derstheviking

[derstheviking]

Lacan’s ‘Four Discourses’ as Metapsychology

I intend to argue that Freud’s metapsychology is the indispensable theoretical contribution to psychoanalysis, and that when Lacan says “the unconscious is structured like a language”, he is right for saying that his theory is a return to orthodox Freudianism since Freud’s “structure” is the domain of language within the unconscious. Therefore, Lacan’s dictum may not be as new as we have been led to believe, and rather that he arrived at it from a close reading of Freud. From this theory of the psyche (Freud’s metapsychology), I also intend to argue that a precise practice can be deduced.

Freud’s metapsychology accounts for both quantitative (the economic point of view) and qualitative (the unconscious is structured like a language”) processes in the unconscious, as well as the process of making the unconscious conscious (the topographical point of view), and the resistances against both the unconscious and the analyst (the dynamic point of view). I will also argue here that Lacan’s ‘Four Discourses’ are really a reformulation of Freud’s metapsychology, and I will attempt to draw a parallel between metapsychology and these forms of discourse into a unified conceptual apparatus.

The basic formula of discourse (agent/truth -> Other/production) given by Lacan consists of signifying chains that are both linear and circular. The metonymic axis of language combines signifiers according to a syntagmatic relationship (i.e. the laws of grammar). On the other hand, the metaphoric axis of language is a series of signifiers linked by free association. Thirdly, Lacan argued that both types of symbolic relationships (syntagmatic and associative) can be combined into the same signifying chain, which Lacan claims exists between signifiers but not between signs (Lacan argued that the relationship within the Saussurean algorithm was highly unstable, putting the signifier in the dominant position over the signified).

Lacan’s Four Discourses are as follows: (agent/truth -> Other/production)

1. The Discourse of the Master (master-signifier/subject -> knowledge/jouissance)

2. The Discourse of the University (knowledge/master-signifier -> jouissance/subject)

3. The Discourse of the Hysteric (subject/jouissance -> master-signifier/knowledge)

4. The Discourse of the Analyst (jouissance/knowledge -> subject/master-signifier)

I will approach Lacan’s ‘Four Discourses’ from the dynamic point of view, or the division between id, ego and superego; in this, the ego clearly acts as the “agent” in Lacan’s formula. The topographical point of view, or the conscious, preconscious, and unconscious, take the place of “truth”. The “big Other” is precisely aligned with the ‘structural point of view’ in metapsychology, as Lacan notes “discourse is the discourse of the Other”. “Production” in Lacan’s terms, linked with desire, is again simply a foreshadowing of later “lines drawn” as when we compare Lacanian production to Deleuzeian production, one with lack, one with chaos, we can see that Freud’s original theory was that of “economic flows” (inspired by the flows of capital that Marx described). These discourses are presumed to occur within the psychoanalytic session, and not all discourse analysts would agree that there are a limited variety of discourses, but the Lacanian theory provides a conceptual structure for the formulation of a theory of metapsychology.

Up until this point I have only discussed the base formula for Lacan’s four discourses, that of the positions that the symbols occupy in the formulas, but have not explained the terms that occupy these positions: those are S1, S2, $, a. S1 refers to the master-signifier which is the signifier that the discourse relates to and structures the dialectic, relating to the group, community or culture, this is the signifier that is dominant over the next term, S2 which signifies ‘knowledge’. Notice that in each of the four discourses these terms can be put in the place of any of the positions discussed earlier, such that, for example, the master-signifier can take the place of the agent, the truth, the Other, or production. I have already explained how this relates to Freud’s metapsychology, but Lacan developed a metapsychology of his own which was structured and split between the Real, the symbolic, and the imaginary. Rather than referring to the positions in Lacan’s four discourses, as Freud’s metapsychology does, Lacan’s metapsychology refers to the terms within the equation that I have just mentioned.

[derstheviking]

The Critique of Ideology

Slavoj Zizek claims that “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”. Zizek asserts the existence of ideology as “the generative matrix that regulates the relationship between the visible and non-visible, between imaginable and non-imaginable, as well as the changes in this relationship.” Accordingly, this matrix can be seen when an event that represents a new dimension of politics is misperceived as the continuation of or a return to the past, and the opposite, when an event that is entirely inscribed in the existing order is misperceived as a radical rupture. “The supreme example of the latter, of course, is provided by those critics of Marxism who (mis)perceive our late-capitalist society as a new social formation no longer dominated by the dynamics of capitalism as it was described by Marx”.

Zizek writes in The Sublime Object of Ideology, “The most elementary definition of ideology is probably the well-known phrase from Marx's Capital 'sie wissen das nicht, aber sie tun es' - ‘they do not know it, but they are doing it’. The very concept of ideology implies a kind of basic, constitutive naivete: the misrecognition of its own presuppositions, of its own effective conditions, a distance, a divergence between so-called social reality and our distorted representation, our false consciousness of it. That is why such a 'naive consciousness' can be submitted to a critical-ideological procedure. The aim of this procedure is to lead the naive ideological consciousness to a point at which it can recognize its own effective conditions, the social reality that is distorting, and through this very act dissolve itself. In the more sophisticated versions of the critics of ideology - that developed by the Frankfurt School, for example - it is not just a question of seeing things (that is, social reality) as they 'really are', of throwing away the distorting spectacles of ideology; the main point is to see how the reality itself cannot reproduce itself without this so-called ideological mystification."

Rex Butler states in his essay “What is a Master-Signifier?”, “Thus, in the analysis of ideology, it is not a matter of seeing which account of reality best matches the ‘facts’, with the one that is closest to being least biased and therefore the best. As soon as the facts are determined, we have already - whether we know it or not - made our choice; we are already within one ideological system or another. The real dispute has already taken place over what is to count as the facts, which facts are relevant, and so on.” He goes on to explain that in 1930s Germany the Nazi narrative won out over the socialist-revolutionary narrative not because it could better explain the crisis of liberal-bourgeois ideology, but because it best insisted that there actually was a crisis, of which the socialist-revolutionary ideology was apart, and could be accounted for as a ‘Jewish conspiracy’.

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.”

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.” Foucault, like Deleuze, develops an immanent philosophy which is post-historicist, but time still plays a crucial role. Deleuze speaks of the micropolitics of ‘becoming’ rather than the usual transcendental ‘being’, following from Bergson the concepts of multiplicities and pure virtuality.

Zizek criticizes Hardt and Negri’s ‘Empire’ for not bringing out the line of argument that the proletarian revolution proceeds from the internal antagonisms of the capitalist mode of production; in this sense he calls their analysis of postmodern globalized finance capitalism to be short of the “space needed for such radical measures”. The reason Zizek is critical of ‘Empire’ precisely is because what is clearly needed in the critique of ideology today is “to repeat Marx’s critique of political economy”, to speak of his hypothesis that the key to social change resides in “the status of private property”, “without succeeding on the temptation of the ideologies of “postindustrial” societies”. Zizek while asking whether ‘Empire’ remains pre-Marxist, interestingly the argument continues that it is actually more of return to Lenin than a return to Marx - for Marx is loved on Wall Street, for he “provided perfect descriptions of capitalist dynamics”. But Lenin on the other hand, Zizek claims, embodies the “concrete analysis of the concrete [historical] situation”. However, unlike Lenin, they do not deplore the notion of “universal human rights”, speaking of a need for the recognition of global citizenship, a minimum basic income, and the reappropriation of the “new” means of production. So why does Zizek consider ‘Empire’ a return to Lenin? Is it because “Benevolent as it is, this will necessarily end in a new Gulag!”? Not exactly, and rather the demand for scientific objectivity means the moment one seriously questions the existing liberal consensus they are accused of “abandoning scientific objectivity for outdated ideological positions”. Furthermore, he accuses them of a “lack of concrete insight [which] is concealed in the Deleuzian jargon of multitude, deterritorialization, and so forth.” and calling their analysis “anticlimactic”.

In the now infamous Slavoj Zizek vs. Jordan Peterson debate, Zizek confronts the threat of a post-ideological postmodernity with the statement that Trump himself is a postmodernist, and is creating the ground for a new postmodern conservatism in which facts are rejected, truth is relative. He on the other hand calls Bernie Sanders an old-fashioned moralist. Zizek, however, is not a postmodernist or post-structuralist himself but builds on Lacan, Hegel and Marx to develop a diagnosis for the conditions of post-modernity that threaten rational discourse. In a lecture with Jean Baudrillard, a woman provides a geological metaphor of modernity and postmodernity riding over each other like tectonic plates. Modernity in this case represents the Marxist paradigm of class struggle, while what is taken up seriously in post-structuralist analyses is the notion of identity formation as opposed to class struggle.

[derstheviking]

Ideological State Apparatuses

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.”

In the words of Karl Marx, “The philosophers have only interpreted the world…The point however is to change it.” For Althusser, the function of ideology as a psychological apparatus functions for the implementation of new structures upon existing structures, with emphasis on the constant renewal and replacement of existing structures with new ones. Ideology unconsciously allows for the “dictatorship in democracy” or “the invisible order”. In critiquing ideology, you should “take off the glasses” to “see things as they really are” as Zizek says. Althusser recognized ideology as “an imaginary relationship to the real conditions of existence”. Marx’s theory of commodity fetishism stated that economic relationships were dominant over social investments as a symptom of capitalism. Marx’s theory of history, proclaiming the eventual dissolution of the socialist State into a stateless classless society is the savior of communist orthodoxy and an ideal that is humanistic enough to find a solution to the violence perpetuated by nation-states.

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 from workplaces, to schools, to the media. 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 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’. Marx thought that the revolutionary organizing of the masses would correspond to a later level of development, but it was shown that feudalism could be replaced immediately with socialism as in Russia in 1917. This is known in communist theory as Trotsky’s theory of ‘permanent revolution’, that the workers in a feudal society could directly transform society to socialism, as opposed to taking the step in historical development towards capitalism.

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. 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. In the first phase of proletarian revolution, it is the task of the proletariat to seize State power and use this State power to destroy the existing State apparatus, only to replace it with a different proletarian State apparatus under the control of the dictatorship of the proletariat. In the second phase of the proletarian revolution is “the withering away of the state” or the end of State power.

The repressive State apparatus ‘functions by violence’ primarily, although this repression may take non-physical forms such as administrative repression. However, the State apparatus as a ‘theory as such’ is not totally repressive in its functions. This is why a distinction must be drawn between the repressive State apparatus and the ideological State apparatuses which ‘function by ideology’ that includes (as Althusser has listed) the religious ISA, the educational ISA, the family ISA, the legal ISA (which is seen as both part of the repressive and ideological State apparatuses), the political ISA, the trade-union ISA, the communications ISA, and the cultural ISA. While the repressive State apparatus functions primarily by repression, it has a secondary function by means of ideology, conversely the ideological State apparatuses function primarily by ideology but function secondarily by repression. What unifies the ISAs into distinct ideological State apparatuses occurs insofar as the ideology according to which they function is ‘unified’ despite its diversity and contradictions. According to Althusser, “no class can hold State power over a long period without at the same time exercising its hegemony over and in the State Ideological Apparatuses”.

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Capitalism and Socialism

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 Unding, 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 to work. As a libertarian socialist, I fully believe that labor should be voluntary and that most people would in practice work, with a minority using their refusal to 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 anarchist federalism or confederalism. Moreover, I do think that 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, the masses of people here in the United States are just starting to become aware of this very fact. But with a society based on Soviet democracy as I discussed, the amount of participation and power that the individual would have over his or her surroundings would constitute decisions being made on a local level, with also the existence of proletarian hegemony - which can turn into post-hegemony, and can exist in the form of counter-hegemony as well (i.e. dual power). Maybe not obvious, is the fact that Gramsci attributed the continuation of hegemony to be in the control of the intellectuals in society, similar to Althusser’s later idea of ideology as the reproduction of the means of production, but it is important to note the role of discourse in the formation of political identities. I am not going to argue that proletarian hegemony cannot manifest itself in party rule, because it can, such as China or the Soviet Union, but the early Soviet Union when there were still trade unions and workers’ councils is what we should be able to find as common ground between Leninists and libertarian Marxists as the ideal for society. So we are not opposed to ‘the Leninist freedom’ (yes, but for whom? to do what?) but rather want to ground our basic conception of freedom in left-wing libertarianism.

What presents itself as the main subject of disagreement between anarchists and Marxists is the transitionary state period from capitalism to communism. This may depend on how one defines a State, which functions one assigns it, etc. The anarchists recognize that a stateless administrative role must be fulfilled, while Marxists argue for a transitionary State socialist period after capitalism. For anarchists, we must make the immediate transition to direct democracy, and while Marxists support all forms of direct democracy, the transition to a post-scarcity way of life requires the intermediate dictatorship of the proletariat partially for the technological acceleration of the means of production. From an economic point of view, all forms of anarchism historically are forms of socialism (i.e. worker ownership of the means of production), and therefore no State bureaucracy exists under anarchism. However, Marxists view anarchism as a utopian and futile struggle, which only in certain historical situations such as Catalonia and Aragon during the Spanish Civil War, can direct democracy be achieved out of capitalism. To speak of the Stalinist Soviet Union’s initial support and subsequent appropriation of the Spanish Revolution, the Trotskyist/libertarian Marxist P.O.U.M. militia fully supported the anarcho-syndicalist direct democracy, despite anti-Trotskyist propaganda coming from the Soviet Union declaring them as traitors.

There exists an exaggerated metaphor in contradiction to the theory of permanent revolution, that as a tribal society could not transform into a capitalist society, neither can a feudal society transform into a socialist society. In theory, this argument is considered a form of “stagism”. There exists two distinct historical situations in which stagism can be applied. First, the existence of a bourgeois-democratic republic created through a bourgeois-democratic revolution. And second, a Workers’ State that oversees a gradual transition through capitalism. Capitalism within a transition through stagism is characterized by the acceptance of bourgeois property and the concentration of capital. It is meant to develop a democratic culture and achieve rapid urbanization and industrialization. Besides the anti-revisionism of the Maoist regime, Mao thought that due to the historical conditions of China at the time, that the model that he expected would overtake bourgeois liberal democracy worldwide, the dictatorship of the proletariat, needed to be adapted to the historical conditions of China and called his theory of the bloc of four social classes (proletariat, peasants, petty-bourgeoisie, national bourgeoisie) New Democracy. He said that every specific historical situation around the world had its own unique path to democracy, and New Democracy set up a temporary alliance with the bourgeoisie (while land redistribution was still occurring), so as to combat Japanese imperialism, and win over more popular support for the Communist Party. China is an example of the latter, a workers’ State that oversees capitalist development.

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 bourgeois state, while the words about the state withering away refer to the remnants of the proletarian state after the socialist revolution. According to Engels the bourgeois state does not “wither away” but is “abolished” 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 “built from the ashes” of the bourgeois state that was abolished during the course of the socialist revolution - into a new form of organization.

As materialists, in the words of Marx and Engels, “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. It is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but their social existence that determines their consciousness.”

This passage from the 1846 ‘The German Ideology’ by Marx and Engels is a basic statement in favor of materialism, to see consciousness as created by the socioeconomic conditions of existence around us, rather than our consciousness forming the material world. The materialist worldview, conception of history, and dialectic, is not dead or static, but dialectical reasoning creates a conflict theory based on contradictions and antagonisms and their historical resolutions, evolutions, and revolutions. In fact, while Marx and Engels formed the Communist League in 1847, a merger of the League of the Just and the Communist Correspondence Committee, the egalitarian inheritors of the left-wing of the Jacobins from the French Revolution and the 1795 Conspiracy of Equals headed by Babeuf. It wasn’t until 1871 when the Paris Commune emerged that Marx wrote ’The Civil War in France’ where he coined the phrase “the dictatorship of the proletariat” as the first post-capitalist stage of government in his theory of historical materialism, the historical outcome of a proletarian revolution that in Paris, in which existed the indispensable form of government that allowed the proletariat to exercise power - the workers’ council. Though workers’ councils as a form of government didn’t appear again until the 1905 revolutions in Russia and Poland. Then, from 1910-1920 in the Mexican Revolution. Then most famously, Soviets (workers’ council in Russian) would arise during the 1917 February and October Russian Revolutions, and in the 1918 German Revolution. While the Russian Revolution would be successful, the German Revolution was not. The word soviets entered the English language inspired by the Russian proletarian dictatorship of the Soviets, and applied in theory as soviet democracy or council communism. The form of government known a “Soviet Republic” refers to a government that is based on soviet democracy. The term “People’s Republic” dates back to the People’s Republic of Ukraine, which gained independence from Soviet Russia in 1918 as part of the Ukrainian War of Independence which started after the February Revolution in Russia when a multitude of different ethnic groups began demanding self-determination, and continuing after the October Revolution, when in southern Ukraine Nestor Makhno and his followers formed the anarchist Free Territory, and in the remaining land two Bolshevik-formed Soviet Republics were established.

The Comintern in 1928 divided history into three periods: “The “First Period” that followed World War I and saw the revolutionary upsurge and defeat of the working class, as well as a “Second Period” of capitalist consolidation for most of the decade of the 1920s…the current phase of world economy from 1928 onwards, the so-called “Third Period”, was to be a time of widespread economic collapse and mass working class radicalization. (Wikipedia)” With the rise of the Nazi Party in Germany in 1933, from 1934 on the Comintern would begin advocating for the organization of “Popular Fronts” to fight the rise of fascism; these organizations were broader than the so-called “United Fronts” that emerged during the 1917 Russian Revolution to unite the minority of the revolutionary working class with large numbers of non-revolutionary workers and trade unions and simultaneously attempting to win them over to the revolutionary cause; the “Popular Fronts” included centrist, liberal and social democratic as well as revolutionary socialists, communists, and anarchists. The system of government that emerged during the Popular Front period was known as “People’s democracy”, which unlike the direct democratic nature of Soviet democracy, represented a parliamentary multi-class multi-party democracy; this change of tactics by the Comintern was directly in response to the rise of fascism in Europe. Stalin knew that the revolutions that followed World War I (1917-1923) had mostly failed and the Comintern recognized that this “Third Period” of revolution never came about. This also influenced Stalin’s national policy of “socialism in one country”.

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Lenin’s Critique of Left Communism

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, can one 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 capitalism. And most strongly, Lenin says “parliamentarianism in Germany has not yet politically outlived itself, that participation in parliamentary elections and in the struggle on the parliamentary rostrum is obligatory on the party of the revolutionary proletariat specifically for the purpose of educating the backward strata of its own class, and for the purpose of awakening and enlightening the undeveloped, downtrodden, and ignorant rural masses.” 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 class and the masses, and by means of which under the leadership of the Party, the class dictatorship is exercised.”

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The Right of Nations to Self-Determination

The concrete split between Luxemburg and Lenin (following after Kautsky) on the National Question, or the Right of Nations to Self-Determination leads one to wonder which opinion is revolutionary and which is reactionary, if an objective conclusion can be come to on the matter, and which is realistically better, and whether both opinions can fit into the struggle of proletarian internationalism, each in different ways, although clearly opposed to each other in goals. Where Lenin’s argumentative strength lies are the examples of Ireland and Poland which fully fit the oppressor-oppressed model. It would be straying from the facts to say that this is a question of plurality of identities or linguistic groups within the same nation-state, but rather that each oppressed ethnic identity or linguistic group within an oppressor nation-state has the right to self-determination as a local minority experiencing discrimination by the centralized government. What Luxemburg argues instead is that in the historical process of self-determination there is the byproduct of nationalism, which must combatted to its full extent, in the struggle for nationhood in each specific historical situation. It can be seen that oppressed nations can take nationalist forms in their struggles for self-determination. Take the example of the Palestinian Liberation Organization or the Irish Republican Army; these are nationalist movements by oppressed rather that oppressor peoples. What historical circumstances lead to a self-determination struggle to take a libertarian communist (e.g. Rojava) versus a nationalist/capitalist (e.g. PLO, IRA) path? The anarchists among us at this point might point out that all societal relations should be voluntary, not imposed, and that there should be no concept of the nation-state altogether, therefore rendering “the National Question” obsolete. Surely Marxists can support the abolition of borders, but with its theorization of a transitionary state socialist period in historical development after capitalism and before communism, the right of nations to self-determination is the basis for the differentiation of marginalized linguistic groups and oppressed ethnic groups under capitalism. Therefore, Luxemburg has a much more optimistic view of the oppressed minority’s position in gaining greater freedom within the context of a pluralistic nation-state, and a more pessimistic view of national self-determination leading to good outcomes. Lenin argues, on the other hand, for full emancipation of oppressed identities. Lenin claims that it would be wrong to see the self-determination of nations as anything other than the right of a population to live as a separate state.

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Critique of Democratic Centralism

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, and 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 efficacious in gaining political power, 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 such that has been established in Rojava seems to be a better model than the party-less system in Chiapas. 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, with the eventual forming of the Spartacus League.

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Spontaneity and Organization

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 only from without, 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”. Without falling to autonomism, which rejects party-organization altogether, considering the dialectic of spontaneity and organization, there can be a party-oriented struggle in favor of Soviet democracy, and without centralism.

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Lacan on Foreclosure and Repression

Lacan’s interest in psychosis predates his interest in psychoanalysis, his doctoral research project ‘Paranoid psychosis and its relation to the personality, was about a woman whom he calls “Aimée”, and was one of the first attempts in France to interpret a case of psychosis in terms of the total history of the patient and to show no psychic phenomenon can manifest itself independently of the personality. Aimée was a 38 year old railway clerk, with literary ambitions, who attacked one of the best-known actresses in Paris, wounding her with a knife. Her motive was a persecutory delusion that the actress and others had been spreading slander about her. Lacan called her case of paranoia “self-punishment paranoia” saying that in her literary works she attacks the ideal image of a woman who enjoys social freedom and power, the very woman she hoped to be by pursuing a literary career. The woman she envied, became her persecutor, and initially her persecutor was her sister, and then a woman friend who Aimée admitted to “I feel that I am masculine”. After her trial for the assault, and after her being found guilty, the persecutory delusion subsided and Aimée was no longer psychotic.

For Lacan, all psychiatric diagnoses fall into three categories which each describe a different way in which the subject relates to the master-signifier: neurosis (repression), psychosis (foreclosure), and perversion (disavowal). The master-signifier (e.g. commodity fetishism; “money refers to value as such, and all other commodities are thought of in terms of how much money one can get for them”) provides a point de capiton or quilting point around which other signifiers can stabilize. Repression as such that the neurotic experiences it, is distinguished by Freud as split between primal repression, which is something that was never conscious to begin with, an originary “psychical act” by which the unconscious is first constituted, and secondary repression, whereby some idea or perception that was once conscious is expelled from consciousness. Freud thought it was not the “affect” which was repressed, but the “ideational representative” of the drive. Expanding on Freud’s theory, Lacan says primal repression is the alienation of desire when need is articulated in demand, the repression of the first signifier. Secondary repression, for Lacan, is structured like a metaphor. There is also a third form of repression which always involves “the return of the repressed”, whereby the repressed signifier reappears under the guise of the various formations of the unconscious (e.g. symptoms, dreams, parapraxes, jokes, etc.). This is why Lacan says that the return of the repressed actually comes from the future, rather than the past, because before the repressed surfaces to consciousness, the unconscious is already under the grips of the repressed, expressing itself in unconscious manifestations, and therefore the symptom arises from the repressed unconscious material, and this is why “the return of the repressed” isn’t to be thought of as bringing back material from the past, but is rather an effect of the future dimension on the present moment in the form of symptoms and unconscious formations. We can distinguish between different types of “the return of the repressed” as a symptom formation, compromise formation, or reaction formation. For Freud, all unconscious material (existing as memory traces) is indestructible in the unconscious, and the repressed material appears according to the degree which it is cathected, decathected, or anticathected. The repressed material penetrates consciousness when a few conditions are present: first, when the cathexis of the ego is either diminished or is differently distributed, as happens regularly during sleep. Second, when instincts attached to the repressed become strengthened. And third, when a recent event produces impressions or experiences which are so much like the repressed material that they have the power to awaken it. All neurotic symptom-formations can be described as “the return of the repressed”. While neurotic symptom-formation can be designated as “the return of the repressed”, psychosis involves a more violent repudiation. Psychosis, on the other hand, is designated by the “foreclosure of the Name-of-the-Father”, which is a primordial signifier and master-signifier, that is repressed in the neurotic but is foreclosed in the psychotic. It is “the desire of the mother” that was the original master-signifier that was substituted with the Name-of-the-Father, the maternal metaphor with the paternal metaphor.

The primordial signifier of the Name-of-the-Father dates back to the most ancient times of humanity, the father was symbolically identified with the figure of the law as a process which unites desire and the law, and thus is differentiated from the role of the imaginary father which is an imago based on splitting between the good and bad father (what Slavoj Zizek referred to as “the reverse of the father…the “anal father” who lurks behind the Name-of-the-Father qua bearer of the symbolic law”). As Klein demonstrated, the function of the splitting of the ego during the paranoid-schizoid position, sometimes understood in papers today as “paranoid social cognition”, is both a mechanism to separate the good and the bad object, and continued with the mechanism of projective identification. Projective identification is similar to transference in that in the latter the imaginary father is projected onto the analyst, but with projective identification, a part of either the good self or the bad self (or both, in a state of ambivalence) is projected onto the analyst and identified with. This is not an imaginary relation like transference, but a symbolic relation of narcissism “which the subject sustains with the image and action of the person who embodies it” (Lacan). In objection to object relations theory, which focused on the dual relationship between the child and the mother, Lacan stressed the existence of the paternal function in three ways: the symbolic father as the figure of the law, the imaginary father as the composite of all the imaginary constructs the subject builds up in fantasy around the figure of the father, and the Real Father who is another real interpersonal subject who stands as the partner of the mother and has his own history, qualities, shortcomings, and psychic structure.

Lacan compares the French phrase ‘le nom de pere’ (the Name-of-the-Father) with ‘le non de pere’ (the no of the Father) and also with ‘les non-dupes arrant’ (the non-deceiving error) and puts forward their structural significance as signifiers. The mechanism of psychosis is uniquely ‘foreclusion’ or ‘foreclosure’ where the symbolic Father is missing from the symbolic order (Lacan indicates a difference in language use between psychotic and neurotic patients based on the foreclosure of the Name-of-the-Father).

Psychosis, according to Lacan, is not to be viewed as an abnormal pattern of behavior, and it can be shown how similar the behaviors of madness are to normal behavior. Lacan says that the delusion is not the “illness” of paranoia itself, but rather is the paranoiac’s attempt to heal himself, a substitute formation in the face of the breakdown of his symbolic universe. Lacan noted the “imaginary external world” of the psychotic, and noted the psychotic’s altered relation to reality. Following Freud, Lacan stated, “the problem lies not in the reality that is lost, but in that which takes its place.” In metaphorical terms, he discussed psychosis as a “psychic rent” or “gap” that appears in relation to the external world, and there is existence of the “patch” which the psychotic subject applies over this gap in the symbolic order, as his imaginary attempt to heal from the “interrogative gap” which opens up in madness, hallucinations, etc. “The function of the imaginary is precisely to fill this gap”, thus overcoming the subject’s division and presenting an imaginary sense of unity and wholeness. Lacan also uses the term ‘dehiscence’ which roughly means “gap” and designates a botanical term meaning the bursting open of mature seed-pods; Lacan uses the term to refer to the “split” which is constitutive of the subject, which Lacan understood as the “split of the subject” which characterizes all neurotic, psychotic, and perverse patients. Lacan also notes the “split” that occurs in causality, the “inexplicable gap” between cause and effect (causality can appear to become inverted in psychosis). And most importantly, the split that exists is between the subject and the Other, such that it is also true that a gap exists in the context of the relationship between the sexes, Lacan writes, “in the relation between man and woman…a gap always remains open”.

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Freud’s Writings on Psychosis

Freud examined seven cases of psychosis during his career. Freud’s earliest account of psychosis was in the 1894 in ’The Neuro-Psychoses of Defence’; he observes a young woman who is afflicted with erotomania. After several disappointments have led to the formation of hysterical symptoms, a decisive event occurs: the young man is invited to a celebration at the woman’s family’s home, but he never arrives. The waiting provokes a high state of psychical tension, which climaxed at the end of the day: Freud writes, “She passed into a state of hallucinatory confusion: he had arrived, she heard his voice in the garden, she hurried down in her nightdress to receive him. From that time on she lived for two months in a happy dream, whose content was that he was there, always at her side, and that everything was as it had been before.” This is the case from which Lacan took Freud’s word Verwerfung (“repudiation”), which Freud developed as a defense mechanism similar to “repression”, but Lacan translated it in French as forclusion (“foreclosure”) as the basic mechanism in the formation of psychosis, and what was foreclosed upon in Lacan’s view was the primordial “the-Name-of-the-Father” signifier or the symbolic Father, whose foreclosure triggers psychosis to emerge. In the case of the young woman, Freud says that she “repudiates” the idea that he truly doesn’t love her, this can be seen as the foreclosure of a primordial signifier which can alternatively to the parental figure, be a courtly love interest, such that Slavoj Zizek writes “Does, however, the figure of the Lady in courtly love not fully fit these determinations of the primordial father? Is she not also a capricious Master who wants it all, i.e., who, herself not bound by any Law, charges her knight-servant with arbitrary and outrageous ordeals?”

The “Neuro-Psychoses of Defence” were changed to the “Psycho-Neuroses of Defence”, and included hysteria, obsessional neurosis, phobia, and finally paranoia. A year after the publication of ’The Neuro-Psychoses of Defence’, came Freud’s ‘Draft H’ in 1895. In this work, Freud tells the story about a young woman about thirty years old with a persecutory delusion who confabulated the story to her sister a few years earlier that her lodger had placed his penis in her hand. “She thought their women neighbors were pitying her for having been jilted and because she was still waiting for the man to come back: they were always making hints of that kind to her, kept on saying all kinds of things to her about the man, and so on” writes Freud. Later she denied the occurrence of this traumatic scene, but Freud was specifically interested in her use of the paranoid defense: “the purpose of paranoia is thus to fend off an idea that is incompatible with the ego, by projecting its substance into the external world.” Freud continues, “in every instance the delusional idea is maintained with the same energy with which another, intolerably distressing, idea is fended off from the ego.”

In 1896, ‘Draft K’, Freud argues that two conditions are necessary to the onset of a psychoneurosis: “that the cause…is of a sexual kind and that it occurs during the period before sexual maturity” and hereditary disposition. Freud compares “the experience of the original event”, which later in ‘Beyond the Pleasure Principle’ he would term the “repetition compulsion”, in psychosis to that in obsessional neurosis. Freud theorizes that while with obsessional neurosis there is “self-reproach” or self-blame, in paranoia there is “mortification”; “in paranoia, the self-reproach is repressed in a manner which may be described as a projection. It is repressed by erecting the defensive symptom of distrust of other people. Projection enables the movement from a self-reproach to a reproach addressed to others. From this point on, Freud now devotes himself to investigating the conflict underlying psychosis and its current and predisposing causes, understanding the “structure of paranoia” on the basis of stratification of the psyche and its dynamism.

Though most of Freud’s case studies were based on patients that he saw himself in clinical practice, nonetheless he wrote ‘Psycho-Analytic Notes upon an Autobiographical Case of Paranoia’ in 1911 based on Judge Daniel Paul Schreber’s memoir ‘Memiors of My Nervous Illness’. The reason that Schreber’s memoir is such an important example in the analysis of psychosis, is that he asks the legal question “In what circumstance can a person be deemed insane be detained in an asylum against his declared will?”, and because of the immense depth of his delusional system. The fundamental unit of Schreber’s delusional system were called “nerves”, which were said to compose both the human soul and the nature of God in relation to humanity. Each human soul was composed of nerves that derived from God, whose own nerves were then the ultimate source or human existence. Humanity’s and God’s nerves existed parallel to each other except when the “Order of the World” was violated, in which the two universes experienced “nerve-contact” with each other. He was also extremely paranoid about his Doctor Flechsig, who he believed had control of “rays” (as did God) who sought to influence him and his reality by “divine miracles”. The rays had the capacity for independent activity, and they were distinguished from souls and nerves.

In 1916, Freud tells the story of a young male doctor who issued a series of death threats at his workplace towards his former best friend, now the object of his delusions of persecution. In the course of several brief conversations, Freud learns that the two men had previously given in to their mutual attraction for each other. The patient then tells him that his illness began when he had finally succeeded, for the very first time, in sexually satisfying a woman. In Freud’s view, this temporal structure suggests that the paranoiac delusion functioned as a defense against a homosexual libidinal impulse.

In 1924, Freud devotes two articles to the differential nosology of neurosis and psychosis. Freud sees the difference in their onset, and not in “the attempt at reparation which follows it”. While neurosis is described as the result of a conflict between the id and the ego, psychosis on the other hand, is triggered by “a disturbance in the relationship between the ego and the external world”, which is equivalent to a loss of reality. While the agent of the ego is the same in both cases, the operation and nature of the psychoses is different from that of the neuroses.

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On the Liberation of Mental Illness

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 the unconscious motivations behind the transference neurosis, the repression inherent in the individual, 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 views 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.

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 views 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 guidance. 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 psychoanalysts as “sinister priest-manipulators” 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 Beck, 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. Aaron Beck had the nerve to ask his patients during sessions, “What are you thinking right now?”, if there was a silence in therapy. Deleuze and Guattari write, “The death instinct is pure silence, pure transcendence, not givable and not given in experience…it is because death, according to Freud, has neither a model nor an experience”. 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 energy. 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 adaptation. Jung identifies four types where adaptations become problematic: adaptation entirely and exclusively to the outside, while entirely neglecting the inside; a disturbance from a preferential adaptation to the inside; adaptation to inner conditions, exclusive adaptation to the outside; and neglect of the outside in favor of adaptation to the inside.

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 (with punctuation) 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. 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 communities. Paulo Freire argued, with his school of critical pedagogy, that a ‘critical consciousness’ must be developed by the student and that education was fundamentally a critical process; as we cannot escape the idea that Cornelius Castoriadis prominently outlined of the intercourse between psychoanalysis, pedagogy, and politics. He gives his account of the efficiency of the unconscious: “I mean animals never do stupid things; they do the things they have to do, right? They are instrumentally efficient and we couldn’t say that they are conscious in the usual sense of the term. And humans are conscious and, at the same time, monstrously irrational. All of human history is there, from the beginning to this very day.”

Perhaps Freud’s greatest contribution to psychiatry, the unveiling of the unconscious, drives and instincts, 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 from “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? It almost resembles the Orwellian notion of “doublespeak”.

The reality of 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.

Yet we are experiencing a great revolt against these 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, and the rising up of the proletariat to the ruling class.

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.

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. In 1913, 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 is the conflict between the self and the other, an idea that he credits Nietzsche with discovering, the pathogenic influence of society on the individual.

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Class Struggle or Postmodernism? Yes Please!

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. Thus, the socialist mode of production can be seen all throughout history, in Christian communities, the Iroquois, the Chachapoyas, the Shakers; these were all organic embodiments of communist practice that predated Karl Marx and Fredrich Engels. 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. The point here is to deconstruct the concepts of post-structuralists such as Foucault, Laclau and Mouffe, and Deleuze and Guattari, the concepts of the existentialists, the concepts of psychoanalysis, and the concepts of critical theory, and compare how they relate to the notion of class struggle.

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 further 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 Ernesto Laclau’s final hypothesis of populism as a rejection of historical materialism, which was his (and Chantal Mouffe’s) basic intellectual project known as radical democracy, 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 progress 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. 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, or 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 conscious as exhibiting not only hegemony, but arriving at a “point de caption” (i.e. Capitalism and Schizophrenia) 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 marketplace (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.

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Orthodox Marxism

Lenin considered himself very much an orthodox Marxist, as we can remember that it was Stalin and later Trotsky who synthesized Marxism-Leninism in their own forms. Lenin rails in his 1902 pamphlet ‘What Is To Be Done?’ about the notion of “freedom of criticism” which he says in the face of political science (i.e. the aptly considered objective truths exposed by Marx and Engels) cannot be refuted in the name a class collaborationist version of Social-Democracy. Another term used widely by Lenin is the notion of ideological opportunism, which he attributes to this new “critical” (Economism, Legal Marxism) school of socialism. Rightly, critical theory in the 20th century would come to be the dominant mode of analysis for socialists, so what then does Lenin mean when he argues against “freedom of criticism” and when he aligns reformism with this “critical” theory of Social-Democracy? What he means is that Marx to political economy is like Darwin to evolutionary biology, or Copernicus to astronomy. Surely, “freedom of criticism” can be taken up as a slogan but to be used in a progressive rather than reactionary way. What Lenin meant was that “freedom of criticism” does not apply to a critique of capitalism, rather that socialism (i.e. to each according to their needs, from each according to their ability) along an orthodox Marxist line must not be appropriated. What is justified here, and why libertarian socialists must pay attention to Marx, is that the scientific foundation upon which a critique of political economy has already been developed, is opposed to what Lenin calls “opportunists”. From a modern critical theory point of view, the very essence of democratic centralism makes us ask ourselves what is worth criticizing and what is worth accepting as objective fact. Althusser says, “If science unites, and if it unites without dividing, philosophy divides, and it can only unite by dividing.” In Althusser’s essay ‘Lenin and Philosophy’ he traces back the history of political economy to Marx, comparing the Young Marx who wrote about the philosophy of dialectical materialism, with the rather objective critique of political economy employed by Marx in his later years. In Marx’s ‘Thesis on Fauerbach’ he foretells of a great coming revolution in philosophy with the materialist shift in understanding to be brought about, but then in the coming years would abandon any sort of philosophical investigations to focus on the hard facts of capitalism, and eventually would study the Paris Commune in its historical reality in his work ‘The Civil War in France’. Where Lenin comes in is in his work ‘Materialism and Empirio-Criticism’ which is rather a polemic against philosophy, regarding science as the highest form of truth, and embracing the materialism of Marx and Engels. Sartre considers the materialist philosophy of Marx and Engels to be “unthinkable in the sense of an Unding, 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.”

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Bureaucracy and Community Development

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.

[derstheviking]

Political Parties and The German Revolution

The Spartacus League was founded by Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht in August 1914, part of the Independent Social Democratic Party (USPD), which after the Russian Revolution of 1917 agitated for a libertarian socialist government based on local workers’ councils. When the German Revolution of November 1918 occurred, a period of instability began, which lasted until 1923. Both Liebknecht and the leader of the SPD, Ebert declared new Republics on November 9, the day after the emperor’s abdication, Ebert demanded the chancellorship for himself. Ebert then offered to take Liebknecht on as a Minister, though Liebknecht wanted full control of the army by the workers’ councils. Around 8pm that night, a group of 100 Revolutionary Stewards from the larger Berlin factories occupied the Reichstag and formed a revolutionary parliament. They originally planned for a coup over the SPD leadership two days later, but noticing a swift rise in revolutionary activity across the country, decided to plan elections for the following day where every factory and regiment was to elect workers’ and soldier’s councils that were in turn to elect a revolutionary government from the members of the two labour parties, SPD and USPD. The elections went on as planned on November 10 with the majority of workers’ and solider’s councils electing members of the SPD. That day, Ebert would try to get the support of the military to reimpose the military hierarchy. The Executive Council and the Council Parliament would share dual power during this time.

Initially the “ultimate aim” of the SPD and USPD was to put at least heavy industry under democratic control, and with the left wings of both parties wanting to establish a direct democracy in the production sector, with elected delegates controlling political power. Though these socialist goals were not reached, blocked by a deal made by the union leaders with the owners of big industry, the official “political program” was announced on November 12 by the Council, which included lifting government censorship and freedom of the press, abolishing “servant rules”, introducing universal suffrage, freedom of assembly, the establishment of an 8-hour work-day, and expanded benefits for unemployment, social insurance, and workers’ compensation. The revolution still needed protection; in Leipzig, Hamburg, Bremen, Chemnitz and Gotha, the Workers’ and Solider’s Councils would take over local city administrations under their control. In other cities, all civil servants loyal to the emperor were arrested. In Hamburg and Bremen, “Red Guards” were formed. By December 15, when the local Workers’ Councils were going to convene in Berlin for a “General Convention”, Elbert and General Groener had troops ordered to prevent the assembly from happening and arrest the Executive Council. In attempting this, soliders opened fire on unarmed “Red Guards” and killed 16 people. With the danger of a coup from the right being visible, Rosa Luxemburg demanded the peaceful disarmament of the homecoming military units by the Berlin workforce, them subordinated to the Revolutionary Parliament and for the soldiers to become “re-educated”.

After their experiences with the SPD and USPD, the Spartacists decided to found the Communist Party of Germany (KPD), joining with other left-socialist groups in a coalition. Rosa Luxemburg drew up her platform and presented it on December 31, 1918. In the first days of the new year 1919, another revolutionary wave developed, although this time it was violently suppressed. On January 5, the USPD, the Revolutionary Stewards, and the KPD called for a mass demonstration and thousands filled the center of Berlin, some armed. The following day, the Revolutionary Committee again called for a mass demonstration, this time even more people showed up; the aim, for some, was to overthrow the government lead by Ebert, but the military mostly stayed loyal to the government and Ebert ordered troops to move into Berlin to suppress the uprising, known historically as the Spartacist Uprising, with 156 people being killed. After this event, Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht would be chased down by the Freikorp, an anti-communist paramilitary group formed by the Defense Minister, and both beaten unconscious with rifle butts and shot in the head, supposedly at the orders of Ebert.

The death of Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht lead to the ultra-leftists within the Communist Party of Germany to leave to form the Communist Workers’ Party of Germany (KAPD) in April 1920. This party represented “Left communism” or council communism and was anti-parliamentarian, though in 1922 the party would split into an Essen faction (who would later found the Communist Workers’ International) and a Berlin faction (merging into the Communist Workers’ Union). The party argued for a complete end to parliamentary activity, the rejection of participation in elections, a rejection of the theory of ‘democratic centralism’ (which would be the basis of KPD functioning in the early 1920s), and a rejection of activism within reformist trade unions, all of which the KPD supported.

In 1928, another split in the KPD occurred with the founding of the Communist Party of Germany (Opposition) or KPD-O, representing the so-called Right Opposition in distinction to the Trotskyist Left Opposition and pro-Comintern centre faction. The party was led by Heinrich Brandler and August Thalheimer who had led the KPD between 1921 and 1923.

[derstheviking]

Chaosophy

In Nietzsche’s terms, there is no ‘empty space’, only a ‘play of forces’. Deleuze and Guattari describe “chaos” not as an absence of determination, but by the absence of an apparent connection between determinations. This can be contrasted with Althusser’s notion of overdetermination where he overcomes Mao’s dualism of “contradictory forces”, and instead describes the multiple, often opposed, forces at work in a political situation. For example, a revolution can be overdetermined by a contrast of multiple and even opposing forces that give way to the revolutionary situation or the revoutionary “act” or “event”. To describe the “necessity of chance” in ‘becoming’ (the force of chaos), Nietzsche says that there is an irrational necessity to conceive of chaos as a cycle or cyclical in nature, and he writes “if there ever was a chaos of forces the chaos was eternal and has reappeared in every cycle”; meaning that chaos is an abyss of repetition. However, rather than chaos being a negative category, as a disorder in sensation, or a hole in our understanding, on the other hand, chaos is rather a source of composition in art, music, philosophy and science. Deleuze writes, “artists struggle less against chaos…than against the ‘cliches’ of opinion…Art is not chaos but a composition of chaos that yields the vision or sensation”.

Take Paul Tillich’s description of expressionist and surrealist art: “the surface structures of reality are disrupted. The categories which constitute ordinary experience have lost their power. The category of substance is lost: solid objects are twisted like ropes; the causal interdependence of things is disregarded; things appear in a complete contingency; temporal sequences are without significance; it does not matter whether an event has happened before or after another event; the spatial dimensions are reduced or dissolved into a horrifying infinity.”

[derstheviking]

Productive Forces

When Marx and Engels speak of the “productive forces” (speculated to have been borrowed from Adam Smith’s concept of the “productive powers of labor”), they are not speaking of the automated production systems that do away with human labor, but instead refer specifically to the human-powered productive forces using equipment and technology to produce a product first-hand from raw materials. The actual relations of production, influencing the productive forces, are the determining criteria of the mode of production. However, Marx thought that the productive forces were not discriminately progressive, and that there also existed destructive forces within the productive forces, diverting the goal of socialist revolution to capitalist reformism or regression into monopoly capitalism. The productive forces are the material power that produces the finished product, while the relations of production refers to who actually owns the means of production, both the raw materials and the finished product, and the equipment and technology such as machines and tools used to produce the product. The crucial development in the productive forces under capitalism, historically, was the invention of machine industry or machine systems that could eliminate human labor, making the employers in industry less reliant on the working class, and creating a “reserve labor force” that was unable to find employment and was either left to starvation or given unemployment insurance under the welfare capitalist system.