This isn’t really a story of when Marx met Freud.

They were contemporaries, or Freud was 27 when Marx died, but they never had a conversation.

In Vienna in 1913 Freud, Stalin, Trotsky and Hitler all lived a few kilometres away from each other, drinking at the same coffee houses in the melting pot of the Vienna Circles; so they did meet in an embodied sense, not just a theoretical one.

My aim is to have Freud and Marx meet on what Deleuze’s ‘the immanent plane’. A flat ontological space that emerges through the act of putting pen to paper, no planning, no history, no future, only unexpected relationships in the moment. Given Freud’s concept of the uncanny and the entire field of Hauntology, it seems to me that history can appear in the immanent plane regardless of its abandonment of time; briefly, as spectres of the past and ghosts of futures never realised. 

Hauntology: I was present last year at a talk by my friend who was involved in developing the mental health system in Gaza. An audience member asked if it was the post-traumatic return of the holocaust, Unresolved collective projection. He disagrees. It is the continuation of the colonial project. There are no psychoanalytic excuses.

Now more than ever we need to allow these ghosts to haunt us. Ghosts of fascism and genocide.  Ghosts of Freud and Marx.

Marx’s concept of alienation has my attention. It seems to capture our current psychological state. Byung Chul Han claims that we no longer have meaningful stories, only snaps and likes. As phono-sapiens we have been dislodged from the great meaning-making discourses, dissociated from knowledge that can only come from a slow lingering, cultivated boredom, true listening. Freud saw distress as coming from the repression of uncomfortable thoughts, which makes us lose touch with our creative and authentic self. Marx saw workers are cut off from their authentic self through exploitation. We have simply shifted from Industrial to Cognitive capitalism. 

I’m taking this opportunity to have a look at a couple of the theorists who have tried to integrate the work of Marx’s and Freud. 

Let’s start with Marcuse – whose concept of repressive sublimation seems to fit right into what is emerging. This refers to the idea that in advanced capitalism commodified technology liquidates art so that no new and oppositional ideas can emerge. This is not done through direct oppression, but the opposite. By giving free expression to every kind of commodified desire possible. Even our identity becomes commodified so we cannot fight back. 

Erik Fromm came to a similar conclusion in The Fear of Freedom. He saw capitalist subjects as more free than feudal ones, in that they are no longer tied to the land or their master, but this freedom brings terrible loneliness and anxiety. There can be two responses. Firstly, submit to the masses and find one’s identity in consumerism or fascist obedience. Secondly, face the distress and respond with creativity.

The Dadaists were contemporaries of Freud, emerging in post-war Germany and Switzerland in direct response to the brutality of WW1. In February 1916 the Cabaret Voltaire became a venue for the expression of their disgust with a country that could commit mass murder in the name of patriotism. The Dadaist Manifesto was performed there in 1918 and Richard Huelsenbeck wrote in the opening pages.

The best and most extraordinary artists will
be those who at every hour snatch the tatters of their
bodies out of the chaos of life’s cataracts, clutching the
intellectual zeitgeist with bleeding hands and hearts.

Freud made many errors in his thinking.

Evidently, he misread the effects of childhood trauma and infantile desires.

Additionally, much is written about the “civilised/savage” binary in his work. His structure of the mind mirrored colonial hierarchies.

Through Marx and critical theory, we find that Frans Fanon, Judith Butler, (and Lacan who I can only read through Zizek) sort these problems out.

I have a tattoo of Freud on my arm, drawn from an image in Vienna, called the Dissection of Sigmund Freud, by Nychos painted in 2016. He is cut in two with a terrible skeleton grimacing at us. This skeleton is the ghosts of lost futures. The collapse of capitalism. The end of personal repression. Unfinished business that we cannot see. Only art can save us now.