“The communists believe…”
The Specter Haunting Psychoanalysis
A DOSSIER OF TEXTS BY ELENA COMAY DEL JUNCO, MAX FOX, YAHYA MADRA, HANNAH PROCTOR, GHALYA SAADAWI, NICA SIEGEL, JULIANA SPAHR, AND GABRIEL TUPINAMBÁ, GATHERED BY ETHAN PHILBRICK
There is a paragraph nestled about two-thirds of the way through Freud’s Civilization and Its Discontents (1930) that begins, “The communists believe that they have found the path to deliverance from our evils.” The paragraph, while ultimately dismissive of the communists and their beliefs, offers a window into Freud’s ambivalent account of the relationships between the state, the family, private property, domination, and desire. During the summer of 2025, I asked a group of eight writers, each in some way positioned at the juncture between psychoanalysis and communist thought, to write short essays in response to Freud’s dismissal of communist politics and to read these pieces alongside one another as part of a remote roundtable. We have gathered these pieces into the following dossier with the hope that, when taken together, they might provide an occasion to rearticulate collectively the relationship between psychoanalysis and the critique of capitalism. — Ethan Philbrick
GABRIEL TUPINAMBÁ
It does not seem to be the object of much attention that the Communist Manifesto does not begin with the confrontation between “all the powers of old Europe” and the communist movement, but between this “holy alliance” of reactionary forces and the “specter of communism.” If a specter is enough to scare and haunt those who are afraid of political change, it is definitely not enough for communists themselves—which is why the Manifesto follows the claim that “Communism is already acknowledged by all European powers to be itself a power” with the prescription that “Communists should openly, in the face of the whole world . . . meet this nursery tale of the Specter of Communism with a Manifesto of the party itself.” It is the task of communists not to fall in love with this haunting and powerful image—ultimately a “nursery tale” produced by reactionary forces themselves—but instead to present and think through the real communist movement, made up of different proletarian struggles all around the world.
Every time someone speaks of “communism,” we must then, as communists, seek to pierce the veil of this specter and ask for the concrete political processes that are being used as a basis for this speculative extrapolation. This is how we might confront Freud with very simple and useful questions: Where, in the long history of communist ideas and struggles, have people been so crass as to believe that abolishing private property would lead to a world without obstacles, without any outlets for aggressive tendencies, or to a social world less capable of addressing man’s complex psychological needs and dispositions? Such a notion belongs, clearly, to the caricature that haunted “old Europe”—Freud is, ultimately, analyzing the fantasies of reactionaries, not the ideas of real communists.
To avoid the temptation of defending this specter against those who invented it in the first place is also to shift the terrain of the debate. The specter of communism is communism without people: without militants and organizations and their diverse debates, doubts, and experiments. To defend it is to engage in empty discourse; in the case of Freud, it is to engage in an asymmetric confrontation, as psychoanalysis has concrete clinical work to back it up. Instead, in order to follow through with the task set out by the Manifesto, we must introduce into the fantasy the concrete historical referents of political struggle and thinking.
It is only from this alternative perspective that the schism between the real communist movement—however small or powerless it might actually be at any given time—and the concoctions of intellectuals can work in our favor, as the basis for new inquiries into what it is that they are so afraid of losing that they hasten to rally against us. In the case of Freud, this is particularly relevant, as psychoanalysis was built out of the speech of regular people—so why couldn’t it listen to us as well?
HANNAH PROCTOR
Civilization and Its Discontents was first published in German in 1930.
In 1930, Vienna was Red; the Social Democratic Workers’ Party of Austria held a majority on the Municipal Council. In the USSR, Stalin had consolidated his power. The first Five-Year Plan was underway. Trotsky had been deported the previous year.
In 1930, Freud wrote to German novelist Arnold Zweig, explaining his refusal to sign a document that “contained an attack on ‘the capitalist economic confusion,’” lest it give the impression that he supported “the Communist ideal”:
In spite of all my dissatisfaction with the present economic systems I have no hope that the road pursued by the Soviets will lead to improvement. Indeed, any such hope that I may have cherished has disappeared in this decade of Soviet rule. I remain a liberal of the old school.
In 1930, Freud’s The Future of an Illusion, originally published in German in 1927, appeared in Russian translation in the Soviet Union. In that text, Freud characterizes the French Revolution’s attempt to abolish religion in favor of reason as “short-lived and miserably ineffectual” and goes on to say that the “same experiment is being repeated in Russia at the present time, and we need not feel curious as to its outcome.”
In 1930, the last report from the Russian Psychoanalytic Society in Moscow was published, part of the broader cultural experimentation that flourished after the October Revolution in 1917. After 1930, no further books appeared in the Soviet State Publishing House’s psychoanalytic library series.
In 1929 or 1930, Communist psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich, who had recently visited the Soviet Union, spoke enthusiastically with Freud about Soviet experiments in bourgeois family abolition, which he speculated could ultimately eradicate the Oedipus complex. Freud reportedly retorted, “This can be compared to treating a person’s intestinal disorders by having him stop eating and at the same time putting a stopper into his anus.”
In 1930, Moshe Wulff, who had formerly served as president of the Psychoanalytic Society in Moscow but left the Soviet Union in 1927, attacked Reich’s account of Soviet psychoanalysis for downplaying the suppression of Freudian thought under the Bolsheviks and for regurgitating party lines on the compatibility of psychoanalysis and Marxism.
In 1930, Zweig, Reich, and Wulff all lived in Berlin. They were all Jewish. When Hitler came to power in 1933, they all went into exile.
Reich’s subsequent life trajectory as the orgasm enthusiast and cloud-busting peddler of bogus orgone accumulators in the US is well-known.
Wulff, though he conducted experiments analyzing the sexual neuroses of transportation workers in Soviet Moscow in the 1920s, was never a Communist. But he was a Zionist. He fled Germany for Palestine, where he was one of the founders of the Psychoanalytic Society of Palestine, which, after the Nakba, was renamed the Psychoanalytic Society of Israel.
Zweig, who had been active in the socialist Zionist movement in Germany in the 1920s, also fled to Palestine. Writing to Zweig in 1930, Freud had noted of the “Soviet experiment” that “[w]e have been deprived by it of a hope—and an illusion,” but far more of the letters between them, which continued until Freud’s death in 1939, concerned Zionism than communism.
Living in a small hotel room in Haifa without central heating, Zweig quickly became disillusioned with Jewish nationalism, which, like Freud’s discussion of Soviet communism, he talked about in terms of lost hopes and illusions. In 1934, he wrote to Freud, “I don’t care any more about ‘the land of my fathers.’ I haven’t got any more Zionistic illusions either. I view the necessity of living here among the Jews without enthusiasm, without any false hopes.” A subsequent letter complained that when he tried to address left-wing workers at an anti-war demonstration, they had insisted he speak in Hebrew rather than German, adhering to what he saw as the “nationalistic fiction” that they didn’t all speak Yiddish. He stated bluntly, “I do not belong here.... [A]ll our reasons for coming here were mistaken.”
A year later, after the beginning of the Arab Revolt in Mandatory Palestine, he wrote to Freud, “I see a dark future ahead.” Jewish people had come to Palestine, he said, “against the will of the Arab majority.”
In February 1939, by which time Freud had finally fled Vienna to London after the Nazi annexation of Austria, Zweig, still in Palestine and living on royalties received from the Soviet Union, complained to Freud that he was “more depressed than ever.” Reflecting on the anniversary of his father’s death, he described his personal anguish but claimed that “what affects me most deeply is the public issue: Spain.” His letter is dated February 6, immediately following the fall of Barcelona and Girona to the Nationalists in the Spanish Civil War and at the height of La Retirada, during which hundreds of thousands of refugees sympathetic to the Republican cause fled to France.
Zweig relayed that his housekeeper’s brother had been shot and killed in Haifa the previous day, just twelve days after arriving from Nazi Germany. Psychoanalysis, he continued, was necessary to make sense of the “frightful idiocy” of the present historical conjuncture: “Ultimately it is only your work which explains what we are experiencing: civilisation’s discontents are now coming to the surface.” Later that month, he sent another letter, similarly observing that “the explanation of the pile of ruins on which we and the dictators now live like rats, is to be found in your work—in your Civilization and Its Discontents. . . . Gentlemen are at last able to shake murderers by the hand without falling into disrepute. All ethical principles have been abrogated without the façade of law and order being demolished.”
Though always more left-wing than Freud, Zweig was not a communist before he left Germany. He was drawn to communism in response to his experiences of Zionist colonial settlement in Palestine. During the war, he helped raise funds for the Red Army and developed friendships with members of communist clubs in Palestine. In an article published in 1942, he proclaimed, “We have not come here to escape from one form of fascism and fall into another.” As an anti-fascist, he believed that the aggressive tendencies Freud described as instinctual, inevitable, and “indestructible” were historical, rather than natural and thought they could—must—be overturned.
In 1948, shortly after the violent founding of the state of Israel, Zweig returned, without illusions, to Berlin—to the Soviet zone of occupation—just before the creation of the German Democratic Republic.
Zweig may have lost his Zionist illusions in Palestine, but as he reached the end of his life in East Berlin, he rejected the official anti-Zionist Socialist Unity Party line on the Six Day War in 1967 and refused to sign a declaration from “Jewish citizens of the GDR expressing outrage at Israeli aggression.” He died on November 26, 1968.
GHALYA SAADAWI
Dear Sigmund,
I began this letter from Beirut during the hot summer of 2025. Here, each household generates its own electricity; there is no state grid. Private wealth flight during the largest Ponzi scheme in recent banking history means the ruling class can always go far into barbarism to protect itself and immiserate everyone else. We have always been vanguard in the darkness we generate.
Tufan al-Aqsa insurrection. The Zionist state and its allies recently embarked on what they term a “New Order” in the form of a genocide that is ravaging Gaza and the Palestinians and extends to Lebanon, Yemen, and Iran. Resistance to a new order of globalized genocide, as normalization desires, to mass death as a form of value, persists across this stage. In Lebanon, the national bourgeoisie, sectarian lords, and what could be coined the collaborator government express a vile schadenfreude at the resistance and its social base. They plot more surplus at the behest of imperial capital—they call it “we want peace”—which they also expect will be fueled by private Rivieras built on mass graves. It is a prime time for real estate, as Adam Tooze tells us: Israeli “currency, debt, and equity lead the world in terms of appreciation” and the shekel is gaining against more than one hundred currencies.
You didn’t meet the Zionist entity, although you must have read those early Zionist writings. In 1948, the Zionists unilaterally declared the State of Israel. After a very long process that started during your lifetime—of emigration, of terror gangs massacring and expelling Palestinians, of land grabbing—British colonial officials eventually withdrew and, under contentious consensus, essentially gifted historic Palestine to the Zionists.
The usurpation, terror, and impunity they and their settler ilk perpetuate today make some of us feel like we live in Satanic times, if you prefer a Biblical reference. Reason is unreason, day is night, night is day, lies are the truth, up is down, the seasons are inverted. Yes, since imperialism became organized around this monopoly stage of capitalism, we live more and more in barbaric times. In fact, one of your successors would pick up death drive as sadistic enjoyment—how the categorical imperative can slip into a cold, Sadean commandment to enjoy.
It is eighty-six years since your death, ninety-two since your New Introductory Lectures, ninety-six since Civilization and Its Discontents, two and a half into an apocalyptic cleansing in Gaza, and you were wrong about a few things.
History proceeds through ruptures, returns, and contradictions, leaving social fossils in its wake. History starts from the end, not the beginning. From commodity to accumulation. This letter from the future to your deceased person signals you in the past erupting in the present and attests to the strange grammar of history and of the unconscious.
To be generous, we could say you were too early for the critiques that took sedimented history to mean social labor under capitalism etched into and as the unconscious, alienating it, forming the drives more than human instincts, as you allude, formed in some sui generis manner, or under Oedipal trauma, or primary repression as a giving up on eros. All of which stink without history or social time.
Speaking of which, a certain Theodor W. Adorno, writing some years after you, impacted far more by Marxism, by another war and death camps you did not live to see, said that the unconscious is sedimented history. He had a habit of boxing with phrases. He wielded the notion of introjection against you. The human instincts are not merely pitted against the social, or the individual against civilization as organizer of instincts, whereby the organism develops a psychic edifice called superego, say, which is measured by introjected aggression correlated to its rage at having to renounce. Rather, the drives and psychic structures already hold the social—alienation, commodification—as congealed second nature in them.
We could also say you were too late. Too late for 1848, 1871; on time for 1917, Balfour, and the Bolshevik Revolution. You wrote in 1933, “Unluckily neither our skepticism nor the fanatical faith of the other side gives a hint as to how the experiment will turn out. The future will tell us.” Sigmund, people tried to change their circumstances. The future primary threat to communism—to social wealth, social labor, to social revolution—had been precisely relations of property and the hunting of communism by the ideologies and practices found in liberalism, Nazism, and one country’s distorted form of socialism. Thus, the biggest threat you oddly missed was the brutally restorative violence of compulsive capitalism as organizer of passions, which wants to turn counterinsurgency, impunity, greed, and hoarding into moral goods. This means that under propertied relations, barbarism as civilization is, in fact, unlimited access for those who cannot relinquish their drives for accumulation and enjoyment, and not individuals in need of property so as not to live barbarically. Your law is turned upside down. It is not private property that organizes the drives. It is private property and free trade as alleged reiners-in of passions that became the cornerstone of a brutal civilization.
Said another way, you misread the abolition of bourgeois property because you were not a historical materialist—and instead mystified the evolution of techne (gunpowder, metal, aerospace, to paraphrase you) as that which moves history. Bourgeois private property does not organize the passions and the interests; it legitimizes them.
Were you theologizing man by implanting in him the immovable seeds of aggression, making them otherworldly? Self-alienating the drives the way that Ludwig Feuerbach had said we were self-alienated by religion? You forgot that Marx said when you were around eleven years old that “[l]abor is, first of all, a process between people and nature. . . . Through this movement he acts upon external nature and changes it, and in this way he simultaneously changes his own nature.”
In inventing primary repression (through analyzing the primal horde and other cases), you thought the conflicting, aggressive, and selfish tempestuousness of interests created a common good—you, too, created an unconscious of free commerce, trade, and interests (see Kant).
But our wager is that practical activity—including inside the clinic, perhaps—seizes us to grasp matters, to take charge of desire. And there, revolutionary praxis becomes categorical imperative. By liberating unfree labor, you free everyone, thought the communists. By effecting such change, people change themselves. Not the inverse: “Be the fucking change you wanna see.” If there is to be social revolution, after relations of production turn “into their fetters” (Marx) and social consciousness changes form—if, again, the unconscious is sedimented history—the work of psychoanalysis at the end of capitalism is thus self-change on a massive scale (see China Miéville).
Finally, you were also too late for Fanon and C. L. R. James—they explain how the subjugated imbibe subjugation. Not revisionists believing in boundless emancipation, they knew, as we know, that we are wrapped up in the consciousness of the Other. So it arises that we must employ violence to reorganize that relationship. And although this is a vexed condition, it didn’t seem lost on you in particular that the drive is not merely homeostasis or pleasure principle, but about both repetition and removal from recurring bounds even if this means death.
Yours,
Ghalya
NICA SIEGEL
As I was preparing for this roundtable, I couldn’t stop thinking about an account of Freud’s influence quoted by the Israeli historian Tom Segev, which describes the anxieties stirred up by the presence of young children on an early kibbutz. “When we saw our first children in the playpen, hitting one another, or grabbing toys just for themselves, we were overcome with anxiety,” wrote one member. “What did it mean that even an education in communal life couldn’t uproot these egotistical tendencies? The utopia of our initial social conception was slowly, slowly destroyed.”
Although and because Freud was critical of Zionism, this seems to me an especially pointed example of a dynamic at issue in Civilization and Its Discontents, by which aggression is displaced away from the political and social conditions and crises out of which it emerges back onto the figure of the primordial child, anchoring a posture of chastened acceptance of biologically necessary, self-protective, and prosocial repression that marks the end of utopia. Just a few years after the Balfour Declaration, inundated with lived histories of European expulsion, amid the displacement of Palestinian villages, I kept wondering: A flailing, dysregulated toddler is what made them despair of the project? Really? What accounts for the power of this child? Of what are they the bearer?
Freud narrates this restaging of aggression, of death drive, at the genesis of human development (phylogenetically) and at the base of subjectivity (ontogenetically) when he writes, “And now, I think, the meaning of the evolution of civilization is no longer obscure to us. It must present the struggle between Eros and Death, between the instinct of life and the instinct of destruction, as it works itself out in the human species.” Notwithstanding the fact that Freud does directly contradict this claim later, one especially Hobbesian commentator plausibly writes, “To Freud, culture is not based on the historically specific form of the division of labour, production and distribution of goods, but first and foremost on the need to control biologically determined anti-social instinctual impulses” (emphasis mine).
When I read this, I feel a real urgency to stand up for a no less psychoanalytic Thesis B: that sexuality, creativity, aggression, and thanatos are not in the least primordially disaggregated in the child. A baby floats around not yet enclosed, but the propertarian encounter (“this is mine, this is yours”) and the experience of scarcity in lived economy (“the milk is not here”) begin to subjectify and organize and incentivize an actually untenable split between what will become the productive, pleasure-seeking, sublimated sexual drives and the aggressions of thanatos. How unbearable this will become and what reality principle concerning the distribution of needs this will later be understood to reinforce or challenge are, in part, questions of the available historical frames for making meaning of these experiences. Brenna Bhandar reminds us that the history of property, including the property in persons, whether wives or slaves, emerges co-constitutively with the idea of self-possession, so that the subjective dimension is no less historically propertarian—a point echoed, for example, by the Catalan psychiatrist Francesc Tosquelles in his essay “Psychopathology and Dialectical Materialism.” There are a number of ways we might engage this insight.
For one, we can find many fruitful attempts in twentieth-century thought to historicize the child’s encounter with libidinal economy, its worries about “what is mine and not-mine,” in terms of the history of racial capitalism. Herbert Marcuse, for example, famously argues that the libidinal economy of psychoanalysis naturalizes political economic scarcity. What Freud treats as necessary repression, Marcuse identifies as surplus repression, and this becomes a provocation in his writings toward new and differently ordered alliances between eros and labor against domination, exhaustion, and racial reification.
As Siegfried Zepf writes, “Despite his objections, Freud is ‘quite certain that a real change in the relations of human beings to possessions would be of more help in this direction [about aggression] than any ethical commands.’” Concerning what he takes to be the limits of this prospect, I’ll just end by noting that the call to abolish private property in Marx refers not to what we might today call personal property, but to productive property, property through which privately-held value is generated by alienated labor, basically what Marx calls the “means of production,” although both the family and the plantation as sites of social reproduction should and do complicate this distinction. From this perspective, the “famous proposal of the Communists,” the call to abolish private property and seize the means of production, is best understood not as a predicament about the disinhibition of forces of primordial aggression, nor the terror of formlessness, but a more interesting question about the possibilities and limits of seeing ourselves, our full selves, après-coup, in the worldly forms that we’ve created.
Such experimentation involves the fate and uses and staging of what sometimes emerges as our aggression and includes disalienating work done within the clinical encounter, as in the tradition of institutional psychotherapy, wherein communist doctors pursued the abolition of private property relations—literally knocking down asylum walls—as part of the analytic mechanism of transference. Interested readers can find further reflections on these themes in the online archives of Parapraxis, which has been an important home for the translation and study of this tradition.
ELENA COMAY DEL JUNCO
If I am not entirely mistaken regarding the nature of the present endeavor, the goal, broadly speaking, is to show that, while not identical, the two movements under consideration at present have something meaningful and mutually productive, indeed complementary, to offer one another. The urgency of finding a common ground between psychoanalysis and communism stems not only from our justified admiration for their respective founders but equally from the apparent tension between them. While I do not deny the satisfaction that would accompany success in such an endeavor, I nevertheless wish to begin with a more sober evaluation of the situation before us. Consider, then, the following:
Why do we have to live with such poverty and inequality? Why can’t we put people over profits? What is the best life in the most just society? Socialism is the most compelling secular religion of all time. It gives you an egalitarian ideal to sacrifice and to hope for.
The smug fatuity of the writing makes it unlikely to be mistaken for Freud, yet an honest appraisal forces one to admit the similarities. (The author is David Brooks, formerly of The New York Times and now The Atlantic.) Here is Freud in the last of his New Introductory Lectures, published three years after Civilization and Its Discontents:
The writings of Marx have taken the place of the Bible and the Koran as a source of revelation, though they would seem to be no more free from contradictions and obscurities than those older sacred books.
That every author will, at some point, let their guard down and commit a certain number of sophisms to writing and that no one, however justified our admiration, can ever entirely escape the pressures of their time, place, class, etc., are little more than truisms. Yet one wants to say more than just a generic truth about intellectuals, assert something genuinely interesting about Freud and perhaps even the relationship between psychoanalysis and communism.
*
Perhaps philosophy, in contrast to the apparently bland commonplaces regarding religion, will provide us with something of a more distinctive character.
The double movement of Marx’s simultaneous rejection and absorption of the “philosophers,” beginning with Hegel, is well-enough known that I will not spend the little time I have here detailing it. But there is a similar ambivalence in psychoanalysis—or, at least, in Freud himself. He denounced philosophers’ tendency to “haughtily point out . . . the intellectual inferiority” of psychoanalysis’ object of study. If this sounds like wounded pride, he repaid the favor, proclaiming that he had “no respect” for metaphysics, which he regarded as an “abuse of thinking.” Yet at an earlier moment in his life, perhaps before encountering the disdain of the philosophers, he described philosophy as his first intellectual calling before he turned to medicine. More strikingly still, he writes of “secretly nurs[ing] the hope of arriving by the same route [i.e. , medicine] at my own original objective, philosophy. For that was my original ambition.”
Nowhere is the failure, perhaps the impossibility, of this shared attempt to escape philosophy clearer than in the paragraph that concerns us here. Freud’s description of what “the communists believe” is no more and no less than a recapitulation of the debate that pre occupied the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries about the nature of man: Hobbes versus Rousseau. A vision of selfishness that can be checked only by the sacrifice of freedom to a leviathan versus one of natural man’s peaceable existence in a primal state of abundance.
Freud allies himself with Hobbes. In Civilization and Its Discontents, roughly two paragraphs before he declares what the communists believe, he asserts, “Homo homini lupus.” The communists will object that they have no interest in a theodicy of human nature, essentially good and corrupted by the institution of private property. They will say this is a travesty of Marx, even the “young,” romantic author of the 1844 Manuscripts. A pared-down anthropology of basic human needs is enough; there is no need for philosophical speculation. And much as Freud might aver a similar skepticism about the value of speculative moral metaphysics, his assertion of human selfishness is no less a philosophical parti pris than its opposite. (And, of course, the specter of religion remains—what else is this but an echo of the Augustinian polemic against Pelagius, with our inner wolf substituted for original sin?)
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The most theoretically interesting and least articulated portion of the passage, the mention of sexual competition, will serve as a further illustration of the difficulties of escaping philosophy.
Freud may admire the communists’ effort at economic revolution, yet he regards it as a moral project to reshape the moral fabric of human beings. The abolition of private property will only push the matter further back to other domains of competition and other forms of aggression and selfishness. And, eventually, the search for the basis of natural selfishness will reach sexuality’s constitutively aggressive dimension. Property and ownership would thus be understood as the displacement of an originally sexual possessiveness. The result is a confluence of two sorts of fetishism: The fetish character of commodities as self-subsisting bearers of value merges with the fetishism of the displaced libido redirected toward objects of the most heterogeneous sorts.
Perhaps the communists have an answer, namely that this shows precisely that the effort to abolish private property must entail a radical restructuring of sexual life. After all, one might grant Freud’s posited link between sexual and economic possessiveness and yet deny that restriction in one domain (the abolition of private property) must give rise to a precisely corresponding loosening in another (increased sexual aggressivity). The wager of the Freudo-Marxists was staked on precisely this point.
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The question, though, is to what extent such arguments, from whichever side they arise (one person’s modus ponens, and so on), rely upon the sort of substantive philosophical anthropology just mentioned.
In the fifth century, a professor of philosophy, Elias, who taught at the Platonic academy of Alexandria, began his introductory lectures with an argument, attributed to Aristotle, about the need to study philosophy: “If one ought to do philosophy,” he said, “then one ought to do philosophy. And if one ought not to do philosophy, then one ought to do philosophy.” The idea behind this older bit of sophistry is that by protesting against philosophy, one adopts a philosophical stance. There is, in other words, no alternative. But the urge to escape is strong, and the fact that one will never quite be free does not make the attempted flight any less worthwhile.
YAHYA MADRA
In Civilization and Its Discontents, Freud names the negativity at the heart of the social as aggression. In the history of social thought, the trope of negativity at the core of subjectivity (taking the form of aggressivity arising from self-love) as that which needs to be accounted for, managed, or domesticated has a long lineage. Hobbes wrote about the necessity of the stateform to govern it; Adam Smith claimed that the invisible hand of the market was sufficient for harnessing the negativity of self-interest.[1] In contrast, Marx took the irreducibility of class antagonism as his point of departure. To the extent that the conditions of reproduction of the social (in Freud’s terms, civilization) are not reducible to the conditions of reproduction of the direct producers of surplus labor in that society, class antagonism remains as the fundamental condition under which all societies will have to make do— with this making do always taking historically and contextually specific and ultimately singular forms. Here, class antagonism must be conceived not in terms of particular conflicts among different classes (as in lords and serfs, masters and slaves, or capitalists and workers) that can ultimately be superseded under a coming communism, but rather as the general impossibility of organizing the economies of surplus labor in a non-conflictual and harmonious manner under any mode of production, including communism.
To put it in properly class analytical terms, there is no one, ultimate way to organize the production, appropriation, distribution, and consumption of the social surplus. All the different ways of organizing surplus are attempts to make up for this constitutive lack, subjectivizing it through some specific form of regulating the flows of surplus and setting the contours of conflict and contestation as well as coordination, negotiation, and collaboration. Wage labor is one such form; it is both a solution to the constitutive lack and a social form that gives an institutional frame for the class conflict to realize itself in a domesticated form. (The so-called wage-profit frontier on which the collective agencies, representing labor and capital, struggle is one such domestication of class antagonism.) The communist proposition, as a critique of political economy, is that we must go through the fantasy of this frame, or, better yet, any such frame, and foreground the impossibility of reconciling class relation as a communist axiom.
Or, to repeat Lacan’s homological reading of Marxism and psychoanalysis, but this time in reverse, we can argue that the communist position, first and foremost, is to make “non-relation” an axiom. Here, the reference is to Lacan’s formalization of sexual difference through his antinomies (in particular, in Seminar XX), where he proposes that the masculine (the logic of exception) and the feminine (the logic of non-all) are two distinct and non-complementary ways of failing to constitute a stable sexual identity. While his formula “there is no sexual relation” was his way of disrupting the biological and reproductionist ideology of harmonious unification (two becoming one) underpinning the binary of the heterosexual couple, it has a much broader purchase, one that extends to his final clinic of the sinthome. This new clinic of knotting contends with the decline of the Name-of-the-Father at the level of social formation by engaging the analysands, who come forth as “ones-all-alone,” to use the language of Marie-Hélène Brousse, in their radical singularity as speaking bodies. More importantly, this axiom of non-relation has implications beyond the domain of sexuality, not only because the sexual is always already in excess of its domain of origin, disrupting and destabilizing the social, but also because Lacan’s formalization is an extraction that gives the axiom mobility across the entire field of the social—hence the possibility of a homology between Marxism and psychoanalysis.
Indeed, however scant, Marx did have a version of this axiom of non-relation: “From each according to their ability, to each according to their need.” It is rarely recognized that this formulation is Marx’s response to the bourgeois economic theory of supply and demand and its harmonious reconciliation under the rule of markets—in contrast to Marx’s axiom, the bourgeois axiom “to each according to their ability” is saturated with productivism and possessive individualism and erases the possibility of solidarity. If we are to counter the risk of reoccupation of the field opened in Marx’s discovery of class antagonism by fantasies of harmonious reconciliation, Marx’s formulation must not be read as a blueprint, ideal, or template, but as a communist “half-said” which delineates the structuring problematic of social reproduction. No doubt, now more than a century after the Soviet experiment (which seems to be Freud’s reference in 1930), the vexing problem of matching abilities to needs beyond market versus plan dichotomy remains to be tackled at the level of praxis. This is not a merely technical or computational problem that can be solved with the appropriate algorithms, precisely because neither ability nor need are reconciled and self-transparent categories that can be matched, coordinated, or, better yet, administered without the disruptive and destabilizing effects of jouissance.
This is the more radical implication of the contention that Freud articulates in these passages. Abilities, in all their real diversity, cannot escape being the screens for phantasmatic projections that aim to organize hierarchically this differential field along (to use Étienne Balibar’s formulation) anthropological differences between gender, race, sexuality, disability, and ultimately between intellectual difference (the so-called difference between the mental and the manual labor). Similarly, needs can never be fully expressed in social (or economic) demands; are always subverted by the excess of desire; and are always snared by drive circuits that get organized around imaginary economies of rivalry and invidious consumption (a genealogy can be traced back to Thorstein Veblen and even Adam Smith). The communist task, if we are to take Freud’s critique seriously, is to unceasingly problematize and experiment with each of these nodes and their non-relation, case by case, one by one, through this half-said (an axiom as opposed to an ideal) of communism that foregrounds the constitutive non-relation at the heart of social reproduction.
MAX FOX
I think it is pretty funny to learn that Freud’s critique of communism is that Marx failed to consider that the history of all hitherto existing society is the history of conflict between antagonistic interests. I’ll confess I don’t know enough Freud to do a good reading of what the mechanics of that joke reveal, so I’ll try and proceed as if he’s right. Of course, it is true that in the communist tradition there are concepts or images of communist society that are too flat, too static, maybe too mystified or religious to meaningfully pass for descriptions of human existence. It is interesting to think about what the communist movement looked like at the time Freud writes this text, 1929, which sees the beginning of the Third Period, the start of the worldwide Great Depression, the fascist electoral advance, and, in the USSR, the end of the New Economic Policy and the initiation of the first Five-Year Plan. It is a moment of immense import for the entire century, maybe the hinge itself, and one which the communists famously, and famously due to a question of theory or belief, got wrong.
Was there a right answer to the cruel riddle posed by history at that moment, and might the communists have arrived at it through taking on Freud’s critique? Perhaps there’s a way he correctly diagnoses the problem: That is, the communists exhibited a failure of imagination and were overtaken by the viciousness of capitalist aggression and its persistence even within nominally communist states of affairs. I still think Freud mischaracterizes what I understand to be the communist position, though in an interesting way, because the caricature of a communist fantasy of perfected human society without conflict obscures an element which I have always found to be foundational and which, moreover, is a striking point of contact between the communists and Freud. This is their shared premise for activity in the concept of free association.
For Freud, of course, free association is the “fundamental rule of psychoanalytic technique which the patient has to observe.” For Marx, it is the necessary condition of the communist society, which he mostly only ever really describes negatively, as the standpoint from which to critique the mystifications of bourgeois political economy: “The veil is not removed from . . . the process of material production, until it becomes production by freely associated men, and stands under their conscious and planned control.” Here already, there is another point of contact, the project of bringing the obscure material of human life into consciousness for the treatment of, or relief from, the past.
I have the impression that “free association” is not as prominent a communist tenet as some others, but it nevertheless has a venerable pedigree in Marx and appears with some regularity throughout the tradition up until this day. The free association of producers is the criterion by which, for example, Perry Anderson scans the landscape of post-revolutionary Europe for the minimal sign of communist life in a recent essay for New Left Review. Fidel Castro describes Cuba’s new “socialist society, our communist society,” as something that “must be eminently a truly free association of citizens” in a speech in 1965. Lenin, in a 1910 polemic against an opposing faction, describes free association as something the party demands from the state, but he also describes the party of the proletariat as itself “a free association, instituted to combat the ‘thoughts’ (read: the ideology) of the bourgeoisie.”
Freud might even agree. “I too think it quite certain that a real change in the relations of human beings to possessions would be of more help in this direction than any ethical commands,” he writes later in Civilization and Its Discontents. “[B]ut the recognition of this fact among socialists has been obscured and made useless for practical purposes by a fresh idealistic misconception of human nature.” So it would seem that a joint project of free association to combat this conception might be worthwhile.
JULIANA SPAHR
How did we arrive at this hellhole that Freud calls civilization?
In Civilization and Its Discontents, Freud describes it as the thing that we created to regulate the various bad things we seem to be hardwired to want to do. But, once created, because we are hardwired to want to do bad things, this civilization makes us miserable because it regulates us. Civilization: both necessary and terrible.
His beef with Marx, as best I can understand it, is that Marx looks elsewhere. The bad things that individuals in general want to do are not Marx’s concern. For Marx, private property is a form of structural aggression. It depends on the threat of force to exclude others from resources. It creates artificial scarcity unnecessarily. And it creates capitalists who are forced into competition to survive and workers who are subject to the systematic pressures of this competition as capitalists minimize their wages and maximize extraction.
For whatever reason, and this is where I confess I am not a Freud scholar, this annoys Freud, and he creates a sort of straw communism in this paragraph, one that claims that Marx seems to believe that if we just got rid of private property, the bad things that Freud believes we regulate through civilization, such as evil, the mistreatment of neighbors, ill will, and enmity among hu man beings, etc. , would go away. This, he insists, is naive. And, yes, it would be if it were what Marx is saying.
It took me some time to even understand what is going on in this paragraph, to be honest. But it helped me when I began to think of Freud as describing this fucked up world we find ourselves in and accepting it as just how it has to be because humans are inherently aggressive. And this fucked up world is so fucked up in so many ways that it causes him to say some of those things that he tends to say that always just seem weird to me and are usually about women and sometimes about women and their male children.
And in contrast, it helped me to think of Marx as describing this fucked up world we find ourselves in. He argues that the way we are, and thus the way civilization is, stem from fairly new and not at all innate ideas, like private property; he also alludes to moments when it has been otherwise, explaining how it can be otherwise for us, too.
Still, communism is not just structural; it is concerned with what individuals can or might do in this moment of otherwise ... so I want to end with that famous Marx quote, because it is something about how individuals might be under communism. Communist society, Marx states, “makes it possible for me to do one thing today and another thing tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticize after dinner.” And then he adds, “without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, herdsman or critic.” That’s the important part. Communism would allow us the freedom of not becoming fixed things, the freedom of not doing work for someone else who then skims off the top of our labor, and the freedom to flourish as we hunt and forage and husband and think.
APPENDIX SIGMUND FREUD
An excerpt from Civilization and Its Discontents, Chapter Five, pages 111–113 in SE, translated by Joan Riviere, edited by James Strachey.
The communists believe that they have found the path to deliverance from our evils. According to them, man is wholly good and is well-disposed to his neighbour; but the institution of private property has corrupted his nature. The ownership of private wealth gives the individual power, and with it the temptation to ill-treat his neighbour; while the man who is excluded from possession is bound to rebel in hostility against his oppressor. If private property were abolished, all wealth held in common, and everyone allowed to share in the enjoyment of it, ill-will and hostility would disappear among men. Since everyone’s needs would be satisfied, no one would have any reason to regard another as his enemy; all would willingly undertake the work that was necessary. I have no concern with any economic criticisms of the communist system; I cannot enquire into whether the abolition of private property is expedient or advantageous.[2] But I am able to recognize that the psychological premises on which the system is based are an untenable illusion. In abolishing private property we deprive the human love of aggression of one of its instruments, certainly a strong one, though certainly not the strongest; but we have in no way altered the differences in power and influence which are misused by aggressiveness, nor have we altered anything in its nature. Aggressiveness was not created by property. It reigned almost without limit in primitive times, when property was still very scanty, and it already shows itself in the nursery almost before property has given up its primal, anal form; it forms the basis of every relation of affection and love among people (with the single exception, perhaps, of the mother’s relation to her male child). If we do away with personal rights over material wealth, there still remains prerogative in the field of sexual relationships, which is bound to become the source of the strongest dislike and the most violent hostility among men who in other respects are on an equal footing. If we were to remove this factor, too, by allowing complete freedom of sexual life and thus abolishing the family, the germ-cell of civilization, we cannot, it is true, easily foresee what new paths the development of civilization could take; but one thing we can expect, and that is that this indestructible feature of human nature will follow it there.
[1] In his The Passions and The Interests: Political Arguments for Capitalism before Its Triumph (Princeton University Press, 1977), Albert O. Hirschman traces the genealogy of how the idea of pursuing one’s own economic interests was first separated from the other passions and sins and then came to be considered a countervailing force against them. He locates the transition not in Machiavelli or Hobbes, who in their analyses of sovereignty and governance began to take the pursuit of material self-interest as a given in a matter-of-fact manner, but in the writings of Montesquieu in France and Sir James Steuart in Scotland, who argued that the extension and deepening of commercial and industrial activity would delimit the arbitrary and authoritarian tendencies of the sovereigns.
[2] Anyone who has tasted the miseries of poverty in his own youth and has experienced the indifference and arrogance of the well-to-do, should be safe from the suspicion of having no understanding or good will toward endeavours to fight against the inequality of wealth among men and all that it leads to. To be sure, if an attempt is made to base this fight upon an abstract demand, in the name of justice, for equality for all men, there is a very obvious objection to be made—that nature, by endowing individuals with extremely unequal physical attributes and mental capacities, has introduced injustices against which there is no remedy.