Nick Malherbe: Anti-Capitalism as a Form of Organization: A Psychoanalytic Approach
I. Introduction While "anti-capitalism" appears to be a simple or even self-evident term, it triggers a series of conceptual and political difficulties. For instance, "if we are against capitalism, can we clearly state what we are for?" [1] The term further implies a multitude of conflicting Left political stances, including anarchism, radical feminism, decoloniality, and communitarianism. History also demonstrates that, despite vastly different modes of discourse, both liberal reformism and fascist nationalism have employed anti-capitalist rhetoric. One could say that the term’s political referent is too broad, lacking the firm conviction, clear reference, and commitment required to drive political progress.
Views opposing the concept of "anti-capitalism" treat it as a "broad signifier," arguing that it contains various rhetorical positions, analytical tendencies, and political stances. However, these arguments seem to overlook the organizational form represented by anti-capitalism—that is, the significance of anti-capitalism in converging, concentrating, reproducing, sustaining, and deploying collective action against capital. (1) As an organizational form, anti-capitalism upholds the principle that political groups are not assembled or organized through immutable or pre-set forms. In other words, collective political will and the demands for emancipation in a specific period construct anti-capitalist organization. The fundamental negativity of anti-capitalism allows the collective to adopt the most appropriate organizational form under existing conditions to organize the most transformative actions. Precisely because of this, anti-capitalist organization can launch assaults on capital across various links of production, markets, and the sphere of social reproduction. (2) Diversified anti-capitalist means ensure that it retains a highly adaptable mechanism of political commitment in form.
It can be said that anti-capitalism is a "loose signifier," referring to a series of organizational forms possessing certain political commitments, each developing independently according to the specific needs of their respective struggles. Our attempts to engage with, analyze, theorize, critique, and justify this form of political organization benefit largely from the radical negativity inherent in the signifier "anti-capitalism." Psychoanalytic theory is particularly helpful for understanding various phenomena of aberration, mental structures, taboo restrictions, contradictory oppositions, and symbolic displacements, as well as the arbitrariness in interpersonal relations and the discontent within social interaction. It is these factors that constitute the negativity-filled organizational form of anti-capitalism. (3)
Some scholars oppose utilizing psychoanalysis to understand anti-capitalism. They might ask: in the face of climate catastrophe, land dispossession, neo-fascism, mass incarceration, and imperialist war, of what use is psychoanalysis? To this, we must point out that psychoanalysis helps us understand the limitations of a politics of resistance that is obsessed with a single organizational form of anti-capitalism. This will prompt us to reflect on how different organizational forms act according to the actual needs of emancipation, and the psychological impact such actions produce on the subjects advancing the anti-capitalist political struggle. (4) This article argues that the anti-capitalist struggle is a collaborative political struggle of subjects suffering from various degrees of trauma; this can also be summarized as a psychological struggle. In view of this, psychoanalysis provides an effective method that helps us understand the mechanisms of psychic dynamics within the anti-capitalist struggle and the human nature contained therein.
II. Anti-capitalism and its Recuperative Capacity Anti-capitalism is generally understood as a conscious political stance—that is, the opposition of individuals and/or collectives to various forms of ownership, economic relations, psychological impacts, and modes of distribution and production under the capitalist political-economic system. (5) Although anti-capitalist action can be carried out spontaneously, if it is to consolidate strength—that is, to obtain the capacity to achieve its goals—it must be incorporated into a political organization. (6) As a distinct concept, the term "anti-capitalism" first gained widespread attention in 1999, when protests at the World Trade Organization meeting in Seattle were viewed as anti-capitalist. Such protests were typically characterized by direct action, resistance to ideological dogma, and the privileging of non-hierarchical relations; therefore, anti-capitalism was initially frequently associated with anarchism. (7) Today, the term "anti-capitalism" has also been adopted by other political factions of the progressive Left.
Anti-capitalist subjects are committed to constructing specific organizational forms, yet a series of alternative forms exist within the symbolic order of anti-capitalism. In his research, Paul Chatterton found that anti-capitalist action is influenced by different locations, identities, social relations, organizational practices, and political strategies, none of which are static or predetermined. To systematize the plurality of anti-capitalist stances, Erik Olin Wright proposed a typology of anti-capitalism, which includes smashing capitalism (the revolutionary overthrow of the capitalist political economy), eroding capitalism (evolutionary/electoral politics), taming capitalism (reformist measures), resisting capitalism (struggles that do not attempt to seize state power), and escaping capitalism (micro-alternatives to capitalism). Orthodox Marxism views the proletarian subject as the practitioner of revolution. However, anti-capitalist practice situates the resistance to capitalism within a series of subjects, actions, and settings. The 1999 Seattle protests manifested this characteristic. As Slavoj Žižek argued:
"Today, everyone is 'anti-capitalist.' Even Hollywood starts making 'socially critical' movies... This shows that the signifier 'anti-capitalism' has already lost its subversive character. Instead, what we should discuss is the self-evident opposite of this 'anti-capitalism'—the belief that the 'democracy' honest Americans possess can substantially dismantle the (capitalist) conspiracy. This is the core of global capitalism today and a true Master-Signifier: democracy." (8)
In Žižek's view, a public committed to emancipation must abandon the anti-capitalist stance because our political opponents are also utilizing the term to garner popular support for capitalist liberal-democratic reforms. Today, billionaires, cinematic blockbusters, and politicians seeking total stability are all likely to express anti-capitalist sentiments to avoid public reproach. (9) Žižek believes that if people adhered to a specific form of anti-capitalism, the above situation would not occur.
The combination of liberalism and anti-capitalism has produced many politico-psychological phenomena. We might borrow the term "enjoyment" (jouissance) from Lacanian psychoanalysis to understand these phenomena. Enjoyment is an unconscious satisfaction. People generate discontent when breaking or transgressing a seemingly coherent symbolic order, and this "discontent" fixed upon "transgression" stimulates the subject's unconscious satisfaction. (10) If both sides of a struggle use the term "anti-capitalism," the referent of the term becomes the slightly reformed neoliberal status quo—capitalism by other means. In this way, anti-capitalism loses its appeal on a psychic level because it cannot provide any form of enjoyment. Consequently, enjoyment is forced to be ceded to right-wing politics, whose path to enjoyment lies in excessive racism, authoritarianism, nationalism, xenophobia, and sexism. (11)
We need not accept the liberal recuperation of anti-capitalism. A major facet of the Left struggle is the refusal to be symbolized. Similarly, anti-capitalism does not have to use its symbolic power to speak for capital reformism. To return anti-capitalism to "progressive politics," one must strip away liberal certainty and permissiveness. In other words, the symbolic coordinates of anti-capitalism must find their foundation in a political commitment that identifies with radical negativity. This radical negativity also cannot be drowned out by the symbols of liberal capitalist ideology. To achieve this, anti-capitalism must be viewed as an organizational form that contains the contradictory and negative factor behind political activity, knowledge, and subjectivity—lack. (12)
Emancipatory anti-capitalism must center its work on class struggle and anti-economic exploitation, but its modes of struggle must be coordinated with the expansion of neoliberal capitalism. Therefore, a broad anti-capitalist class struggle must be rooted in a series of struggles—feminism, decoloniality, ecologism, and anti-racism—deriving from them a mass base, a moral foundation, and legitimacy. Anti-capitalism is always a contingent mode among various forms and cannot be predetermined. Nonetheless, we can explore what anti-capitalism means to those organized within its symbolic order. Given this, psychoanalytic theory is particularly effective for studying the psychological identification with radical negativity and its political potential. Before arguing for the politico-psychological value inherent in anti-capitalism, it is necessary to trace the numerous historical paths through which psychoanalysis, as a system of thought and clinical practice, has advanced the anti-capitalist stance.
III. Psychoanalysis and Anti-Capitalism The development of psychoanalysis reflects a history of fluctuating political commitments. Freud’s theoretical system represented a bourgeois drive; once this drive was excavated, psychoanalysis became a theoretical tool for various schools of thought. It has spoken for liberalism, helping people adapt to capitalist exploitation [2]; assisted colonialism in Palestine and Algeria [3]; stood for neo-conservatism in much of contemporary Europe [4]; and even supported fascism in Latin America [5]. We also cannot deny the racism and patriarchy within mainstream psychoanalytic practice. [6]
Since its inception, psychoanalysis has also been used to speak for specific anti-capitalist tasks. Although Freud himself held differing opinions on the politicization of psychoanalysis, he nonetheless insisted that psychoanalytic theory should be used to understand the repression and alienation brought about by the development of capitalist political economy. In the early 20th century, several prominent psychoanalysts interpreted Freud’s ideas through a Marxist lens, combining psychoanalysis with artistic expressionism and radical politics.
After Freud’s death in 1939, psychoanalysis continued to integrate with various forms of anti-capitalism. On the eve of World War II, the German Institute for Social Research (the Frankfurt School) drew upon Freudian Marxism to understand unconscious desire, economic change, and capitalist culture. [7] While most members of the Frankfurt School remained silent on the issue of colonialism and had few links to working-class social movements, the academic influence of the School’s application of psychoanalysis to anti-capitalist analysis cannot be underestimated. [8] In the mid-20th century, anti-capitalists in the French-speaking world embraced psychoanalytic theory, including Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari, Jean-Paul Sartre, Jean-François Lyotard, Frantz Fanon, and Louis Althusser. In the 1970s, Juliet Mitchell utilized Freudian concepts to understand mental life in patriarchal capitalist societies; Christopher Lasch used psychoanalytic theory to explore the phenomenon of cultural narcissism in the United States; and the Ljubljana Lacanian School [9] combined German Idealism with Lacanian psychoanalytic theory to advocate for (typically Marxist) socialist theory. Scholars such as Slavoj Žižek and Alain Badiou played a key role in developing and strengthening what Yanis Stavrakakis calls the "Lacanian Left." In the 1980s, the post-Marxism of Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe influenced the Essex School, which combined post-structuralism with psychoanalysis. Since the 1990s, Judith Butler’s best-selling work on gender performativity has had a massive impact on anti-capitalist feminists. In this work, Butler cited numerous psychoanalysts, including Freud, Joan Riviere, Lacan, and Julia Kristeva.
Today, many influential anti-capitalists also utilize psychoanalytic theory to interpret social phenomena. Butler uses the theories of Melanie Klein [10] to conduct a feminist analysis of the precarity of individual life in capitalist society and advocates for anti-capitalist practice through non-violent means. Derek Hook employs psychoanalytic concepts to explore desire and temporality under the racial capitalist order in South Africa. Todd McGowan utilizes Freudian and Lacanian theory to study the individual’s unconscious attachment to capitalism. Some scholars have also attempted to advance an unconscious interpretation of anti-capitalism by drawing on Fredric Jameson’s influential work in the field of Marxist cultural criticism. [11]
Although much of the aforementioned psychoanalytic writing seems distant from anti-capitalist practice, this is not actually the case. In colonized Algeria, Fanon’s sociological work integrated anti-imperialist action with psychoanalytic theory and practice. In 1970s France, Guattari introduced psychoanalysis into political groups with differing views. A series of groups titled "Psychoanalysis and Politics" also combined Marxism and psychoanalysis to advance a radical feminist agenda. In recent years, some scholars have been working to merge psychoanalysis and anti-capitalist action with queer theory. Today, we also see scholars attempting to use psychoanalysis to guide the anti-capitalist actions of Marxist social movements and anarchist collectives.
The current state of the fusion of psychoanalysis and anti-capitalism presented in this article, while limited, is not lacking in intense debate. It should be noted that scholars use psychoanalysis to support different anti-capitalist attitudes, discourses, stances, academic analyses, and practical actions. When psychoanalytic theory is used to analyze anti-capitalist organization, it is usually associated with specific organizational forms, such as the socialism of the Frankfurt School, the communism of Žižek and Badiou, the radical democracy of the Essex School, and the post-anarchism of Saul Newman. Therefore, with the exception of the research of Rodrigo Nunes, [12] few psychoanalytic works treat anti-capitalism itself as an extremely negative form of organization.
IV. Anti-Capitalism: An Extremely Negative Form of Organization
As a form of organization, anti-capitalism is essentially determined by negativity. In other words, the Symbolic order of anti-capitalist organization focuses on elements excluded by capitalism. Therefore, we can contrast the anti-capitalist organizational form with those organizational forms predicated on affirmative inclusion. As signifiers, the categories of affirmative organization are poorly defined; their signifieds always remain on the generic term "the present." In such cases, repetitive attempts to confirm the referential categories of the organizational form lead to a deficiency in that form. It is precisely due to this lack of reference that affirmative organizations are always difficult to sustain. The fundamental negativity of anti-capitalism represents an expressive impotence; it is perpetually unable to refer to the whole. This is a failure at the level of self-consciousness, an inability to incorporate all struggles based on affirmation. Every struggle against capitalism is an inseparable part of the anti-capitalist Symbolic; this means that the form of anti-capitalism is determined by the democratic will of all groups excluded by capitalism. As a general term for many forms, anti-capitalism does not conform to a certain standard in search of stability; on the contrary, it is reshaped by the continuous exclusion practiced by capitalism.
Tensions within anti-capitalist organizations drive rather than undermine the development of anti-capitalism. Organization members articulate their political tactics, goals, and strategies according to the needs of different struggles, and their organizational form is determined by the most urgent political commitments of the moment, without requiring members to always identify with a self-contained, immutable political program. Only such a flexible organizational form can allow the collective to be responsible for its respective political commitments and meet the most pressing needs for liberation. Adhering to deeply rooted forms of practice within the organization also means the organization has no time to attend to the symbolic limits assigned to different practices. It is at this point that anti-capitalism deconstructs organizational ruts; it typically focuses on situations that fixed organizational forms cannot effectively resolve or predict. Anti-capitalist organization is constituted by the tension between its internal subjects. In other words, the existence of the anti-capitalist form is predicated on the ebbs and flows of capitalist oppression.
Anti-capitalism is also an organizational form that values the mobilization of passion [13], emphasizing mutual communication among organization members and the emotional bonds of collective resistance against capitalism. In fact, the psychological projection toward political action is usually unrelated to reason, and even less does it require intellect to maintain such a psychological state. It is more like an emotional identification thoroughly suppressed by Enlightenment rationality. [14] To understand anti-capitalism's ability to grasp the psychological projections of the masses, one must turn again to Lacan’s concept of "enjoyment." [15] Enjoyment, or what Lacan calls jouissance, is the unconscious satisfaction obtained from symbolic rupture or blockage. In the capitalist context, the subject usually derives enjoyment from accumulating surplus value, [16] attaining an imaginary self-identity, [17] or from political fantasies that stimulate individualistic desires. Anti-capitalism provides another kind of enjoyment—an enjoyment predicated on negativity, which Lacanian scholars call "lack." We can enjoy lack because it allows us to return to an imaginary moment. There, we sacrifice a superficial mental integrity in exchange for a Symbolic order torn by contradiction (which is the basis of our communication with one another). Anti-capitalism rejects fixed organizational forms, which means the subject can find enjoyment in identities, strategies, and guidelines that have not been provided. These elements are continuously established, revised, abandoned, and transformed in the process of democratic struggle. Even if anti-capitalism forms a specific organizational form, this form is always in a state of flux and thus always in a state of lack. The inherent lack in anti-capitalism also introduces desire into political activity. In this way, its organizational activities are driven by the "lack-in-being" of the organizational form rather than by "attaining a specific form." Anti-capitalist organization is thus endowed with a psychological level of gravity, which is usually triggered by the radical actions of the political right.
V. Cognition, Action, and Being in Anti-Capitalist Organizational Forms
Anti-capitalism’s embrace of diverse organizational forms reflects the contradictory mental structure of the political subject. Through psychoanalysis, we can understand how members fulfill political commitments, consolidate organizational strength, and drive strategy implementation within a Symbolic order that is constantly changing and constructed through democratic organizational forms. This section will employ psychoanalytic theory to explore how anti-capitalist organizational forms facilitate members' contradictory cognition, drive organizational action, establish their respective modes of being, and clarify the significance of these contradictions for promoting political progress.
(1) Cognition
Knowledge is always lacking, and political knowledge is no exception. If we eliminate the contradictions in the political cognition of organization members, their political behavior will also become solidified. In other words, political action presupposes the political cognition of the members. This has the potential to drive the subject to view violence as a concrete signified within a specific political knowledge. [18] Attempting to strengthen the certainty of political knowledge in this way masks an epistemological lack. Some organizations use violence to create a surplus of political knowledge; such a surplus can likewise allow members to obtain enjoyment. However, the enjoyment of political knowledge does not necessarily have to yield to political rights. We can also formulate policies, demarcate the limits of political knowledge, resist the dominance of knowledge, and establish our epistemological positioning within the acceptance of the lack and contradiction of knowledge to obtain opportunities for enjoyment. As we have seen, the form of anti-capitalism, through continuous evolution and the expression of liberation demands via democratic channels, constitutes political knowledge. It is just that we cannot "know" the specific organizational form of anti-capitalism, and the knowledge it provides is very sparse. Correspondingly, however, this also allows its organization members to obtain opportunities for enjoyment.
The truth obtained from unconscious knowledge is not related to relationships, reason, or cognition, but is a clearly self-contradictory and politically charged truth that can consolidate social relations and open up new, unforeseen possibilities for organizing anti-capitalist politics. [19] Researching unconscious "political truth" may require collaborating with psychoanalysts to create an objective and reflective space where organization members can openly discuss the emotional dimensions of anti-capitalist organization. Various unconscious ideological mechanisms existing among members—such as patriarchy, racism, and even classist currents—can inform the anti-capitalist organization, letting members know how to work together to make the unconscious operational processes within the group visible and allowing each member to take corresponding responsibility. [20] For many, this political truth at the unconscious level is difficult to accept. Lacan calls this resistance "paranoid knowledge," which functions by always announcing to oneself and others a plan beneficial to both parties, mirroring the structure of narcissism. [21] Anti-capitalist organizations need not feel ashamed of paranoid knowledge; on the contrary, they should reserve space for it within the anti-capitalist organizational form and use it to clarify how the collective's political commitments can be respected by individual members. In this way, the internal bonds of the collective can be consolidated through the tension between interpersonal relationships.
Accepting the lack and contradiction inherent in political cognition does not mean that anti-capitalist organizational forms must dispense with political fantasy [54]. At the same time, we cannot abandon the critique of fantasy. It is through fantasy that a lack of knowledge can be presented in the more palatable form of "lost knowledge." The latter implies possession, a state that either blames the subject’s sense of lack on others or encourages people to advocate for the recovery of certain knowledge they have supposedly lost. The political knowledge we fantasize about collectively congeals our mutual jouissance. Therefore, we should not overlook the collective fantasies within anti-capitalist organizations, lest our cognitive jouissance cede ground to right-wing politics. Fantasy allows the subject to transcend the limitations of specific symbolic structures, revealing the ruptures and mismatches within them, thereby unbinding the psychic control the capitalist symbolic system exerts over our political imagination. As Freud pointed out, fantasy is the screen upon which unconscious desire is staged or negated [55]. This means that, politically, fantasy can stimulate desire, facilitate solidarity, and bring about the collective identity upon which anti-capitalist organization depends [56]. It is precisely through the affective connections established by fantasy that members of anti-capitalist organizations mobilize the collective political fantasy of the organization, thereby escaping the throes brought about by the limitations of knowledge. It is also because of this that fantasy cannot be the ultimate determinant of anti-capitalist organizational activity. However, we can strategically liberate fantasy to dismantle the fantasies imposed by capitalism—such as those of capital surplus, individual competition, and industrial accumulation—satisfying the needs rooted in shifting, practical struggles. In doing so, we create the affective conditions to coalesce the knowledge that members lack during the anti-capitalist process.
Our political actions can transcend our ability to symbolize the current situation. Anti-capitalism does not necessarily have to follow psychiatric goals, but it requires a set of master-knowledge derived from the master-signifier, along with corresponding master-actions, to exorcise the tensions between individual organizational members and obtain collective organizational answers [57]. In other words, taking the lack of knowledge itself as a premise and shaping the organization through the contradictory cognitive modes of its members is feasible. Anti-capitalist organizational forms can accept the lack inherent in political knowledge, yet this does not lead their political commitment toward a definitive epistemological stance. This organizational form repeatedly elucidates the anti-capitalist symbolic order (the Symbolic) and, in the process of interpretation, aligns the organization with an epistemological lack, thereby meeting the current needs of emancipation.
(2) Action
The subject’s mode of cognition (whether conscious or unconscious) determines their mode of action. Clear political cognition implies clear political action. While situations exist in right-wing groups where such "certain knowledge" is used for action, there are also those in the left-wing camp who advocate for conducting action based on this type of knowledge. This is most vividly reflected among the psychoanalytic Left—usually the Lacanian Left—who operate under the banner of "Act" (变革). In contrast to persistent resistance, the Act is a political stance that stimulates—sometimes briefly—emergent modes of action or cognition outside the mainstream capitalist symbolic order [58]. An Act means refusing to take a particular action within a specific context or withdrawing from that context. A famous case is Rosa Parks' refusal to give up her bus seat to a white man in 1955. We should not confuse this with the "pseudo-activity" of the obsessive-compulsive, which serves only to prevent an Act [59].
Members of anti-capitalist organizations should not overlook the possibility of an Act, but neither should they be misled by the idealistic tendencies of the Act. Idealizing a single Act as a matter of faith may give rise to organizational characteristics such as bureaucratism, "burnout" office culture, and the pursuit of mediocrity. Compared to the Act with its clear purpose, anti-capitalist organizations are more concerned with small-scale transformative actions that continuously adapt to the structures of capital. For organizers, they must interpret the capacity to facilitate numerous transformative actions in their totality; they cannot view a single behavior in isolation. It is precisely these inconspicuous actions—including the refusal to work, union building, or establishing worker cooperatives—that shrink the categories of global capitalism to an imaginable scale. Focusing on these smaller actions reflects current, concrete political tasks.
Focusing on a series of small-scale transformative actions does not mean abandoning the singular Act. We can also seize the political opportunities brought by a single behavior through small transformative actions. The 2015 student protests in South Africa were triggered by an individual act of a student throwing excrement at the statue of Cecil John Rhodes at the University of Cape Town. This behavior sparked a series of protests lasting months. Students experimented with various anti-capitalist organizational forms, such as refusing to pay tuition, opposing colonial curricula, and opposing exploitative labor outsourcing [60]. Although the act of throwing excrement at the statue turned a "taken-for-granted" event into a reality [61], various subsequent actions triggered a series of transformations. Similarly, we should not separate Parks' action from the subsequent Montgomery bus boycott, nor should we examine the persistent resistance of Parks and her companions over the years before and after her refusal to give up her seat separately from the series of actions in South African universities.
Inadvertent actions often produce a "symbolic-real" fault line associated with the singularity of the Act. In any case, organizing small-scale transformative actions does not depend on the symbolic power of a single behavior; the inadvertent actions of people in their daily lives are often rebellions against tradition. Therefore, everyday actions are crucial for the survival of marginalized groups [62]; whether they are constructive (establishing worker cooperatives) or destructive (theft), they have the potential to change dominant power relations [63].
Everyday actions always follow fixed patterns and are rarely formally organized; thus, they do not provide a fully "knowable" vision of emancipation. Instead, they represent non-definitive, prefigurative experiments in mass emancipation. Everyday actions point toward an unpredictable fragment of the future, one that evades the "known future" presupposed by capitalism and presented in the present. Because of this, everyday actions are not premised on predetermined results; they are always lacking in results. Anti-capitalist organization helps connect, support, and create interpersonal networks, thereby consolidating these everyday behaviors and coalescing them into action. One might say that everyday actions are most transformative when organized. The logic of everyday action oriented toward the future is always a logic of desire; based on a non-definitive lack, it demonstrates a series of fields that anti-capitalist organizational forms can permeate, such as daily life, industrial manufacturing, social reproduction, and market circulation.
Anti-capitalist action is committed to reshaping a world that transcends capitalism but still operates under the constraints of capitalism. In short, the actions of anti-capitalist organizations rely on subtle behaviors whose political significance cannot be determined in advance and need not be credited to a single revolutionary subject.
(3) Existence
Capitalism imposes on the subject a promise that can never be fulfilled—such as future rewards, class mobility, or the attainment of happiness—which constitutes a stable foundation for capitalist ideology and capitalist subject identity. The closer subjects get to realizing this capitalist promise—such as through consumption, eliminating competition, or working hard—the more intense their inner sense of alienation becomes, and this alienation, in turn, drives them to believe in the capitalist promise once again. In attempting to approach the "ego ideal" promised by capitalism, the subject also seeks to be labeled "good" by an imagined social authority—what Lacan calls the "Big Other." This "goodness" lacks clearly defined symbolic coordinates and can only be approximated by projecting concepts like "evil" onto individuals who do not conform to one’s own vision of a common future (i.e., those who do not embody the capitalist promise), rather than by fully realizing the concrete referent of this "goodness."
Progressive political organizations may also reflect the subjective certainty of the capitalist promise and the deferred nature of moral evaluation. Of course, it is possible for left-wing groups to determine the subjective positions of their members or to hand over all decision-making power to a charismatic leader. Anti-capitalist organizational forms accept the subject's symbolic lack and their inability to integrate with the present symbolic order. Thus, the organization resorts to elements excluded from the capitalist symbolic order, such as collective values, politics, and desire, as well as workers, refugees, and the proletariat. The fundamental negativity of anti-capitalism means that the birth of subjectivity does not require the help of a specific ego ideal or mandates from the Big Other. On the contrary, anti-capitalist organization accepts the feelings of otherness rejected by the capitalist promise. It should be emphasized that anti-capitalism does not entirely deny the existence of subjectivity; it does not follow a single organizational form, and its organizational subjects are composed of shifting sets of identities within different contexts of struggle. We need not understand the negativity of anti-capitalism as a deconstruction of the self, but rather as an affirmative, collective, and creative generation of subjectivity.
As an organizational form, anti-capitalism builds mutual solidarity upon a shared sense of otherness, ensuring that individual subjective lack and feelings of contradiction are not obscured by ideological fantasies. Instead, the subject utilizes the lack of the "comrade other"—who shares the same political commitment—to fill their own sense of lack [64]. This is not to say that the form in which all subjects bear lack is exactly the same. Lack itself can create pathways for solidarity between subjects of different identities; they utilize a shared sense of lack to consolidate the anti-capitalist struggle. We might say that the reason anti-capitalist organizations stand in solidarity is not because individuals are the same, but because the way they resist capitalism is identical [65]. What these struggles have in common is a negative opposition to capitalism, which is also reflected in the negative foundation of this organizational form.
Even so, anti-capitalist organizational forms cannot rely on organizational links between members to consolidate strength in all circumstances. In some cases, subjectivity is persecuted and devastated by capitalism. Action organized around the pursuit of subjective consistency is crucial for creating the conditions for subjective healing within the struggle. This was the case with the Black Panther Party in the United States and the Black Consciousness Movement under South African apartheid; they advanced anti-capitalist political commitments through a consistently rebellious construction of Black subjectivity. Therefore, anti-capitalist organization does not mean relying on a single subject to promote and construct solidarity between different struggles in all circumstances. Political subjects sometimes need to organize around subjective consistency to resist the deprivation of humanity and the reliance on victimhood, marginalization, or political failure. Although the fundamental negativity of anti-capitalism helps utilize a collective sense of lack, it can also represent a space of freedom in which the subjects of struggle reject capitalist identity and recreate the meaning of being a human subject. Political commitment shapes existence [66]; it can be said that subjectivity belongs to both the individual and the intersubjective. The negative structure of the anti-capitalist organizational form opens the door to a vast number of politically strategic modes of existence within the collective.
VI. Conclusion
Marx once pointed out: "Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past" [35]. (46) The new is always influenced by the old; its emergence carries the shadow of the old and constitutes the latter's contemporary form. Therefore, when the people organize to oppose capitalism, they must conform to the dialectical laws of history. Perhaps we cannot defeat history, but we can reshape society so as to stand alongside history rather than suffering within it. (47)
Anti-capitalism as a form of organization provides the subject with a space of extreme negativity. Within this space, subjects can make political commitments, unite, and coalesce collective power. It is precisely within negativity that subjects can organize to respond to the ever-changing demands of liberation. Utilizing psychoanalytic theory, we can see how anti-capitalist organizations use the contradictions between the practice of struggle and the subjects of struggle to drive "progressive politics," imbuing it with psychological appeal, thereby adapting to the modes of capital reproduction and defending their own structures. The foundation of anti-capitalist organization is a commitment, mediated by democratic means and dictated by the requirements of actual struggle, to a corresponding real-world situation.
Whether anti-capitalism is centralized, decentralized, communal, legislative, or grassroots, local, and international, it always depends on how the masses organized under a symbolic system of negativity understand the specific demands of their respective struggles. In this regard, anti-capitalism is concerned with collective action driven by conviction and desire. Although these anti-capitalist organizational forms are not necessarily named "anti-capitalism," naming them as such allows us to unearth their inherent political-psychological value. To challenge the totality of capitalism with the necessary commitment, categories, psychological appeal, and political ambition, we can and must cultivate the capacity for organization in its diverse forms.
This article originally appeared in the online edition of the journal Theory, Culture and Society on June 29, 2023 (see https://www.theoryculturesociety.org/ for details); the translation has been abridged.
[Nick Malherbe: Institute for Social and Health Sciences, University of South Africa; Zhang Keren: School of Translation and Interpreting, Sichuan International Studies University]
Online Editor: Zhang Jian Source: Foreign Theoretical Trends (Guowai Lilun Dongtai), Issue 3, 2024.