Tag: Psychology

25 years of “Requiem For A Dream”
Entering the year 2000, America was at its peak power. The economy was roaring, the global economy fell in line with U.S. designs, military alliances were swelling, barriers to trade were falling. The American Dream was coming true for many.¹ It was from this summit of American prosperity where Darren Aronofsky’s Requiem for a Dream broke loose and tumbled down to the harried masses. It is an artifact of western capitalism that evokes Ozymandias: “Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!”²

Requiem for a Dream is a novel by Hubert Selby Jr. that was adapted into one of the most lachrymose films ever made, revolving around four characters in Coney Island. There is Sara Goldfarb, a lonely widow with an offer to appear as a contestant on some junk gameshow. Her son Harry is a heroin addict who feeds his habit by repetitively pawning his mother’s television set. His girlfriend, Marion Silver, has a talent for artistic textile designs but gradually becomes hooked on heroin herself. Their friend is the orphaned Tyrone C. Love, fumbling at some misguided effort to find acceptance in the low-level world of organized crime.

Predestination

The psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan said in no uncertain terms: “A letter always arrives at its destination.” The present moment manifests itself by way of a material reality and psychological being that have already crystallized.³ The chance encounter with your future partner; the bus you miss for the first time; the promotion you just got at work—these are the letters that arriving from addresses we have occupied in the past. In the film, this is symbolized quite literally with anxiety-inducing violins thrumming as Sara pushes her contestant form into the mailbox and Tyrone leaves the apartment to pick up a “pound of pure.” Their dreams are set in motion, their letters are out for delivery: Sara will get her 15 minutes of fame after years of invisibility, Marion will get her own artisanal clothing shop, Harry and Tyrone will prove they can earn the serious cash that nobody in their family ever had.

A letter always arrives at its destination but that place isn’t always intended by the sender. Dreams can turn into nightmares. Sara needs diet pills—amphetamines—from a quack doctor so that she will lose weight and fit into her favourite red dress. Harry and Tyrone need just “a little taste” to know how much to cut their product with. Marion needs to keep her creative energy up. We see a cotton ball swell with moisture. We see a syringe barrel boiling and a vein of blood pumping. And the dilated eyes—that eye—a vacant gaze into the abyss:

This is the Night, the interior of human being, existing here in phantasmagoric representations: here a bloody head suddenly shoots up and there another white shape, only to disappear as suddenly. We see this Night when we look a human being in the eye, looking into a Night which turns terrifying. From his eye the night of the world hangs out toward us.⁴

Image: Alamy

When the film reaches its climax, we see horrific scenes of Sara convulsing under electroshock therapy, Tyrone taunted by racist prison guards, the bloodspray from Harry’s infected arm being amputated and Marion’s grotesque humiliation as a prostitute before a perverted group of johns. Their letters had arrived.

American Dream

This film disturbed a generation of viewers because it is so much more than a cautionary tale about drugs. In fact, the shadow that Requiem casts over audiences does not even belong to drugs; it belongs to the American Dream. Selby writes in the preface to the novel:

I believe to pursue the American Dream is not only futile but self-destructive because ultimately it destroys everything and everyone involved with it. By definition it must, because it nurtures everything except those things that are important: integrity, ethics, truth, our very heart and soul.⁵

Whatever lofty ideals the phrase may have originally held, the American Dream was always destined to become entangled with notions of wealth and class in a capitalist society like the United States. At the outset of the film, vapid materialism had already hollowed out the lives of our characters and this made them vulnerable to toxic escapism in the form of television, drugs and junk food. Karl Marx:

In all forms of society there is one specific kind of production which predominates over the rest, whose relations thus assign rank and influence to the others. It is a general illumination which bathes all the other colours and modifies their particularity. It is a particular ether which determines the specific gravity of every being which has materialized within it.⁶

Like the audience, the characters of Requiem are children of capitalism and this is why it haunts us. The American Dream is a capitalist construction that preaches richness in consumption. What Sara, Harry, Marion and Tyrone expose is our collective inability to find richness in “our very heart and soul,” to use Selby’s phrase.

The Gravity of Capitalism

Sara’s pre-standing addiction to television, specifically a self-improvement game show, reveals a person yearning for meaning in her life as a widow and mother to an emotionally absent drug addicted son. The sweets are making her fat. The game show sells a self-help program for $39.95. In a revelatory hallucination, a film crew takes down the walls of her apartment and reveal that her living room has been the TV studio all along. There is no product for Sara; Sara is the product.

Harry appears to have fallen wayward sometime after his father passed away. He does not ask his mother for money to directly feed his drug habit. Instead he has constructed a ritual whereby he barges into her apartment and takes her television set only for her to retrieve it later at the pawnshop. The pawnbroker facilitates the monetary transaction between Harry and Sara, giving Harry the requisite emotional distance to lead such a tormented life. The first thing he does when he scores some cash is purchase his mother a new television set from Macy’s. After extending this material gesture to his mother he can brave to sit down and talk with her. Sara tells him that she does not want commodities; she wants a grandchild. Harry falls to tears upon realizing the void his mother is facing—and the bodies of Marion and himself are too polluted to build the family she asks for. Dazzling cash stacks and getting high have estranged him from his true dreams in life: happiness for his mother and Marion on the pier.

Mirrors hold a significant register in psychoanalysis because it is at the mirror stage when we become cognizant of ourselves as autonomous beings and individuate from our mothers. As Tyrone regards his sliding mirror, his business is doing well and a beautiful woman awaits him in bed. The film flashes back to a young Tyrone running to his mother and jumping up on her lap. “I told you, mom, one day I’d make it,” he whispers. She replies: “You don’t have to make anything, my sweet. You just have to love your mama.” His face belies bewilderment at this recollection: while he has learned to “make it” by a material standard, he has never learned how to love another person. His girlfriend disappears from the plot after this scene.

Marion must have the steepest fall from grace of all four characters: from a comfortable upper middle class family to a drug addicted prostitute. We learn that she resents the emotional coldness of her parents who only care about money and appearances. For this, she defies them by exchanging sex for drugs with her shrink and slumming it with Harry in a decrepit apartment. But we learn that she is not much different from her money-minded folks after all. At the same time she rejects her parents fixation with their textile business, she aspires to have one herself. The warmth and comfort of her relationship with Harry turns cold and transactional as they spiral into addiction. It is this narrow view of human beings as objects of exchange that ultimately makes her addiction vulnerable to exploitation by wealthy predators.

In his Paris Manuscripts, Marx wrote: “Private property has made us so one-sided that an object is only ours when it exists for us as capital, or when it is directly possessed, eaten, drunk, worn, inhabited, etc. In the place of all physical and mental senses there has therefore come the sheer estrangement of all these senses, the sense of having.”⁷ As our labour and means of life have become saleable commodities, our existence is reduced to that of a spiritually-barren market participant. Community is dissolved, friendships are transactional and familial bonds are strained. So long as this alienated world exists, Requiem will shuffle in its shadows.

Thanks for reading!

Footnotes:
1. Noted by Hubert Selby Jr. in his Preface to Requiem for a Dream (De Capo Press, 2000): v. ↩︎
2. Percy Bysshe Shelley, Ozymandias. ↩︎
3. See Jacques Lacan, Écrits (W.W. Norton, 2006): 28-29 and Slavoj Žižek, Enjoy Your Symptom! (Routledge, 1992): 1-27 for more on Lacan’s purloined letter and future anteriors. ↩︎
4. G.W.F. Hegel, Jena Lectures. ↩︎
5. Selby, Requiem for a Dream, v. ↩︎
6. Karl Marx, Grundrisse (Penguin, 1993): 106-7. ↩︎
7. Karl Marx, Economic & Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844. ↩︎
23 Oct 25
Ask the Editor: “Online Shopping and Overspending”
Dear editor,

There’s too much out there already. I’m online shopping and overspending. I can’t say exactly when it started, it crept up on me sometime after I started my current office job. I’m reading promotional emails at lunch and browsing my socials and Amazon after dinner. I am getting at least one new package every day.

The worst part is I’ll start browsing for something that I think I need to buy, like tablecloths, and end up with a couple of belts. I’ll forget about the tablecloth until the next day and it happens again. Money can get tight when I need it unexpectedly or for a social obligation. It all seems so wasteful and I’m feeling guilty. What can I do?

Thank you,

Patricia.

Dear Patricia,

You are a human being. There is a side to our nature that is thoughtful, caring, cooperative and holistic. This is where the guilt stems from. Then there is another side that is impulsive, greedy, hungry and competitive. This is where the overconsumption stems from.

It is a deafening fact that we exist in an economic system that appeals to the worst side of our nature and it makes us miserable. We do not choose these circumstances but we are wise to understand them.

In Lacanian terms, what is happening is repetition stemming from a lack. In the process of becoming fully developed subjective individuals, a split develops between conscious and unconscious, ourselves and others, who we think we are and who we really are. The resulting void is the lack that causes desire.¹ When you intend to buy one thing only to buy something else, as in a trance—that is not important here. It may feel as though you are filling a void with that flash of dopamine that is transmitted once your item is on its way. But this is a void that cannot be filled, it can only be distracted from and kept away at a distance. The impossibility of complete satisfaction will drive repetition, resulting in deflation upon realization that the void remains.

Knowing this won’t fix your problem but hopefully it helps break the current pattern of repetition. Scroll to the bottom of those promotional emails and unsubscribe yourself from all of them. Replace browsing time with another activity, preferably off-phone. Make a conscious effort to buy exclusively from brick and mortar stores, where possible.

Consider Heraclitus: “Always having what we want may not be the best good fortune. Health seems sweetest after sickness, food in hunger, goodness in the wake of evil, and at the end of daylong labour, sleep.”² Once novelty, need and planning are incorporated into your purchases, they will feel gratifying once more.

In sols,

Your editor.

Send your questions to the Reclamation: editor@thereclamation.co

Footnotes:
1. Calum Neill, Jacques Lacan: The Basics (Routledge, 2023): 56-58. ↩︎
2. Heraclitus, Fragments (Penguin, 2003): 69. ↩︎
01 Oct 25
Psychoanalyzing “Seinfeld”
Every second our senses send approximately 11 million bits of data to our brains for processing. To avoid overload, only a maximum of 120 bits is handled by our conscious selves at any one time. That means 99.9999% of the information that our brains receive is unconsciously filtered out in a process known as sensory gating. What information actually registers with our conscious minds is determined by a range of factors—our knowledge, passions, past experience and the immediate environment.

There is no doubt that Larry David and Jerry Seinfeld mastered the art of observational humour. It works by dredging up universal experiences familiar to the audience—but only familiar at the level of the unconscious. Each episode bounces like a pinball against the bulk of overlooked perceptions, fleeting thoughts and petty nuisances that form the social unconscious. In this way the fabled “show about nothing” becomes “a show about everything.”

Less Than Nothing

Ever had to wait a while for a table at a restaurant? There’s a Seinfeld for that. Ever encountered a hostile service worker? There’s a Seinfeld for that. Ever had an encounter with a communist? There’s a Seinfeld for that. Ever had someone call you by the wrong name? There’s a Seinfeld for that. Ever been short of toilet paper when you needed it most? There’s a Seinfeld for that. Any and every petty occurrence of social life is picked up and taken to its extreme end in the world of Seinfeld, where exclamation points end relationships and lunchtime calzones make-or-break careers.

The situations in the series may seem obvious at the surface but it is no easy feat to keep the stakes spinning so high on axes so small. Seinfeld accomplishes this by removing the frictions that rub against the grain of our lives in the West. The financial stress of mortgage payments or annual rent increases; the social pressure to start a family; the heartbreak of losing a relationship; the emotional complications of friendship; depression owing to unrequited dreams; the precarity of work in the neoliberal economy—the emotional toll of life is completely alien to the protagonists of Jerry Seinfeld, George Costanza, Elaine Benes and Cosmo Kramer.

The worst financial disruption in the series occurs when an unemployed George is forced to move back into his childhood home for nearly two seasons. But this is only used as a narrative device to foreground the comically dysfunctional relationship of George’s parents. Outside of this setback for George, the characters all exist in vaguely middle class stations without need—even Kramer, who doesn’t have a job or clear means of support.

In the absence of economic pressures, the social world of these characters has the luxury of collapsing into the myopic. When Jerry’s girlfriend declines his invitation to a bite of his apple pie, he spends the episode investigating her behaviour and figures she is psychotic. When Kramer spots a former roommate at the airport who stiffed him on $240 two decades prior, he purchases an even more expensive flight ticket to confront the man. When Elaine realizes her apartment building is just outside of a Chinese restaurant’s delivery zone, she moves into a janitor’s closet across the street in order to get their flounder delivered. When George’s girlfriend passively receives a “thank you” for a salad that he purchased, his demand for recognition causes the dissolution of their relationship.

As director Tom Cherones flipped through early scripts of the show, he struggled to understand it. “This storyline all about Jerry buying a suede jacket and everyone flipping out about the lining being pink-and-white striped. Why was the lining of a jacket such a big deal? Who fucking cared?”¹ Good question.

By itself, the material comfort of the show’s protagonists does not explain their total fixation with the excruciating minutiae of everyday life. But these are people devoid of any lofty goals or long-term ambitions beyond the immediate situation before them. The Marxian psychoanalyst Erich Fromm warned “if man does not overcome his infantile strivings…he is torn between the desires of the child within himself and the claims which he makes as a grown-up person.”²

Through the Looking-Glass

The infantile tendencies of the characters are demonstrated throughout the series. Jerry habitually eats kids cereal and idolizes Superman. George sobs during Home Alone and reveals his favourite drink is milk with Bosco chocolate syrup. Elaine chews Jujyfruits and likes the kid-friendly movie Sack Lunch while her more refined boyfriend, boss and friends insist on The English Patient. Kramer obsessively safeguards a game of Risk and rolls around the neighbourhood on a girls’ bike.

The objects of the characters are torn between the social reality of adult human beings and those carried over from their childhoods. This is further reflected in their inability to form emotional attachments. The romantic relationships in the show resemble sibling rivalries more than affectionate bonds and the four friends themselves often treat one another callously unless they need something. The neuroses displayed in Seinfeld tilts toward what Sigmund Freud termed “primary narcissism,” wherein an individuals’ “only realities are his own bodily and mental experiences, and the world outside does not yet [emotionally] exist.”³

This neurotic presentation was fuelled by Larry David’s notorious “no hugging, no learning,” rule for the characters. These characters were condemned to be consumed by the socially unconscious “little things in life” and therefore had to be regressed themselves—their sensory gates open to a conscious mind that is less developed than the typical adult faculty.

The universal relatability of Seinfeld thus has two layers: in the situations presented to the characters and the characters themselves. That is because primary narcissism is a psychological development stage that we all pass through en route to adolescence. This stage is shed as our personalities mature but it is embryonic and foundational to further development. Freud wrote: “The earlier phases of development are in no sense still preserved; they have been absorbed in the later phases, for which they provided the material…We can only be sure that the preservation of the past in mental life is more the rule than a strange exception.”⁴

We do not approve of the characters’ actions in Seinfeld but we immediately recognize the situations that confront them and follow the logic of their response. This is because, for some period of our development, we were them. In Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious, Freud observes that peculiarities in the infantile way of thinking “are retained in the unconscious of adults” and that “any recovering of unconscious material of this kind strikes us in general as ‘comic.’” Suspension of disbelief is achieved whenever the characters’ actions or schemes result in failure and ostracism. The self-defeat of the characters is never-ending and it imputes just enough realism to a show that would otherwise slip off a fantastical cliff.

While some cultural creations take many years before they are appreciated—Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, David Lynch’s Twin Peaks and Orson Welles’ Citizen Kane are some examples— Seinfeld gained massive resonance with an audience during its run by ruthlessly pulling out those perceptions normally filtered by our consciousness and throwing them to our feet. It has maintained its popularity in the years since, if Netflix’s recent $500 million acquisition for streaming rights is any indication. But it is a product of its decade.

The Freezer of Time

Seinfeld could not be created today because the social unconscious has changed too radically in the years since facing disasters such as the “war on terror,” accelerating environmental ruination, destabilizing refugee crises,’ COVID-19 and western deindustrialization. It is not a coincidence that the first full season of Seinfeld aired in 1992—the very same year when Francis Fukuyama’s The End of History and The Last Man was released. The grand Cold War ideological debates were over, neoliberal capitalism had triumphed, history had ended and “the little things” were the only remainder. Seinfeld was the ultimate statement from the yuppie middle class of the 1990s on the irrelevance of politics, its ignorance of class conflict, their indifference toward collective aspirations and the futility of fretting over the future. Seinfeld is that head space containing everything that ever was and would be.

The continuing appeal of this postmodernist, ‘90s-era “show about nothing” is best explained by its striking quaintness and naïveté in the eyes of contemporary viewers. To continue with Freud, in Beyond the Pleasure Principle he describes instincts as “an urge inherent in living organic matter for the restoration of an earlier state.”⁵ What Seinfeld offers today is a dream-like return to the apparently simpler, more pleasant social unconscious of a bygone era. Thirty years ago Seinfeld was the zeitgeist; now, it is the palpable escape.

Thanks for reading!

Footnotes:
1. Jennifer Keishin Armstrong, Seinfeldia (Simon and Schuster, 2016), 49. ↩︎
2. Erich Fromm, Beyond the Chains of Illusion: My Encounter with Marx and Freud (Bloomsbury, 2020), 31. ↩︎
3. Ibid, 46. ↩︎
4. Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents (Broadview Editions, 2016),51-2. ↩︎
5. Sigmund Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle (Broadview Editions, 2011), 75-6. ↩︎
24 Sep 25
Ask the Editor: “I Am Losing My Hair”
Dear editor,

I am losing my hair. The first time I noticed was a few months ago and I did not think on it much. But the signs are everywhere: cleaning the shower drain, fluffing my pillow. The process is accelerating. Yes, I have been to the doctor. If there is a vitamin or mineral deficiency, it is not showing. Stress, genes and/or hormones, she said.

I don’t think anybody can fix this problem with the follicles. What I am left with is a distressed feeling, particularly around the mirror. I dread to run my hands through my hair. What is left of it, that is. Any thoughts?

Thank you,

Alex.

Dear Alex,

I want to first emphasize that what you are experiencing is completely normal. Despite a high prevalence of baldness and hair loss that affects both men and women, I have yet to meet anyone who was not extremely upset by the process. In psychoanalytic terms this relates to castration anxiety. As the philosopher Slavoj Žižek explains, the horror of castration “is the absence of the penis, i.e., the fact that there is nothing to see where the gaze expects something.” The power of Edvard Munch’s Scream is struck by the subject’s missing nose and ears more-so than the shriek itself.¹ When it comes to hair loss, it is the sight of skin where one expects to see hair that is distressing most of all.

The good news is that this is only symbolic. Like any other loss, the shock of baldness interrupts our imaginary place in the social order. But once we have internalized our new reality, we embrace the social order anew. I’d like to refer you to an article written by Stuart Heritage and published in The Guardian: “Going bald is terrible. But being bald? Actually not bad.” In other words, the worst part is coming to accept the new state of being. Whether your hair loss halts or you get plugs or you shave it off—that will not matter. Once your new state of being is embraced the anxiety will dissipate.

In sols,

Your editor.

Send your questions to the Reclamation: editor@thereclamation.co

Footnotes:
1. Slavoj Žižek, Enjoy Your Symptom! (Routledge, 1992), 130. ↩︎
04 Sep 25
Alienation
This article is part of a series on classical Marxism.

In the typical western city, one does not have to search very hard to find the signs: derelict buildings, littered streets, homeless with pockmarked faces pushing carts filled with bottles. Across North America, opioid abuse and a cost of living crisis have sent homeless populations climbing against a backdrop of city blocks scorched by wildfire, ground tremors from fracking, mass flooding by storm surges and condos of glittering glass. In 2018, Chris Hedges published one of the most potent illustrations of capitalist alienation with America, The Farewell Tour.

In the book, he sets the table early: “Hurricane after hurricane, monster storm after monster storm, flood after flood, wildfire after wildfire, drought after drought will gradually cripple the empire, draining its wealth and resources and creating swaths of territory defined by lawlessness and squalor.”¹

Hedges then introduces us to Christine Pagano, a woman who fell into drugs during high school after her stepfather was caught sleeping with her 16-year-old classmate and her home life imploded. Years after experimenting with heroin, she would turn to prostitution in order to feed a $500 heroin habit and sold her body in Jersey City to Wall Street traders, business executives and bankers “who were the prostitutes’ main customers.”² She shares that this was preferable to Camden, New Jersey, where “‘the poverty is so bad. People rob you for $5, literally for $5. They would pull a gun on you for no money.’”³

Then there is Robin Rivera, the product of a troubled home who later earned minimum wage at a hair salon in Los Angeles. She accepted a proposition from a talent agent in the pornography industry in the hope of making ends meet. “‘They tied me up and hung me from the ceiling,’ she said,” adding that she was also electrocuted with a cattle prod. “‘They put a hook in my ass’” and “‘tied my ponytail to it. They tied my arms to a barrel. They tied my legs to a barrel. He put a vibrator on me…Five hours is a long time. For $900.’”⁴

Depravities of this kind are rarely discussed in the media. This could be due to the sheer numbers of those who indulge—up to one-quarter of web searches and one-third of downloads relate to pornography, after all. But it is corollary to the economic imbalances and deprivations of the economic sphere, the “rough neighbourhoods” on the other side of the tracks in our cities or the beggars encountered at home and abroad. As noted in “Ecology,” capitalism turns both land and people into commodities—“venal objects”—and this becomes the lived experience for all-too-many in rich and poor countries alike.⁵

When Marx discusses “alien capital” confronting “alien labour,” he is spotlighting two economic processes which move on their own momentum, as though independent of human agency.⁶ Human beings are creative by nature and we define ourselves by conscious, self-directed activity. Under capitalism, this is rarely the case. Individuality and self-expression is seldom found in production; work is transactional and conducted under authoritarian oversight for a wage on which to subsist. In his Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts, Marx writes that “the need for money is therefore the real need created by the modern economy, and the only need which it creates.” It is this need of money that elevates exchange-value to the highest priority, with use-value of only secondary consideration to a profitable exchange. Work is reduced to a pursuit of that universal commodity, money, and it is only in that cramped space of time off the job when we are free to express ourselves, largely as consumers. Due to the energy consumed by employment, leisure itself is distorted and becomes a site of excess and expense. Born of this common need for money, we see an extension of products which appeal to our base instincts, subservient only “to inhuman, depraved, unnatural and imaginary appetites”—of the sort highlighted in the above paragraphs.⁷

As psychoanalyst Erich Fromm interpreted Marx, “alienation leads to the perversion of all values.” Because economic aims are “the supreme aim of life, man fails to develop any truly moral values,” and “the riches of a good conscience, of virtues, etc.” are impossible as they lack monetary impetus.⁸ The capitalist system of production severs society from the splendour of nature and turns individuals into replaceable parts—whether they be numbered employees and managers or prostitutes and johns. Freethinking and meditative contemplation is thus muzzled with individuals crippled by a pursuit of exploitation and libidinous excitations. Downstream from a mountain of emissions and cheap labour are resort vacations and cruises, restaurants serving high-priced cocktails and IMAX movies with sensory-melting special effects. This is what passes through the free time of conforming consumers under capitalism today.

Engels saw this “spiritual-barrenness” through all echelons of society. Corporate conglomerates are the fountainhead of prepackaged, empty pleasures but there is a social context to it. Everyone seeking to maintain or improve their standing within the capitalist hierarchy ultimately become slaves to their own employment—even elite financiers and CEOs become “slave of his own capital and his own profit-getting.”⁹ Even the ruling class beneficiaries of capitalism’s wealth find themselves with limited agency when it comes to maintaining their standing. If they do not open mass markets, pollute, debt-shark or shrewdly exploit, they will simply be overtaken by a more capable servant of capitalist expansion.

The total alienation of the individual by the ever-complex and expanding process of capitalist production is the reason behind mental health epidemics. In the United States, 90% of people believe there is a crisis of mental health and 20% experience acute symptoms. In Canada, almost half the population is estimated to experience episodes of mental illness by age 40. In Britain, depression is the condition most commonly encountered by the National Health Service and the instructor Mark Fisher observed: “Many of the teenage students I encountered seemed to be in a state of what I would call depressive hedonia…an inability to do anything else except pursue pleasure. There is a sense that ‘something is missing’—but no appreciation that this mysterious, missing enjoyment can only be accessed beyond the pleasure principle.”¹⁰ Supporting the Marxist theory of alienation are the many studies concluding that the more a country is penetrated by capital relations, the worse the mental health becomes. Fisher explains: “When it actually arrives capitalism brings with it a massive desacralization of culture. It is a system which is no longer governed by any transcendent Law; on the contrary, it dismantles all such codes, only to re-install them on an ad hoc basis.”¹¹ The implication is that less-developed countries contain communitarian cultures that are less eroded by capital and experience lower rates of mental illness when compared to the hyper-competitive, technologically advanced and socially isolating realms of wealthy capitalist nations.

But the task of building an unalienated, harmonious society necessary to individual freedom and human flourishing will not be accomplished by sliding backward on the development scale. Marx did not advocate for an anti-capitalist world, but rather, a post-capitalist one. This means negating the liberal order by incorporating capitalism’s high economic productivity while removing its deleterious effects on the social fabric and natural environment. Capitalist productive forces have brought humanity an enormous capacity to produce but an incredibly inefficient and wasteful manner of allocation. By exerting a conscious, democratic control over the production process, a material output could be allocated according to need rather than payment. The pursuit of exchange-values creates an alienating and immoral world but the pursuit of use-values reverses this effect. Houses to live in rather than speculate with. Medicine to save lives rather than profit. Nature for its aesthetics and life-giving functions rather than plunder. Food grown for nutritional quality instead of an ultra-processed quantity.

Use-values demand broad input from consumers and workers, they demand the elimination of noxious products and exploitative services from production, they demand positive, humanistic outcomes from artificial intelligence, they promote free time and activity that nurtures the latent talents within all individuals. In other words, they place moral virtue, community, family, mental tranquility and natural beauty into the heart of economic production.

A post-capitalist and unalienated free association is one where people are their own masters, liberated from state authority, irrational market fluctuations and corporate dictates. To quote Marx, “the associated producers regulate their interchange with Nature rationally, bring it under their common control, instead of being ruled by it as by some blind power; they accomplish their task with the least expenditure of energy and under conditions most adequate to their human nature and most worthy of it… Beyond it begins that development of human power, which is its own end, the true realm of freedom, which, however, can flourish only upon that realm of necessity as its basis.”¹²

Further reading:

Karl Marx, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844.

———–
1. Chris Hedges, America, The Farewell Tour (Simon & Schuster, 2018), 34. ↩︎
2. Ibid, 62. ↩︎
3. Ibid, 65. ↩︎
4. Ibid, 129. ↩︎
5. John Bellamy Foster, Marx’s Ecology: Materialism and Nature (Monthly Review Press, 2000), 74. ↩︎
6. Karl Marx, Grundrisse (Penguin, 2005), 266. ↩︎
7. Karl Marx, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844. ↩︎
8. Erich Fromm, “Alienation,” Marx’s Concept of Man. ↩︎
9. Friedrich Engels, Anti-Dühring and Other Works (Graphyco Editions, 2021), 157. ↩︎
10. Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? (Zero Books, 2009), 21-22. ↩︎
11. Ibid, 5-6. ↩︎
12. Karl Marx, “Chapter 48,” Capital: Volume Three. ↩︎
04 Apr 25