For a little over a century, first in the West and then in almost the entire world, the proletarian project was dominant, that of human emancipation through a revolution that would put an end to the movement of capital as it was undermined by deep contradictions. However, as K. Marx had foreseen, capital overcame its contradictions and effectuated an escape which ultimately led to its disappearance as a social relation, and to the autonomisation of its form: that of the increment.

As a result, first with the enormous increase in consumption caused by the integration of proletarians following their immense defeat in their struggles against the capitalists, and then with their disappearance in relation to the end of wage-labour, the subject, the fundamental agent of such emancipation disappeared, along with, unfortunately, the possibility of a revolution. To say ’unfortunately,’ does not imply regret, or an admission of powerlessness, but an objective acknowledgement of a catastrophe that we have often highlighted and insisted on at length.

From the early 1970s we proclaimed the end of the revolutionary process and tried to find a way to live in a world where exploitation and repression had free rein; but also, and above all, to understand the reason for such a development. Hence, our question as to why the species had produced capital which, despite being born in a restricted area of the globe, had invested the entirety of the world. We answered: in order to step-out of nature, to achieve security, to escape dependence and to continually mutate; all of which, at an unconscious level, meant the conjuring-away [conjurer] of the threat of extinction.

The broad psychological dimension concerning the species became obvious to me. But the same question was asked of K.Marx: why did he do so much research into capital only to abandon it without actually concluding on the subject in both his published texts and those posthumous works that F. Engels tried to continue. Before answering, it should be noted that K. Marx, from the end of the 1860s – in observing the reformist bent of the proletariat (apart from the uprising that was the Paris Commune) and the fact that Capital can overcome all its contradictions – looked “elsewhere” for emancipatory possibilities; hence his study of communities (which focussed on those diverse parts of the world where they still persisted) and his affirmation of the possibility of leaping over the capitalist phase of development, for example in Russia, by grafting onto the Obschina the technical achievements of the West.¹

Let’s return to the question concerning K. Marx. Is it basically that his oft-resumed study of capital was due to his mostly unconscious search for what is irrational? Because, for him, capital conceals a profound irrationality²  that echoes his own experience. It consists in living outside one’s nature, outside one’s naturalness. Now, this setting outside of nature stems from repression, of which capitalist exploitation is a striking expression, and he insists on the phenomenon of form, especially putting-into-form, because repression makes it possible to give form to the individual.

Studying the work of A. Miller on parental repression gave me access to such an understanding of K. Marx’s life-long journey.³  However, the therapy she proposes, which involves reliving one’s original sufferings, also includes a condemnation of the parents and demands a concrete schism from them; or a symbolic one if they are dead. This is to forget that the parents merely replayed [rejouer] what they themselves had suffered, and thereby disregarded the infernal mechanism of the replayings. Moreover, it maintains the enmity which tends to vitiate all human relations. It is not a question of forgiving or condemning but of reliving a painful experience thanks to a deep listening which is to place ourselves in continuity. The use of this group therapy, eliminating the above-mentioned negativity, reveals the power of the community [communauté] and therefore the need for it to regain its naturalness.

So, it was therefore through studying capital that I realized the importance of psychical phenomena in determining all human activity, and that ultimately men and women tend to solve their psychical problems through economic phenomena. This constitutes an immense substitution that has gradually taken place, with periods of stagnation and questioning, since the rise in production during the Neolithic period.  From this we can deduce that K. Marx ’s work is no longer relevant with regard to our actual future, but remains indispensable for understanding how we arrived here and, moreover, that we need to undertake a different cognitive dynamic other than one dominated by separation. A dynamic which no longer consists in either the search for a reassuring hierarchy or a seeking-after a determining instance in the realisation of our life process, but rather one that consists of a know-how [connaissance] which is the presentation of reality affecting human beings, the species; whereas representation implies taking a position in relation to the upheavals that this reality is undergoing. For example, the current invasion of the species by madness. This phenomenon can only be curbed by starting from its concrete manifestation and by listening to it in depth in conjunction with an immersion-in and a regeneration-of nature. However, the reaffirmation of naturalness, the resorption of madness, can only be fully achieved by our putting an end to parental repression and abandoning enmity.

Translated by Howard Slater
Original text at http://www.revueinvariance.net/introduction.html