of the classic trajectory of anti-psychiatry, excavating for ideas about a better future for our current mental health system than the bio-cognitive-behaviorist paradigm that dominates Western psychiatry and therapy. The path forward is obvious, we need the institutional critique of the institutional psychotherapy movement in France in its radical communist fashion to change the circumstances of the masses, but we need to change the way we look at the diagnosed patients of mental health facilities, stop enforcing stigmas against the disabled, and a communist program is the way forward for the liberation of this group fully, because until all people are equal and guaranteed a job and their needs met at a fair standard of living with the formation of new organizations of power politically that give direct participatory power over ones surroundings to the individual, with delegates that act to facilitate deliberative, organizational, and administrative tasks, but subject to direct recall if circumstances change. From the micro-politics of the mental health clinic to a political revolution, to finally achieve equality and cooperation between people, is the rising up of the proletariat to the ruling class.

<em>Part II - The Perspective of Anti-Psychiatry</em>

The power of language in the establishment and maintenance of social order cannot be stressed enough. Thomas Szasz compares the power of language to two men in a fight for the possession of a gun. Whichever grabs the gun and shoots the other is the winner, the other is the victim. The power of language works much the same. For example, in the family, if mother and child do not get along, who is mentally sick in this situation and therefore causing the problem?; it turns out to be the one who first seizes language and imposes their worldview on the other in the psychiatric setting. In another example, women who did not conform to a man's wishes were traditionally diagnosed with hysteria. This “rhetoric of therapy” functions both in small interpersonal realms, and in wider economic, social and political spheres.

Psychiatry actively obscures the difference between behavior and disease in its quest to either control or help various parties set in conflict. According to Szasz, "no behavior or misbehavior is a disease or can be a disease". A disease rather is defined as a malfunction of the brain. In the psychiatric model, misbehaviors are instead used against patients to deny them any sort of status as a 'moral agent' with satisfactory moral aptitude, in an attempt to control such offending behaviors. More so, people with "problems in living" cannot be just said to have a psychiatric disorder, especially when used to support certain abuses of power by psychiatric authorities.

In the contexts of social and political conflict, the "rhetoric of therapy" is the way in which political and cultural discourses have adopted psychotherapy's lexicon to maintain social order. Rather than encouraging patients to attempt to reform flawed systems of social and political power, the "rhetoric of therapy" forces them to focus on their personal lives. This takes social and political problems and turns it into a rhetoric of individual responsibility and coping. Individuals who deal with problems such as unemployment or family stress are expected to conform with the prevailing social order and to identify with therapeutic values.

Instead of understanding the individual through their unique social context, mainstream psychiatry attributes mental distress to a specific pathology of the individual. Psychotherapy should instead reinsert the individual into their social milieu, encourage them to take social action, and engage them with their existential life-project. The medicalization of mental disorders is the current dominating paradigm of biopsychiatry where human conditions and problems come to be defined and treated as medical conditions. Once a condition is medicalized, the “medical model of disability” (linking an individual’s disability to a specific pathology of the brain) tends to be used instead of a social or sociological model.

Psychopolitical validity is a construct used by Issac Prilleltensky to measure psychiatric interventions and the extent to which they are reflective of power dynamics in society. The analysis has two components: epistemic validity measures the degree to which the issue of power is considered in treatment, while transformational validity considers the extent to which interventions encourage structural change. Structural changes can be encouraged by the promotion of political literacy, education on overcoming oppression, empowerment of individuals and groups to take action against injustice, and advocating coalition building. When psychologists don’t see the intrinsic connectedness of socioeconomic structures with the person’s experience, then their observations aren’t seen as psychopolitically valid. Anti-psychiatrists argue that “feelings and emotions are not as commonly supposed, features of the individual, but rather responses of the individual to their situation in society” (Wikipedia). Mainstream psychology has often been criticized for its tradition of explaining human behavior independently of the sociopolitical, historical, and cultural context of the person’s life.

David Cooper argues that the nosological disease-category of schizophrenia as a specific pathology is flawed, though that the term ‘schizophrenia’ is not entirely meaningless. He provides the following definition: “schizophrenia is a micro-social crisis situation in which the acts and experience of a certain person are invalidated by others for certain intelligible cultural and micro-cultural (usually familial) reasons, to the point where he is elected and identified as being ‘mentally ill’ in a certain way, and is then confirmed (by a specifiable but highly arbitrary labelling process) in the identity ‘schizophrenic patient’ by medical or quasi-medical agents.” Cooper conducted interviews with many young schizophrenic patients, their families, and then the patients and their families together, to arrive at the conclusion that rather than the disease being a facet of the individual, there was a disruption in the micro-social or micro-political milieu in terms of the relation of the patient to their family and others. He notices that the interaction between a schizophrenic patient and their family is completely different than the way they act with other patients on the ward floor. He then intends to understand the function of the family situation on the behavior of the patients interacting with other patients in the ward.

Psychosis is often discussed in psychiatric literature as being a social or biological failure of adjustment, or radical maladaptation, a loss of contact with reality, or a lack of insight. R.D. Laing17 reflects that in his clinical experience, schizophrenics never behaved in the same way that is described in standard textbooks on the subject, and often he had a very difficult time in clinical practice actually recognizing psychotic symptoms such as hallucinations and delusions, and concluded that the so-called deluded man may actually be telling the truth. A radical change needs to be made in the way we listen to schizophrenics. To understand the schizophrenic in his social context, what must be interpreted is not the ‘signs and symptoms’, but how the patient is experiencing himself and the world, to arrive at an understanding of his ‘existential position’. There is a story about a patient who was given a lie detector and asked if he was Napoleon, he replied “no” and the lie detector went off and said he was lying.

So then where do things stand with the relationship of the family? R. D. Laing’s theory of the family nexus provides many answers. The psychological implication here is that of a family psychic apparatus that consists of a common viewpoint held by most of the family and consequently reinforced by the parents regarding the family’s relationship with the world, such that this always exists in a “double bind”, and more so as a closed nexus, where the energy of the family as well as extra-familial people closely associated with the family and its worldview unconsciously block out any threats to its identity, such that dialogues are often deceptive. The “double bind” is “a situation in which contradictory demands are being put upon a child (or patient) in such a way that there is no avenue of escape or challenge”. Thus, the anti-psychiatry movement’s criticism of family therapy’s accounts of the “identified patient”, in the way that they argued that it was “the family who is chiefly mad, rather than the individual the family identifies as ‘sick’”. Another type of a psychologically repressive social formation is the concept of “role suction” whereby roles (as a form of micro-social organization) are allocated to members of a social group or family, such as the scapegoat, the joker, the peacemaker, the idol, or the identified patient.

<em>Part III - Freud and Beyond</em>

Freud would be rolling over in his grave if he knew the extent to which his teachings have been excommunicated from the mental health establishment today. Of all the approaches to psychotherapy that came about in the mid-20th century, such as humanistic, existential, relational, systems, etc., one modality has clearly established itself as the triumphant and hegemonic theory of psychotherapy - cognitive-behavioral therapy. Trading Freud’s ‘basic rule’ of psychoanalysis, ‘free association’, the medium of uncensored and largely unstructured talk therapy, for either structured or semi-structured psychotherapy, such as giving out homework, asking predetermined questions, compliance to specific phases in treatment, etc. has been detrimental to the preservation of Freudian theory and practice and the psychoanalytic cure. In most psychiatric clinics today, psychotherapy is highly allied with biopsychiatry and the medical model. This becomes problematic due to the fact that it relies on biological reductionism, lacking the unified theory of the mind or metapsychology that psychoanalysis developed. The other alliance of the psychiatric clinic is that between the psychiatrists and pharmaceutical representatives, leading often to the biased prescription of the wrong or too many drugs, and corporate influence on psychiatry.

The Freudian paradigm argues essentially that one’s past has a determining unconscious influence on present experiences and behavior, and therefore the analysand must reconstruct all the details of his past experiences (including his relationship with his parents) in order to understand the present. In contrast, CBT is solely focused on coping skills to deal with the present moment, and argues for the adapt ation of the psycho-educated individual to use these coping skills to develop non-distorted, rational cognitive functioning (in opposition to the classical Freudian theory of defense mechanisms). With the founding of psychoanalysis as the “science of the unconscious”, just as Lacan spoke of the “barred subject” that is split due to his unconscious, Lacanian psychoanalysis (combining its radical “return to Freud” with structural linguistics) deconstructs the subject in relation to the big Other, such that “the unconscious is the discourse of Other”, that knowledge is discursively constructed, and that knowledge itself is culturally relative. When Lacan said psychoanalysis is the “exact opposite of anything to proceeds by adaptation”, what he meant was that rather than being a question of adaptation to “reality”, the ego in neurosis is too well adapted to its own constructed reality, and therefore psychoanalysis is primarily a subversive discipline that seeks to undermine the patient’s unconscious and upend unconscious psychic conflicts, whereas they can resolve the dynamic conflicts by means of overcoming the alienation of the ego, and healing traumatic past experiences.

Ronald Fairbarin argues that both acute traumatic episodes and the everyday “harshness” of reality contribute to unconscious conflicts, endorsing a trauma-based model of psychopathology, as did Silvano Arieti in his book ‘The Interpretation of Schizophrenia’. The trauma-based model, however, has been replaced with the biomedical model in psychiatry and cognitive-behavioral therapy in psychotherapy; these ignore the individual’s subjective experience, negates the role of social influences on behavior, and denies the importance of unconscious mental processes.

How can we trace the genealogy of “the talking cure” from its origins in Freudian psychoanalysis to the contemporary practice of psychotherapy? And what still remains canonical in psychotherapy, and what mainly has been rejected? The cornerstone of psychoanalytic treatment, which in practice consists of sessions of talk therapy typically lasting 50 minutes, ideally 4-5 times a week, where the patient may lie on a couch with the analyst sitting out of sight, where he or she expresses his or her thoughts using free association as well as recounting their fantasies and dreams, from which the analyst infers the unconscious conflicts causing the patient’s symptoms in the context of their character structure. Not only has modern psychotherapy reduced the unconscious to the apparently more fashionable term, “subconscious”, but in actuality it reduces the unconscious to a “non-conscious”, defined erroneously as simply “things that are beneath our awareness”. The mainstay of psychoanalytic treatment is the interpretation of the complex relationship that develops between the analysand and the analyst, known as ‘transference’ and ‘countertransference’. While some forms of humanistic psychotherapy have attempted to resolve this problem with “unconditional positive regard”, while others have utilized the countertransference as either a diagnostic tool, or an insight into the patient’s personality, in CBT, transference and countertransference are fallaciously not acknowledged or addressed in therapy, denying that the patients relationships can be projected onto the therapist, promoting a type of therapy in which only the present moment is acknowledged and is only a short-term intervention, and therefore it is impossible for a genuine transference with implications on treatment to be established.

If psychoanalytic psychotherapy is meant to be a subversive discipline based on the technique of interpretation, which disrupts the patient’s everyday way of looking at things and is therefore an insight-based form of therapy, mainstream psychotherapy often considers the goal of therapy to be the adaptation (a concept introduced into psychoanalysis by ego psychology) of the individual to a reified version of reality, where the patient’s suffering is presumably due to “maladaptive behavior” (Lacan argued that human beings are essentially maladaptive) and “automatic negative thoughts” due to problematic “core beliefs”. Thus, the goal of therapy in this betrayal of psychoanalysis, is to influence the client through suggestion, and to change these “core beliefs”. This not only turns therapy into an exercise of power where the therapist imposes his preconceived worldview on the patient, but it represents the regression of psychotherapy into an instrument of social control. So then we are faced with a critical impasse in mainstream psychotherapy, that as Ian Parker argues, “normalizes conditions of social alienation”.

Starting in 1902, a group of Viennese physicians began to meet at Freud’s apartment every Wednesday to discuss psychology, originally called the Wednesday Psychological Society. This group formed at the suggestion of Wilhelm Stekel, and also included Alfred Adler. By 1906, the group grew to sixteen members including Otto Rank. In this same year, Freud started a correspondence with Carl Jung, already a renowned psychological researcher. In March 1907, Jung and Ludwig Binswanger visited Freud and attended his discussion group. In 1908, the group changed its name to the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society with Freud as president, and they held the first International Psychoanalytic Congress at the suggestion of British neurologist Ernest Jones, and also attending was Karl Abraham from Berlin, and Sandor Ferenczi from Budapest. A journal was launched in 1909 with Jung as editor, and then another with Adler and Stekel as editors, and then another edited by Rank. In 1910, the International Psychoanalytical Association was formed, but Adler would leave a year later to found the first divergent movement from psychoanalysis with his “Individual Psychology”. In 1911, the American Psychoanalytic Association was formed partly by Ernest Jones, who then left for Britain to found the London Psychoanalytical Society, serving as its president until 1944. By 1913, Carl Jung’s ideas were also very divergent from orthodox Freudianism and he founded his school of “Analytical Psychology”. Those remaining loyal to Freud’s ideas included Jones, Abraham, Ferenczi, Rank, and Hanns Sachs.

Ego psychology was the dominant psychoanalytic approach in the United States from the 1940s to the 1960s under theinfluence of European analysts who emigrated to the United States. Unlike the later neo-Freudians such as Erich Frommand Karen Horney, who would place emphasis on social determinants on the individual, ego psychology as developedmainly by Anna Freud and Heinz Hartmann, which would be the first post-Freudian school of psychoanalysis, would speak about the role of the autonomous ego in interacting with both internal and external forces. Freud, who originally equated the ego to consciousness, he later argued that like the id, the ego has unconscious components. Anna Freud focused on these unconscious functions of the ego, such outlining the different defense mechanisms in ‘The Ego and the Mechanisms of Defense (1936). The basic tenant of ego psychology was the the analyst should pay attention primarily to the defensive operations of the ego, rather than a direct interpretation of repressed content. Heinz Hartmann was the first to describe the ego as that which facilitated the individual’s ability to adapt to his or her environment. He developed the idea of the “autonomous ego”, which while Freud’s notion of unconscious conflicts was originally the basis for psychoanalytic interpretation, the ego in this sense was independent from libidinal and aggressive drives, except he admitted that that under certain conditions it is possible for conflicts to emerge, and therefore in this situation the analyst must “neutralize conflicted impulses and expand the conflict-free sphere of the ego functions” resulting in a ‘compromise formation’’, the uncovering of a repressed wish or idea into a conscious form, albeit in a disguised form as a symptom, parapraxis, etc.

Several ego functions were revealed by ego psychologists: reality-testing, impulse control, affect regulation, judgement, object relations, thought processes, defensive functioning, and synthesis.

Parallel to ego psychology in the 1940s, and building on Sullivan’s interpersonal psychoanalysis and its emphasis on individual relationships over Freud’s drive theory, object relations theory as explicated by Melanie Klein, Donald Winnicott, Harry Guntrip, and Ronald Fairbairn, explored both the individual’s interpersonal relationships and the importance of the individual’s internalized images of these relationships. In the British Psychoanalytical Society, from 1942 to 1944, began what came to be known as the “controversial discussions”. This led to a tripartite division between Anna Freud’s ego psychology, Kleinian object relations theory, and the Middle (or Independent) Group of analysts who also based their theories on object relations theory, but maintained a theoretical “open-mindedness”. The Independent analysts included Sylvia Payne, Ronald Fairbairn, John Bowlby, and later Donald Winnicott who would eventually leave the Kleinian group.

In understanding the interpersonal turn in psychoanalysis, what is the discrepancy between drive theory and social psychology? How can phenomenology be applied to psychology in a relational context? What role does intersubjectivity play in human relationships? What is the difference between a system and a structure? What influence did attachment theory provide to the psychoanalytic theory of interpersonal relationships? Is process-oriented psychology in any way applicable to the interpersonal approach? And does an interpersonal psychoanalysis imply social constructionism? Harry Stack Sullivan was arguably the first psychoanalyst to take psychoanalysis in an interpersonal direction. The related movement, relational psychoanalysis that emerged in the 1980s, attempted to integrate interpersonal psychoanalysis’ detailed exploration of interpersonal interactions with object relations theory’s focus on the importance of internalized relationships with other people. While Jon Mills argues, “relational theory is merely stating the obvious...a point that Freud made explicit throughout his theoretical corpus”, interpersonal and relational psychoanalysis represent an innovative theoretical development in psychoanalysis. In the relational paradigm, the psychological drive is the motivation to form and maintain relationships with others (rather than the classical Freudian theory of motivation being derived from the sexual and aggressive drives and instincts), one implication being the encouragement of the client to to develop a social support network.

While Lacan rejects the notion of a failure of “reality-testing” in psychosis, and instead speaks of the split of the ego in psychosis, and the splitting of the subject in general, Fairbairn fifteen years earlier in his 1940 “Schizoid Factors in the Personality” attributes the splitting of the ego structure to dissociation, rather than the classical Freudian basis that denotes that repression as the basic defense mechanism, or for Lacan, ‘foreclosure’. He specifically argues that the dissociation in the schizoid personality is a result of dissociated memories of trauma, which result from both acute limit-experiences and the everyday “harshness” of reality. Psychodynamically, the traumatic memories reside in the unconscious, where the subject “no longer knows they exist”, and as Freud said in “Repeating, Remembering, and Working Through”, it is the task of the analyst to allow the patient to remember correctly in order to resolve unconscious psychic conflicts. The basis of Fairbairn’s etiology of psychosis is primarily a trauma-based model, with childhood being critical in development, such that repeated rejections of the child’s legitimate need for love and emotional support result in emotional frustration because of the failure of the parents to act with tender, loving emotions, a situation where the child fails to feel loved as a person by the mother, that his own love for his mother is not seen as valued and accepted, resulting in a highly traumatic situation where the child begins to perceive his mother as a Bad Object because she seems to not love him, he begins to regard outward expressions of his own love as bad, and eventually develops to see all love relationships as bad; this is all a precursor to the splitting of the ego in the development of psychosis.

If it is to be maintained that there is an “optimal possibility of solution” for any given case in psychoanalytic treatment, guiding the patient through the “working through” of past experiences, and resolving unconscious conflicts, this must be done by appreciating individual differences in psychopathology and personality, as well as a multitude of factors in identity, sense of self, and psychological vulnerabilities. Why then is Lacanian psychoanalysis superior to other developments in psychoanalysis such as ego psychology, object relations theory, and self psychology? First of all, rather than the reduction of the unconscious to the realm of the Imaginary at the expense of the Symbolic, as did Melanie Klein, Lacanian psychoanalysis marked the introduction of linguistics in psychoanalysis and the primacy of the symbolic in structuring the imaginary. Lacan did not deny the idea of an unconscious fundamental phantasy, but said that fantasy is “an image set to work in a signifying structure.” However, Lacan considered Klein to be at least more acceptable in theory than that of traditional Anna Freudian ego psychology. Lacan’s main criticism of ego psychology is based on its notion of “the strengthening of the ego” as the goal of treatment. Not only does Lacan argue that there is no version of reality that can be unproblematically adapted to, as in an objective, “knowable” reality, but that to strengthen the ego would only strengthen the individual’s defenses that impede treatment by way of resistance. Lacan argued that the discovery of the Freudian model of the unconscious, removed the ego from the central position of the subject, as had been assigned to it since Descartes, and instead as the subject of postmodernity came to be formulated, the ego is an object of consciousness, de-centered. Lacan argued the ego is always subordinated to the people and images with which it identifies, and is alienated as a consequence of “the process by which the ego is constituted by identification with the counterpart”. For ego psychology, they give the simplistic view of the unproblematic adaptation to reality, in the sense that the ego is an “autonomous ego” that is not only centered in the subject, but implies that the goal of psychoanalysis is for the patient to begin to see the world through the eyes of the analyst, a form of adaptation that is really an introjection that can’t be considered a healthy identification with the analyst.

<em>Part IV - Politics and Psychotherapy</em>

There are certainly ways that an analyst can apply class consciousness to therapy, without "indoctrinating" the client, such as allowing them to reach the point where they can analyze, deconstruct and fight back against oppressive power relations in their life, the exploitation that they may be experiencing under capitalism, and more broadly bring in social/relational psychology perspectives to better understand the social contexts that they interact within, their pattern of relationships, power relations, etc. If the analyst believes that the Marxist social ontology is descriptive of real processes, they can apply a Marxist interpretation to the patient’s relations of understanding, context within the relations of production, and elucidate their patients' experiences in terms of what Freud called "the slow demolition of the hostile superego".

Originating in the 1960s as a second-wave feminist slogan, “The personal is political”, is in a phrase the basic argument for why psychoanalysis has revolutionary potential in changing the social order, but also why it is impossible to escape ideology, to not be subjected to its logic. In 1913, the anarchist psychoanalyst Otto Gross declared, “The psychology of the unconscious is the philosophy of revolution: i.e. this is what it is destined to become because it ferments insurrection within the psyche, and liberates individuality from the bonds of its own unconscious. It is destined to make us inwardly capable of freedom, destined to prepare the ground for the revolution.” Gross, an early colleague of Freud and Jung, held that the main conflict in the psyche was the conflict between the self and the other, an idea that he credits Nietzsche with discovering, the pathogenic influence of society on the individual. All political revolutions depend on a preceding revolution of the psyche. The realization of ideology as a material force can lead us to a philosophy of praxis. If as Marx claimed, the masses of people themselves make history, such that the proletariat are both the subject of history (as in Gramsci’s and Lukacs’ theories of class struggle) and the “universal class” that represents the best interests of the whole society, but that due to the false consciousness imposed by the hegemony of the dominant capitalist ideology, the postmodern subject and the structure of the system is essentially de-centered. In Marx’s formula for false consciousness “they do not know it, but they are doing it”, which Zizek reformulates as “they know it, but nonetheless they are doing it”, such that hegemony reproduces and reinforces the dominant ideology, how are we to, through class struggle, change the given conditions of alienation, coercion, and exploitation that the capitalist system forces upon us? How do we arrive at a truly egalitarian society?

Many therapists make clear that political issues such as electoral politics are “off limits” and that personal issues are what is to be dealt with in treatment. What frightens therapists most about political discussions within therapy is the fact that they are responsible for taking an ethical position; Lacan says that there is “no such thing as an ethically neutral position”, therefore disclosure about one’s own political beliefs becomes inevitable. There has been an increase in the amount of clients who want to talk politics. What is to be argued, is that sociopolitical topics not only have a determining influence on the patients unconscious, but that ideology has unexpectedly overwhelming effects on the patients experience and therefore must be dealt with in therapy. It becomes apparent that it is not so easy to separate what is ideological from what is personal. Political ideology is not necessarily something that is outside of therapy (to be “left at the door” when therapy converges) but is rather an integral part of human identity; exploring one’s subjective stance towards ideology can be a rather worthwhile engagement within psychotherapy, especially if the individual encounters political oppression firsthand, or the discursive dynamics of politics in one’s life.

<em>Part V - The End of Analysis</em>

A parallel can be drawn between Freud's superego and the dominant ideology or cultural hegemony. Rather than ideology being a "set of core beliefs" as is talked about in most non-Marxist discourse, Lacan says that the superego is "both the law and its destruction". Importantly, Marx called ideology a false consciousness (as opposed to class consciousness); collectively ideology reproduces the means of production and acts as a material force; Althusser also gave a third definition: in Lacanian terms, the Imaginary relation to the Real conditions of existence. This definition is most similar to the way non-Marxist discourses see ideology, more as a "set of beliefs" that constructs political discourses, which Althusser gave the word "interpellation" to describe the ideological process of subjectivization, which Zizek says submits reality to a "critical-ideological procedure" but also bases itself on a constitutive naïveté, about which though even if the subject's information is incomplete about events, we nonetheless (because of ideology) preeminently decide which facts matter and are relevant, so that as soon as we are subjectively interpellated we already lie within one ideological domain or another.

Lacan’s conception of the end of analysis is different from Freud’s original conception of the end of analysis, which has different goals or aims, which were as follows: (1) when the unconscious “conveys” itself into the preconscious; (2) the overcoming of internal resistances; (3) the replacement of repression with condemnation; (4) the advance from the pleasure principle to the reality principle; (5) saving mental energy to make the best of one’s inherited capacities to become as capable of enjoyment as possible; and (6) partial or complete sublimation. There is debate about whether Jacques Lacan is to be considered a post-structuralist, but there is no doubt that he professed a unique school of psychoanalysis. According to Lacan there are six goals or aims of psychoanalysis that mark the “end of analysis”: (1) to articulate the truth about one’s desire; (2) the advent of true speech and the realization by the subject of their history; (3) to traverse the radical fantasy; (4) identification with the sinthome; (5) when the analyst becomes the object-cause of the analysand’s desire and falls from position of subject-supposed-to-know; and (6) if the analysand passes to become an analyst themself. In opposition to ego psychology, Lacan claims that the end of analysis does not result from identification with the analyst, nor positive transference, nor the strengthening of the ego, nor an adaptation to reality, nor the disappearance of the symptom, nor the cure of an underlying disease.

Lacan devotes his first two seminars to the question of technique in psychoanalysis. If the analyst must reduce a precise technique from the psychoanalytic theory of psychic illness, what are the fundamentals of this theory and technique and how can it be applied in practice? In light of the diversity of clinical pluralism and the meta-analysis of common factors theory, why is Lacanian psychoanalysis still relevant today? And should we return to Freudian orthodoxy or embrace new perspectives on the technique of psychotherapy? As Lacan said, “It is up to you to be Lacanians if you wish. I am a Freudian”; many contemporary psychoanalysts or psychodynamic psychotherapists still defend the original Freudian theory of psychoanalytic treatment. Psychodynamic psychotherapy emphasizes the importance of resolving dynamic unconscious conflicts, the formativeness of early (often forgotten) childhood experiences, one’s patterns of interpersonal relationships, the analysis of resistance and defense mechanisms, dream interpretation, the use of free association, transference interpretation, personality structure, and a form of insight-based psychotherapy. Existential psychotherapy also has provided a useful technique for psychotherapeutic practice: namely, the active participation of the client in determining the meaning and focus of the therapy process, the recognition of the significance of the inner world, understanding the meanings attached to experiences and relationships, valuing freedom and openness, the accentuation of moments in therapy that contribute to unity in self, time, and relations with others, etc.

If it is to be maintained that there is an “optimal possibility of solution” for any given case in psychoanalytic treatment, guiding the patient through the “working through” of past experiences, and resolving unconscious conflicts, this must be done by appreciating individual differences in psychopathology and personality, as well as a multitude of factors in identity, sense of self, and psychological vulnerabilities. Why then is Lacanian psychoanalysis superior to other developments in psychoanalysis such as ego psychology, object relations theory, and self psychology? First of all, rather than the reduction of the unconscious to the realm of the Imaginary at the expense of the Symbolic, as did Melanie Klein, Lacanian psychoanalysis marked the introduction of linguistics in psychoanalysis and the primacy of the symbolic in structuring the imaginary. Lacan did not deny the idea of an unconscious fundamental phantasy, but said that fantasy is “an image set to work in a signifying structure.” However, Lacan considered Klein to be at least more acceptable in theory than that of traditional Anna Freudian ego psychology. Lacan’s main criticism of ego psychology is based on its notion of “the strengthening of the ego” as the goal of treatment. Not only does Lacan argue that there is no version of reality that can be unproblematically adapted to, as in an objective, “knowable” reality, but that to strengthen the ego would only strengthen the individual’s defenses that impede treatment by way of resistance. Lacan argued that the discovery of the Freudian model of the unconscious removed the ego from the central position of the subject, as had been assigned to it since Descartes, and instead as the subject of postmodernity came to be formulated, the ego is an object of consciousness, de-centered. Lacan argued the ego is always subordinated to the people and images with which it identifies, and is alienated as a consequence of “the process by which the ego is constituted by identification with the counterpart”. For ego psychology, they give the simplistic view of the unproblematic adaptation to reality, in the sense that the ego is an “autonomous ego” that is not only in the centered in the subject, but implies that the goal of psychoanalysis is for the patient to begin to see the world through the eyes of the analyst, a form of adaptation that is really an introjection that can’t be considered a healthy identification with the analyst.

Transference is nothing other than “the attribution of knowledge to a subject”, according to Lacan. It is the analysand’s supposition of the knowledge of the analyst that initiates the analytic encounter. However, Lacan claims that this “subject-supposed-to-know” is far from appearing in the early stages of the treatment and takes time to establish itself, and more importantly, the analyst from the beginning is aware of the split between the knowledge attributed to him and the knowledge he actually has. Lacan says, “The analyst must realize that, of the knowledge attributed to him by the analysand, he knows nothing.” The exact type of knowledge that Lacan claims the analyst is supposed to possess is none other than a retroactivity of “special meanings” by which the analysand judges the insignificant details of their past speech and behavior (i.e. “chance gestures, ambiguous remarks”) as signification of the formations of the unconscious.

Marx’s original idea of false consciousness becomes central to Lacan, even if he never attributed the concept to Marx, but in Lacanian psychoanalysis the “failure to recognize” or “misconstruction” is the French word méconnaissance, which bears similarity to the French word for ‘knowledge’, connaissance; alternatively, symbolic knowledge in Lacan’s work, goes by the French word savoir. Lacan differentiates ‘symbolic knowledge’ from ‘imaginary knowledge’, attributing each to the ‘subject’ and the ‘ego’ respectively. The imaginary knowledge (which Lacan considers to have the structure of “paranoiac knowledge”) is said to “block” symbolic knowledge, and the course of psychoanalytic treatment must reveal the symbolic knowledge which is being blocked by a delusion of “absolute knowledge and mastery” (i.e. a delusion of grandeur). Therefore, imaginary knowledge is an “obstacle” in treatment, which must be overcome by means of free association, the technique by which symbolic self-knowledge can be revealed. Insofar as symbolic knowledge allows the analysand to articulate the truth about their desire, Lacan says “knowledge is the jouissance of the Other”, or in other words, a form of enjoyment which acts intersubjectively rather than residing in a particular subject, and is attributed to the analyst via the “subject-supposed-to-know”.

Lacan eventually in rejecting the identification with the analyst as being a goal of psychoanalytic treatment, he nonetheless conceived of the identification with the sinthome as very much a desirable outcome of analysis, while still rejecting the idea that one “progresses” through analysis, seeing it instead in terms of “logical time”. Therefore, there was no cure to an underlying disease in Lacan’s teaching. In an extension of his assertion that the symptom is an unanalyzable kernel of enjoyment, he marks the end of analysis as a process of “subjective destitution”, when the analysand suspends the urge to symbolize and internalize the ‘deeper meaning’ and accepts that his traumatic encounters as the trajectory of his life were “utterly contingent and indifferent”, that they ‘bear no deeper message’. This is “a moment when the subject’s identifications are placed under question in such a way that these identifications can no longer be maintained in the same way as before”. In terms of the unitary trait hypothesis, identification proceeds by an introjection of a single trait (or symptom) of either thelove object or a rival.

In Lacan’s teaching, the symptom or sinthome is unlike “acting out” not interpretable, or is unanalyzable. This for Lacan, is because it is beyond meaning. Topologically, the sinthome is the fourth ring which ties together the Borromean knot, which constitutes the structure of the unconscious - Real, Symbolic, and Imaginary - which is always threatening to become undone. In his earlier seminars, on linguistics, Lacan rejects the view of the symptom as a ciphered message qua a signifier that can be deciphered by reference to the unconscious as structured like a language, arguing instead that it is a modality of the subject’s jouissance that can only be defined as a pure jouissance addressed to no one, rather than a “call” to the Other.

Freud’s famous phrase “Where the id was, the ego shall be” is the basis of the ethics of psychoanalysis. Freud thought that the unconscious, which deals with the problem of a pathogenic civilized morality under the command of the superego, exists subjectively primarily as an ethical agency rather than an ontological agency. The ego, in Freudian terms, can be approached in two ways - first, when “the ego takes sides against the object”, and second, when “the ego takes sides with the object” - the former related to the object-cathexis in the libidinal economy following the pleasure principle as a narcissistic relation, and the later related to the perception-consciousness system and opposed to the pleasure principle. Since Lacan formulates in his discussion of ethics that in every way that the analyst directs treatment, whether he admits it or not, he is forced to face ethical questions and take an ethical position in relation to the analysand’s guilt that arises from the superego, Lacan argues that the psychoanalytic ethic is to lead the analysand to act in relation to their desire (“Have you acted in conformity with the desire that is in you?”), and to articulate the truth about one’s desire in immediacy of the present. According to Lacan, the articulation of one’s desire doesn’t exist as a pre-formed fullness that exists waiting to be discovered by the analyst, but that desire is intersubjective and dialectical, that “There is neither true nor false prior to speech”, and that the analysand brings their desire into existence only by this dialectical movement.