[2018] Claudia Leeb - Mystified Consciousness: Rethinking the Rise of the Far Right with Marx and Lacan

Artigo aqui: https://www.degruyter.com/downloadpdf/j/culture.2018.2.issue-1/culture-2018-0022/culture-2018-0022.pdf

• drawing on Marx does not mean that I support the theses that it is solely economic factors that led to the rise of the far right that plagues the world today. Rather, my argument is that economic factors interact with psychological factors in the rise of the far right and Marx’s concepts help us [...] in conversation with the French psychoanalytic thinker Jacques Lacan.
• I show that Marx had a keen understanding that any attempt to aim at a whole subjectivity generates the money fetish, what Lacan termed object petit a, and which contributes to mystify the consciousness of the (white) working-classes and keeps them in their dreaming state.
• Marx shows us in Das Kapital I that there is a hole in the commodity form, which is predominant in capitalism, much like we find in hole in the Lacanian signifier. Like the Lacanian signifier, whose meaning is determined by its relation to a whole chain of signifiers [...] the commodity, argues Marx, stands in “a social relation to not only one kind of commodity, but to a whole world of commodities” [...] much like the signifier, whose meaning we can never fully determine, because it is linked to a whole chain of signifiers [...] Marx explains that the determination of the commodity’s exchange value remains necessarily “incomplete, because the series representing it is interminable [...] Here Marx identifies the basic indeterminacy of the commodity: in every exchange-transaction there remains a certain insecurity in how to determine the exchange-value (the meaning) of the commodity (the signifier). Although the commodity presents itself as a whole, there remains a hole at its centre, which occupies an analogous position as the Lacanian moment of the Real. It is then perhaps then no-coincidence that Lacan signified the Real also as das Ding [...] which Marx had used to characterise the commodity [...] The hole in the w/hole is connected for both thinkers, Lacan and Marx, to subject formation
• The subjects’ confrontation with the Real, the hole in the signifier (or in the commodity), is a traumatic moment because it confronts them with the fact that they are subjects-with-holes. This is then connected to two affects: desires and anxieties [...] When the subject is confronted with the anxiety-provoking moment of the Real, or the hole in the commodity form, which tells her that she cannot become whole and that she remains a subject-with-holes no matter how much she tries to become whole, object petit a emerges as an unconscious fantasy object whose core aim is to conceal the impossibility of becoming whole [...] Object petit a is the historically contingent and privileged object that provides the subject with the illusion that she is or can, after all, become whole. This fantasy object fulfils the subject’s desire for wholeness and allows her to get rid of her anxieties that reaching wholeness is impossible. As Lacan puts it: “The object petit a is what falls from the subject in anxiety. It is precisely that same object that I delineated as the cause of desire” [...] Although object petit a allows the subject to cover over her remaining a subject-with-holes, and, like a mirage, feel whole again, Lacan makes clear that object petit a never manages to fully cover over the subject’s hole, since the whole subject is the result of a fantasy
• As Marx explains in Das Kapital I, the commodity, from the standpoint of satisfying human wants (its use-value), has nothing mysterious about it. However, once we consider it only from the standpoint of exchange-value, it turns into a mysterious thing—the commodity fetish. [...] For Marx, money is the fetish, because it is the privileged general equivalent, and as such it promises to erase “all qualitative differences of commodities” [...] As the “radical leveler of all differences,” money is the element in capitalist exchange that promises to eradicate the remaining insecurity in every exchange-transaction—how to determine the exact exchange-value of the commodity, or the hole in the w/hole of the commodity. [...] money blinds our eyes because it covers over the hole in the commodity form (the signifier). As such, money functions as the object petit a, the privileged object in modern, capitalist societies to conceal the trauma of the impossibility to become whole. As Etienne Balibar further explains, whereas commodities seem to have an exchange-value, money, for its part, seems to be exchange-value itself, which has an irresistible power over individuals
• Insofar as the [American] Dream tells subjects that they can make it from the dishwasher to the millionaire, we find the money fetish as the unconscious fantasy object a at the core of the Dream. The money fetish assists, like a mirage, to erase the appearance of structural barriers of gender, racial and class injustices, and provides subjects with the illusion that they can become whole. [...] Although the money fetish is nothing else but a Spuk (specter) in our heads that mystifies subjects’ consciousness, it has all-too-real effects upon subjects, because, like a mirage, it produces subjects-without-holes, and allows subjects to fulfil people’s desire for wholeness and cope with the anxiety of non-wholeness. [...] The members of the ruling class use the means of mental production to advance the money fetish as the unconscious fantasy object a. As an example, a video of a ground-breaking ceremony celebrates the expansion of Sasol, the South Africa based petrochemical giant in Louisiana, by pointing at the ways in which such expansion will allow people to feel whole again. [...] The story of the American Dream makes it seem as if success is merit-based, such that if you try hard you will be rewarded, or if you’re talented then you’ll do well. However, money as the alienated ability of humankind shows us that it is those who are talented, but do not have money, cannot get the right degrees and attend the right schools, and as a result, end up being regarded as stupid. Whereas those who do not have talents, but have money, can buy themselves tutors and entry into the right schools, and at the end appear as smart
• Although religion is a protest against the suffering produced by capitalism, it functions at the same time as opium or a painkiller that assists subjects to endure such suffering, which helps to explain why the white working-class in the United States, instead of rebelling against the vampire capital, opted for enduring such suffering. [...] A recent study shows that the chronic use of prescription opioid drugs was correlated with support for Trump in the 2016 US presidential election, and is the result of subjects’ socioeconomic suffering, which they aimed to dull with their support of the far right, which functioned like an opiate insofar as it allowed them to feel great [...] Furthermore, religion is so central for [...] the far right in Louisiana, who are all religious, because it provides subjects-with-holes, whose desires for wholeness and anxieties about their non-wholeness are heightened by the toxic environment they work and live in, an illusory world of wholeness in the sky, much like the money fetish as object petit a provides them with an illusory wholeness on earth. The illusory world of wholeness in the sky, allows subjects to cope with their anxieties of non-wholeness and fulfil their desire for wholeness, even if they need to wait for such wholeness until after they are dead. [...] it is the destruction of real trees on earth by industry that makes the fantasy world of beautiful trees in the sky so effective to mystify subject’s consciousness [...] such an illusory world contributes as a painkiller that does away with subject’s desire to rebel against the vampire capital [...] The churches in Louisiana receive ample monetary support from big industry that pollutes the environment to remain silent about the suffering big industry causes. [...] Marx did not suggest that what makes people rebel against the vampire capital is to abolish religion itself, as this would merely leave the conditions due to which a society produces religion as opium intact.
• By branding certain groups of people as representing a general limitation, and thus non-whole (Muslims, Mexicans, women), the far right allowed the white (male) working classes to fulfil their desire for wholeness, insofar as they can feel superior and thus whole again [...] Marx explains that the bourgeoisie in England consciously fomented white supremacist attitudes and anti-Irish sentiment to divide the working-class into antagonistic camps. [...] By displacing their anxieties of remaining non-whole in the ruling ideology of the Dream upon branded groups, they can feel themselves whole or “great again,” although the lingering feelings of anxiety that they are far from having achieved the Dream, and that they are breathing in polluted air, eating toxic food, working in dangerous factory jobs, and looming new environmental disasters, remain. Moreover, what also remains is their subjugated position within American society, which they can only overcome if they unite with those the far right brands as inferior.
• The most important conclusion is that we must do everything to break through the various forms in which subjects’ consciousness becomes mystified, which the far right takes advantage of to shore up its power, to form a revolutionary proletariat. [...] How is that possible, since the mystification of subjects’ consciousness, as discussed with the examples in this paper, seems somewhat total? Here the moment of the Real, which points at the non-wholeness in the signifier (Lacan) or the commodity (Marx) offers a hint. Although the commodity presents itself as a whole there remains a hole at its core. Commodity fetishes are failed attempts to eradicate that hole at the centre of the commodity. Since there is a hole in at the core of the signifier or the commodity fetish, far-right discourses fail to completely mystify subject’s consciousness. [...] Marx, as an example, ruthlessly critiqued religion as a source of mystification. However, such critique does not mean that he wants to take away the only means of consolation people seem to be left in neo-liberal capitalism [...] Similarly we must ruthlessly critique the money fetish as object petit a, whenever it surfaces in the discourses on the American Dream of becoming a billionaire or millionaire, because such critique allows subjects to disillusion them about the Real state of affairs on earth, which the money fetish aims to cover over [...] Furthermore, and perhaps most importantly we must ruthlessly critique all forms of the branding of the raced and gendered working classes as inferior, as it is such branding that keeps workers separated [...] As Marx put it, “the call to abandon their illusions about the condition is a call to abandon a condition which requires illusions” [...] We must not be afraid of such criticism, even if it brings us in conflict with powers that be.