Review: A Socialisme ou Barbarie Anthology: Autonomy, Critique and Revolution in the Age of Bureaucratic Capitalism. Published by Eris (1 Oct. 2018)

Introduction

In 1916, after two years of mass death on the battlefields of the First World War, the Polish revolutionary socialist Rosa Luxemburg declared bourgeois civilization was at a crossroads while humanity faced a stark choice: either socialism or barbarism. The European state system was collapsing because of the terrible destruction inflicted by war that detonated a chain of rebellions and revolutions shattering nations and empires. The apotheosis of this cataclysmic moment was the October revolution – an apparent herald of a deluge that would sweep world capitalism away.

30 years later when a small French revolutionary group with just 20 members formed, adopting Luxemburg’s watchword as its name, the Socialisme ou Barbarie group inhabited an entirely different universe and socialism’s promise had been reduced to ashes by the monstrous existence of Stalinist bureaucratic totalitarianism across Eastern Europe. The ‘moment of Leninism’ in the early 1920s when the 3rd International’s mass Communist parties vied with Social Democracy for the allegiance of the working class across Europe, had long since passed. Fascism had triumphed in Italy in 1922 virtually unchallenged, foreshadowing the victories of Hitler and Franco. The defeats of the 1930s were grievous wounds. In Germany fascism’s ascendancy saw the jewels of the European working class, the SPD and KPD, crushed into dust while Stalinism’s ascendancy signalled a revolution betrayed in the East, itself a prelude to a revolution strangled in its cradle on the Iberian peninsula.

In stark contrast to the grim 1930s and the Second World War, the SouB group, formed in late 1948, led a subterranean existence on the margins of the French working class dominated by the Communists (PCF) and the Socialists (SFIO). There SouB remained for almost two decades before finally dissolving in June 1967 after 40 issues of the ‘Socialisme ou Barbarie’ journal whose strap line had been an ‘Organ of Revolutionary Criticism and Orientation.’ Many of the articles in the journal published between March 1949 and the last issue in June 1965 have enjoyed quite an afterlife as the posthumous reputation of the SouB group grew, translated and reprinted on numerous occasions. A major reason for the SouB group’s burgeoning reputation could largely be attributed to their political and theoretical perspicacity and originality, especially how SouB first re-imagined Marxism, revolution and socialism in a daring, lucid libertarian register that enabled SouB to push beyond Marxism and tentatively propose new directions for reconstituting radical politics, autonomy and democracy. Avenues would be opened up that Castoriadis in particular explored after SouB’s demise.

Over half a century later Eris Publications has produced an invaluable 485 page anthology collecting a variety of articles by many different contributors to the ‘Socialisme ou Barbarie’ journal’s 40 issues (translated from an earlier French anthology into English). ‘Socialisme ou Barbarie: An Anthology’ (2018) provides an indispensable collection with a wealth of invaluable historical background in the notes with introductions accompanying the anthology’s seven thematic sections. This anthology is an essential companion to (or supplement) the equally irreplaceable 3 volume ‘Political and Social Writings’ of Cornelius Castoriadis’ translated and edited by Castoriadis scholar David Ames Curtis who, unsurprisingly, is a moving spirit behind this English translation; or, an addition to the collections of Claude Lefort’s such as ‘The Political Forms of Modern Society: Bureaucracy, Democracy, Totalitarianism’ (1978 French edition, 1986 English edition) that started with two Lefort SouB era articles – a 1948 essay on the contradictions of Trotsky’s politics from ‘Les Tempes Modernes’ journal and a essay on totalitarianism after Stalin.

There are many different contributors to the anthology, not just Castoriadis and Lefort, reminding us SouB was a revolutionary group uniting intellectuals and workers who were revolutionaries first. The SouB group aspired to overcome the impact of the social division between mental and manual labour and workers dependence on intellectuals in their own political organizations. The idea workers were inescapably dependent on intellectuals as the bearers of science, was originally proposed and defended by Karl Kautsky against the challenge of ‘revisionism’ in German Social Democracy. ‘Revisionism’ basically dismissed Marxism and the maximum goal as alien impositions on the working class. Kautsky’s remarks (a gloss on Marx and Engels’s aside in ‘The Communist Manifesto’ observing bourgeois intellectuals able to scientifically grasp the direction of history would defect to the proletarian cause), greatly influenced Lenin’s own understanding of the party (the crucible of science). The alleged inability of workers to generate socialist (re: scientific) consciousness from their own ‘economic’ struggles was originally outlined by Kautsky before Lenin adopted it as Social Democratic or Marxist orthodoxy. Five decades later, such elitist arguments were plainly anachronistic as the social division between mental and manual labour was drastically modified due to changes in the nature of capitalism, the growth of immaterial labour, the advent of universal education, the expansion of higher education and many other developments.

The many articles included in this anthology appear variously under seven themes:

(1) ‘Bureaucratic Society’ – including ‘Socialism or Barbarism’, the statement of intent penned by Castoriadis (Chaulieu) in the first March 1949 issue. The SouB group immediately grasped the epochal significance of bureaucracy for the development of modern capitalism as an expression of the concentration and centralisation of capital and the growing salience of the state.

(2) ‘The World of Work’ – including Paul Romano’s ‘The American Worker’ from 1950, an article that demonstrated the SouB group’s awareness of what was taking place on the shop floor in the US, Britain and elsewhere in the West in the years of economic boom and workers wildcat resistance to both speed up and collaboration between the trade union officials and bosses and so on.

(3) ‘The Crisis of the Bureaucratic System 1953-57’ – addresses the working class challenge to Stalinism and bureaucratic rule in the East in East Berlin, Poland and the 1956 Hungarian revolution when workers councils appeared again in Europe.

(4) ‘The Content of Socialism’ – is devoted to Castoriadis’s long article of the same name which appeared in ‘Socialisme ou Barbarie’ #22 (1957), when Castoriadis basically dismissed planning and nationalisation in the ‘name’ of the working class (‘the dictatorship of the proletariat’), as the programmatic goals of ‘bureaucratic capitalism’. Instead, socialism should be defined positively in terms of working class autonomous self activity and the self management of society that Castoriadis thought should be based in industrial enterprises ie a position privileging the industrial working class over other workers and social strata – a section of workers who were a declining minority given the secular recomposition (and disaggregation) of the working class as a whole. Castoriadis would shortly realize this himself and break with Marxism.

(5) ‘Organization’ – focuses on the dispute between Castoriadis and Lefort on the nature of workers political organisation. The SouB group arguably never fully broke with Leninism or the conviction the working class required revolutionary political organization though the latter was defined in terms of Luxemburg’s critique of Lenin. However Lefort dissented arguing any political organization was incompatible with proletarian autonomy because it would ultimately usurp the working class in any revolutionary scenario. In the 1950s Castoriadis and Lefort debated the question which was still unsettled when Lefort left SouB in 1958.

(6) ‘The Third World’ – as the anthology’s introduction to this section makes clear colonialism and the anti-colonial struggle was never at the forefront of the SouB group’s thinking in terms of global capitalism which focused on modern capitalism East and West and the significance of the bureaucratic trend, at the expense of struggles in the developing world or the Third World as it widely became known as after the Bandung Conference in 1955. However, the anti-colonial resistance in Algeria that began in full earnest in 1954 encouraged Jean-Francois Lyotard to take on the challenge of analysing the struggle – support for the struggle, anti-colonialism, anti- imperialism but also rejecting nationalism and suggesting the FLN was a putative bureaucratic ruling class in the making. Lyotard provided physical aid to the struggle but SouB did not insist on unconditional support for the resistance to French colonialism. The other issue arising from Algeria was the racism of the French working class and the utter failure of the Socialists and Communists to challenge that racism or argue the case for internationalism and solidarity with the Algerian anti-colonial struggle. The French settler state in Algeria conducted a vicious, bloody war against Algerian independence and anti-Arab, anti-North African racism ran deep in France itself (a poisonous legacy surviving in France to this day and extending to Islamophobia). In comparison with the Socialists and the Stalinist PCF who bestrode the working class, the tiny SouB group (less than a 100 members before 1957-58) was utterly marginal. This section has two excerpts from Lyotard’s SouB journal pieces on Algeria written between 1958 and 1961. The other article in this section is on China.

(7) ‘Modern Capitalism and the Break with Marxism’ – is devoted to SouB’s ongoing critical exploration of post-war capitalism’s nature which eventually led to Castoriadis’s break with Marxism tout court. Below, Paths and Bridges provides a brief history of SouB.

Finally, the Anthology has a full table of contents for every article (and author) in all 40 issues of the journal and a short biography for every SouB author anthologised here.

Origins of the SouB Group

Though the Second World War ended with fascism’s crushing defeat, there was no revolutionary reprise of the working class revolt that marked the end of the 1914-18 Great War as most revolutionaries had anticipated. Once a mass presence in the European working class, the surviving groups and currents of revolutionary socialists were a tiny minority (council communists, Bordigists, Trotskyist, anarcho-syndicalists and others), scattered by the calamities of the 1930s and facing a fresh challenge: how to digest the import of ‘total war’, the rise of bureaucracy and the transformation of capitalism. Pre-war expectations were brutally erased by new realities. Maps and compasses from another universe had to be discarded as worse than useless. The perspectives of the Fourth International (FI), founded in profoundly unpropitious circumstances in 1938, were a case in a point. These perspectives had been strongly influenced by Trotsky’s eve of war predictions – war would have a shattering effect on the Soviet Union and the usurping Soviet bureaucracy. Trotsky believed the Stalinist bureaucracy was no more stable than a pyramid standing on its point because it was parasitic social stratum, an excrescence sprung from the working class. However, the Stalinist bureaucracy proved to be far more resilient than expected. The bureaucracy survived Hitler’s military onslaught while the restorationist ‘political’ revolution of a reawakened Soviet working class expected by revolutionaries never happened. Also Trotsky was never able to revise his prognosis as he was murdered by a GPU agent in Mexico City in August 1940. Yet in ‘The USSR and the War’ (1939), Trotsky remarked:

‘If the international proletariat, as a result of the experience of our entire epoch and the current new war, proves incapable of becoming the masters of society, this would signify the foundering of all hope for a socialist revolution, for it is impossible to expect any more favourable conditions for it.’

The SouB group first began life as the Chaulieu-Montal tendency in the Trotskyist Parti Communist Internationale (PCI), the French section of the FI which was formed in 1946. Even by the modest standards of the post-war revolutionary left, the SouB group was never large and so when the Chaulieu-Montal tendency departed the PCI in late 1948 it had just 20 members. A decade later SouB had reached almost 100 members. The tendency was formed by Cornelius Castoriadis (Chaulieu) and Claude Lefort (Montal). Both men were drawn together by their common disagreement with the FI’s attitude to the Soviet Union and the historical role of the Stalinist bureaucracy. So Castoriadis rejected Trotsky’s portrayal in ‘The Revolution Betrayed’ (1936) of the Stalinist bureaucracy as a gendarme ensuring the orderly distribution of the social product among the different social classes and groups of Soviet society in a context of scarcity. Castoriadis didn’t believe the bureaucracy was simply an ephemeral or ‘transitional’ phenomena destined to wither away as the socialist economy finally achieved abundance for all. Rather the tendency and then the SouB group concluded bureaucracy was a major feature of a transformed modern capitalism defined by the growing weight of the state and the bureaucratic trend, presenting a major obstacle to working class autonomy and self activity.

The SouB group was made up of a handful of white collar workers and professional and manual workers most notably the car worker Daniel Mothe, a militant working at Renault’s huge Billancourt factory on the Parisian outskirts while Castoriadis and Lefort were the group’s most significant thinkers. Castoriadis was a Greek citizen (he didn’t become a French citizen until 1970) born in Constantinople in 1922. When Castoriadis was a few months old his parents were forced to return to Greece. During the Second World War the young Castoriadis was a Trotskyist hunted by the Nazi’s and the Stalinists. After the Germans were driven out Greece descended into civil war. Castoriadis fled to France where he resumed his education in Paris. Claude Lefort was a brilliant student of Maurice Merleau-Ponty and became a Trotskyist during the occupation in 1943.

Statement of Intent

In March 1949 the first issue of the ‘Socialisme ou Barbarie’ journal appeared. The eponymous editorial both established the restless critical tone that would characterize the journal for two decades while introducing many of the themes SouB scrutinized throughout its existence. The editorial cum statement of intent (uncredited but written by Castoriadis) began by observing that 100 years after ‘The Communist Manifesto’ (1848) and 30 years after the October revolution, the revolutionary proletarian movement had disappeared, like a river approaching the sea, breaking up into rivulets. A vast gulf separated socialism’s ideals from the tawdry reality of betrayal. In the so-called socialist countries labour camps and repression were the norm. In the West millions of workers were organised in bureaucratic parties and trade unions that functioned as a barrier to social revolution. This editorial introduced a major leitmotif of SouB, the idea the fault line of the modern age was a division between ‘directors’ and ‘executants’ rather than owners of the means of production and the propertyless. Though marginal groups of revolutionaries had ‘survived’ the “general shipwreck”, the FI was blinded by a “spurious faithfulness to the letter of Marxism as a substitute for an answer to the important questions of the day.”

Capitalism’s evolution meant new problems for revolutionaries in terms of rebuilding the proletarian revolutionary movement unknown in 1848 like bureaucracy in the workers movement but also new forms of capitalist organization especially state ownership of production which promised to eclipse private capitalist ownership in the age of “declining capitalism” (the notion of capitalism’s civilizational decadence was at the heart of the orthodox Trotskyist lexicon after Trotsky’s 1938 Transitional Programme). The rising bureaucracy was the social embodiment of these new innovations in capitalism. In fact Castoriadis’s editorial strongly suggested an elective affinity between the goals of the labour movement (nationalisation, planning) and direction of capitalist development. Nationalisation and planning could no longer be regarded as unambiguously progressive goals but potentially heralded new forms of the domination and exploitation (1).

In ‘The Contradictions of Trotsky’ that appeared in ‘Les Temps Modernes’ in 1948 Claude Lefort offered a similar argument to Castoriadis but addressed the evasions of Trotsky’s analysis of the origins of the Stalinist bureaucracy – essentially Trotsky’s prime fault wasn’t only helping pave the way for the counterrevolution’s triumph, (for instance by helping crush the Kronstadt revolt in 1921), or temporizing with Stalin’s faction of the Bolshevik Party by failing to fully bloc with a stricken Lenin when the latter urged a campaign to crush Stalin or subsequently vacillating in the struggle against Stalin and the degeneration of the party-state but fundamentally misrecognising the bureaucracy’s significance, its social and historical import as the embodiment of new forms of class control and exploitation (2).

Intriguingly, the ‘Socialism or Barbarism’ editorial also pointed beyond Leninism though further years of disputes on the nature and raison d’etre of revolutionary organization, elapsed before the most intransigent anti-Leninists and most vocal proponents of proletarian autonomy like Claude Lefort and Henri Simon departed SouB in 1958. Shortly after the group around Castoriadis started relinquishing Marxism and became embroiled in another internal struggle with those unwilling to jettison Marxism including Jean-Francois Lyotard years before he coined the term postmodern or became known as a major figure in the French new wave of post-modern philosophy and social theory. Lyotard’s group split from SouB in 1963 and formed Pouvoir Ouvrier which survived until 1969, outliving its original host. SouB officially dissolved in 1967 though the group had effectively stopped functioning earlier when the final issue of the journal appeared in 1965.

Earlier, against Lefort and others, the SouB majority (including Castoriadis), defended the necessity of revolutionary political organization with their understanding of its nature indebted to Rosa Luxemburg’s devastating criticism of Lenin and the Bolsheviks after the October revolution: the exaggerated emphasis on centralisation, the importance of the revolutionary high command and its ‘infallible’ decisions at the expense of the necessary mistakes of the masses (the struggle was an indispensable school) – a model politically allergic to the authoritarian and anti-democratic biases of Bolshevik practice. There was also a tacit rejection of Lenin’s assumption the methods of struggle of the revolutionary movement had to be symmetrical to those of the state.

Beyond Marxism

SouB’s dazzlingly original attempt to relate revolutionary theory and practice to the world as it had become eventually pushed its most adventurous members to plead the case for going ‘beyond’ Marxism to reconstitute radical social theory. In 1959, Castoriadis (Paul Cardan) drafted ‘Modern Capitalism and Revolution’ (1960-61) laying bare Marxism’s ‘objectivism’ and the inadequacy of its critique of political economy. ‘Marxism and Revolutionary Theory’ (1964-65) consolidated Castoriadis’s critique of Marxism. Castoriadis conceded Marxism’s historical role in foregrounding the ‘social question’ and establishing class politics as part of the social universe. Yet Marxism was no longer a revolutionary force in the world but instead an ideology of putative power. Marxism had not only sought to interpret but change the world and so it could not be exculpated from the consequences of the preceding decades of its practice and influence. Indeed, to do so would condemn Marxism to being “mere theory.” Castoriadis argued similar considerations barred a ‘return to Marx’, effectively elevating Marx above history or insulating actually existing Marxism(s) from criticism; a move that would certainly be a violation of Marx’s own understanding of his enterprise. Marxism had become many Marxism’s, so many pragmatic, delimited or ‘local’ ideologies (as Fredric Jameson once acknowledged) justifying the practice of a wide variety of social and historical forces. Marxism had long since stopped being a ‘living theory’ as the shedding of pitiless self criticism indicated. Fruitful applications of Marxism for grasping social reality had been replaced by endless and arcane discussion of Marxism that treated its theoretical corpus as a substitute object universe. Castoriadis also rejected appeals to ‘method’ as Marxism’s salvation (Lukács). Method was neither separate from history nor from the content of Marxism, its core and auxiliary concepts and hypotheses. The development of the social-historical world was the unfolding of a universe of meaning while the belief sharp logical distinctions separated fact and meaning, was in practice invalid. The contemporary reality of modern capitalism, falsified Marxism – it could not be grasped by traditional or ‘amended’ categories because it simply wasn’t a matter of the redundancy of auxiliary hypotheses but many of the core features and propositions of Marxism. Consequently, Castoriadis concluded revolutionaries faced a choice: remain a Marxist or a revolutionary but it was no longer possible to remain both.

Despite SouB’s invisibility during its lifetime, SouB’s ideas had a huge impact on the revolutionary ferment of May 1968 in France. SouB’s critique of Stalinism and the suffocating role of the bureaucracies at the summit of the workers movement (political parties and trade unions), was far more radical than orthodox Trotskyism’s critique of bureaucracy. Also, the SouB group generalised from the powerful shop floor militancy and wildcat strikes in the US, Britain and elsewhere and the workers revolts against the Stalinist bureaucracy in the East, to present a positive conception of socialism as workers self management resting on working class self activity and initiative. Any alienated, institutional product of working class passivity like the political party or the trade union, invariably strengthened the grip of bureaucracy and officialdom, and was antithetical to autonomy and socialism. Such ideas provided the student revolutionaries of the Sorbonne and Nanterre with powerful critical weapons. For example, Daniel Cohn-Bendit (or ‘Red Dany’) readily borrowed from the iron rations of SouB’s revolutionary politics. In Britain SouB’s politics was an inspiration to the small libertarian socialist group Solidarity (UK) group founded in October 1960 by Christopher Pallis (a surgeon who published as Maurice Brinton) and Ken Weller (a young engineer) and others when first Weller and then Pallis was expelled from Gerry Healy’s orthodox Trotskyist Socialist Labour League. Solidarity (UK) subsequently moved away from Trotskyism and though modest in size briefly played a key role in CND especially its advocacy of a shift in strategy from marching against the bomb, to carrying out acts of mass civil disobedience (advocated with the Direct Action Committees and then the Committee of 100) that aspired to disrupt the unruffled, invisible functioning of the “warfare state.” Pallis was the chief proselytiser of SouB in the Anglophone world from the 1960s onwards, translating nine of Castoriadis’s SouB texts (as Paul Cardan) into English which formed a significant proportion of the 60 pamphlets Solidarity (UK) published in its lifetime (the group finally folded in 1992).

Expiration

In June 1967, two years after the final issue of the journal, the group circulated a notice ‘The Suspension of Publication of Socialisme ou Barbarie’ that announced the dissolution of the group explaining SouB had always been conceived as a “revolutionary political project” that had sought its raison d’etre in, and nourished itself on, struggle and political activity. With 18 years of collective activity and experience behind them those remaining in the group after the departures of 1958 and 1963, wondered if the nature of modern capitalism tended to extinguish political activity due to growing privatisation of social life, that with exception of noisy minorities, “silence” reigned in society. Also the forces countering this trend such as workers autonomous struggles, the self-directing struggles (gestionnaire) championed by SouB, would ominously become increasingly feeble or rather, more accurately, didn’t catch fire in France to the same extent they did in other countries. SouB had expected the shop floor militancy in the US and Britain to happen in France and then acquire a political aspect transcending the sphere of the economic. In fact SouB concluded that such shop floor, rank and file struggles in countries like Britain had proved to be inherently limited or circular, failing to breach the narrow economic sphere of wages and conditions. Yet this was arguably an over hasty conclusion. In Britain from the mid 1960s onwards successive Labour and Conservative governments had wrung their hands about Britain’s lack of economic competitiveness compared to other rival developed economies and how to improve productivity and profitability. Both Labour and Conservative governments identified workers shop floor muscle as the chief impediment to the renovation of British capitalism. Thus governments turned their attention to ways shop floor militancy could be bridled and mooted legislation to curb the trade unions with a mixture of voluntary and involuntary measures intended to enlist the help of the trade union bureaucracies in policing the rank and file. Instead such measures provoked significant shop floor resistance and it was clearly the case that the ‘wall’ between the economic and the political was – in some places at least – breached. In Britain, at least a combination of the economic impact of the breakdown of the post-war ‘long boom’ and the alliance of the trade union bureaucracy and the 1974-79 Labour government, finally broke the back of the shop floor militancy that had been such a feature of the post-war scene in Britain, and incidentally had a profoundly demoralising political impact, helping pave the way for Margaret Thatcher in 1979.

In France in the 1960s SouB saw little evidence of similar struggles and judged the working class politically quiescent (De Gaulle had returned to power in 1958 invited by the National Assembly and granted extraordinary powers to govern as a result of the political crisis directly sparked by pied-noir settler reaction in Algeria). In such an inhospitable context it was impossible to build revolutionary political organization in the absence of a living dialectic between revolutionary politics and struggle. SouB’s circular was damning about the pseudo activity of groups that were blind to the fact that praxis required certain conditions of possibility: a politically confident and attentive working class – instead a “useless and sterile simulacrum of this activity” was the unsentimental verdict (4). In hindsight, after the social explosion of May 1968 in France and events elsewhere (the Italian ‘Hot Autumn’ of 1969, industrial struggles in Britain during Heath’s 1970-74 government and so on), it might have seemed SouB was premature to liquidate itself and there was some attempt to reconvene the group in light of the May evenements but this came to nothing. Yet while May 1968 revived the radical left, the upturn in wider struggles began to lose its impetus in the course of the following decade before the triumph of Thatcher and Reagan confirmed the ebb tide. Finally, we might say that in terms of the broader social and historical canvas, SouB did accurately gauge the longer term post-war secular trends unfolding in the democratic developed countries apparent in our present moment: increasing privatisation, atrophying of the public sphere, decline in political participation, breakdown of political behaviour and party affiliation based on class identity.

Barbarism or..?

In our contemporary universe, two decades into the C21st everything is falling apart it seems. Yet not everything is as perishable as the ‘tradition’ of revolutionary socialism finally proved to be in the face of its mortal enemy, capitalism. Yet a dwindling band of adherents and believers still talk of the relevance of the ‘tradition’ – a certain sign of senescence. Some things remain because they changed while other things change and in doing so vanish. Today it may no longer seem plausible to argue the fundamental choice facing humanity is socialism or barbarism but it does appear there is a fork in the path looming, always assuming that there isn’t something fundamentally flawed or misplaced about continuing to think in such stark binaries in the first place or if there is, that there is still something useful to be gained from such an approach. Scepticism and suspicion is perhaps unavoidable after the postmodern ‘turn’ in social theory and culture with such binaries tainted by the eschatological connotation of a choice between salvation or oblivion but also a revenant of the ‘Midnight in the Century’ (Victor Serge) that ensured the destruction of any glib faith in the fatality of history moving in a progressive direction.

Nonetheless, if the shipwreck of socialism spells the definitive closure of the project associated with the classical workers movement and if the sobriety of our age insistently demands that we set aside all the cathected attachments and satisfactions associated with revolutionary millenarianism, there are still grounds and reasons to conclude that humanity is at a crossroads. Some of those reasons include the nature of instituted-instituting societies (Castoriadis), globalisation, the relatively open ended character of politics in the modern era, the reality of the climate change crisis among others. In fact, the climate change crisis indicates the Great Acceleration (the latest stage of the Anthropocene which began 12-15,000 years ago at the dawn of settled agriculture), is an urgent actuality and that humanity still faces collective choices. Barbarism or extinction, more or less (for what would the practical difference be?), will be our likely fate unless we collectively begin constructing an alternative that would also mean fashioning a different social order to global capitalism though we can no longer confidently state what that alternative order would look like concretely. Averting eco-malign barbarism implies a radical departure from ‘business as usual’ and probably exiting (revolutionary?) capitalism as it is irrevocably predicated on endless growth that must treat the biosphere as the enabling adjunct of capital accumulation. Such a vista or project implies a momentous effort to shape a viable civilizational alternative to the current destructive course that at a minima must be based on collective, democratic decision making linked to extant here and now struggles, for autonomy, recognition and social equality.

The libertarian socialism of SouB, its restless critical spirit, has been a point of departure and an inspiration for ‘Paths and Bridges’ as has the encounter with the thinking of Castoriadis and Lefort after they left SouB, especially their effort to rethink radical politics and the necessity of saying farewell to Marxism, for our far more modest political endeavour. It is this latter post-SouB political and theoretical endeavour that is of the greatest value and honesty compels us to make it clear that ‘adherence’ to the politics of SouB is not really possible. How can anyone maintain fidelity to the politics or outlook of a tiny revolutionary group that dissolved itself over 50 years ago in a different historical universe? Such a stance would practically amount to political necrophilia or hobbyism. The militants, activists and thinkers at the heart of the SouB group could not and did not stand still and neither can we (and certainly not in a spot last occupied half a century ago). Yet there is still a great deal to be learned from the SouB group but more so from the subsequent political and theoretical journey undertaken by Castoriadis and Lefort which represented both a break with, but also maintained strong elements of continuity with the politics of SouB.

Castoriadis’s project for autonomy in particular is valuable in this respect – ‘Paths and Bridges’ considers the numerous local struggles for autonomy taking place across the globe, to be hugely significant in relation to the fate of radical or progressive politics in the present and near future. In our view autonomy encompasses the struggle for recognition (Axel Honneth) and its extension, democracy, freedom, civil rights but also the struggle for social justice. It is a global struggle that has no other centre than civil society or nascent civil society. Apprehension of the goals of this struggle for autonomy and democracy also discloses the agency of this struggle – the citizen (citoyen), a collective formed of particular individuals whose telos in relation to identity implies a cosmopolitan meta-identity derived from autonomy and reciprocal recognition and incidentally, in terms of psychoanalysis, would also imply self knowledge and an ethics of the self and its free development that can only rest on respect for the other as self and its own free development. As Axel Honneth argues (following George Herbert Mead) the struggle for mutual or reciprocal recognition is linked to the reproduction of social life in our present – it underpins a practical a relation-to-self, meaning that an individual would only learn to view herself ‘objectively’ within the wider normative perspective of the inter-subjective sphere. But our present world or nomos falls far too short to allow autonomy to fully flourish. Mutual recognition and autonomy would also be a prerequisite for social esteem and individual differentiation. Such a view of autonomy as a political project with all that it implies about social agency is surely incompatible with Marxism and the idea the working class might as the identical subject-object of history (Georg Lukacs) or the revolutionary subject at the heart of a movement of the immense majority and part of the ‘real movement of history’ (Marx). In the last phase of its existence as a group, SouB started to grapple with the eclipse of the classical workers movement and the quietism of the working class. At present, we consider the evidence of the waning of collectivity (Raphael Samuel) or the atrophying of proletarian solidarity, too overwhelming to ignore, discount or treat as a temporary historical blip. Arguably, despite the ‘proletarianization’ of the globe including the formal expansion of wage-labour in countries like China, other global trends such as the disaggregation of the working class and erosion of proletarian solidarity, have been more decisive. Yet we concede it is possible to envisage labour movements – such as they are – playing a part at the heart of a broader political movement of citizens whose goals would be to continually extend and deepen autonomy and democracy.

Finally, no one who regards themselves as a radical or revolutionary could fail to be provoked or inspired by the SouB group and the Anthology is an irreplaceable resource – an opening not only to the SouB group whose politics anticipated our social universe but a door to Lefort and Castoriadis whose work is a major touchstone for ‘Paths and Bridges’ conception of radical politics and autonomy – a subject that we intend to return to in more detail in the near future.

Paths and Bridges

Notes
(1) Cornelius Castoriadis ‘Socialism or Barbarism’ in ‘Socialisme ou Barbarie: An
Anthology’ (2018), pp.43-64.
(2) Claude Lefort ‘The Contradiction of Trotsky’ (1948) in ‘The Political Forms of
Modern Society: Bureaucracy, Democracy, Totalitarianism’ (1986) pp.31-51.

A Moon of Nickel and Ice, Directed by Francois Jacob. Canada/Russia (2017)

The project, so intrinsic to capitalism, by which the world is conceptualised as resources, dead matter to be used toward the goals of accumulation and the transformation of the world, chrematistics and mastery, is sometimes laid so wide open in all its irrationality, that it brings into stark relief the madness of the civilisational complex we call modernity. Perhaps, now climate change threatens societal destruction, this has become understood on a wider basis. Up until now the question of why we seek to live this way has been mainly posed by ecological or religious thinkers – or both, like Jacques Ellul – or by “peripheral” communities at the sharp end of environmental destruction and social exclusion, who once lived by social significations totally incompatible with the ‘rational mastery’ master narrative at the heart of capitalism, and plainly see it as not rationality but dizzying delusion.

At the massive open mines of the Australian outback, on the levelled bauxite mountains of Orissa or in the Amazon perhaps there’s a clearer view? As for the Russian Arctic North, its history is perhaps the most entwined with the madness of the modern project. Though Communist Party bureaucrats from Lenin and Trotsky on would have considered the quest to master this massive landmass and draw from it the base materials of development as the epitome of sense, perhaps the young women and men from Lviv or Riga taken there under guard saw it for what it was, capitalist ideology spiralling out of control. Treated as much as objects as that which drew out of the Earth, they must have seen the madness as well as the cruelty there. To us now, it surely can be no more ‘rational’ than an Aguirre’s quest for El Dorado.

In this three places stand out. Magadan, the ‘gate of hell’ on ‘the island’ (so called as it was only accessible by boat despite being on the far eastern coast of Eurasia) from where prisoners were forced to mine gold and uranium at fifty below in the Kolyma mountains.(1) Vorkuta, where prisoners were sent from Moscow by train, until the railway ran out then marched hundreds of miles out into the wilderness alongside malarial waterways too shallow to navigate, to mine coal in prison camps at the Usa river basin (2). And Norilsk, created to mine the nickel from the Putorana mountains and process it in massive metallurgical plants, the northernmost city in the world, closed to outsiders and only accessible by plane or via the Arctic Sea. It is the subject of Francois Jacob’s documentary, ‘A Moon of Nickel and Ice’.

The foundation of these places read like some adventure story for trainee state bureaucrats, as free-wheeling explorers tapped the state to fund their expeditions into the endless permafrost horizon, with the promise of riches to follow. On having discovered deposits in the north of the remote Taymyr peninsula, such men put on Commissar uniforms to return with the state and 1200 prisoners to found Norillag (Norilsk Corrective Labour Camp). We are told that none of the 1200 survived long enough to be buried in graves. Seeing the frightening frozen windswept darkness filmed from a car window it is easy to see why.

The dilapidated housing blocks and the antique-looking but functional mines, a thousand kilometres from the next nearest city, are a testament to human endeavour, in addition to man’s ability to treat his fellows as chattel, creating human mega-machines of awesome co-ordination with the whip hand. A pinnacle of creation of a dark kind, summoning awesome imaginative powers to build prison camp mines 400 kilometres above the Arctic circle in the name of the loftiest aims. Now a city of 200,000 souls, the most polluted place on Earth.

Through Jacob’s lens we meet various inhabitants, who he wisely allows to speak freely without a master narrator to endorse or contradict them. A Lithuanian with a tragic past who left his family to work here alone.  A photographer-designer who says his home city was built through a kind of oppression that mirrors its merciless environment, he has recorded and commemorated its history in a book. Workers who joke their medical notes are as thick as a Tolstoy novel. Theatre makers who are used to playing to packed crowds for want of anything else to do (once commonplace in Soviet monogorods). A man whose grandfather was sent to the camp in 1937 as part of a purge of the Soviet intelligentsia. An articulate young writer who seems to see most clearly of all from the penury of her mother’s flat. A survivor who recalls he was known only by a number while he worked in the mines.

And we notice the long and thin street length concrete apartment blocks, overground pipes, metal towers, smokestacks and the thick sheets of ice. A camera tracks through empty evening streets, filled with florescent light, as a resident wonders where all these people came from and why they are still here.

To return to the question of man and nature, the ecofeminist philosopher Val Plumwood drew a very clear relationship between the domination of nature and the domination of people (and treating people and nature as objectified resources). She claims the dualistic relationship of dominator and dominated is based upon a denied dependency on the subordinated other. This shapes the imaginary contours of all social relationships whether human/nature, culture/nature, power/subjects (subject/objects), male/female and reason/nature. The second in these pairs is denigrated as inferior to justify its domination. For the bosses and bureaucrats that founded Norilsk the workers don’t think, the Party thought for them. Power plans and orders, the workers’ execute, or are executed.

“Dualism can be seen as an alienated form of differentiation, in which power construes and contructs difference in terms of an inferior and alien realm” (3)

Counter-revolutionaries, class enemies and non-historic peoples here are the inferiors to be worked to death in the name of the Party. Stalin in his Kremlin could hardly have considered those mining in the Far North or the environment they struggled in any differently to those who ran rubber plantations in the Congo or a Brazilian Minister of Mines and Energy. Indeed, the landscape of Norilsk and its outlying areas look like a scene from apocalyptic science fiction, used up and bled dry. Prisoners, workers and nature are the resources for power projects independent of their purview.

“The natural world and the biosphere have been treated as a dump, as forming the unconsidered, instrumentalised and unimportant background to ‘civilised’ human life; they are merely the setting or stage on which what is really important, the drama of human life and culture, is played out. In the dominant view, the biosphere forms the taken-for-granted material substratum of human existence, always present, always functioning, always forgiving; its needs do not have to be considered, just as the needs of other species generally do not have to be considered, except as they occasionally impinge upon or threaten the satisfaction of our own. Systematic devaluation and denial are perceptually ingrained in backgrounding, involving systematic not noticing, not seeing. The way in which we background nature is evident in our treatment of it in a range of areas; for example, it is backgrounded in standard treatments of human history. It is also backgrounded in standard economics where, notoriously, no value is given to anything natural or to resources as they stand before they acquire use-value or before human labour is applied, where no account is taken of natural limits and ecological factors are treated as ‘externalities’.” (4)

We hear that 650,000 prisoners passed through this place between its foundation and 1956. Those men and women built the camps they lived and worked in, then the city itself, with their bare hands. We see chilling drawings of the way it looked; see the crumbling remains of the timber barracks and working quarters where 250,000 died. 150,000 bodies were apparently dumped at the edge of the tundra where a Golgotha now stands. Instrumentalised bodies, not beings, as disposable as slag.

We also hear something of the Norilsk Uprising. When in 1953, 16,000 men and women went on strike for 69 days while the post-Stalin leadership panicked before putting it down with characteristic brutality. Like the Vorkuta uprising of the same period, its failure nevertheless spelled the end of the Stalin era GULAG system of mass slave labour. The rebels were mainly Ukrainians, Balts and Georgians, people who knew a lot about national as well as personal oppression. Little known and written about outside of memoirs and specialist histories, these uprisings have a place in the history of the project for human freedom and autonomy yet to be articulated and reconstructed. However, considering the extremity of the regime of domination and heteronomy in the Arctic camps, they stand as a high point in the history of rebellion. Yevhen Hrytsyak’s memoir of the uprising is, as far as can be ascertained, yet to be translated into English.

Though the means have changed dramatically, even now Norilsk Nickel admit they have to trap people to stay, encouraging the young to make families knowing they will be likely to be forced to stay in Norilsk in order to provide for them, taking up extremely demanding work at -40 outside or in the blazing heat of the foundries. The young people in the film say they wish to leave, though many suspect they are trapped and will end up like their parents. Unsurprisingly, considering the state-private nexus in Putin’s Russia when a resident we have already met stages a memorial for the 1953 revolt he is fined and made to do community service by the local courts.

In a town where the company decides everything, a GULAG town turned company town (to steal the title of Alan Barenberg’s fascinating history of Vorkuta), this past of slave labour is not publicly alluded to, and one can’t help to wonder how that sits in the psyche of those who call Norilsk home. Marina Arutyunyan has written on how the mass killing of the purges, collectivisation and the GULAG means that Russia is a society of recent descendants of victims, guards and killers, living together (often in the same family). How this past has been repressed in the Russian collective memory, and how these things must inevitably return is, for Arutyunyan, central to the continued support for authoritarian government among many Russians. One can only speculate about how this must play out in a city like Norilsk.

The setting makes this a film of great formal beauty, wisely shot and cut in a plain and unobtrusive way, with awesome inspiring tracking shots of landscapes, apartments buildings and industrial enterprises intercut with close ups of faces, drab interiors and everyday existence. The ever present voices of Norilsk residents on the soundtrack speak plainly of life on the periphery of civilisation. There for an export economy that extracts commodities crucial for modern capitalism in a place built purely on the mad logic of a heteronomous system in which progress means the destruction of the planet.

Though residents see the town is dying one can only hope that the day this city is finally left to the tundra and the smokestacks have stopped billowing, it isn’t because the world is doomed but because a collective decision has been made that places and practices like this should not exist.

by Joseph Aylmer

Notes

(1) See Varlam Shalamov, The Kolyma Tales; Janusz Bardach, Man is Wolf to Man: Surviving the Gulag (1999)

(2) Alan Barenberg, Gulag Town, Company Town: Forced Labour and its Legacy in Vorkuta (2014)

(3) Val Plumwood, Feminism and the Mastery of Nature (1993).

(4) Plumwood, Ibid.

In this short article, I want to think about the nature of bureaucracy and the contribution bureaucratic organisation plays in the current accelerated deportation regime and ‘hostile environment’. It will start at the top and move downwards through the organisation, using quotes from wider analyses of bureaucratic forms to reinforce my argument. I am not trying to explain the use of disciplinary state functions as an aspect of contemporary capitalism as such, though my argument is not entirely disconnected from such a critical goal.

To start at the top is to start with the imaginary dimensions of what it means to be a member of a society. As Paths and Bridges has discussed before, all societies exclude others as part of the work of defining themselves and all regimes of domination instantiate the human tendency to use others as a scapegoat to absolve itself, so that its members project their disappointment, frustration and self-hatred toward what is different (which is not to say that leaders and power holders don’t also hate the others and participate in this projection). In this sense, the expanded immigration and expulsion regime initiated under Theresa May’s tenure as Home Secretary (complete with the vans roaming the streets telling migrants to go home) and continued under her Premiership, is about exploiting the worst instincts of human beings, instincts that are not readily sated. As grist to its base and other voters who had moved toward UKIP, the Tory government under David Cameron made promise after promise to reduce migration (‘to the tens of thousands’), promises utterly out of keeping with the historical reality of the post-colonial world and the nature of contemporary capitalism. It was in fact a rejection of reality. There is a straight line from this to Brexit and the Windrush scandal.

As the insatiable appetite for a whiter and more racist England was set loose – and as charlatans and opportunists of many political stripes made capital from it – a callous, brutal target based deportation regime was set in motion. Above the bureaucratic order is a daemon. Once a daemon referred to an occult power shadowing individuals drawing them into its machinations in a process that was a reification of the human tendency to project our own desires and fears outward, displacing them onto the world. Here we have the institution of racism as a daemon, fused with the conquering chrematistic logic of capitalist modernity, a devouring monster that stokes more racism and more deportations. Many Leave voters saw Brexit as about ramping up this racism to the level of mass deportations – ‘sending them all home’.

In such circumstances, we can see how May’s instruction to Civil Servants to set targets for deportations created an insatiable monster. When translated to a power order this devouring monster can make and break careers. Ulf Martin explains the reality of the atmosphere inside of bureaucracy:

“In theory, bureaucratic rules are “rational” and set up by disinterested persons / sections and are executed as written. In reality, everybody involved is interested in making a career, not to work too much etc. Bureaucratic institutions are pervaded with power struggles: managers of lower levels of the hierarchy try to rise and hence make informal arrangements, perform mobbing, withhold information etc. The subordinates either try to do the same or resist or try to keep out of the game. In any case, the activities are motivated by goals that are “irrational” from a “higher” perspective and are not a conceptual part of the bureaucratic schemes.”1

Here we see the beginnings of a situation where the ostensible values, domestic civil rights and even international law is continually broken by those supposedly bound by it (as was continually the case in the Windrush scandal and is likely to be post-Brexit). My point here is not to exculpate the political classes for this monster of their making but to note that any bureaucratic system of hierarchy will – in fact necessarily has to – get around formal rules (and if necessary laws) to deliver its targets; and that that any system of professional advancement based on such targets will lead to abuses that are against letter of the system but fully consonant with the spirit (imaginary) of the ends or goals sought.

It’s worth noting that while Marx’s almost perfect pithy explicandum of bureaucracy from 1844 still retains a great deal of validity, the apex of the bureaucratic order is always happy to turn a blind eye – or even issue plausibly deniable instructions on the quiet – if the benefit appears to outweighs the cost:

“The highest point entrusts the understanding of details to the lower echelons, whereas these, on the other hand, credit the highest point with an understanding of the universal, and thus they deceive one another.”2

Moving down the system to the lower echelons, we find not just the jockeying for position and mobbing we see in the Senior Civil Service and higher management grades but also a specific process of socialisation that requires those tasked to execute the actual day to day work to identify with the goals and ends sought; and ultimately with the broader ideology that has created the need for such ends. While jobs with a disciplinary function (especially those involving socially approved discrimination against marginalised groups) are likely to attract more authoritarian and prejudiced personalities than others, the pure struggle to live a psychically integrative life requires – as we all see and probably feel on an everyday level – a certain degree, inevitably, of identification with the organisation one serves.

“The functioning of the administrative departments presents a very different picture. Here, at the bottom of the scale, we find clerks without real qualifications, employees whose professional training is rudimentary or non-existent. Between these employees and the managing director of the firm, the hierarchy of jobs is a hierarchy of power. The relations of dependence become determinant and to have a function is to define oneself, at each level, with regard to a superior, whether he is a branch supervisor, a departmental supervisor or a manager. In this context, the double nature of work thus reappears: it both corresponds to a professional activity and constitutes itself as the expression of an established social order, an order within which the firm exists. Indeed, from the top to the bottom of the scale, the relations are such that they serve always to reinforce the authoritarian structure of the administration. But that does not mean that the individuals situated at the bottom of the scale participate in the bureaucracy in the same way as the middle or upper strata. In certain respects, clerks are like the workers who carry out orders, deprived of any authority. They often earn less than certain categories of workers who are paid by the hour. Their work could not be described as ‘responsible’ and it cannot be assumed that they find in their work a basis for identifying with the aims of the firm. Nevertheless, they are not unconnected to the bureaucracy: they are its dependents…Now as soon as we try to circumscribe the properly bureaucratic sector and are led to highlight a specific type of activity, we uncover a dialectic of socialization which is of a different order than the dialectic of the division of labour”3

So, while, as Lefort notes, in general clerks (in modern British parlance, administrative and operational delivery grades) may not identify with the goals of any organisation they serve in, when the work is the forcible and coercive work of the Home Office (rather than say, the production of paperwork or statistics), the notion of a dialectic of socialisation weighs even heavier. This is bureaucratic order in its purest sense, in which one cannot be a thinking individual or moral agent because to be so one could not do the work of the organisation. When Marx linked bureaucracy and alienation he saw them as spiritually synonymous for this very reason.

In keeping with our psychoanalytic starting point, we depart from Marx here only because he suggests a tautology, if the irrational logic of the system pervades its charges, and society is a human creation – where does society draw this perversion from? His answer, the mode of production, only issues in further tautology. Our answer, the infant situation which hates the others because it represents the society that socialised it, thus making it renounce the pleasure principle has more weight. It also suggests a way out of this mournful situation, via the acceptance of a reality principle that doesn’t hate others, doesn’t embrace divisions based on artificial differences or demand people be punished for their otherness by bureaucratic systems. So, it is socialisation itself that must be our starting point, inevitable as much as it is unwanted. The dialectic of socialisation is something different, that does indeed stamp the wider social values (rather than the tendency toward the adoption of such values based on unconscious motives) onto the individual. So, as noted above, to survive or accept with apparent equanimity the horror of ruining anonymous individuals lives such an organisation must render its charges truly ideological (at least while carrying out their professional activity), often forcing them to split (in the Kleinian sense) into good and bad, lawful and unlawful, worthy and unworthy (white and black?), those that they deal with. It must numb those flux of human responses that cut against the hatred of others – such as love, compassion and justice – and render unthinkable inconvenient truths and inferences that might lead them to question their tasks.

Taking in these elements, the social imaginary, political power, bureaucratic hierarchy and individual alienation – a bureaucratic department becomes a racist megamachine in Lewis Mumford’s sense. This is the reason why, from top to bottom, the logic of bureaucratic power can only serve authoritarian ends.

by Joseph Aylmer

Notes

1. Ulf Martin, Pseudorational Control and the Magma of Reality (2016). Seminar at the Department of Political Science, York University.
2. Karl Marx, Contribution to the critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right (1844)
3. Claude Lefort, What is Bureaucracy?, in The Political Forms of Modern Society (1986)

The Barque of Dante, Édouard Manet (1854–1858)

Much has been written about the election of ‘populists’ in the US, Italy, Hungary, Poland and other countries. Indeed, though these governments hold values and goals that may unambiguously be identified with the far right, ‘populism’ or ‘right-wing populism’ is not a misnomer. Populism invokes and appeals to the organic unity of the ‘People’ defined broadly (and covertly, selectively) with despotic and even totalitarian undertones. Polities employing this language evince different levels of authoritarianism from the illiberal or managed ‘democracy’ to fascism, mediated by particular local histories and political life.

Now we see the rise of populist revolt marked by variegated demands drawn from across the political spectrum – from higher wages for the struggling mass of ‘left behind’ employees and higher public spending, to tighter immigration controls and the deportation of immigrants, for a more generous benefits regime and to administering such a regime on a ‘racialized’ basis.

The commentary generated by these campaigns and movements – here we are thinking of the Brexit campaign in Britain which fundamentally reshaped the political terrain, the Italian national election that saw the Northern League break out of its relatively affluent northern strongholds and join the Five Star Movement in government and most recently the ‘Gilets Jaunes’ protests in France – all reveal a worrying trend to take populism at its own word, treating the phenomena as somehow transcending politics.

In reality, the idea of a revolt of the whole of society, of all the ‘popular classes’, except perhaps a narrow ruling stratum and their explicit supporters, was only ever valid in the colonial situation (but even then, often not). While the financialization of global capitalism has led to a world market economy, exacerbating uneven development and extremes of wealth and poverty (even as it raised incomes everywhere), to claim counter-systemic populism is a revolt against exploitation per se, seems far from the mark. Rather, in keeping with this highly cathected and risible  notion of majority victimhood in the global North, we are offered a simulcra of the colonial revolt in reverse with genuinely oppressed minorities cast as the pied noir aligned with ‘globalist’ liberal elites. Such a perverse view is a text book example of privilege or pathological narcissism. Having found oneself on the summit of Mount Olympus no less, our benighted First World citizen ignores the spectacular view in favour of a minute inspection of their navel. After years of austerity in Britain it would be foolish to deny the reality there is some degree of wretchedness in the country as the UN’s rappateur discovered recently while touring many of the poorest towns, cities and regions but the decisive battalions of Leave voters were provided by older UKIP and Tory voters who resemble nothing so much as The Fatted of the Earth.

The idea of social fluidity, multiculturalism and the long, slow decay of essentialist or traditional notions of identity, has provoked a reactionary backlash and come under sustained attack recently, especially since the referendum. Yet these ‘cosmopolitan’ conceptions were very much a positive part of global modernity’s curate’s egg. From the Brexiteers pantomine claim that Britain is a vassal of Brussels to the anti Semitic suggestion that Macron is a play thing of ‘the Jews’, much of the current situation in Europe is about the inability to face up to a baleful past of imperial domination and murder, preferring instead the narcissistic clinging to roseate illusions of a lost golden age of ‘sovereignty’.

With Toni Negri’s comical resuscitation of the idea of the ‘jacquerie’ to various anarchist inflected notions of spontaneous revolt in France, the left has an idea of a pre-political revolt in which the right and left duke it out to win hegemony. A left desperate to deny its own meaningless and nullity, instead acts as if History had granted a wish. This is utterly wrong, not just because the left is historically and culturally very unlikely to triumph as a result of the sedimentation of right-wing ideas as common sense in the social imaginary or because it leads, as we have already seen, to the left screening out stubborn facts or reading them as morbid symptoms pointing down the road to Calvary (that’s if they don’t simply tail ‘anti-systemic’ racism, as many do) but also because the idea of a social movement, however, amorphous, existing in a state of pre-signification and pre-meaning, is simply impossible. Only movements with a strong sense of civic or humanist values and significations of self government and equality, properly count as progressive social movements. Populism like other forms of majoritarianism is a pernicious poison because it draws from the doxa of the current value orientations of this society while rejecting that society. Populism hothouses, metastasises and mutates the worst reactions of the reigning social malaise.

Now with fascists across Europe donning yellow vests we are able to glimpse how fascists will organise for the foreseeable future. This could be a successful modus operandi as it battens on to the idea of ‘racial’ threat and an elite conspiracy against the plebeian nation. A conspiracy theory is often an act of displacement, with shadowy elites who are often invoked in such narratives, being much more psychically palatable than the truth that the global social order has run out of control – with no one truly in charge – the real condition of capitalism. We have already seen that C21st fascism in Europe comes with the words globalism on its lips,  Russian money in its pocket, Syrian blood on its hands and bawling conspiracy theories.

A striking feature of the current populism is the prominence of climate change denialism – if fascism has often been linked to a displacement of both death and change, particularly the individual’s inability to permit the thought that their identity and objects are not superior to another’s and thus begin to work on the unconscious egotism about perfection and eminence that haunts the human condition due to our long infancy and helplessness – we now see  individuals refusing to register the profound civilizational and personal change necessary to deal with global warming and its concomitant change of values. The current populism doesn’t suggest a New Man but the same man without the irritating challenges to his own self-satisfied sense of entitlement.

If fascism represents a drive to abolish the non-I by annihilating that which is in conflict with one’s own desires and fuse with an ‘archaic’ mother represented by the monist mass movement, perhaps we could also speak of climate change being the elephant in the psyche that is displaced by projective identification. If the grand changes brought about by modernity were displaced on to ‘the Jew’ in the Nazi imaginary, could today’s civilizational challenge posed by climate change now be displaced on to migrants, outsiders and ‘globalists’ (the last standing for anti-racists and liberals)? If in the unconscious nature is associated with the mother’s body, is it any wonder that we often repress the damage we have done to it and refuse to acknowledge the catastrophe at hand, can it but draw into consciousness repressed the guilty feelings about damaging mother that all children have?

For us, democratic revolt means the disenchanted radicalism of a project for an egalitarian future that openly acknowledges the damage that our imperial and ecocidal civilisation has done to others, the Earth and ourselves. Populism, drawing long and deep from the fascist imaginary, represents almost the exact antithesis of this project.

by Joseph Aylmer

Hitherto, all radical movements have sought to end this evil old world, now the point is to save it

Over the last few weeks we have seen, in an impressive and sometimes spectacular way, protests and groups spring on the scene under the banner of Extinction Rebellion (XR) calling for urgent action by government and citizens to tackle the climate crisis. What will be said here is not related to the climate crisis as such, we should take that as a postulate of common knowledge that only the foolish or criminally cynical would deny. I wish to speak in favour of this new movement and make some observations on the political and civilisational dimension of a new ecology movement.

We need, across a wide range of different issues, heterogeneous social movements with a strong level of autonomous activism without either a behind the scenes leadership (of the ‘front’ kind) or a movement as messianic mission which would rapidly condemn the cause to becoming a sect.

There are tendencies in any movement that wants to see real social change but incline toward world rejection and authoritarianism because of the society that socialised its participants, as well as more general foibles of the human condition. As participants we must fight against those tendencies inside the movements and in ourselves.

Capitalism as a system could carry on with devastating climate change, indeed if people continue to believe in the values of capitalism it will carry on indefinitely until social collapse. The question is rather whether the values of capitalism – and it is a system of values before it is an economic system – is consonant with a habitable planet or democratic societies. Certainly, the effects of climate change will lead to increasingly authoritarian methods of controlling populations. What climate change forces us to recognise is that both the social order and its radical countercultures like Marxism – in terms of the structure of needs it suggests, the meanings we give our lives, the way we conceptualise the world as resources, social organisation as bureaucracy – is based on principles deeply tied to capitalist ontology.

The philosopher and social theorist Cornelius Castoriadis made a profound point when considering the traditional movements for social change and the newer ecological movement. Writing over thirty years ago, he noted that whereas the working class movement – in so far as it was not completely degraded by the poisonous effects of bureaucratic managerialism or Leninist totalitarianism – put into clear relief the dimension of authority, whether in society as a whole or in the workplace in particular, and called for the democratisation of society (sadly this critique was to fade as bureaucratic organisations inside and outside the workers movement came to dominate society), the ecological movement calls for us to reconsider, in his words…

“the scheme and structure of needs, the way of life, of society. And this constitutes a capital breakthrough in comparison with what can be seen as the unilateral character of previous movements. What is at issue in the ecology movement is the entire conception, the entire position of the relations between humanity and the world, and ultimately the central and eternal question: What is human life? What are we living for?…”

Where XR has been impressive, in so far as I have been able to follow it and in the conversations with participants I have had, is that it has attempted to confront these dual questions – the question of power and the question of the values, at the same time. While there is a danger that the focus on extinction may lead to an apocalyptic sectarianism, it doesn’t seem to be the dominant feature as yet. Rather, the focus on care for planet and participants, as well as the rather obvious fact that climate change will likely mean extinction for many in the Global South in coming decades, seems sober rather than alarmist.

What we have to address if we wish to do something about the climate emergency while securing a habitable planet and a democratic free society is start to create meanings and forms of activity that work toward the first goal – indeed, the first steps toward this have been brought into being by the collective work of so many thousands of people over decades, phrases and ideas that are at heart significations (that which holds and conveys meaning) such as ecology, sustainability, renewables, etc. Types of activity which fuse thought and action are part of the bringing into being of a new and different relationship between the planet and human beings and between humans ourselves. Sometimes, in keeping with the values of the society we live in, it has been posited that change will come through individual choices. However, this kind of myopia is ultimately a abdication of responsibility. The question of the values that dominate society are social questions that cannot be tackled by blind, anonymous market forces or noble individuals.

By fusing the question of authority and the question of values, we come to the heart of the social question – politics. Many astonishing ecological thinkers – Ellul and Charbonneau come to mind – rejected politics for many understandable reasons including that it degraded social questions to vulgar interests, however the values and meaning of human existence can only be tackled by way of politics in its broadest sense.

There is a danger, as Ellul’s and Charbonneau’s work points out in a extremely sophisticated way, that the very science that allows us to identify the climate crisis will overshadow and therefore undermine human actions by having us think we are dealing with a question of technique. Undoubtedly, scientific work on soils, renewable energy and a host of other things shall be crucial to creating a world where the values of ecology and democracy can prevail but ultimately, to tackle the climate crisis we will need a civilisational change that sees capitalist values like profit, ever expanding productive capacity and meaningless consumption abandoned.

This is the work of politics, particularly a politics that totally rejects racism, xenophobia, the veiled anti-semitism around pseudo-radical talk of elites, and the hatred of migrants and refugees that rationalises other people being degraded and destroyed, in favour of opening up of social life, the breaking down of divisions between people and for society to become self-managing rather than managed by bureaucratic fiat or hierarchical order. This means a high level of activism and engagement from the society as a whole, the complete opposite of the passivity and privatisation of our current society of television and consumerism.

Indeed, the change of values necessary is a whole rewriting of the underpinnings of modern life, to quote Castoriadis again

“The most beautiful and concise formulation of the spirit of capitalism I know of is Descartes’s well-known programmatic statement: We are to attain knowledge and truth in order to ‘make ourselves masters and possessors of nature’. It is in this statement of the great rationalist philosopher that one sees most clearly the illusion, the madness, the absurdity of capitalism (as well as of a certain philosophy and a certain theology that precedes it). What does it mean to ‘make ourselves the masters and possessors of nature’? Note, too, that both capitalism and the work of Marx and of Marxism are founded upon this meaningless idea.

Now, what becomes apparent, perhaps in fits and starts, through the ecology movement is that we certainly do not want to be masters and possessors of nature. First of all, because we have understood that this does not mean anything, it has no meaning – except to enslave society to an absurd project and to the structures of domination embodying that project. And next, because we want another relationship with nature and with the world – which means, too, another way of life and other needs.

The question, however, is this: What way of life, and what needs? What do we want? And who can answer to these questions, how, and on what basis? By answer I mean not in a state of absolute knowledge but, rather, in full knowledge of the relevant facts and lucidly.”1

These last questions can only be answered by political movements invested with compassion and care, prepared to live in the world in a different way and by different values, that doesn’t reject the world as a whole but instead invests life with a new horizon and mode of being in the world. What must be avoided is new identities in the millenarian style of Bolshevism, religious redemption or trans-humanism that is an escape from the problems of the human condition, instead we need more a grounded, more worldly society with a less hateful conception of self and other. A conception that sees our species of one among many and the Earth as our dwelling place that we may never totally understand but wish to preserve nevertheless. Democracy, both in form and content, is the only framework for this. This is where our social movements should aim.

by Joseph Aylmer

Notes

1. Both quotes from ‘From Ecology to Autonomy’ (1980), reproduced in The Castoriadis Reader (1997, Blackwell).

Castoriadis appearing in Chris Marker’s ‘L’Héritage de la chouette’ (1989)

Cornelius Castoriadis was born in 1922 in Constantinople (today Istanbul) in what was the dying days of the Ottoman Empire, to Greek parents who were forced to leave the country for Athens only months after Castoriadis’s birth, in a Greek-Turkish population exchange. Castoriadis first became active in politics as a teenager in 1937 against the Metaxas regime and joined the Young Communist League. In April 1941 Nazi Germany invaded Greece to aid fascist Italy’s faltering occupation of the country. Castoriadis briefly joined the Greek Communist party (KKE) before becoming a Trotskyist – a heroic, embattled minority persecuted by the Communists and the occupying Axis forces. 

By 1943 the end was in sight for the Axis occupation though their forces wouldn’t finally be driven from the country until 1945 when Greece descended into a civil war between the left and the right that would rage off and on until 1949 when the right backed by the US and Britain finally triumphed. Castoriadis who had criticized the tactics of the KKE and its armed wing, left Greece on a steam ship for France in 1945.

Once in Paris, Castoriadis resumed his studies and joined the Trotskyist Parti Communiste Internationaliste (PCI) in 1946. The post-war years of economic recovery, reconstruction and then boom with the relative stability and social peace that it delivered, refuted Trotsky’s prognoses for the aftermath of the Second World War and the general perspectives of the Fourth International majority that essentially clung to the letter of Trotsky’s expectations of a reprise of the social earthquakes that effectively ended the First World War but demonstrated little of the critical acuity Trotsky had still retained at the end of his life. An inability to acknowledge new realities inevitably entailed a failure to reorient. Internationally a minority across the FI argued recognising unpleasant facts was the order of the day.

In the PCI Castoriadis and Claude Lefort formed the Chaulieu-Montal tendency (Castoriadis was the former and Lefort and the latter) that was a prelude for their disenchantment with Trotskyism. Together they produced ‘On the Regime and Against the Defence of the USSR’ (1946) which rejected the majority’s related beliefs the Soviet Union was somehow still socialist (no matter how ‘degenerated’) and so should be defended against imperialism. In 1948 about a dozen people including Castoriadis and Lefort left the PCI and formed the Socialisme ou Barbarie (S ou B) group and journal whose politics underlined working class self activity and self organisation and could essentially be summarised as libertarian communist or councillist. As a group S ou B had an elective affinity with other small heterodox groups of revolutionaries from the milieu of Trotskyism including links to those like the Johnson-Forest Tendency (CLR James and Raya Dunayevskaya) based in the US – originally a faction of Max Shachtman’s Workers Party before they briefly returned to the common home of American Trotskyism, the Socialist Workers Party (SWP) before finally eschewing Leninism. The Johnson-Forest tendency disagreed with Shachtman’s idea the Soviet Union was a form of bureaucratic collectivist society and instead proposed it was a form of state capitalism. A similar state capitalist position would be adopted by the tiny Socialist Review Group in Britain, a forerunner of the International Socialists. More directly, the existence of S ou B inspired the formation of Maurice Brinton’s Solidarity group in Britain in 1960 who despite limited resources, promoted Castoriadis’s evolving understanding of capitalism and his unfolding critique of Marxism, in the Anglophone world

Though these different groups advocated some sort of a return to Marxism’s ‘fundamentals’ and continued fidelity to the revolution, S ou B’s political re-evaluation never stood still and would eventually push it beyond Marxism.

S ou B probably never had more than a hundred members in the eighteen years of its existence before it was wound up in 1966 but their libertarian socialist politics and their rejection of the system East and West, exercised an influence far beyond their small numbers, particularly on the revolutionary events of May 1968. It is probably true to say that Castoriadis (also known as Paul Cardan) and Claude Lefort, who left S ou B in 1958 after political disagreements, were the guiding intellectual impetus of S ou B but they were by no means alone. The group stood on the margins of the French working class dominated by the PCF and the CGT but they did have a few manual workers, most notably Daniel Mothe who was based at Renault’s giant Billancourt plant. Jean-Francois Lyotard was also a member of S ou B for a period. It was Lyotard, then teaching in Algeria, who penned the articles supporting the FLN’s war of independence against France’s brutal war to defend colonial power in contrast to the silence of the French Communist Party (PCF) though the group’s solidarity had few practical consequences given their marginality. Another notable member of S ou B, albeit briefly in the early the 1960s, was Guy Debord who was undoubtedly attracted to the S ou B’s avant letter theoretical heterodoxy, advocacy of proletarian councillism and global opposition to capitalism east and west.

In 1948 Castoriadis started working as an economist at the Organisation for European Economic Co-operation (OEEC), the forerunner of the OECD, set up to help administer the Marshall Plan in Western Europe. This work provided insight into the workings of modern capitalism and had a major impact on his critique of both bureaucracy and classical Marxist economic theory. Castoriadis was at the OEEC and then the OECD until 1970 when he became a French citizen and embarked on becoming a psychoanalyst after marriage to Piera Aulangier in 1968, a French psychoanalyst who had undergone analysis with Jacques Lacan for six years from the mid 1950s. Castoriadis’s engagement with Freud and psychoanalysis was a very important aspect of his later thinking and the development of his radical ontology of creative being. 

As noted in the immediate post-war years Castoriadis explored capitalism’s nature west and east. He regarded the Soviet Union as a species of totalitarian bureaucratic capitalism and he noted the reality that the working class had been usurped by the ruling party-state bureaucracy. The Soviet Union was not a ‘degenerate’ or ‘deformed’ form of socialism amenable either to reform or a political revolution but a social formation whose fundamental social antagonism was that between ‘directors’ and ‘executants’ – a cleavage defining the system globally.

So in the course of his activity in S ou B, Castoriadis became increasingly critical of Marxism on a number of levels including its view of history as objective fatality unfolding in progressive stages that entailed highlighting its economic reductionism. Finally, in a brilliant series of articles, ‘Marxism and Revolutionary Theory’, for S ou B‘s periodical Castoriadis applied Marxism’s historicist powers of critique to Marxism itself and demonstrated that no ‘return’ to an original or ‘pristine’ properly revolutionary Marxism was possible. Henceforth revolutionaries would have to choose between Marxism or facing the world as it was as the key to unlocking revolution. (Maurice Brinton would translate a fragment under the name ‘The Fate of Marxism’ for Solidarity‘s publication, available here).

Castoriadis’s sharp rejection of Marxism was a prelude to a project that would see him spend the next three decades developing an alternative, distinctive and sometimes complex social theory that offered a strikingly different account of historical change and the constitution of society to that of Marxism, drawing on a number of different parts of the social sciences including sociology, philosophy and psychoanalysis. Castoriadis’s social theory was introduced in the path breaking work The Imaginary Institution of Society (1975) and extended in his multi-volume collections of essays Crossroads in the Labyrinth. It is simply not possible to summarise Castoriadis’s thinking after the S ou B years in few brief sentences given its breadth and depth but we can note that it encapsulated a number of interlocking concepts and themes whose starting point was rejecting Marxism’s determinism, on the one hand, though it was arguably rooted in the most original aspect of Marx’s own social and political theory, on the other, – that men and women make their own history, that their own self activity led to the creation (and recreation) of society. Except that Castoriadis went much further than Marx by exploring an ontology of the creation of society, of social-historical creation, mediated by the shared existing significations of the social imaginary, the depositing of new significations – ‘magma’ (a key Castoridian concept) – that both captured the fluidity and sedimentation of society.

This conception of the creation of society was closely linked to a central, recurring concept of Castoriadis’s work – autonomy whose conceptual roots were originally derived from the councillism of S ou B, the preoccupation with working-class self activity and self management. Broadly Castoriadis understood autonomy as the growing freedom of every individual and so his understanding of autonomy – pointing beyond the proletarian as the only relevant historical actor according to the schema of Marxism to the citoyen – subsequently outgrew its original libertarian socialist framework. If contemporary capitalism was characterised by complexity and heteronomy (law from another), Castoriadis in contrast, sought to both define autonomy’s scope in a hierarchical social world and champion autonomy as a political project to expand individual and collective freedom, fostering the autonomy of every individual as the potential harbinger of a properly autonomous society (though autonomy was not a habit as Aristotle observed but an actively willed project).

Castoriadis’s late preoccupation with autonomy and democracy and their enabling conditions led to a growing engagement with classical Greek thought and the Greek polis, particularly Athenian democracy, as one of the few historical instances where self government of the citizens briefly ensured democracy was ascendant, allowing autonomy to trump heteronomy (Castoriadis was of course aware that Athens citizens democracy excluded women and rested on a slave economy).

Paths and Bridges intends to explore Castoriadis’s distinctive recasting of social theory in proper detail in the near future and, in particular, explore his conception of autonomy, its relation to social struggle and democracy, and consider how and to what degree these Castoriadian concerns may play a role in helping to renovate the struggle for democracy and social justice and a myriad of related struggles globally. As an appetizer for this future endeavour, we offer this 1990 interview of Castoriadis (conducted seven years before his death) by two editorial members of Radical Philosophy, at Essex University, that ranged over Castoriadis’s life, thinking and politics.

Paths and Bridges

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Radical Philosophy: What were the fundamental experiences which brought you to philosophy and politics, and to the exploration of the relation between the two?

Castoriadis: To begin with, there was always an intellectual curiosity for which I am indebted to my family. I came into contact with philosophy very early on, at a ridiculously early age in fact, at 13. I came to philosophy through classical manuals; to politics through Communist publications in Greece, around 1935, and then immediately afterwards, through the works of Marx. The two things have always been there in parallel. What attracted me to Marxism, as I saw at the time, was a very strong feeling about the absurdity and injustice of the existing state of affairs.

RP: What was the political situation in Greece at the time?

Castoriadis: 1935 was the eve of the Metaxas dictatorship which lasted throughout the war and the occupation. At that time, in the last year of my secondary education, I joined the Communist Youth, which was underground, of course. The cell I was in was dissolved because all my comrades were arrested. I started political activity again at the beginning of the occupation. First, with some comrades, in what now looks like an absurd attempt to change something in the policies of the Communist Party. Then I discovered that this was just a sheer illusion. I adhered to the Trotskyists, with whom I worked during the occupation. After I went to France in 1945-6, I went to the Trotskyist party there and founded a tendency against the official Trotskyist line of Russia as a workers’ state. We split in 1948-9 and started ‘Socialisme Ou Barbarie’, which went on until 1965 (the journal) and the group (1967).

RP: Is it true to say that you never really accepted Trotsky’s interpretation of the Soviet Union? Or did you accept it for a short time?

Castoriadis: For a very short time, yes. As soon as I moved out of Stalinism, the very first thing to grasp was the idea that the revolution had degenerated and that there was a bureaucracy which was just a parasitic stratum. But I soon started to reject this. You must realize that under the Metaxas dictatorship all left-wing books were burnt. And then there was the occupation. So one was not really in touch with the literature. Still, in 1942-3 in Greece, I had the good luck to find copies of Trotsky’s ‘The Revolution Betrayed’, Victor Serge, Ciliga’s book and Boris Souvarine’s ‘Stalin’ – a wonderful book which has been re-issued now in France. And it was already clear in ‘The Revolution Betrayed’ that Trotsky was contradictory.

RP: In what way contradictory?

Castoriadis: Well, he says, for instance, that Russia is on socialist state groundings because all property belongs to the state. But he goes on to say that the state belongs to the bureaucracy. So therefore property belongs to the bureaucracy. If one is logical, one asks, ‘What has all this to do with the workers’ state?’ The means of production belong to the bureaucracy. As I discovered afterwards, this idea had been around for some time already. One can see it among the inmates of the Russian concentration camps in 1926-7: the idea that the bureaucracy was becoming a new ruling stratum and exploiting class. What reinforced me in this conviction was the first Stalinist attempt at a coup d’etat in Greece in 1944. There really was something there, with the masses struggling under the leadership of the Communist Party; and for me it was crystal clear. If the Stalinists had gained power at that time, they would have installed a regime to that of Russia. I said so and wrote so at the time. It was the only time I was in disagreement with an older militant, Spiros Stinas, who I had worked with all this time, and who, in a certain sense, was my political teacher.

How could one account for this on the basis of the Trotskyist theory of the Russian regime, that is, a proletarian revolution which has degenerated? Bureaucracy was appearing as a quasi-autonomous historical force attempting to establish a regime for its own interest and outlook. The whole development of my political conceptions about bureaucracy – and in contra-distinction to this, what is socialism? – started at this time. If socialism is not nationalised property, not just a bureaucratic method of central planning, then what is it? Immediately the idea of autonomy arose. Socialism as self-government in production and political life; that is, collective organization and self-determination at all levels.

RP: How did your move away from Trotskyism affect your understanding of the Russian revolution? As I understand it, ‘Socialisme ou Barbarie’ was quite closely identified with the ideas of the Left Opposition in the Soviet Union? Did you identify politically with the Left Opposition?

Castoriadis: In a certain sense, yes. But they didn’t go far enough. Later on, I wrote a text about Alexandra Kollantai’s paper on the Left Opposition of 1921, and its limitations. But this is not our problem now. The defects are obvious there: about the role of the party, the role of the trade unions, and so on. Of course, Kronstadt was the last mark of some independent activity of the masses, which was crushed by the Bolshevik party. But once I started the critique of the bureaucracy, it evolved quite rapidly into a critique of lots of things: of the Leninist conception of the party, and then of Marxian economics. I had started working as an economist at this time, and was working on ‘Das Kapital’. I couldn’t make much sense of it in relation to actual developments. I couldn’t make much sense of it theoretically, either. Here starts all my criticism of the theory of value, which finds its final form in the text about Marx and Aristotle which appears in ‘Crossroads in the Labryinth’. Next came the critique of the Marxian conception of what socialism is all about, the bad utopian aspect of all this: the elimination of the idea of politics, the sort of paradisiac state depicted in the early manuscripts, where in the morning you are a fisherman, in the afternoon a poet, etc – I don’t know what you are after dark! There is also the idea, absolutely central to Marx, that labour is slavery and freedom is outside the field of labour. Freedom is leisure. This is written in so many words. Labour is the field of necessity.

RP: That’s more characteristic of the older Marx, isn’t it?

Castoriadis: It is in ‘Das Kapital.’ The kingdom of freedom can be built through the reduction of the working day. During the working day, you are under necessity. This is diametrically opposed to any idea of self-management by producers, and of production itself – once it is radically changed, and once technology is also changed – as a field of exercise of human capabilities and human freedom.

RP: There is also the idea of labour becoming “life’s prime want.”

Castoriadis: That’s in the early manuscripts. But this is abandoned in the system. Next came the critique of what one can call Marxist economism. The imaginary signification of the centrality of production and economy throughout history. This is obviously a retrojection of capitalist imaginary significations throughout the whole of human history. Then there was the philosophical work, which is there in ‘Marxist Thought and Revolution’, the first part of ‘The Imaginary Institution of Society’ which was published in the last five issues of ‘Socialisme ou Barbarie’ in 1964-5.

Socialisme ou Barbarie

RP: Could you say something about the experience of ‘Socialisme ou Barbarie’? What was the political context in which you operated? And how, given your critique of the Leninist conception of the party, was the group organized, internally? How were its interventions made? What do you think are its enduring achievements?

Castoriadis: Well, the famous organizational problem was there all the time. After an initial period during which there was strong residual elements, including in myself, in favour of the Leninist conceptions of the party (which I gave up about 1950), there was still an internal divide concerning the problem of organization, between people who were saying that no organization is needed (the proletariat will do everything, we are just a group trying to work out some ideas) and others like myself, who insisted, as I still would insist, that a political organization is necessary. Not a vanguard party, certainly, but some sort of political organization. Political activity is collective activity, and it ends up with concrete acts, be it a publication or whatever. You have to take decisions. And so you have to have some rules about how you take decisions. Say, majority rules. Obviously, you allow the minority to express themselves, even publicly. But there are some points at which decisions have to be taken, and they have to be univocal. Some coordination of the general activities is necessary. But I said very early on that the only way to do this is on the basis of the idea of some sort of collective self-government. Also, the political organization could play the role, not of a model, but a sort of exemplary activity, showing the people that they can organized collectively; that they can rule their own affairs.

RP: It sounds quite Luxemburgian.

Castoriadis: If you wish. In a certain sense, yes. From this point of view, certainly. This led to splits with Lefort. He was against any formal organization – ‘We are an intellectual group, we publish a magazine, that’s all.’ You must remember the circumstances at the time. The Cold War started about 1947 and in Europe, especially in France, the Stalinists were all powerful, even if they did leave government in 1947. All the Left was with them. Remember the stories of Sartre and others, the fellow travellers? We were absolutely isolated. There was a period when, after the outbreak of the Korean war, we were less than a dozen in the group. And the audience was extremely limited, residual ultra-leftist groups. We cleared the ultra-left ground. Whatever was really of worth there came to ‘Socialisme ou Barbarie’ – not the Trotskyists, of course. But the situation was extremely hard. Later, after 1953, with Stalin dead, the Berlin revolt, the Czechoslovakian strikes in 1954, then Hungary and Poland in 1956, the atmosphere started changing, and the review gained some audience – never very important. At the time were selling about 1,000 copies of the magazine, which were read around. Then came the Algerian war, and the stand we took against the Algerian war. There was a kind of renaissance amongst the student youth at the time. People started coming and the group grew. Some time in 1958-9, in the whole of France, including the provinces, were about 100. By 1962, 1963, 1964 we could hold public meetings in Paris with, say, 300 or 400 people. But all of this, as you see, was extremely limited. Of course, after 1968 lots of people said they were in ‘Socialisme ou Barbarie’. To which I have answered that if all these people who say they were in ‘Socialisme ou Barbarie’ had really been in ‘Socialisme ou Barbarie’, we probably would have grasped power in France some time around 1958.

RP: So you disbanded as an organization just before that moment, in the later 1960s, when the left began to open up and expand as a result of changes in the political and economic situation more generally?

Castoriadis: Yes. We had some people in the Renault factories who were producing a paper specifically for Renault workers. This was not a subsidiary of Socialisme ou Barbarie. It was produced by workers and so on. But all this was extremely limited. There was much more underground influence, unknown, anonymous; and it sprung out in 1968 in lots of people, including, for example, Danny Cohn-Bendit.

RP: Why did Socialisme ou Barbarie come to an end?

Castoriadis: This was a decision I pushed very strongly. First of all, there had been a split, a second split between 1960 and 1963. In 1960 I wrote a text called ‘Modern Capitalism and Revolution’, which was the most thorough critique of the classical Marxist position at this time: at the idea the proletariat has a privileged role to play, of the idea that economic problems are the main problems, and so on and so forth. It argued that the problem of the transformation of society is a much more general problem. There is the question of youth, the question of women, of the changing character of labour, of urbanism, and of technology – changing technology. All this created a strong reaction from part of the group, for which the theoretical representative was Lyotard, who at the time was playing the adamant Marxist. This led to a split in 1963 which weakened the group. We were the majority. We kept the magazine, they kept the monthly journal, ‘Workers Power.’ It was the first paper of this name. Later, the Italians published ‘Potere Operaio’. This was part of the underground influence. In Italy, lots of these people had been reading ‘Socialisme ou Barbarie’. But the group was weakened.

Public influence was expanding, as I have said. We were selling more and more. People were coming to the meetings, but they would not actively participate. They were passive consumers of the ideas. And this was reflected on the review, because to produce a magazine the main problem is collaborators – the people who write. It’s very funny. We never had money, but publishing ‘Socialisme ou Barbarie’ was never a financial problem. We always managed. The problem was the contents. Not enough people were coming into the group. Also, my own personal collaboration was beginning to take a different form. I was digging deeper and deeper into the theoretical underpinning, both at Marxist theory and of what we needed for a new conception. This was the first part of ‘The Imaginary Institution of Society’.

RP: You were still working as an economist at this time?

Castoriadis: Yes. I was working at the OECD. The review was taking the bizarre aspect of a theoretical-philosophical magazine which was also pretending to be a revolutionary organ. It was the first in France, and all over Europe, for instance, to produce an extensive account of the Berkeley events. The review anticipated the movements of the 1960s. It is there, about the students, the women and so on. It is written down. But this was not enough. And so at some time in 1966, we said, ‘For the time being, the thing has become meaningless. We had better stop and begin again later.’ And two years later, of course, came 1968. I don’t know what would have happened if we had still been a group in 1968. But 1968 very quickly fell under the spell of the Maoists and the Trotskyists and so on – not at the beginning, I mean the great period, but very quickly. One can’t rewrite history.

RP: Did you have any relations with the ‘Arguments’ group, the people who left the Communist Party in 1956?

Castoriadis: Yes. But the relations were bizarre. Edgar Morin published a paper in which he both recognized the role of ‘Socialisme ou Barbarie’ and criticized it very strongly, saying we were obsessed with bureaucracy and making a sort of panacea or shibboleth out of self-management. There were answers in ‘Arguments’ on our part. But there was not very much contact, except on some personal levels. Later on, when ‘Arguments’ had stopped, Morin participated in some of our public meetings. He wrote a paper in ‘Socialisme ou Barbarie’ but there was never a close collaboration. From the beginning, ‘Arguments’ took itself to be a review by intellectuals for intellectuals. We never abandoned the idea that we aim at the general public and not at intellectuals.

Philosophy and Imagination

RP: Perhaps we could switch the topic back to the issue of your intellectual formation. What were the main intellectual sources of your move away from Marxism? What did you draw upon to fuel your development away from an orthodox communist politics? You have defined your relationship to Marxism negatively in terms of the things you gradually gave up and finally more or less the whole thing had to be given and you embarked upon an independent intellectual project. Who inspired you in this second stage?

Castoriadis: It is quite difficult to answer your question in a modest way. I would say that the main source was the immanent critique. It does not work, this system which had fascinated me as a 13 year old boy: the idea that you have a coherent picture of human history and the world – that’s how it works – and its going to reach a happy final stage…

RP: You mentioned Aristotle…

Castoriadis: Yes but that was 1975. In the whole of my writings for ‘Socialisme ou Barbarie’ which have been published in paperback now in France, there is I think, in all one mention of Plato and one mention of Thucydides. That’s all. Before the first part of ‘The Imaginary Institution of Society’ (1964-5), there is no mention of any philosopher at all. It’s not that I didn’t want to mention one. It was because this was an immanent critique. The main thing that fuelled it was contemporary experience: the experience of working class movements. The theme was the critique of capitalism, the critique of the development of capitalist economies – the nonsensical character of the aims proposed by the capitalist economy which was more or less shared by Marxism; let’s increase material wealth and so on. Then after a point the questions became for me: ‘What is history?’ and ‘What is society?’ The work about the institution began here in 1959. There are already seeds in a 1953 article criticizing Marxist economics and speaking about creativity in history; and even before, in 1950-1, speaking about creativity and autonomy. The idea was there but it was not elaborated.

RP: It was drawn from Merleau-Ponty?

Castoriadis: No. Merleau-Ponty had nothing to do with it. There is no idea of creativity or creation in Merleau-Ponty, as far as I can see. I had been interested in philosophy since my adolescence. But I kept the two things separate. This is perhaps a bizarre personal trait. I didn’t want to mix political thinking and political activity with philosophy. Not for practical or pedagogical reasons – you don’t go to the workers telling them to read the ‘Third Critique’ – but this is a position which I still have. I don’t think you can draw directly from philosophy, as such, political conclusions.

RP: Yet in your recent writings you see philosophical reflection as quite central to the project of autonomy – not the whole of that project, but very central to it…

Castoriadis: That’s true. But my ontology is an ontology of creation: creation and destruction. Creation can be democracy and the Parthenon and Macbeth, but it is also Auschwitz, the Gulag, and all that. These are fantastic creations. Politics has to do with political judgements and value choices.

RP: For which you can’t find an ontological ground?

Castoriadis: No. I don’t think there is an ontological basis for value judgements. Once you enter the field of philosophy, you have already made a value judgement, Socrates’ value judgement: the unexamined life is not worth living (and the unlived life is not worth examining, as you say in Essex – this is true as well). But this is already a stand you have taken. In this sense, the decision to enter the reflexive domain is already a sort of grounding decision, which can’t rationally ground itself. If you rationally try to ground it, you use what is the result of the decision. You are in a vicious circle.

RP: So how do you draw people into the reflexive life? Through examples?

Castoriadis: Yes, through examples and through consequences. But you can’t force somebody rationally to be rational. There is no demonstration of the kind: if you don’t philosophize, you are absurd. Because the other says, ‘I don’t care about being absurd,’ or ‘I have to be absurd, otherwise I am not a true a Christian.’ Credo quia absurdum. You can’t ‘refute’ Tertullian.

So, for a long time, I tried to keep politics and philosophy separate. They joined in the first part of my article of 1964/65, ‘Marxism and Revolutionary Theory’. Once I had reached the idea of the institution, of the imaginary creation of history, I started re-reading philosophy with a different eye. And what I encountered there as forerunners in this field – but only at the level of subjective individual imagination, of course – was Kant and Fichte. Later, I took up Aristotle, much later. That is the first place you find an examination of the phantasia: the genius discovering the thing, and the limitations and impossibilities the discovery of phantasia creates for the Aristotelian ontology. Then another development starts. I had never stopped busying myself with philosophy. I came to France to do a PhD thesis in philosophy. (The theme of the thesis was that any attempt at a rationally constructed philosophical system leads to blind alleys, to aporias and to antimonies. Mostly what I had in mind was Hegel but not only). This remains an unfinished manuscript. So I was reading things and scribbling and jotting all the time, but not systematically. It was only after Socialisme ou Barbarie that I took this up again systematically. Even then my main sources of inspiration have never been, properly speaking, in the history of philosophy. They have been much more problems arising out of, say, psychoanalysis; out of the analysis of the socio-historical; out of the state of contemporary sciences – the crisis of foundations in mathematics, the aporias of contemporary physics, or problems of biology – the emergence of living things: what is a living thing? What is the biological closure of an organism?

As far as the problem of imagination is concerned, the main difference is that for both Aristotle and Kant, as for all philosophers, imagination is looked at uniquely from the point of view of the subject: the transcendental imagination in Kant, the imagination of the Transcendental Ego in Fichte, etc. There is nothing corresponding to the social-historical. The same is true of Heidegger. There is no substantial relation of Dasein to history; to society even less. If I have made a contribution, it is this: what I call the radical imaginary, the instituting imaginary, as a social-historical element.

I accuse all philosophers of ignoring the ontological status of, for instance of language. Language is institution. It is a fantastic paradigm of institution. The philosophers think – they think, therefore they talk, they use language, but they don’t care to say what language is and how it came about. And when they do say, they say, like Heidegger: the gift of Being. Everything is a gift of Being, including death of course. If one envisages the institution of language, one has to envisage a creative possibility which actualises itself in the anonymous collective, which is the instituting imaginary, which posits language, which posits rules, and thereby enables the singular human being – which is unfit for life qua singular human being, a biological monstrosity – it enables it to survive. I am very much attracted by some philosophers. There is no problem about it. I’m very much attracted by the Great Four – Plato, Aristotle, Kant and Hegel. I always find food for thought there.

RP: You’ve referred to your classical predecessors, but someone looking at French intellectual history in the twentieth century can see a very strong thematic of the imagination. For example, there is one of Sartre’s first books, L’Imaginaire. When you arrived in Paris, you attended a course given by Bachelard, for whom the notion of the imagination is absolutely central. Then there is Lacan, of course, as well. You do seem to fit into a twentieth century French tradition of reflection on the problem of the imagination. Are there really no influences here?

Castoriadis: I think I come from a completely different direction. Sartre’s imaginary or imagination is purely negative. It is the possibility of envisaging that something could not be. It’s a negativizing faculty of the ego. For me, it’s just the opposite. It’s the capacity to posit something which is not there.

RP: Isn’t the philosophical structure of that process actually the same, with one side rather than the other being emphasized?

Castoriadis: But there is no given without imagination. In this respect, my view of imagination is much nearer to Kant. It’s constitutive, absolutely constitutive. The difference from Kant is that my imagination is creative in a genuine sense. The Kantian imagination, the transcendental imagination, always has to imagine the same thing. If the Kantian imagination started really imagining, the world would collapse. It has to posit the same forms, otherwise it’s just what he calls empirical imagination. We remain in the realm of the subject. Lacan’s imagination is a very bizarre thing. Vulgarly speaking, it is the illusion. Nothing more than that; the reflection in the mirror; the image in the mirror, and the image the other sends to me of myself. Lacan’s imaginary is the optical illusion.

RP: Is it not also connected to the lack? Isn’t it a more dynamic process – the filling of a lack? You make it sound very empirical, this notion of reflection…

Castoriadis: The attempt at filling a lack is desire. Lacan doesn’t link it to the imaginary as such, which for him, has to do with what he calls ‘demand’. It’s another realm. You have the lack, you have desire, you have the Law – which imposes the lack in a certain sense. But the imaginary is not a result of the desire – or of ‘demand’. It is exactly the other way round. Cows do not desire, for they have no imagination – not in the human sense. Bachelard is another thing. I followed Bachelard when I arrived in Paris, for half a year, because he was the only one worth following. Then he stopped. That year, he was engaged in discussing some aspects of science from the point of view of his own epistemological conceptions. It was interesting, but it didn’t go very far. I read Bachelard much later, but if you know his work you’ll see the differences. It’s imagination in a very loose sense. It’s not constitutive in character. And certainly, it’s not a social element.

RP: But there is that sense of creativity there?

Castoriadis: There is in a certain sense, a sense of creativity in Bachelard. That’s true. But I was never really attracted to his work.

RP: What about surrealism?

Castoriadis: I knew a bit about it because there were some Greek surrealists, and I was very fascinated by them. Then, when I came to France, I learnt much more. I was extremely fascinated by Breton and everything he had to say. At the time, the interest of Breton for me was the poetic dimension. Twenty five years later, ‘creation is poesis’, and I gave another meaning to poesis. It’s very difficult to make one’s own intellectual biography in a thorough and honest way. You are exposed to influences all the time that you don’t even know about; or you don’t know the way they are going to work through you, perhaps much later. But among the people who were for me the most important in France at that time was Breton. And then Benjamin Peret, who came later to ‘Socialisme ou Barbarie’ and published a text in the journal; and a younger surrealist called Jean-Jacques Lebel who was in the group and very much in touch with us.

RP: We were thinking on a more theoretical plane, about your interpretation of the Freudian unconsciousness. One can read Freud in a very deterministic way, but the notion of the creativity of the unconscious is obviously there if you read between the lines. It seems that it was the surrealists that picked up on that.

Castoriadis: They picked it up, yes; but they never theorised it. They used it. They interpreted it this way. It is the fantastic part of Freud, the Freud who is always talking about the imagination but never names the thing. But what else are the phantasies? The positivistic streak in him is very strong. After all, this is Vienna at the end of the nineteenth century, and there are problems of scientific respectability. He was already creating havoc by saying children were polymorphous-perverse people. If in addition he had said, ‘Whatever I tell it’s just the imagination of the subject…’, he would have been even more laughed out of court than he was at the beginning. Around 1911 he signed a manifesto calling for the establishment of a society for the diffusion of Positivistic Thinking, with Petzold, Hilbert, Einstein and some other people. He was a very contradictory character.

Autonomy

RP: You have said that your notion of the imagination is not related back to the subject, at least not only to the subject – individuals are formed within the context of a particular institution of society, and you have written about the heteronomous institution of society as that which has obtained historically; and about autonomy as a political value. Yet if the process of institution is not in some sense the outcome of collective activity, but is the matrix within which all activity takes place, how could there be an autonomous institution of society? It seems as though the institution of society always already precedes the empirical activity of human beings.

Castoriadis: This is the problem of autonomy, of the establishment of an autonomous society. I think that you can have, you can imagine, you can devise – and you have, up to a certain point, you did have, in the Western world – institutions which are not just institutions of closure. If we have institutions which not only allow but further the creation of individuals who are capable of discussing, or putting into question, if we create a public space where discussion is genuinely made possible, where information is available, etc., this is already something completely different, completely other, from the state of classically heteronomous societies, where you have to think what the institutions of society tells you to think.

RP: But doesn’t the philosophical structure of the concept of institution mean that, at an ontological level, it is tied up with heteronomy in a way that suggests that when one is speaking of autonomy and heteronomy politically one is actually talking about something else?

Castoriadis: We are working under the weight of inherited thought here. Behind what you say, there is a conception of autonomy which I would call metaphysical freedom, in the derogatory sense.

RP: Some Kantian notion?

Castoriadis: Kantian, or perhaps even to be obscene, Sartrean. That is, one would be autonomous if one were absolutely outside any external influence and fully spontaneous. Now, this is just nonsense. This is a philosophical phantasy, and it judges reality against this phantasy. It doesn’t exist. Autonomy, as I understand it in the field of the individual, is not a watertight frontier against everything else, a well out of which spring, absolutely spontaneously, absolutely original concepts. Autonomy is an ongoing process, whereby you always have contents which are given, borrowed –you are in the world, you are in society, you have inherited a language, you live in a certain history. You have been geworfen, as Heidegger says. You have not chosen to be in 1952, or whenever, neither have you chosen to be born in England. This is just the case. You will never know the great philosopher of the years 2100, who might have changed your way of thinking. It is in this world that we have to have a workable and effective concept of autonomy. Autonomy does not mean I am totally separated from everything external. And, in relation to my own contents, which are 99 per cent borrowed, have come from outside, I have a reflective, critical, deliberative activity, and I can to a significant degree say yes and no. I can also allow my own radical imagination, my flux of representations and ideas – we are talking about thinking now – to well up, and there to choose again; because my radical imagination may produce nonsense, or absurdities, or things which do not work. It is this ongoing process which I call an autonomous subjectivity.

RP: So the radical imagination is a kind of pure source?

Castoriadis: It is the permanent welling of representations, desires and affects which, in heteronomous societies, are practically 100 per cent repressed and appear only in Freudian slips, dreams, maladies, psychoses and transgressions. It is always with us, and can be freed; not that we would accept all its products. But it could be free to supply contents, new contents, upon which our reflective and deliberative activity can work. So if we consider the relation to the collectivity, the idea that I’m not free because the others are there, or because the law is out there, only really makes sense against this traditional phantasy. Others, and the existence of the law, are not just constraints. They are also sources of freedom. They are sources of the possibility of action. They are sources of facilitation. They are riches.

RP: So what you understand by the project of autonomy is the maximization of the possibilities of reflection, self reflection and deliberation? Is this an Idea in the Kantian sense?

Castoriadis: No, it’s not an idea in the Kantian sense.

RP: So it’s realizable, then, your concept of autonomy? It’s philosophically constituted in such a way that it is a possible object of historical realization. It must be materially possible?

Castoriadis: Yes. It must be materially possible. It’s not a utopia. And it’s not a Kantian Idea. It’s not an infinite distance. It’s not the polar star.

RP: And yet it’s already implicit within history, in the way that some people understand Marx to have thought.

Castoriadis: No. It’s an historical creation, an historical creation which is up to now unfinished.

RP: But if it’s not implicit in history, if it is to be created in an open history, how do we know it’s actually going to be realizable?

Castoriadis: We don’t. We work for it, but we don’t know in advance.

Market and Plan, System and Lifeworld

RP: Perhaps we could turn more directly to politics. It has become prevalent on the Left to say to say, ‘If the plan doesn’t work, then we’ve got to go back to the market. In a complex modern society we have to have impersonal forms of mediation, impersonal forms of collective regulation’ – in Habermas’s terms, the distinction between system and lifeworld. Habermas argues that, although systems should ultimately be under democratic control of the lifeworld, we can’t abolish the systems as such. The market and some forms of administrative-bureaucratic regulation of society must remain. This is the basis of his critique of Marx: that Marx has some notion of collapsing all social relations back into the immediacy of the lifeworld. It seems that a lot of your inspiration comes, albeit indirectly, from the early Marx. Where does your concept of autonomy place you in this debate?

Castoriadis: Marx was certainly wrong in thinking that all impersonal mediations have to abolished. This appears to be his critique of the commodity, and also money. I repudiated this as early as 1957 in a text called ‘The Content of Socialism’ which is in my Political and Social Writings. For me it’s quite obvious: you can’t have a complex society without, for instance, impersonal means of exchange. Money has this function, and is very important from this point of view. It’s another thing to deprive money of one of its functions in capitalist and pre-capitalist economies as an instrument for personal accumulation of wealth and the acquisition of means of production. As a unit of value and as a means of exchange, money is a great invention, a great creation of humanity. We are living in societies; there is an anonymous collectivity; we express our needs and preferences by being willing to spend that much on that item, and not on anything else. This doesn’t, to my mind create any problem. The real problem starts when you say ‘market’. Again, in this text from 1957, I said that the socialist society is the first society where there’s going to be a genuine market, because a capitalist market is not a market. A capitalist market is not a market, not only if you compare it with the manuals of political economy, where the market is transparent and where capital is a jelly which moves from one field to another instantaneously because profits are bigger there – and that is nonsense there – but because prices have nothing to do with costs. In an autonomous society you will have a genuine market in the sense both of the abolition of all monopolistic and oligopolistic positions, and of a correspondence of the prices of goods to actual social costs.

RP: Will you have a market in labour power?

Castoriadis: This is a problem. My position is that you can’t have a market in labour power in the sense that you can’t have an autonomous society if you persist in the differentiation of salaries, wages and incomes. If you do have this differentiation, then you keep all the motivations of capitalism, of homo economicus, and all the old hodge-podge starts again.

RP: Won’t this undermine the market?

Castoriadis: I don’t see why. There are no economic or rational grounds on which I can say, ‘One hour of this man’s work is worth three times that off some other men.’ This is the whole problem of the critique of value theory, and the critique of what underlies value theory, which is the idea that you can impute the result of production to this or that other factor, in a definite way. But in truth, you cannot do this imputation. The product is always a social product and an historical product. You have to take into account that whatever imputation of costs you do, it’s a relative imputation, geared to social needs and geared to the future – which has, of course, to have some relation to historical costs and reality. But you cannot have differential labour costs based on any rational or even reasonable justification. That’s a very hard point to swallow.

RP: So you don’t think there is any rationality to the capitalistic distribution of social labour through the wage relation, in terms of productivity? It’s purely political?

Castoriadis: It’s purely political. The present distribution of income, both between groups and between individuals, is the sheer outcome of a struggle of forces. Nothing more. This creates problems in relation to work discipline. If the work collective is not capable of establishing enough solidarity and discipline, in order to have everyone working according to some accepted collective rules, we reach the political hard core of the problem. Then there is nothing to do; no more than there is in the field of political democracy, if people are not willing to be responsible for the decisions of the collectivity, to participate actively and so on. This doesn’t mean that you have to maintain bureaucratic and hierarchical structures in production – on the contrary. The division of tasks is not the same as the division of power.

I spent a lot of my time trying to analyse the functioning of capitalist factories. I found that the capitalist planning of production in the factory is half of the term absurd. The factory works because the workers transgress the capitalist organization of production. They work against the rules, or at a distance from the rules, so production can go on. If they were to apply the rules, production would stop immediately. The proof is that ‘working to rule’ is one of the most efficient ways of breaking everything down. So much for the capitalist organization of hierarchy. As soon as you have hierarchy, you have this fundamental opacity in the production sphere, because you have the division between executives and directors: people who manage and people who execute. By virtue of their position, the workers have to hide what is going on from the eyes of the directors. This reaches delirious proportions in a fully bureaucratic society, but is the case practically everywhere. The collective has to take the basic decisions. It can delegate, but it elects and it can revoke.

RP: This will entail very high levels of political culture and activism.

Castoriadis: Yes, high levels of responsibility between people. That’s certain. You cannot have a truly democratic collectivity, not only self-management and production, but on the sheer political level, unless people are really active. But we shouldn’t fetishize this: one can think of institutions which facilitate this participation. Today, to be responsible, to attempt to participate, you would have to be heroic twenty four hours a day.

RP: This would mean a reduction of working time.

Castoriadis: Certainly. But there are other considerations. What is working time spent on? During the war in America production doubled between 1939 and 1942. And the workers were only working for about four hours in the factory. They were playing the numbers, or they were playing cards, or they were ‘working for the government’, as the Americans say – ‘Leave me alone, I’m working for the government’. That meant he was doing something which he would take home. What is the English expression? – moonlighting. In France they call it ‘la perruque.’ And in Russia, you know the tremendous extent of it. I would argue that present output under different conditions of participation of the workers could take place in four hours or six hours instead of eight.

RP: Would it be true to say that you are in favour of what is sometimes called indicative planning, via some general democratic framework at a social level?

Castoriadis: More than indicative. I don’t think there is a contradiction between market and planning in this respect. In an autonomous society one must have a true market, not just with consumer freedom, but with consumer sovereignty: which specific items are produced for consumption must be decided by consumers in the day to day vote of their purchases where everybody has equal vote. Today, the vote of Mr Trump is worth one million votes of the average American. That’s not what I mean by a true market. But you have general decisions about at least two things: the partition of national product, or national income, between consumption in general or investment in general; and the general share of the mass consumption between private consumption and public consumption – how much society decides to devote education, to roads, to erect monuments, to all public endeavours: and how much it decides that individuals are free to spend as they want. You need a collective decision about this. You have to have proposals and discussions, and bring forward the implications of decisions before the eyes of the people.

In this sense, you have to have planning, because the implications of the decision about investment and consumption have to be foreseen. If you decide that you will have so much investment, these are more or less the consumption levels you can count upon in the coming years. If you want more investment you will have to consume less. But maybe you will be able to consume more in five years time. If you want more education, you can’t have it for nothing. You will have to devote resources to education, and you have to decide where you take these resources from. Do you take them from private consumption? Or do you take them from investment, that is, from the future growth of productive facilities? Do you care about any future growth of productive facilities, or do you want to renew the existing capital? All this has to be brought forward, and it cannot reasonably be decided by market forces.

RP: This sounds like the kind of debate currently taking place in the Soviet Union?

Castoriadis: In a sense, yes. But I don’t accept this idea of Habermas’s that because you have to have the system you have to accept a degree of alienation or heteronomy. I don’t say you can be the master of everything. You can’t control everything. That’s not the problem. The point is that you can always look back, always change things, and establish mechanisms whereby the function of society is made controllable by people, though certainly not fully transparent.

Events in Eastern Europe

RP: You draw a contrast between the fragmented bureaucratic capitalism and totalitarian bureaucratic capitalism which makes it look as though the Eastern European societies were a more closed, more extreme form of the same sort of society which we have in the West. Yet they have a fragility which was quite unexpected. Do you think your interpretation of bureaucracy and capitalism needs to be revised in the light of more recent events? And, given that what perhaps the majority of Eastern Europeans seem to want at the moment is simply to exchange the plan for the market, in what sense was 1989’s ‘Springtime of Nations’ a manifestation of autonomy?

Castoriadis: Eastern Europe is different from Russia. It had an imposed and imported regime, which never had the same roots, and the same strength as it had in Russia. I don’t think the events in Eastern Europe, or even in Russia, have changed the characterization of the regime as it was. The regime was a form of bureaucratic totalitarian capitalism. But it was subject to deep internal antimonies, which I have analysed for a long time. From the time of the Hungarian revolution, and even before, people were resisting passively, but they were resisting fantastically, even in Russia. In Russian factories they were resisting fantastically. But this totalitarian regime, this bureaucratic totalitarian capitalism is not a timeless essence. It has a history. Already after Stalin’s death, it was obvious that it couldn’t go on as before. You had Khrushchev, and the period under Brezhnev, which I characterised as a stratocracy, in the sense that the regime had become totally cynical. Nobody believed in any ideas in this regime. The only objective was sheer force. Brute force for the sake of brute. The maximum possible social resources were put into the military sector. What we know now about what was going on proves that, if anything, my analysis fell short of the reality. The degree of the suppression of the civilian economy for the sake of the military was even bigger than I had originally reckoned at the time, in 1981.

The Polish and Afghan events played a very big role in the change, in the sense that Russian leading groups realized they were confronted by an impasse. They didn’t intervene militarily in Poland, they intervened in an indirect way through General Jaruzelski. And in Afghanistan they failed. What nobody had foreseen, me as little as anybody else, was the emergence of Gorbachev and the reforming group. This was totally unforeseeable. A big part of the thing is Gorbachev’s role as a civilizing autocrat. But it’s not just that. He also happened to be a very clever and able politician. And he certainly could not have risen to power without the support of the army and the KGB. That’s quite clear. They realised there was an over-extension of of Russia’s attempts to be a world power. This unleashed a series of events which culminated in Eastern Europe. There, people hated the regime and were ready to act, as soon as they were sure the Russian tanks would not enter.

I gave an interview to Esprit in 1982 called ‘The Hardest and Most Fragile of All Regimes’ in which I argued that, as long as the thing holds it appears to be like steel, but in fact it is extremely fragile – like glass – and could be pulverized from one day to the other. This is what happened. This amazed people, because all these organizations, these steely Stalinist people – ‘we are the vanguard of humanity’ – became sand from one day to the next. But the same thing is not happening in Russia. Which proves that there the thing has much more important roots. Up to now the process is much slower. You have ethnic strife, and you had this fantastic Miners’ strike in the summer of 1989, with demands which were not just economic but also political, but demonstrations by the people were only just beginning. But Gorbachev is overrun by events, both in the ethnic field and the general field – and that’s why he retreats constantly in external relations. I wrote in 1977 that of all the industrialised countries Russia is the first candidate for a social revolution. Up to now, the social revolution hasn’t appeared but…

RP: Are you hopeful?

Castoriadis: No. If the social revolution happens…that’s another point. We will probably have to pay the legacy of Marxism-Leninism for years from now. Its true that in Eastern Europe at the moment, people can’t think of anything else except a liberal capitalist society. Almost everything else has disappeared from the horizon. As an Hungarian friend of mine was telling me some months ago: in Hungary you can’t even pronounce a word which starts with ‘S’ – enough of it. Any word. This is the negative side of it. They are under the understandable delusion that the West is a utopia, a cornucopia. In actual fact, they are not even going to have that. They are going to have a very miserable situation. Even in the political field it’s not clear that anything resembling a parliamentary regime in the West will be easy to establish; except perhaps in Czechoslovakia or Hungary. We are confronted with history in the process of creation.

RP: Are there no grounds for hope, then?

Castoriadis: I don’t much like to talk of ‘grounds for hope’. I think that you have to do what you have to do – and hope for the best. If you take the rich, ripe capitalist countries, we certainly should not renew the discourse about insurmountable internal contradictions. Yet there are at least two facts which make it extremely difficult to believe in an indefinite reproduction of the present state of affairs. The first is the ecological limit, which we are nearer and nearer to. The second concerns the present state of capitalist society, but is somewhat analogous to the ecological question. Everybody is lauding the extraordinary efficiency of capitalism in the field of economic production. This is true. But up to now this has been achieved through the irreversible destruction of a capital of natural resources which had been accumulating for three billion years (or at least 700 million years). This has been thrown away, destroyed, over fifty years or a hundred years. There were sediments of forests, of land, of oxygen, of ozone, of a variety of living species, etc. But the same is true on the anthropological level. Capitalism can function – could function – because there was a capitalist entrepreneur who was fascinated and impassioned by producing things, and setting up new machines. Very often he was, if not an inventor, at least a quite clever design engineer – Edison and Ford, for example. This type is disappearing, More and more, you make money by playing in the casino, not by setting up production facilities. Capitalism also presupposes anthropological types – the bureaucrat, the judge, the educator – which are pre-capitalist products. If the prevailing philosophy and system of values is that you try to earn as much money as you can can, and to hell with the rest, one doesn’t see why you should have judges, or university professors or even schoolteachers. You will have them, but they will do their job in the worst possible way: trying to get away with as much as they can; being corrupt, if corruption is materially feasible, and so on. In this respect, capitalism is living by exhausting the sediments of previous norms and values, which become meaningless in the present system. Absolutely meaningless. But this is not a ‘ground’ for hope. An ecological catastrophe, for instance, could very well lead to a series of quasi-fascist dictatorships – ‘The holiday is over. This is your ration for the coming months; ten litres of oxygen. That’s all.’

Interviewed by Peter Dews and Peter Osborne
Essex University February 1990

Otto Dix, In Memory of the Glorious Time, 1924

Written on Remembrance Day 2018, the centenary of the end of the First World War

In Britain, it seems the cult of the war dead is back and stronger than ever, driven from the top of the culture industry under the guise of an guileless goodness that evacuates the meaning from history and is manifestly a paean to dying for power. Indeed, upon visiting my hometown this afternoon I noticed that the streets were pinned with posters that noted names and other details of those killed in the Great War (1914-18), each poster is specific to the the very street in which it is placed. Like the omnipresence of the poppy on TV screens and the context-free commentary it is an obstacle to remembering. Or rather we are asked to remember that lots of ‘our’ men in uniform died, how sad this was and it should never happen again but not why it happened which might broach the question: should it have happened in the first place? It’s a call to merge with the dead, join up and march into unthinking obedience lest you offend the dead ancestors. In short, from the pools of blood and skin in Flanders fields a primordial politics emerges to stoke a myth more than familiar to the primal horde.

If some experienced the First World War as a kind of fatal blow to a straightforward identification with Western Civilisation for having automatically expunged the irrational element of the human psyche by means of the scientific method it seems that it neither discouraged the radicals from the idea of a march of history or the conservatives from associating death with glory. With respect to the latter, a cult of the dead was built in the imperial pomp of melancholy stone. The function sought is an affect. If one walks along the esplanade at Southsea at dusk to the spotlit naval cenotaph, a stone shaft with a globe on top, one is meant to see national honour and valiant sacrifice rather than empty tombs, barren wombs and an obelisk erected for an ocean of corpses. This is the work of the national myth of ourselves and the others.

Memorisation without history tends to make deaths meaningless because they are decontextualised from wider events. Memorisation without history prepares the ground for more deaths by making the meaning of history mass sacrifice. That the First World War was fought by poor conscripts for a British Empire that held hundreds of millions without rights or freedom is elided for obvious reasons but a national imaginary that invests so heavily in misremembering is surely built upon denying the consequences of a past that many find too painful to repudiate. The wages of this can be seen most clearly in the ideological narrative that spawned Brexit – nostalgia for a past that didn’t exist that only functions as a outlet for the idea that the I/We are the eternal victims of the others.

Every social order spends a great deal of time making sense of death but the particular form this takes is anything but inevitable, just or free from ‘politics’ (in the pejorative sense). Now that the last veterans have died and the movements for social progress that nominally considered themselves against such barbarism, have either faded into irrelevance or are busy defending new barbarisms of their own, the cult of the dead is free to become myth in the proper sense, free of any social anchor that could contradict its self-proclaimed sacrality. Long solemnly installed in avenues, parks and public squares the grey stones filled with ordinary names now can become abstract monuments to a death drive that obliterates the willing over barbed wire and machine gun fire and puts the unwilling or insane before the firing squad, the abyssal meeting with Ur-Mother-Nation is the consolation it offers to all.

In this new age of monsters our fear is that zombie nationalism is not a reversion to jingoism past but a palimpsest stretched to cover newer inchoate politics which are inarticulate precisely because they have not yet taken shape but are propelled by subterranean drivers, the same drivers as Brexit, Trump and post-fascism. This is Mytho-Praxis (1) in mass society, as the human links with the past are broken the significations of the social order can be reorganised for somewhat different purposes. The question that still cannot be answered is why did those 12 million die along that western front because the answer is that is was for nothing at best and for the despicable form of oppression that is colonialism at worst. If mourning on that basis is too difficult then a defence must be created that makes the sacred symbols of the war dead part of a common culture that repudiates that reality.

by Joseph Aylmer

Notes

(1) The term is taken from Marshall Sahlins, see Islands of History, The University of Chicago Press.

A talk given by Castoriadis at the Institute of Contemporary Arts, London on 7th December 1992. This has been written up, imperfectly, from the audio here to give this important and sometimes amusing talk another airing.

UPDATE: The original P&B transcription has been reread and edited by David Ames Curtis, Castoriadis’s preferred translator. We are grateful to David for making our rough transcription, provided for information, into an altogether more elegant and accurate text.

I am not going to talk about psychoanalysis as such. I have to presuppose that, at least roughly, classical Freudian theory is more or less familiar to everybody here. Nor am I going to take very much into account post-Freudian theorisations, mostly because they are parasitic of particular fragments of Freud’s thought, not very productive, and only too often expressions of fashions and fads.

Now, the title, I think, of this talk has been announced as ‘Psychoanalysis and the Origins of Society’. Perhaps this title is misleading. It should rather be ‘Psychoanalysis, Society, and Politics’ or ‘Possibilities and Limits of a Contribution of Psychoanalysis to our Understanding of Society’.

Ideally speaking, we have four main themes here:

1. What does psychoanalysis have to say about the origins of human society? And this is more or less identical – I draw your attention to that – to the question: What does psychoanalysis have to say, as psychoanalysis, about the humanisation of the great apes?
2. Now, second, what about history? Is history, psychoanalytically speaking, just an epiphenomenon? Or else what, or why not?
3. What does psychoanalysis have to say about the content and structure of social and political institutions? In particular, here, domination and power, gender domination, labour, and knowledge.
4. What does psychoanalysis have to say as to the possibilities, and the desirability, of the transformation of existing institutions, or about the proper institutions of society, that is, politics in the genuine sense of the word?

All that follows will be outrageously sketchy, of course. I will be rather brief on Freud himself, because of the postulate of common knowledge on Freud; I take it that you are all experts on Freud’s thought. Nothing about his epigones. And I will concentrate on the aporias, critiques, and, egoistically, on my own views.

Now, as to the first question, that is, the origins of human society, or humanisation of the apes. There is a curious complexity or confusion in Freud’s attempts to give an account of the origins of society. Of course, the main text here is Totem and Taboo, which is the most psychoanalytical, and, after thirty years, the main strands of thought, more or less, you can find again in Moses and Monotheism. Now, in between, at the end of the 1920s, you have two other books The Future of an Illusion, about religion, and Civilisation and Its Discontents, as it has been translated into English,which present a quite different picture, though it is by no means contradictory or incompatible with the previous one.

Totem and Taboo recites an individual history. Totem and Taboo contains a myth, you all know: there is a horde or a Cyclopean family; there is an omnipotent father, omnipotent in the physical sense, who forbids any access to the available women under his power to all his sons, castrates them perhaps, except for the last one who succeeds him. Someday, perhaps, says Freud, because of some invention, technical or otherwise, the up to then helpless brothers gather, decide to murder the father, after which they are seized by deep guilt feelings, they erect the father as a totem and this totem is the origin of the institutions. They perform an oath, among themselves, an oath ceremony whereby they swear that nobody will attempt any longer to have all the women to himself or kill or castrate the others, etc., etc.

That’s the classical picture. It’s a myth, it’s obvious. It’s a very important myth, in a sense. An aside: in a certain way, it is of course a repetition of the Greek myth of Ouranos, Kronos, and Gaia. I am torn here between my Freudianism and my cultural chauvinism, but I think that the Greek myth is, in a certain sense, more complete. Why? Because there is a question with the myth of Totem and Taboo – why the hell is the father castrating the male children? And the only answer to this is that this primeval father has read Totem and Taboo [laughter]. And knows what awaits. But when Kronos in the Greek myth starts eating up his children or, rather, swallowing them, he knows very well why he is doing it, because he has already castrated his own father, Ouranos, at the incitation of his mother Gaia, the Earth, who was really tired of the incessant lovemaking of Ouranos. So, never mind. As in all myths, the myth is a totality and its beginning presupposes the end; otherwise, no sense can be made of it. But this is not an objection against the myth.

Now, the Freud of Civilisation and Its Discontents or of The Future of an Illusion is much closer, in many respects, to the run–of–the–mill, so to speak, sociological conceptions. Civilisation, says there Freud, is essentially a repression of drives. The civilising process is exclusively the work of minorities, which of course benefit from it as they go by ensuring privileges for themselves, and are or seem the only ones capable, after a while at least, of higher pleasures like sublimation, whilst the masses hate civilization, are hostile to civilisation, because it forces them to repress their drives. Now, Freud is very equitable in this respect; he says that the masses are absolutely right in hating civilisation. He has a sentence about a great experiment going on in some big Eastern country at that time but nobody knows what the outcome will be or if the results will be worth the cost, and we know there were no results but many costs. As the Communists used to say, to justify their murders, You can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs, to which I used to reply: But we can’t break eggs and make no omelette, right? So they have broken lots of eggs and didn’t make any omelette. Anyhow, Freud was very sympathetic to these attitudes of the masses, though you know very well how cultured a man he was and how he loved art and so on. He justifies them. There are many anarchistic accents, in some parts of the book, many Threepenny Opera aspects of the book. The only thing that helps the masses a bit to remain within civilisation are some slight elements of identification with the higher classes. Parenthetically, from the theoretical point of view, one should indicate here that this fundamental concept of identification, slowly elaborated from 1910 onward, has been very significantly and fruitfully put to use in another work of Freud’s, Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego of 1920, despite the flaws of this work, which I won’t dwell on here, but one should retain this idea that this aspect of identification – whereby perhaps, I don’t know, the poorest English housewife somehow or other feels she participates in Queen Elizabeth – has always played a tremendous role in the cohesion of divided and dominated societies.

Now, in both cases – that is, Totem and Taboo and Civilisation and Its Discontents  – there is a view of human beings as exclusively directed and motivated by their drives, triebe he says in German; the otherwise excellent Standard Edition has monstrously translated triebe as instincts – something we ought to keep for animals. Drives (triebe)  – pushes, if you wish – are essentially or exclusively, as you know, sexual. Anyhow, they have to do with a pleasure principle which reigns without limits in the first stages of psychical development. Now, here arises a first aporia: animals, starting with bacteria, but we don’t need to go there, dogs, apes, lions have, of course, very strong drives or instincts and, in a sense, they are the same as humans‘ – sex and hunger. Why isn’t there a proliferation of animal societies? Why are humans humanised? Why do oxen, or lions not have totems or taboos?

On this, there is an implicit answer in Freud, which in fact doesn’t explain anything. And that implicit possibility of an answer has remained unexplored up to today, which I am presently going to take up. The implicit answer is that humans possess consciousness, in contrast to lions, oxen and bacteria. Freud states repeatedly that this is the main enigma of psychology. What is consciousness? He would like very much – of course, he is under a delusion – to explain, psychoanalytically, how consciousness can arise; of course, he never succeeds in doing so and nobody could. Anyhow, this element will not do to differentiate us from animals or from higher apes. Consciousness as such does not add anything to anything. More precisely, consciousness adds to what happens a passive quality; this happens and I happen to be conscious of what happens and that’s that. In order to make a difference, consciousness must at least be active, a sort of operating rationality, as perhaps Hegel would say. But we know that these two things are widely different. All of us know that animals, despite our silly talk about ourselves as humans, are much more rational than humans. I mean, animals never do stupid things; they do the things they have to do, right? They are instrumentally efficient and we couldn’t say that they are conscious in the usual sense of the term. And humans are conscious and, at the same time, monstrously irrational. All of human history is there, from the beginning to this very day. Most importantly, if the drives or instincts are the only forces, this consciousness, rational or not, would always produce the same, save perhaps for minute adaptations to changing circumstances. And this is not what we know; we know there is a human history in a very, very, very strong sense of the word. This is the black hole of history in the midst of psychoanalysis about which, unfortunately given the constraints of time, I can’t say anything more here.

Now, the unexplored possibility of an answer, in Freud, about the difference between humans and animals is in the very important and very profound 1915 text about Triebe und Triebschicksale  – Drives and Their Vicissitudes, as the Standard Edition translates it. (i) Freud does not elaborate the answer, but one can draw it from the text and it boils down, with some extension, to the following: Drives have their source in the body (this is Freud), soma, whether we talk about animals or humans. They aim at the satisfaction of some need or, more generally, procuring pleasure, discharge, and then tranquility. The action leading to satisfaction is necessarily mediated by the psyche, even animal psyche or human. If you prefer, if you are an adamant biological positivist, whatever goes on in the central nervous system in order to trigger the action that will bring about the satisfaction, the psyche has to be influenced, of course, by the somatic push, the drive, the instinct if you talk about animals.

Now, these two realms, that is the soma and the psyche, are heterogenous. Freud is adamant about this and rightly so, despite the many difficulties of the problem. In the one, in the soma, we have physical movements, charges and whatnot. In the other, we have, as he said already from 1896 in a letter to Wilhelm Fliess, qualities and, mostly, representations (Vorstellungen); mind you, in German, in philosophy, Vorstellung doesn’t mean ‘representation’ in the sense you have an object which is fully formed in a signed photograph that you keep near your heart – the Vorstellung is that you create an image out of an X that is out there and about which nothing more can be said except by means of another image which again you create – through an electronic microscope or whatever. OK. There is something, but all you know are the successive Vorstellungen which you create about this something.

You have, then, these representations. Now, the somatic push can trigger the psychical world only by producing in it, or inducing in it, the appropriate image. This image is what Freud calls the Vorstellungsrepräsentanz des Triebes , that is, the representation, in the parliamentary sense, through representation, in the philosophical sense, of the drive in the soul (psyche). The somatic drive sends an ambassador, or makes emerge an ambassador, to the psyche because the drive can’t speak the language of the psyche. The language of the psyche is Vorstellungen, is representations. So the somatic drive has to have a representation which represents it; it is the M.P. of the drive with the psyche and has a psychical existence.

Here we get to the difference between animals and humans, which Freud at that time doesn’t mention – he is not interested. The difference is very simple. In animals, this representation is fixed, canonical, and biologically functional, e.g., excuse me, for the he-dog the image and the smell of the she-dog is the canonical representation of the sexual object and that is that. The same is true for food, shelter, and so on. In humans it is not. It’s not, because, as we know, we have the so-called ‘normal’ people, we have fetishists, we have sadomasochists, we have homosexuals, and you can go on. And even the same person in different periods of his life may like small men, tall men, large–breasted women, thin women, whatever you want. There is no canonical representation of the sexual object. Of course, there is a minimal canonicity, if I may say so; otherwise, the human species would have disappeared. But this is not what is essential about sexual life. The essential thing about the sexual life of humanity is not that, from time to time, couples have copulated, in the missionary position or I don’t know how, and the female got pregnant. OK. Everybody knows it, what else is new? The essential thing is all the other things, and these other things are what is typically human [sounds in room]. I hope I haven’t shocked you [laughter].

How does this difference emerge? There is only one possible answer in this. It is because, in the human psyche, you have a terrible, monstrous, almost cancerous outgrowth of a function, which has a functionality with animals, which stops having this sort of functionality with humans, and this is radical imagination.

So, humans are defined essentially by an imagination with the following traits: first of all, there is a free or unmotivated flux of representations – you stay there, I’m talking, your attention is distracted, then suddenly you think of your gas bill, for instance; that has nothing to do with what happens around you; secondly, and most importantly, the domination of organ pleasure by representational pleasure, which means that imagination is defunctionalised and pleasure itself is defunctionalised. Sexual pleasure for a dog – for a he-dog or a she-dog – is linked to the reproductive function; in humans, sexual pleasure is linked to the reproductive function – what? once in 10,000 times. Right? This settles the problem. That boils down to saying that humans are mad animals and fundamentally unfit for life if left to themselves. Not because they would indulge in unlimited physical or organic pleasure – that would be the point of Civilisation and Its Discontents – but because they would remain enclosed in what is the pristine form of their existence, that is, a self-enclosed, representationally autarkic psychical monad indulging in the limitless pleasure of representation, and that is the hallucination of the newborn. We positively know that this is the natural state of the newborns, and we know – but with difficulty we confess to ourselves – that this is the normal state of grownups, because most of our time we are daydreaming and when we sleep we dream as soon as we can separate ourselves from “reality” within quotation marks.

One more word on this: This monadic initial state of the psyche supplies that which will remain for all the life of the subject, and even for philosophy, the matrix of meaning. If you want to have an idea of what is ‘full’ meaning for a human being, you have to think of an autarkic representational state of self-pleasure where the subject is omnipotent because it can form at will his or her representations so that they conform to pleasure and so that there is nothing that escapes the subject. That is omnipotence of thought – Freud calls it magical omnipotence of thought; in a certain sense, he was not very strict because it is not magical, it is real omnipotence of thought. Why is it real? Because it is omnipotent in the psychical reality. It is not omnipotent in relation to the ape. But psychoanalysis does not talk about apes. It talks about psychical reality, and there thought is omnipotent. And it is this meaning, this sense, that is the recovery of such a type of state, which is the constant quest of the human psyche all of its life long, and which you find as well in religion, ecstatic states, Tristan and Isolde, and whatever you want.

Now, obviously this is a state that fully contradicts the requirements of the human being qua biological being. You cannot feed on hallucinations; you hallucinate the absent breast, then you suck your thumb, and after a certain time the somatical processes make the baby scream. Not always – we have anorectic babies who would rather die than accept the breast. But there you have the total prevalence of representation. Happily, in most cases this somatic need imposes itself, and you are never born alone. There is an other present, generally the mother; and this somatic need, on the one hand, and the other, the mother, violently break this monadic state and force the infant to enter into a process of socialisation that is of a humanisation in a second and more current sense.

Now, of course, a socialised mother must obviously already be socialised herself; for instance, she must talk. Can we derive language psychoanalytically? Obviously not. In brief, there is not and cannot be a psychoanalytical answer to question of the origin of society because society must be there for human subjects to live and construct it. There is nothing in the human Unconscious capable of producing what are the defining characteristics of society, that is, institutions and social imaginary significations. Institutions: language, law, religion, or whatever you want. Social imaginary significations: gods, God, virtue, commodity, capital, interest, falling rate of profit, General Secretary of the Party, national honour, the Queen, and whatever you want. Or, a commodity. A commodity is a social imaginary signification. A car is a physical object; it is not a commodity, it is a car. It is a commodity because social relationships exist which make out of it a commodity. This boils down to saying that the psyche is irreducible to society, though the socialised individual – you and me – is virtually nothing but successive deposits, strata of socialisation. Psyche irreducible to society and society irreducible to the psyche because, again, nothing in the Unconscious can produce institutions. Nothing in the Unconscious can produce, create language.

One fundamental restriction to this: There is and always has to be a minimal correspondence between the requirements of the psyche and those of society, and this boils down to the following: institutions and social significations must provide the socialised psyche or the social individual with meaning. That is, they must create a diurnal world – a day–to–day world, not a dreaming world – where things and people more or less hold together and where, for the individual, life and death have meaning. That is, each society creates its own world; this world has to hold together, not according to the criteria of today’s science but according to its own criteria; and for the individuals, this is the true world and in this world everything is more or less in its place, and if something is not in its place you do something about it – you call the sorcerer, you call the priest, or you expiate, you kill the firstborns of families, and so on and so forth. You redress the order and the meaning of the universe.

So, where does society come from? The only possible answer is that society is a collective creation, a creation of the collective anonymous or of the social instituting imaginary. This imaginary, which you have to imagine, to represent to yourself, as a sort of creative faculty of vis formandi inhabiting every human collectivity, has to reckon, up to a point of course, with the underlying physical and biological reality, and this it always does – almost always. But this is not the important aspect – that’s why we cannot explain society by saying, e.g., that all societies always have to provide for production and reproduction of material life or for the sexual reproduction of humans. These are perfectly true statements, but they are perfectly tautological, and they do not explain anything either about the fantastic variety of social forms – all societies have to eat, OK; what does this explain? – or about their self-alteration. We have to grant the original creativity of the social historical field qua radical instituting imaginary. To insist, to be tiresome: If Totem and Taboo was enough, one can’t understand why there has been history. And if Civilisation and Its Discontents had been enough, why has there been what Freud inaccurately characterises more or less as a progress in rationality?

Now the point about the structure and content of social and political institutions. First, religion – here, Freud is clear, and I think basically correct, though one could and should supplement this with some very important points. He sees – and in this he is not original because this starts with Plato and through Voltaire goes to Ivan Karamazov – the essential role in religion in the repression of drives. ‘If God did not exist, you would have to invent him’ (ii), said Voltaire in order to keep the people quiet, and any prefect of police would say the same thing. But Freud goes much further because he says that religion – though he doesn’t say it in these words; these are my words – supplies meaning. Freud says rightly, Illusion is an erroneous belief supported by desire. Not just an error. It is an erroneous belief, which is supported by desire.

What is desire here? Desire to know, desire to make sense, desire to protect the feeling of self that is threatened by the unfathomable vastness of the world. Desire for consolation, desire for a semblance of a solution to the most terrifying enigma, the enigma of death. And also, says Freud very correctly, giving meaning to the world. What is it for humans to give meaning to the world? Of course, it is to give to the world a human meaning. A meaning which makes sense, makes meaning for what humans mean by meaning. We could have an excursus on Heidegger, and Sinn von sein, here, but that’s not our point. Freud says very beautifully: With religion, Man fühlt sich Heimlich in umheimlich, ‘one feels at home with this extreme strangeness’ – when the extreme strangeness of the world becomes home, becomes Heimlich because it is, I don’t know, the Word of God or the ire of Zeus or anything. How does it do this? Of course, generally by the anthropomorphisation of the universe, mostly relying – and that’s true of infantile projection, especially, says Freud – on the paternal imago; that’s the Christian-Hebraic ancestry, but of course the same would be true, and has been true, for the projection of a maternal imago.

Freud thinks that religion can be superseded because, he says, humanity cannot remain eternally in the infantile stage; it must one day go out to the vast world. But he is very sparing as to the ‘How?’ this will happen. And this question is still with us, not only because of the persistence of religious creeds, but because behind this superseding of religion looms an enormous unknown. To put it very starkly, this unknown is this: Can human beings ever face frontally their limitation and their mortality? History has yet to answer this question. Theory cannot answer it. Historical experience shows one clear example and two half examples where they have more or less been able. The clear example, to my mind, is the Greek one, the proper Greek one, up to 400 [BCE]– not Plato, huh? Plato is not Greek [laughter]. Because up to 400 [BCE] there is no idea of a positive immortality in the Greek creeds. Either nothing is after death, or what is after death is worse than what is here on Earth. That’s that. So, here we are here, we do what we can do, and then after: nothing – and that’s why nobody is happy before they are dead (iv). And certainly there was no political role for religion, properly speaking. The half examples are the initial Buddhistic creed, but this boils down to acosmism, that is, retreat from the world, and it also did not last but became an ordinarily instituted religion with holy men, monasteries, and things like that. And Modern Times, of course, modern Western-European times, including North America, where nevertheless one has mostly seen a secular religion of progress, both in Liberalism and Marxism which are absolutely identical in this respect: there is a promised land, asymptotically for the Liberals or, precisely, would-be defined for the Marxists, with the known catastrophic conclusions and results. Or otherwise, this demise of religion has offered only the meaninglessness of life for the ‘normal’ (in quotation marks) individual in today’s society and the ludicrous compensations for this meaninglessness it finds in supermarkets and TV masturbation [laughter].

Now, gender domination. As is well known, there have been attempts to give a psychoanalytical answer to the question: Why the inequality of genders and what makes genders what they are – beyond anatomy, of course? This has been done either to justify the existing male domination – and here, certainly, the first culprit is Freud himself – or, more paradoxically in the recent period, especially among some American feminists, through some attempts to invert the Freudian scheme. But surely there is no reason why psychoanalysis could explain gender domination and the patriarchal organisation of society more than, say, the general asymmetric and antagonistic division of society between dominant and dominated strata. I mean, I have never seen a psychoanalysis trying to explain the birth of slavery by psychoanalytical considerations about, I don’t know what, the penis of the slaves or whatever. Anatomy, or destiny, says Freud. Freud makes a pastiche of Napoleon. Napoleon used to say, quite correctly: Geography is destiny; the place of France or the place of Germany is destiny. And Freud transforms it into saying ‘Anatomy is destiny’ (v).

It is true. You are born a boy or a girl; okay, in a sense. Now, this anatomy or destiny can explain, or rather give support, to an instituted difference of sexes, but not to the domination of the one sex over the other. I mean, there are lots of hidden postulates, which are – how to say? – taken in under the carpet in order to consolidate the argument. Can we have a psychical derivation of this domination? The explanations that Freud gives, or which one can derive from him, beg the question – the little boy retreats before the father in fear of castration and in the hope that one day he will take his place; the little girl expects from the father, or later the father substitute, the gift of a child as a penis substitute. All this implies both the already instituted dominant position of the father and the exorbitant valorisation of the penis – phallus, as the Lacanians would say – instead, e.g., of the swollen pregnant woman. Why not?

Freud rightly insists at times, rather inconsistently with what has just been said, about the inherent psychical bisexuality of humans. I think that this is fully confirmed by clinical experience. It’s a psychical bisexuality because certainly it is not a biological datum; it is true that there are elements of hormonal bisexuality in humans, but in this there is generally a normally canonical, gender–defined resolution. I mean: male hormones or female hormones prevail. But the psychical bisexuality is true and it is very important, and it corresponds also to the well-known perverse polymorphism of children and, also, the onmisexuality of sexual fantasies – I mean any psychoanalyst worth his or her salt knows that in a sexual fantasy the subject is in all the positions at the same time, and the same is true, for instance, for sadomasochistic relations – acted out, I mean. Thus, active as well as passive attitudes are there from the beginning in both sexes. That they become generally opposed and irreconcilable traits of genders, posited antinomically, is, again, an effect of socialisation, which has been posited by these significations as antinomic. Either you are passive or you are active. And women are passive – why? And men are active – why? There is a very nice sentence, a bit dirty, from Suetonius, I think, about Caesar, who, as you well know, was a quite important warrior and statesman and whatever, and who was known to be perfectly bisexual. And Suetonius reports that the Romans of the time were saying about Caesar – whilst putting him in triumph, and so on and so forth – that he was omnium mulierum vir and omnium virorum mulier, he was the husband of all the wives of Rome and wife of all the husbands of Rome (vi). So, where is passivity and where is activity?

To sum up, we can’t find any structural necessity for the patriarchal organisation of society. The only structural necessity is that the dual, face–to–face, almost fusional child/mother relationship has to be broken at some point. This certainly entails the entry on the scene of a qualitatively different figure, but certainly not of a dominant figure, of a dominant figure supplied with a penis. Now, given the fact that the institution of society must introduce some regulated relations of sexual reproduction, it must also certainly institute the social significations of man/woman as inseparable polarities, asymmetrical, but not necessarily unequal, one way or the other. And why this asymmetrical relationship has also been unequal is the explicandum in history that is not explained by psychoanalysis, by all the discourses. Male domination is, in the end, an arbitrary historical creation, which doesn’t make it less real, but does mean that it can equally well be done away with.

Now, domination proper. I think that the same is true about domination proper. I don’t mean by domination the division of society in general. There will certainly always be an articulation of society in various ways. I mean by domination the asymmetrical and antagonistic division, with monopoly of power and wealth on the one hand, obedience and poverty on the other. I will not enter into the criticism of the Marxian attempts to explain the birth of this, which, to my mind, fail miserably. The same is true of Freud’s attempt in Civilisation and Its Discontents, where he postulates that there is a sort of enlightened minority that imposes oppression on the ignorant masses and, in the process, draws most of the benefits of the oppression. Where does this minority come from? And why do the masses accept this situation? Because, as we know at least since La Boétie and Hobbes, of course the masses are physically much more powerful. The strongest man is extremely weak against ten weak men, or even five weak women. And here you have a sophism that very often you find both in anarchistic thinking and in feministic thinking in another way: Human nature is good but has been perverted by the dominant classes. Now, do the dominant classes not participate in human nature? From where did the dominant classes draw their own perversion, to pervert the others? So, this is nonsensical. The same is true here: you have a minority which is enlightened. Why is this minority enlightened? Why don’t they also indulge in – I don’t know what – limitless satisfaction of their drives? The fact of the matter is that domination cannot exist without the imposition of a system, or rather a magma, of social significations of a hierarchical character, and the emergence of these significations is a historical creation of which no explanation can be given. As I have written, it’s much easier to understand that, once you vanquish the enemy, you kill him, or you eat him (it’s very normal, zoologically speaking); it’s a totally perverse idea that you chain him up and you make him work for you – apart from the technical prerequisites. There is the true invention, a true creation, which cannot be explained. Normally, you should eat your enemy, that’s all. Now, to enslave him and make him work of course is more profitable in the long run but entails, requires the transformation of the imaginary signification from: This is an alien, hostile monstrous human being to the signification: This can become my property. This cannot be derived from any development in the productive forces or all this nonsense; all these are external conditions.

Now, the persistence and conservation of domination – that’s another point that is very important – presupposes the internalization, by the dominated, of the existing relationships of domination. And, of course, this internalisation presupposes that this relationship is already imaginarily and really instituted. This is the circle of creation. You cannot have domination unless the dominated have internalised domination. They can’t internalise domination unless there is domination. These two things go together. The attempt to explain one from the other is to introduce physicalistic or mechanistic attempts at explanation in history. All this is not to say that we can’t find in the psyche elements equivalent to or homologous with the social significations. We did so already, for instance, relative to the projection of omnipotence onto the godly figures. Or indeed, much more profoundly, in the psychical requirement that the institution and the social significations provide meaning for the psyche. But in the same way that this universal requirement does not tell us anything as to why this meaning of life and world is so different among, let’s say, Confucian, Hebraic, Greek, modern worlds, not to speak about the Azande or the Nambikwara. It doesn’t tell us anything, either, about the institution of the social or gender domination. To wit, what the psyche and its socialisation carry together into the world is, first, meaning as closure, self-sufficiency, omnipotence; second – this is the growing up of the infant – somebody else – an other – on whom – and this is the mother – meaning, self-sufficiency, omnipotence are almost inevitably projected and who becomes the guarantor that there exists meaning, self-sufficiency, omnipotency, etc. So far, so good. Or, so bad.

But we know that further developments are possible. And they have existed. They have entailed a historical break and a new creation. Such as, for instance, the social imaginary signification that nobody embodies meaning, self-sufficiency, omnipotency and that such meaning, self-sufficiency, omnipotency as may exist are the creation of the collective, of the brothers and sisters; the latter, as we already said, have been historically repressed.

So, very briefly, I’ll finish with the last point. Does psychoanalysis anything to say about a proper form of human society and social institutions, that is, about proper politics? To this, one has to answer by asking another question: Does psychoanalysis have anything to say about what is a proper form of a human being? In other terms, does psychoanalysis know what its proper aims, its proper finalities, are? This question is much less idiotic than it may seem, given all the quarrels about the end of the analysis and the concept of normality or normalcy. I can only sketch briefly my own answer to this.

The aim of psychoanalysis, of course, is not knowledge per se. It’s knowledge insofar as it leads to a transformation of the analysand. This is why I call analysis a practical-poietical activity. Now, what is this transformation aiming at, or what ought it to be aiming at? I will not dwell on the repeated returns to Freud on the question of the end and the ends of analysis. There is only one answer that holds water. And this is: Psychoanalysis aims at the autonomy of the analysand. The meaning of this autonomy is not to eliminate the Unconscious, which is impossible and would be monstrous anyhow, nor even the domination of the Conscious over the Unconscious, but the instauration of another, new, different relationship between Conscious and Unconscious. This new relationship can be defined as one in which the subject is, as far as possible, aware of his or her unconscious drives; does not, strictly speaking, repress them; recognises them but can reflect upon them; and, through this reflection, deliberately decide if and how it will act them out. The motto of psychoanalysis ought to be: I know that this is my desire – to kill you, for instance; I desire it, but, all things well considered, I will not, or I will, I have come to realise. This means inter alia that the subject is capable of positing his or her own laws of conduct and of thinking. But no man or woman is an island. We are all social beings; therefore, our autonomy is necessarily limited and can even be a delusion if it ignores our participation in a society and therefore the fact that we are coming under collective laws. This would appear and be a fully heteronomous condition, because the laws are the laws of the others. Save in one case. If the subject can justifiably and reasonably say that these social laws are also his or her own laws, not because they have been imposed on him or her but because he or she has fully participated, on an equal footing with all the others, in their institution. In other terms, real autonomous individuals can exist only in an autonomous, fully democratic society; and, vice versa, you can’t have a democratic society with a nation of sheep.

In this sense, psychoanalysis can be consonant only with a democratic polity and an explicitly, lucidly self-instituting society. And to be fair to the deepest strands of Freud’s thought and attitudes, and despite his frequent pessimism, this is the meaning of his pronouncements about ‘our god Logos’ (vii) and the need to get out of the infantile situation of humanity, out in the wide world. And this is also the meaning of the other half of the myth of Totem and Taboo, the half usually omitted, neglected, or suppressed: the oath of the brothers following the murder of the father, according to which nobody will any longer seek totality of power or of its perquisites for himself alone. What is unfinished in this myth, though certainly historically accurate on a metaphorical level, is that the brothers – obviously Freud ignores the sisters, but we don’t have to ignore them – in their oath link the rules with the transformation of the dead father into a totem, into something transcending society and transcending their own power. That is, they totemise their institution. What is in front of us, what the ancient Athenians in their way, the Westerners in another way, have more or less attempted, without fully and finally succeeding, is the full detotemisation of the institutions, the recognition that there can be no human society without institutions, but that these institutions are and always have been our own creation under the given constraints, that we have to recognise this fact and stop the search for transcendent, extrasocial guarantees of meaning, knowing that meaning can be found and created only in and through our own free and lucid activity.

Thank you.

Notes

i Editor: The ‘correct’ Standard Edition title is:  Instincts and Their Vicissitudes. Clearly, Castoriadis has trouble bringing himself to using what he said above was the Standard Edition’s incorrect translation of Triebe as “instincts” (instead of “drives” or, his suggestion: ‘pushes’). 

ii Editor:  Voltaire [1768], from ‘Epître à l’auteur du livre des Trois imposteurs’(OEuvres complètes de Voltaire, ed. Louis Moland [Paris: Garnier, 1877-1885], tome 10, pp. 402-405); English translation: ‘If God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent him’ http://www.whitman.edu/VSA/trois.imposteurs.html 

iii Editor: The ‘question of the meaning of Being’ appears on the very first page of Martin Heidegger’s Sein und Zeit. In, e.g., ‘The Greek and the Modern Political Imaginary’ (1990; now in World in Fragments: Writings on Politics, Society, Psychoanalysis, and the Imagination [Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997], p. 99), Castoriadis says: ‘Once again, it was Plato who created this ontology wherein Being equals the Good equals Wisdom equals the Beautiful — which later led someone like Martin Heidegger to repeat that the task of philosophy is to seek the meaning of Being, without him ever once asking himself the question whether Being has or can have a meaning and whether this very question has any meaning (it does not)’. 

iv Editor: In ibid., p. 98, Castoriadis references ‘Herodotus’s story about Solon and Croesus’ (Histories, 1:30-33): ‘[W]hen Croesus complained to Solon that the latter had not mentioned him among the happy men Solon has known, Solon responded to him, among other things: But you are still alive, it cannot be said of you that you are happy; one could say that only after your death’. 

v Editor: Sigmund Freud, ‘The Dissolution of the Oedipus Complex’ (1924), trans. J. Riviere, The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Vol. 19 (London: Hogarth Pres, 1961), p. 178. 

vi Suetonius Divus Iulus 52. 

vii The Future of an Illusion, in Standard Edition, vol. 21, p. 54.

“Whoever obeys the laws lives as a stranger here on earth. Thus we read in Psalm 119:19: “I am a stranger in the earth: hide not thy commandments from me.” Staying true to the law means living as a stranger on earth, even in the Promised Land. The law circumscribes a counterfactual order that compels its people to dwell in the world without entirely being assimilated to it. Monotheism fosters an existential unhomeliness. This estrangement from the world is what is meant by “progress in intellectuality.” (1)

“Modernity has no foundation, since it emerged in and through the destruction and deconstruction of all foundations. In other words, modernity is founded on freedom. There is nothing new in this thought, for in fact all representative modern thinkers and all modern foundational documents (for example, constitutions) confirm and reconfirm it. What I wish to do is to interpret it. The modern world is based on freedom: that is, freedom is the arche of the modern world. Yet freedom is entirely unfit to serve as an arche, because it is a foundation that does not found. As a Grund – to speak with both Hegel and Heidegger – it opens the Abgrund: that is, the ground opens the abyss. And since the modern world is based on freedom, on an arche that cannot found, it remains a world without foundation, a world that continuously has to reinvent itself. This is one of the main reasons why all the constructed models of the modern world are abstract, in the Hegelian sense of the word, and by definition counterfactual, and why all coherent narratives ring true for no more than a few decades.” (2)

Paul Delvaux, Landscape with Lanterns (1958)

There is a common argument that says that the problem of the recent decades is the eclipse of class struggle politics (from the left) and the rise of cosmopolitanism, ‘identity politics’ (left and right of the political spectrum) and struggles for legal recognition of minority groups. It suggests that a majoritarian resentment has generated a backlash (true) in which forms of majoritarianism – from the resurgent nationalism, to populism and even a crass racist secularism – have arisen. Indeed, this argument is often presented as a form of conspiracy that saw global ruling class power defeat the nation state and/or working class organization and, incidentally or intentionally, promote these ineffectual new politics. However, it might be more true to say that ‘class struggle politics’ fell into meaninglessness following a titanic struggle when the system reconstituted itself while those that identify with this majoritarian resentment are not the victims of power but rather the ensnared in an infantile drama that occasionally serves constituted power and might be the handmaiden to a terrifying resurrection of the basest forms of politics that modernity has precipitated.

In light of 1968 and the various ‘movements of the sixties’ the more advanced representatives of capitalist power understood that a renovation of the apparatus of legitimation was needed. This meant sweeping away the fusty old order of censorship and ‘moral’ watchfulness – succinctly illustrated in France where the cinemas that could not show the banned Vivre Sa Vie ten years before now played Contes Immoraux– while allowing the logic of commodification to colonise growing parts of social life. A mercurial intervention that expanded the horizon of freedom while distorting its meaning and praxis. The economic shocks of the seventies signalled the need to reconstitute the economic foundations of the old order as well.

So, this reconstitution had a number of fronts that are interrelated but not determinate of each other. The end of the social democratic era and the turn toward cosmopolitan capital under American hegemony took place at the same time as the struggles for recognition fought the political representatives of economic transformation. Despite Thatcher and Reagan being socially reactionary, society, including to some degree the future stewards of the system, ultimately decided in favour of the struggles for recognition (minimum programme). How much the ideology of cosmopolitan capital and the notion of human beings as anonymous, fungible and autonomous economic agents dovetailed with the social movements demanding the prising open of the closure of inherited identities, is a moot point that deserves further investigation.

With the fall of the consumerist dream that replaced the social democratic one, some have taken cosmopolitan capital and the struggles for recognition as not only allies but as essentially synonymous. With the end of these dreams and the certainty of an unknown future and the possibility it will not be pacific but malign and tempestuous, the desire for a ‘genuine’ place in the world not threatened by the Other arises from the infantile interior of the self. Due to a general crisis of meaning and ends in modern society, people on the right and left overwhelmingly  look for some kind of monolithic power to take them in hand.

No quarter must be given to this tendency. Democracy was forged by working class struggle because the impoverished masses knew they were strangers in this world. The bureaucratisation of the workers movement ended its revolutionary role in so far as it found a place in the world for significations created by a movement of people that were not so much practicing a rejection of the world as were rejected by the world. Similarly, in repudiaing inherited identity, the struggles for recognition of the post-68 era intimated that they were strangers in a world who needed to reconstitute or found themselves as subjects anew. Our groundlessness in this world, the fact we don’t know why we are here, and that we have to give meaning to our own lives, ends and projects, is the very condition of freedom. If being a stranger in the world led in the Axial age to a progress in intellectuality, it also stands for an opening of possibilities.

Letting traditional forms of identity circumscribe us smothers freedom and leads to its opposite, a harsh regime that imposes society’s goals and its subject’s identities from above (and ultimately in heteronomy). The project of human autonomy must always include the struggle for economic equality but economic equality in itself is not the project for human autonomy, as the human personality has needs that overshoots the bodies requirement for decent sustenance and shelter.

The revolutionary project has more than once been broken by an abstract rejection of the world and the concomitant danger of millenarianism. Thus, we cannot reject the world as constituted in toto. A conceptualization of ourselves as strangers in a world that is not our own, and as human beings who can only make good this baffling situation by creating society as autonomous individuals, a situation that cannot be naturalized or justified, nor escaped or overcome, but can only be worked upon is the Archimedean point for the project of human autonomy.

By Joseph Aylmer

(1) Jan Assman, The Price of Monotheism (2010, Stanford University Press).

(2) Agnes Heller, The Three Logics of Modernity and the Double Bind of the Modern Imagination (May 2005, Thesis Eleven Volume 81).