Monday, July 26, 2021

The Gods That Failed



The Achilles’ heel of Marxism is its failure to account for psychology. In the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 Marx does deal with the alienation attendant upon factors like the division of labor. But the cure he would propose in Das Kapital would partake of the same impersonality as the disease. The legacy of the Industrial Revolution was the production line, a key facet of both the capitalist and communist economies. However, capitalism allowed for the entrepreneurial spirit, while agency and motivation are absent under the dictatorship of the proletariat. The price for economic freedom within the Marxist paradigm is individuality. Ironically Marxism and Psychoanalysis are actually both Gods that Failed to cite Koestler’s famous iteration. The acuity of Marx’s economic analysis (particularly of capitalism) was tantamount to psychoanalysis's understanding of the mind and brain. Yet both systems of thought have proved to be ineluctably tethered to the l9th century societies out of which they emerged. Deleuze and Guattari tried to merge Marxist precepts and psychoanalysis in The Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Imagine Marx ringing the bell at Berggasse l9, looking for help.

Read "Oedipus at Rest" by Francis Levy, HuffPost


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