Socialism Does Not Exist: a Lacanian Critique of Liberal Freedom and its Paradoxes
I: LACAN’S FORMULAS OF SEXUATION AND THE SECOND SEX
Ideology maintains the hegemony and domination of one element over others not by asserting the superior one as explicitly superior, but by implying that it is somehow the “default”, normal, neutral or universal one among the two, the other one being its exception. This is what both Jacques Lacan and Simone de Beauvoir correctly noticed about the role of masculinity in society: patriarchal language posits masculinity as the default position, with femininity as its exception. The two genders in the patriarchy are “woman” and “agender”. Thus, de Beauvoir writes:
“Humanity is male and man defines woman not in herself but as relative to him (…) Man can think of himself without woman. She cannot think of herself without man. And she is simply what man decrees; thus she is called ‘the sex’, by which is meant that she appears essentially to the male as a sexual being. For him she is sex — absolute sex, no less. She is defined and differentiated with reference to man and not he with reference to her; she is the incidental, the inessential as opposed to the essential. He is the Subject, he is the Absolute- she is the Other.”¹
Lacan provides a similar analysis in his formulas of sexuation. Each sex is defined by a self-contradictory set of two formulas, thus “sex” for Lacan being defined neither as biology nor as culture, but as a primordial clash between the two. There is an a priori contradiction within the very idea of sexual difference itself, and two mutually exclusive ways of dealing with this contradiction. Thus, the very sexual difference looks different depending on whether you view it from the masculine or the feminine side. It’s not that we first define masculinity, and then femininity, and finally we can compare the difference between the two: Lacan correctly implies that one must first start with the seemingly paradoxical task of first defining the difference between masculinity and femininity without knowledge of what masculine and feminine even mean, and only after that noticing how the very difference looks different on each side. There is no neutral, objective or unbiased way of defining sexual difference, there’s the masculine way of defining the difference between masculine and the feminine way of defining the difference between masculine and feminine and they are fundamentally incompatible. If this sounds paradoxical, take Rubin’s Vase as a visual analogy:
The difference between white and black in the above picture precedes the identities of white and black in the sense that the difference between the two colors looks different depending on whether you view it from the white or the black perspective. There is no neutral and objective way of defining that difference above: if you view the difference between white and black from the white perspective, it looks like the difference between two white faces on a black background. If you view it from the black perspective, it looks like the difference between a black vase and a white background. Again, one must first establish the difference without establishing the two different terms, and that difference itself looks different depending on the two sides. This is how masculinity and femininity work for Lacan, there is no primordial “Yin/Yang” harmony of the two energies as you can find in writers like Carl Jung.
When Lacan analyzes in what ways the masculine and the feminine strategy deal with that difference-in-itself, he comes to a similar conclusion as Simone de Beauvoir: the masculine strategy hides the contradiction inherent in sexuality by positing itself as whole, without contradiction, and in the case there is one then it must be coming from “outside”, like a virus. Thus, the difference between masculine and feminine from the masculine/patriarchal perspective looks like the difference between a harmonious self-consistent whole which can absorb everything (the masculine) and the Other sex, the exception to this order which disturbs its harmony (the feminine). This is why it is rare to find ‘strictly masculine’ clothing, language or spaces in society: we have unisex clothing and feminine clothing, we have gender-neutral language and feminine language, etc. Like I said in a previous article,
“Dude”, “bro”, “guys” can refer to either men or to everyone but never to just women. We speak of “mankind” or “humankind” but never womankind. In my native language, we have two words for the third-person plural (they): the masculine ei and the feminine ele. For a group of man, we use “ei”, for a group of woman, we use “ele”. But what if you have a mixed group? In Romanian, if a group is composed of one million woman and a single man, we still use “ei” as a translation for “they”. The masculine pronoun is also the gender neutral one. Hence the unsolvable deadlock of sexual difference is partially solved by the masculine approach by trying to encompass all sexual positions into one, by being the sex, by the erasure of any other alternative.²
Lacan summarizes the two sexual positions in two formulas. The masculine formulas of sexuation are: there is a universal, and there is an exception (to this universal rule). The feminine formulas of sexuation are: there is no universal (rule) but there is no exception either. From the feminine perspective, one is constantly pulled in two opposite sides, there is no “role model” for women as the expectations are contradictory in the patriarchy (Todd McGowan’s example: being both the erotic whore and the holy virgin at the same time³). This is also the advantage of the feminine position insofar as the contradiction is inherent in the masculine position too, it’s just that the masculine position seeks to obfuscate it and project it onto an Other. The purpose of this article is not to analyze Lacan’s formulas in-depth as I’ve already done that previously², but to show how the exact same relations hold true if you replace “masculine and feminine” with “capitalism and socialism”, with “right-wing and left-wing” or with “USA and the rest of the world”.
II: THE ILLUSION OF CAPITALISM BEING THE “DEFAULT” ECONOMIC SYSTEM
Right-wing defenders of the established liberal-democratic order imply that capitalism is not a system that requires active intervention from the state, but that it is the result of human nature being set free through the absence of state intervention. In the same way that the patriarchy posits masculinity as “the default sex”, liberalism posits capitalism as the economic system. Liberal ideology frames the economy in a way such as to make it seems like communism, as well as previous economic systems like feudalism and slavery, involved an active attempt from social institutions (such as the state) to impose a particular economic system onto people. Capitalism, they claim, is the result of human activity after letting them free, the absence of intervention. Thus, when the state increases taxes or raises the minimum wage, this is viewed as a state intervention in the economy, but when the state lowers taxes or decreases wages, this is for some reason not viewed as a state intervention, but as somehow cancelling out the previous interventions, thus returning the economy closer to its normal or ‘default’ state. Of course, the proper left-wing answer should be that it does not even make sense in the first place to measure or somehow quantify “how much” the state intervenes. A decrease in taxes can be thought of as a state intervention just as much as an increase in taxes. As Todd McGowan notes: “Capitalism is not the default economic system that results from the failure to decide politically on some alternative. It is political through and through. Its existence depends on the collective decision that brought it into being and that continues to sustain its development”⁴.
Just like masculinity, capitalism maintains its hegemony by an expansive attitude in the semantic field, it seeks to include everything other than its inherent self-contradictions. Our definition of capitalism is so broad that it’s hard to imagine anything different, because it’s analogous to “everything”, “nature” or “how life works”. Thus, when communism ended in the Soviet Union and the Eastern Bloc in the early 90’s, this was not viewed as an active attempt to put another economic system in place, but by simply returning to “the system”, to a default harmony of nature. This is why Frederic Jameson claims that it’s nowadays easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism.
But the requirement of massive state intervention and active participation in the economy to maintain the bare existence of capitalism becomes evident during times of crisis. Capitalism is the first economic system that generates its own crises, constantly undermining itself in a self-destructive fashion. In the middle ages when feudalism was the dominant economic system, we had crises with economic effects, that is, crises caused by something else which also affected the economy (natural disasters, wars, pandemics). Capitalism is the first self-destructive system, a system filled with contradictions where its own expansion leads to its own destruction. In capitalism, the term economic crisis arose to explain crises with both economic causes and economic effects. In such moments, capitalism is getting closer to the point of suicide and it requires massive state intervention to maintain its existence. The financial crisis of 2008 was the latest such event on a global scale. While the Occupy Wall Street movement failed to mobilize enough energy to provide an alternative to capitalism at an opportune moment where one could be found, governments around the world artificially injected money into the economy in order to save those banks and big businesses that were “too big to fail”.
When the economy crashes, the system seeks to find scapegoats external to the system to make it seem like they are not failures of the economy in the economy, but external intrusions in the harmonious self-consistent whole of the capitalist order that disturb its natural balance. This is how right-wing ideology functions, and in the most extreme cases, fascism. In order to maintain the illusion that the capitalist economy is self-consistent (and thus, cannot “kill itself on its own”), fascism blames a foreigner, an intruder, a “virus” in the system. This is why Slavoj Zizek claims that fascists want “capitalism without capitalism”⁵ (the illusion of a self-consistent capitalist economy purified of its contradictions, which are projected onto an enemy). Hence, it is not automation and technological development that is causing unemployment⁶, but the immigrants that are stealing your jobs. It is not poverty that causes crime, but the foreigners bringing in drugs. The Jews most often end up as the final scapegoat in fascist ideology since they are associated with financial capitalism.
US cultural hegemony works in a similar fashion in the 21st century. It occupies the “default” in the Anglophonic online sphere. r/USdefaultism represents a subreddit exemplifying this phenomenon. The relationship between US and the rest of the world is the same as the one between masculinity and femininity for Lacan.
The othering away of the contradictions of capitalism onto an external scapegoat is not the only thing analogous to Lacan’s formulas of sexuation. One can notice a similar pattern in the relationship between capitalism and socialism. Our definition of capitalism is so broad that it includes social-democratic “mixed economies” as well, in the same way that a group that includes both men and women will be referred to by the masculine third-person plural pronoun in my native language. This wouldn’t necessarily be a problem if the partial successes of the social democratic welfare state wouldn’t be implicitly and even unconsciously associated with capitalist, market economies. Red scare propaganda works across this double-standard: if a communist country “failed” (whatever “failing” may even mean at this point), it’s because it was communist. If a capitalist country “fails”, it’s not because of capitalism, but because of some other factor.
In this sense, we are constantly given the tired argument that trying to find an alternative to capitalism is too risky since every time humanity attempted it, we “failed” and we got either famine or authoritarianism (or both). But the way this argument functions subliminally is through a semantic manipulation which seeks to place capitalism as a universal with no exception that is ultimately logically fallacious. There are multiple “capitalist” countries who either succeeded or failed in various ways and because of diverse factors, but few are taking that as evidence that “capitalism never works”. Just like masculinity in Lacan’s formulas of sexuation, liberal defenders of capitalism do not allow for capitalism to have any inherent failures and contradictions, capitalism is simply the neutral or default ground of the economy, the way “things are”, and if a capitalist country fails it was something else, some external intruder in the system that disturbed its natural balance, someone trying to mess with ‘human nature’.
So-called “socialist economies”, just like capitalist economies, are also not a homogenous whole that we can generalize about. Thus, another way in which liberal hegemony asserts itself is by the following logically fallacious assumptions:
- Assuming that there even is in the first place a neutral or default ground of the economy that one can make changes “from”
- Cherry-picking a few examples of changes from this default, neutral ground that caused suffering to humanity (ex: authoritarianisms of Maoist China or Soviet communism)
- Generalizing to the fallacious claim that any change in this default order is analogous to those specific changes
For example, if a libertarian socialist or a left-wing anarchist wants to change our economic system in a particular way that has little to nothing in common with the authoritarian state communist countries of the Soviet Union, they will still be bombarded with the argument that “communism” never worked, that any time in history we tried to replace capitalism with something else it resulted in disaster. The fallacy is in taking a few very specific ways in which changing capitalism did not “work” and generalizing to the assumption that any change of our economic system will fail. The solution to this deadlock is to move to the feminine position in Lacan’s formulas, where there is no universal signifier to denote these economic systems, thus leaving us with the painful fate of freedom.
III: SOCIALISM DOES NOT EXIST
Just like the difference between masculinity and femininity looks different from either the masculine or the feminine perspective (recall Rubin’s Vase), so does the difference between capitalism and socialism look different from the capitalist or the left-wing perspective. In the previous section, I showed the failures of viewing that difference from the capitalist, liberal or right-wing perspective. The two signifiers of “capitalism” and “any other economic system” are defined as boundaries in such a way such as to preserve the hegemony of the system, thus power working even at a subliminal semantic level. How would the other perspective look like, the abandonment of the security and comfort of this universal signifier? It would imply the acceptance of the inherent self-contradiction of the two signifiers. This is what Lacan’s infamous statement that “there’s no such thing as a relationship between the sexes” means. A lot of contemporary views of gender identity put it on a spectrum, assuming that on one extreme you have very masculine people, and on the other extreme very feminine people, and everyone is “a mix of masculine and feminine”, a bit of both. This view of gender as a spectrum is wrong insofar as it fallaciously assumes that masculinity and femininity are somehow inversely proportional, that the more masculine you are the less feminine you are and vice-versa. To break this illusion of a spectrum from the feminine side implies to notice the inherent self-contradiction of each sexual position. Thus, Lacan correctly claims that the inverse relationship is not between the sexes but within each sex. It would be more correct to say that the more masculine you are, the less masculine you are and the more feminine you are, the less feminine you are. In other words, there is no way for a person to be 100% masculine or 100% feminine, not because they are a mix of the two, but because what we call “masculinity” (or femininity) is already self-contradictory. In order to be more masculine in one way, you have to be less masculine in another way.
We must apply this insight onto capitalism and socialism as well. We do not need “a balanced mix of capitalism and socialism”. This wrongly assumes that the two poles are somehow inversely proportional, that the more capitalist an economy is, the less socialist it is and vice-versa, but that makes no sense. Instead, what we must show is that what we call ‘capitalism’ is already a conglomeration of many different configurations of our economy that have little to do with each other, that in order for an economy to be “more capitalist” in one way it has to be “less capitalist” in another way (and same with ‘socialism’ which is simply a signifier for any alternative to capitalism in which workers own the means of production, and hence also a conglomeration of many different mutually exclusive systems). To put it in the words of Todd McGowan, “capitalism does not exist”:
“Capitalism’s appeal as an economic system stems in part from its capacity for protecting subjects from seeing their own role in constituting the system in which they participate. Capitalism seems to run on its own. Subjects participate in it, but their decision to participate or not does not appear to affect the functioning of the system. Th is is why capitalists who decide to outsource their labor or to manufacture deadly products (like guns or cigarettes) defend their actions with the claim that someone else would be acting this way if they weren’t. In other words, the system, not individuals themselves, is culpable for the sins committed within it. Subjectivity entails responsibility, but capitalist subjects evade any sense of responsibility because the system obscures their role in what transpires. By keeping the awareness of this role at bay, by promulgating a sense that capitalism exists, the capitalist system produces the appearance of solid ground beneath the subject’s feet.”⁷
Thus, the liberal-democratic defenders of the establishment cherry-pick some of the destructive effects of our social order and blame them on various factors such as state intervention, bad economic policy, foreigners, etc. and then take other destructive effects of our social order and frame them as if “that’s just the way things are”, a system perpetuating itself indefinitely, a dictatorship without dictators. In Zizek’s words, ideology maintains its power by defending what he calls “objective violence”, the violence inherent to the system, to what we simply accept as normal:
“At the forefront of our minds, the obvious signals of violence are acts of crime and terror, civil unrest, international conflict. But we should learn to step back, to disentangle ourselves from the fascinating lure of this directly visible “subjective” violence, violence performed by a dearly identifiable agent. (…) Subjective violence is experienced as such against the background of a non-violent zero level. It is seen as a perturbation of the “normal,” peaceful state of things. However, objective violence is precisely the violence inherent to this “normal” state of things. Objective violence is invisible since it sustains the very zero-level standard against which we perceive something as subjectively violent.”⁸
What Zizek misses to say in the above paragraph is that liberal ideology does not merely defend objective violence as “human nature” or “normality”, but defines the difference between subjective and objective violence in the first place. Just like masculinity and femininity for Lacan, the difference between subjective and objective violence exists only from the perspective of subjective violence. The difference between them looks different depending on which one of the two poles do you view it from.
We should broaden this critique and push it to the end by claiming that the key to a socialist emancipation lies in noticing that the very distinction between capitalism and socialism is fabricated in an arbitrary way by the capitalist ruling ideology. Socialism, in an essence, does not exist⁹. Both capitalism and socialism are two words each including a variety of mutually exclusive and self-contradictory ways to run a society. There is no default or neutral, harmonious state of the economy that we can return to, there is no such thing as an absence of state intervention, there are simply multiple configurations of our economic system. This realization is socially traumatic insofar as it gives us too much freedom. The fact that we live in a capitalist economy is an active decision, not the indecision to decide on some alternative, but the imposition of one particular way of life upon others. And we are free to think of an alternative, which is just as arbitrary and oddly specific as the seemingly “natural” capitalist order we live in.
IV: CAPITALISM IS ANTITHETICAL TO FREEDOM
Defenders of capitalism constantly invoke freedom as one of its primary advantages. But like Todd McGowan perfectly shows again, capitalism is not the cause of freedom but a symptom against freedom. Liberal/libertarian ideology functions as a defense mechanism against freedom. To be free is too traumatic so the invisible hand of the free market always gives one a criteria upon which to make the decision. In capitalism, you do not decide anything for yourself fully, any decision is guided by the free market, by the laws of supply and demand:
“Nowhere is this contradiction more apparent than in the work of Ludwig von Mises. Unlike most other exponents of the free market (like, for instance, Milton Friedman), von Mises doesn’t grant the existence of any form of freedom other than that produced by the market. He says, “There is no kind of freedom and liberty other than the kind which the market economy brings about.” […] Von Mises presents himself as an apostle of freedom, as someone so committed to freedom that he will countenance extreme inequality to sustain it. But then, when he extols the virtues of the market, he praises its ability to rescue us from our freedom. This is one of those shocking moments when a thinker inadvertently exposes the unconscious desire at stake in her or his conscious project. According to von Mises, “The market process is the adjustment of the individual actions of the various members of the market society to the requirements of mutual cooperation. The market prices tell the producers what to produce, how to produce, and in what quantity.” Rather than confronting the burden of freedom when we decide on our life’s work, von Mises believes that the market decides for us. This is the crucial move in the thought of von Mises and many other champions of capitalism. They give the market the status of the Other for subjects within the capitalist economy.”
In capitalism, workers are sparred from the painful freedom to decide what job they will get, as they will always have the laws of supply and demand in the labor market to decide that for them. Similarly, capitalists are sparred from the painful freedom to decide what to produce: the market will decide for them, and they just need to follow the “invisible hand”.
Critiques of alternatives to capitalism have a similar quasi-religious logic. From 8:27 to 11:23 in this video, Yanis Varoufakis provides a model for an alternative to capitalism¹¹. Because of the ideological blindness that seeks us to believe that everything must revolve around profit, other than profit which must revolve around itself, Gillian Tett asks Varoufakis whether there was any cooperative that succeeded on the market. At 12:20, she asks why aren’t more companies copying the cooperative model if it’s so good. Yanis Varoufakis correctly responds that one reason is because they will be ‘eaten up’, bought by the larger companies. But the key insight to take away here is how ideology manifests itself in how even alternatives to capitalism must succeed according to the demands of capitalism. According to defenders of capitalism, if market socialist economies led by cooperatives were indeed better, then they would have outcompeted today’s companies. It’s almost a circular logic in the sense that it basically implies that “if socialism is so good, then why didn’t it succeed on the market?”.
In this sense, Walter Benjamin was right in asserting that “capitalism is a religion of pure cult, without dogma”¹⁰. After God died with the advent of modernity, the enlightenment and capitalism, He was replaced with the invisible hand of the free market as a new big Other controlling everything. In capitalist modernity, God is everywhere and everything, which is precisely why we can’t see Him. In this sense, one should correct Nietzsche in his famous declaration that God is dead and that we have killed him. Instead, we should now say that God is invisible, He has killed Himself and His soul now haunts the air we breathe. He has become so all-expansive that He became the water and we became the fish that swim in it.
NOTES:
1: Simone de Beauvoir, “The Second Sex”, p. 15
2: “The Woman” does not exist: Lacan’s formulas of sexuation vs. Neo-Jungian Phallogocentrism — https://lastreviotheory.medium.com/the-woman-does-not-exist-lacans-formulas-of-sexuation-vs-neo-jungian-phallogocentrism-df91f481bdef
3: Todd McGowan, Formulas of Sexuation, YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Km-JQnebWt0
4: Todd McGowan, “Capitalism and Desire”, p. 70
5: See: Slavoj Zizek — “The Universal Exception”
6: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technological_unemployment#19th_century
7: Todd McGowan, “Capitalism and Desire”, p. 72
8: Slavoj Zizek, “Violence”, p. 2
9: Just like “The Woman does not exist” for Lacan.
10: Walter Benjamin, Selected Writings Vol.1, p. 288–291
11: Finding Ways to Fix Capitalism — Yanis Varoufakis & Gillian Tett [2021] | Intelligence Squared — https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wcLemOt6qEk
