c) Definition of the second dimension of the ensemble: National Socialism.
This internal play, however, will be halted by a “fatal” characteristic of capitalist growth: the Nation—the essential superstructure which supports this economic expansion—authorizes both the greatest extension and the strongest restriction. On the one hand, we have the accession to State capitalism, and on the other, the delimitation of production by the superstructural authorities of the Nation. (This internal contradiction prohibits the transition to the “new society” of intensive bourgeois consumption—permissive society, which is the overexploitation of the producer according to the new models of consumption dictated by the neo-capitalist mode of production.)
d) National Socialism (fascism) as the model of this situation when it reaches its paroxysm. Characteristics of capitalism which serve nationalist expansion.
This kind of capitalism is not only in continuity with the national unity of the 19th-century but also represents its actual accomplishment.
We can distinguish two great moments:
– in the first moment, capitalism reinforces nationalism,
– in the second moment, nationalism restricts the expansion of capitalist industry.
Its mode of production; implementation of the capitalist infrastructure:
– energy produced per territory (autarkic energy policy) – concentration of production in trusts – heavy industry – large capital stock – infrastructures of the Nation (highways – public utilities) – mass production limited to capital goods (socialist alibi).
Nationalism, as a movement emanating from the provinces and rural areas (dignitaries and landowners), from the middle classes and the civil and public service class of the Nation (bureaucracy, government officials), sought national unity and a strong State capable of reconciling local antagonisms by means of an ideology driven by xenophobic and racist “values.”
Hence the resulting double characteristic:
– National Socialism has no interest in a light industry of mass production, overseen by a new specialized caste that would substitute traditional executives and produce a new distribution of power and class strata together with a new ideology for the “consumption” of consumer goods. Indeed, nationalism has no interest in a new liberal society that would create new needs.
– Strategic expansion will no longer pertain to Capital but to the Nation. The conquest of new markets and outlets will be occulted by the conquest of territory (vital space). War industry will divert from mass production (of capital and consumer goods) definitively.
This structure, which defines the mode of production under National Socialism, can be verified by:
– the geopolitical contradiction (Prussia, Ruhr Valley),
– the economic crisis of 1930 (fascism gives work to the unemployed),
– the history of National Socialism (internal political fluctuations: Night of the Long Knives, liquidation of the Nazi SA paramilitary),
– the confrontation with other modes of production:
•First stage: triumph of National Socialism over competitive liberalism (in France) as a result of its highly advanced industrialization.
•Second stage: nationalism encounters its internal limitations (the money invested by the USA in the industrialization of the Ruhr Valley following WWI is lacking, oil resources are insufficient, absence of a colonial empire as a source of wealth and supply); consequently, National Socialism gets crushed by the heavy industry of the USSR and the USA.
E) Victory over fascism unleashes the economic expansion of capitalism: neoliberalism—radical liberalism (third term of the ensemble)—announces the transition to a mode of mass production of capital and consumer goods as per the capitalist exploitation of new productive forces (techniques, sciences).
This capitalist mode of production is contradictory, since it sanctifies a technological and scientific progress that is merely caused by the expansion of productive forces. The infrastructural, techno-scientific acquisition that neo-capitalism mobilizes within bourgeois superstructures challenges the superstructures of traditional capitalism, and even those of neo-capitalism. As Lenin once said, “State monopoly capitalism is the anteroom of socialism.” The paradox, however, lies in the fact that State monopoly capitalism achieves the maximal extortion of surplus value from the progress in production that results from the productive forces.
Freudo-Marxism is the ideology with its multiple expressions and derivative uses, the strategy, and the gimmick that exploits this situation. It must legitimize the recuperation of progress, resulting from the new mode of production, by the new liberal bourgeoisie who profits from it.
Its task is to reconcile emancipation and reformism under a unitary discourse.
It must emancipate from the authority of the old bourgeoisie (government officials, provincial dignitaries, administration, traditional middle classes) by instilling models of consumption proper to radical liberalism (libertarianism) that are authorized by the new production and the extortion of surplus value; and also by destroying the moralizing models (i.e. Scarcity of goods) of the old bourgeois class.
At the same time, it seeks to exert a political influence on sectors of labor by way of a radically liberal (thus libertarian) ideology that claims to surpass “Marxist-Leninist dogmatism.” This opportunistic reformism is by no means opposed to Marxism (as dad’s ideology was); instead, it feigns to endorse the Marxist corpus only to inflect it tendentiously.
Its solution consists in unifying two approaches by manipulating the common opposition that both Marxism and Neoliberalism hold against a conservative, traditionalist and fascistic capitalism. Such common ground of the bourgeois and the socialist oppositions authorizes an opposition to tradition, which serves to justify the “progressive” approach of Freudo-Marxism.
Essential remark: the antagonism between the two moments of the bourgeoisie’s development, which respond to two modalities of the mode of production, is already determined by the internal contradiction. This contradiction is merely relative, since it is overcome by the constant and continuous extortion of surplus value. It is precisely this overdetermination, effected by the play of the internal contradiction, that occults their profound complementary nature (techno-hippy).
F) The ideological operation at stake here is that of an occultation by means of an inversion or proper use of transference.
The ideologists of Freudo-Marxism will conceal the profit and the parasitic nature of the new bourgeoisie (mainly of the service industry) by pretending to denounce the integration of the proletariat (into the system), when in fact no one but this new bourgeoisie is being integrated. They will substitute the “failed” revolutionary vocation of the proletariat with some “changer la vie” emancipation from traditional bourgeois values. This inversion therefore consists in attributing the negativity of the new society to the producer (proletariat), and the revolutionary positivity to the libertarian consumer!
The key notion introduced by this transference-inversion will be that of the “society of consumption.” The ideological camouflage will consist in including the worker, producer, into the new society of State monopoly capitalism, and excluding… those who truly benefit from selective consumption.
The internal contradiction thus becomes the primary and determining one, while the contradiction between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat secondary. These “revolutionaries” will say exactly what we now hear from employers, expressing themes of a technocratic regime and pathetic accents of the “new society” upheld by Chaban-Delmas: workers and employers are two parties conglomerated in the techno-structure. They participate in one and the same universe, subjected to a fatal evolution; the initial antagonism is surpassed by the imperatives of post-industrial society (hence ecology) and by the shared consumption (already or soon-to-be realized) of manufactured goods.
Then, on the second panel of this “protest” diptych, these same people will deem (with the bad faith so well described by Sartre) the emancipatory practices of the new bourgeoisie spontaneous, revolutionary, creative, instinctual, authentically libidinal—those that are the very models of integration into the new selective and libertarian consumption. This will give rise to spatiotemporal marginal groups that will be organized and controlled by neo-capitalism (permissive society). These marginals are nothing but the finest up-and-coming members of a new and hip bourgeoisie that succeeds the outmoded one. They know the “enjoyment” of living by the signs of an underground and very elitist culture that aptly expresses the anti-cultural culture of neo-capitalism. Spontaneous protest is here the overdetermination.
This strategic camouflage, this transference-inversion—a classical psychoanalytic procedure, and paradox that consists in ascribing one’s own negativity to the other while claiming its potential—is possible only because of the class power that serves as the support to cultural alibis (pop), sophistic tricks (such as the amalgamation of the schizo and the Vietnamese soldier), and ideological cover-ups.
Polemicizing against Freudo-Marxism means exposing this class power, insofar as such an ideological discourse reveals the nature of the prestigious new intelligentsia that produced it; indeed, this new caste of mandarins represents nothing but the emanation of the new bourgeoisie that profits from neo-capitalism.
Freudo-Marxism thus allows us to reconstruct the mutation of bourgeois society following a basic outline, thereby substantiating our polemic. It is by localizing this crucial element that we can reveal the whole.
G) The law of the three stages of capitalism and the cyclical reproduction of the whole.
We can grasp the capitalist ensemble as a whole by considering the following three stages: classical liberalism, National Socialism, neoliberalism (society of consumption). Classical liberalism generates growth, yet a crisis will challenge the very principle of this liberalism. National Socialism saves capitalism, but at the expense of a nationalist blockage of economic growth.
This situation generates an enormous potential for demand that the “society of consumption” satisfies. Then, yet again, the crisis…This cycle would be the model regulating every crisis through the opportunistic repetition of its stages. It is through this self-regulation of growth that capitalism would insure its perennial nature. In case of overproduction, we would return to a zero economic growth plan (i.e. Mansholt Plan), to an economy of scarcity organized by older nationalist executives who would finally seize this opportunity for revenge. Then, whenever demand authorizes an upturn, we will come back to a high rate of economic growth (Pinochet). This petty game of interplay (break-boost) has already become the standard procedure of the French Minister of Finance.
In conclusion, capitalism is an ensemble (of stages necessary to its economy) and the repetition of this ensemble: the eternal return and the decay of history.
This strategy of capitalism currently relies on Freudo-Marxism, whose twofold ideological mission is to provide the model of consumption authorized by neo-capitalism, and to prepare the transition from radical liberalism to neofascism (on account of an entire ideological camouflage).
This is what our polemic seeks to establish.
translator’s note: Five years after May 1968, the Marxist philosopher and sociologist Michel Clouscard launched a polemic against the testament of the “soixante-huitards” generation, namely Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guatarri’s Anti-Oeudipe (1972). Yet Néofascisme et idéologie du désir was more than a polemic, for it inaugurated an entire series of books that Clouscard devoted to the socio-economic analysis of what he called “libertarian liberalism,” which he considered to be the next step of capitalist development that shaped French society anew after May ’68.
Néofascisme et idéologie du désir was the first book Clouscard wrote shortly after he completed his dissertation L’Être et le Code: le procès de production d’un ensemble précapitaliste (1972, Éditions Mouton) under Henri Lefebvre, and defended it before Sartre amongst others. Although the ambitiousness of his work was praised by an older generation that included not only Sartre, but also Lucien Goldmann and Vladimir Jankélévitch, his relentless criticism of and opposition to the work of his contemporaries—be it Althusser’s Structural Marxism, Foucault’s epistemology or Deleuze’s post-structuralist metaphysics—ultimately relegated his own work to relative obscurity.
Despite being sidelined, Clouscard was a prolific writer and taught sociology at the Université de Poitiers from 1975 to 1990. He remained supportive of the French Communist Party (PCF) throughout his life, without ever joining its ranks. Instead of condemning or defending the Communist regime in the Soviet Union, Clouscard focused on describing the peculiar discourse of emancipation that resulted from the marriage of psychoanalysis and Marxism, which was then termed Freudo-Marxism, and was gaining currency in the aftermath of May ’68. For Clouscard, the emancipation of desire and productivity upheld by the Freudo-Marxists went hand-in-hand with the emergence of new markets and technostructures which defined the development of social democracy in France. In Néofascisme et idéologie du désir, he provides both a Marxian economic analysis of post-’68 France and a Marxist critique of the ideology promoted by those whom he considered its new intelligentsia.
By undermining the rupture of poststructuralism with structuralism and emphasizing the continuity of capitalism in its transition from classical to libertarian liberalism (or neoliberalism), Clouscard courted controversy. This alone might explain why his work has not yet been translated into English.
It is crucial to note that Clouscard does not simply equate libertarian liberalism with fascism, but warned against the investment of US capital in the reconstruction of post-war Europe (European Recovery Program or Marshall Plan), which marked the return to a radically liberal Weimar Republic model of social democracy dependent upon foreign investment (Dawes and Young Plan). European democracies therefore remained bound to international financial crises and chauvinist ressentiment. Not unlike Pasolini, who understood the protests of 1968 in Italy as the revolt of the children of the bourgeoisie, Clouscard debunked the revolutionary myth of May ’68 by opposing the students who became media clerks or successful theoreticians of this “event” to the working classes. Workers were offered cars to drive to work as a concession made to a rising middle class, yet the root of class struggle was left unresolved. Now workers drive to protest around France in high-visibility vests, dissatisfied with the mutinous legacy of May ’68.
ANASTASIA GARREL studied Comparative Literature at New York University, and works as a research assistant to Professor Boris Groys. She is a member of Barricade’s editorial collective.
MICHEL CLOUSCARD (1928-2009) was a French philosopher and sociologist, whose published works include L’Être et le Code (1972), Le Frivole et le Sérieux (1978), Le Capitalisme de la séduction – Critique de la social-démocratie (1981), Critique du liberalisme libertaire: Généalogie de la contre-révolution (2005), all of which are available in French from Éditions Delga.
