“You ask me what the English workers think about colonial policy. Well, exactly the same as they think about politics in general: the same as what the bourgeois think. There is no workers’ party here, there are only Conservatives and Liberal-Radicals, and the workers gaily share the feast of England’s monopoly of the world market and the colonies” – Friedrich Engels, 1882 letter to Karl Kautsky

The above Engels quote is cited routinely these days, particularly by third-worldists, as a means of rebuking traditional “working class” struggle. I myself agree with them in places, and diverge where their analysis hypostatizes capitalist desire. But Engels himself was essentially saying that workers being unorganized meant that it didn’t matter what they thought, and not that they believed in wrong, immoral things. Workers thinking “the same” as the bourgeois in 1882 was a matter ideological practice, which is not primarily a matter of conscious will.

Engels wasn’t pointing out that reality as a way to say “fuck these immoral workers, I hate them.” If there’s no organized force representing the proletariat, then of course they are going to accept what ever “bargain” they’re offered. Worker interest in relation to the total system can only be made clear by sustained organization. Otherwise, individualistic, reified, “false” consciousness will pervade all affairs, and the little crumbs thrown to workers will keep the pressure off the system enough to stop the proletariat from feeling so deprived that they act out. What workers do as individuals in that case is understandable.

What workers thought at the conscious level didn’t matter. The workers didn’t think as a class because there was no organization to facilitate such a thing, and the ruling class threw them enough crumbs to stop them from being desperate. Desperation was where workers might start asking the questions that might lead them to thinking as a class. One thing I often see from third-wordlists on this front is this need to tell the workers that they’re going to have to take a hit and accept that life will get worse for them. The problem with this line is that it smuggles back in capitalist ideology through the backdoor. What we want is to completely dissolve the entire framework of what appears as good or worthwhile in capitalism.

Communism centers basic universal needs, and so you must start from this premise when addressing desire. You don’t leave capitalist desire intact and go, “yeah, you’d be happier if you had more worthless crap, but we’re going to put you on a diet!” Acting as if excess consumption is straightforward fulfillment of conscious need, in just some instrumental sense, is wrong. But you also smuggle in capitalist ideology to assert consumption is just an inevitability, too. I don’t think anybody is really happy with this society. The people who supposedly get something out of it are murderously unhappy, and act in a way that will destabilize their order.

“Yes, you want consumption, because you’re too stupid to know better” is a liberal answer to the problem, and one that is terrified of finding a commonality in dissatisfaction. There are reasons for everybody to hate this society. And there are reasons for all why a new mode of social life would be better. We are all also split between the old and the new, between the familiar and the intoxication of imagining what is beyond this awful world. No one you speak with is absolutely good or bad.

We are trying to take the project of communism in its concrete manifestation and loop it between the accommodating desires of as many people as possible. The concrete project must find its way through those compatible desires, even if each individual has many conflicting desires. We are contradictions within ourselves now, and would be contradictions still in a communist movement. We are only pulling people from prioritizing the detached individual, to then prioritize what is common for all individuals. We can all lean in aligned or opposed directions in relation to social change now, so we must take the dialectic and apply it to desire in order to find where the project can chart a course through what’s shared. We can not see people as static or as absolutely opposed and thus disposable.

People are wedded to consumption not through instrumental need but through libidinal and social desire. To challenge the state of consumption and the economy is not a matter of giving or taking commodities and disciplining people to be happy with less consumer goods. We want to challenge the very frame of social desire that offers consumption in place of catering to more fundamental social needs. If people only consumed in line with strict need, we wouldn’t be where we are. It is a disfigured social reality that brings us excess consumption.

Social factors are what shape us. We are constituted through social imprinting. As we set out in life to reach towards the social subsequent to this imprinting, the capitalist system intervenes and intercepts our desire. It takes us and encodes on us a path that itself becomes both a retreat from society, and simultaneously an unconscious incursion into it. We move towards society in a way that is mediated by self-image. We attempt to arrive at ourselves through society and at its expense. This is the fundamental fault line of capitalist subjectivity..

We reach towards the social automatically from the basic premises of language and custom, only to have capitalism push us back to our own image. A lasso is placed around our self-image as capitalism steer our desire for its own gain. We are caught from the outset in a loop where we unconsciously attempt to complete ourselves in the social, but through a path that continually demands we disavow that same social for the sake of survival. We never fully are able to accept the social desire that compels us, nor can we be satisfied with what society labels as fulfillment. We can only return to where we started, to follow the path of desire towards illusory completion again. Communism, then, must be, as a movement, what breaks us out of this loop.

We cannot just take consumption as a given of human desire. There are things we all want more than consumption, that capitalism prevents. Consumption is itself a replacement for the social. We consume through the prism of social desire. But then, practical togetherness is what can uncover our own social desire in ways we failed to understand prior. We have to be struggle and fight together. A lot of the questions about desire are answered that way. For us to learn through practice how much we need the social, and the very social that capitalism must keep hidden. Our social under capitalism, even when collective, points us back to ourselves.

Our friendships, relationships, family bonds, even something like sex, all are conditioned to isolate us in individualistic meaning. We need to uncover the support system for new social bonds, that can teach us, in practice, what more there is to desire, beyond consumption. It will be achieved in social practice, but it lurks within all of us, still. We come into the world in a social webbing. We don’t know ourselves apart from society’s language and customs. Consumption in capitalism is a veil over more fundamental needs.

We never actually have the society our language and concepts should imply. We are always brought to the precipice of the social, only to have it closed off. Our “collective” practices are unconsciously social, always pointing us back to ourselves while making our bonds invisible. We need to constitute a real social foundation in practice. This is what will bond us and steel us for the fight to come against capitalism.