Whatever the individual’s responsibility is now, in times of chaos and collapse, it must always be connected back to a collective response, in terms of political demands we make against the ongoing crisis. People must “do something” not as individuals with an obligation to conform to the ideal of unconscious society’s de facto moral individual, but to break free from such an atomized experience. Such an ideal is a prison but is also standard. Part of why we are trapped is that we do not know how to be multidimensional social individuals at all. What we should incorporate as our own control over the process of working through social values, we instead take as an external command of a disciplinary authority, that frames social behavior in accordance with a limited individualistic meaning. We are moral in order to be correctly an individual, and not out of practical necessity, nor to exist among others on consciously social terms. Society itself always traps us in a practice that reinforces atomization. There is no way to escape that most people in this society will have that psychic shape of the liberal individual framing any demand you make. Your command will always be filtered by their internal command structure, that is a mix of half-realized values, and repressed desires.

We can seek to gain the favor of this seemingly external voice and utilize its commands, or even instantly refuse its interpellation, all depending on where we are situated in relation to a given social issue. This voice we feel as external is often our own disavowed conscience, which is filtered back to us through events in a myriad number of ways, that we can take various postures towards. We can see it as an overwhelming command. We can see it as something to hide from. We can adopt its commands against others, hoping to save ourselves from brutality by becoming an enforcer of the law. this commander is, most of the time, speaking in an inverted way. You aren’t quite getting a real law of society straightforwardly addressed. It is, much like a dream image, something to pick over and trace a meaning through, where the initial story itself may not tell you anything truly revelatory, or may even tell you something totally nonsensical.

In this inner torment, you are getting a cross-wiring of various signals and meanings through a psychic filter, that is only ever consistent in form. The superego is itself without a moral center, ironically enough. It is pure voice in an aggressive form, constantly shifting in content. It is a psychic form of aggression that can easily contradict itself. If your own values are contradictory or undeclared, this psychic form will thrive off contradiction, and you will feel its ferocity no matter where you land. Part of the problem is that we take our self-image as what is supposed to be static, and act as though our values should change according to the needs of that image’s consistency. The superego is hinged to the static manner of ego, and reinforces the need for image over principle. The image is the only principle.

For us to reverse this is not to act as if we do not have an image, or that such a thing isn’t necessary, but that we are truly expressed in our principles. But we disavow our conscience in relation to principles for as much as we foreground image. It is subjectivity itself at the onset, even prior to the capitalist world we inhabit, that traps us in ego. We see our repressed conscience inverted based on other latent prerogatives in our general conduct, as a voice that reminds us of what we otherwise believe, even if only implicitly. But because we do not claim values that we actually do prove to believe in an unconscious way, we cannot not take this revelation as anything but persecutory. When this persecution kicks in, we begin to feel in our bones that we believe something other than what we have consciously tended to, and in fact we do. But until we allow ourselves to own beliefs, their disavowal, non-acceptable, or evasion leads to the persecution of self-image. Our beliefs as manifested in action are more powerful than our self-image, but if we refuse those beliefs, or never arrive at their truth, the force of practice manifests as a persecution against what we try to uphold as our image.

The less clear we make our own values, the more this voice reigns and stomps around in the ambiguities. This voice reigning defaults to the dominant order’s advantage. You are always interacting in a social field that is in some way stressing its values. This social field has a constructed history over many generations. There is always billions of hands that went into to establishing these values, and yet a lot of terrain is as unconscious and contradictory as you’re own. If you have incoherent beliefs that are untended to, your own disavowed beliefs will reassert themselves against the series of beliefs you have used to prop up a self-image. This is constantly reactivated by the external society’s control over ideology’s naturalness.

Society in liberal capitalism reinforces this voice as external against our limited individualistic sense of self. To cross over this barrier and claim the real values exploited by this voice, would also be a part of claiming society as a whole, as an actual society, and not merely a container for atomized competition. We do not now have an established conscious knowledge that is collective in scope, in terms of what mediate political activity. We know know the present is horrific, but we do;’t know what to do, or what would overcome it. We keep reasserting the individual’s limitations, even in our commands to just do something, and our default ideological landscape, and common psychic investment, pushes us back into the individual’s cage. Without the mediation of the transcendent society, capitalism will reabsorb us, even as we believe we are fighting conditions. How we fight will be marked with capital’s branding, one way or the other, if the beyond of capitalism is not made conscious.

We have been atomized out of any sense of society, and only this vague lingering guilt remains, that we also do not have immediate remedy for it. We have no collective organs. We have a responsibility to create them, yet it is only who we will become collectively that will be able to set those things in order. What we are now as a collective does not have a solution, and this must be acknowledged in our demands for others to do something. There is nothing we could know to do on our own, other than find each other. If that is the case, then we acknowledge none of us as individuals have the leverage to tell others they should have known better in this regard, as it is only the social collective that can remedy the problem. Given that we have never established the reality of the need for this collective agent, we must forgive each other until that is a reality. Anybody who reinforces the limitation of the liberal moral individual has to be sidelined.

It is not a given to any of us that we would know how collective struggle works. The “something” we must do is also the act of an individual towards a project that does not express itself on individualistic terms. We are acting as people in the direction of a larger group that we will collaborate with. We don’t have solutions on our own. If we can’t establish that the “what to do” part was always finding the collective response, then there’s no sense in guilting people about their failure. And if we are talking about a social product, that we are all both partially to blame in some respects, and also stuck tending to something that isn’t our fault as lone individuals. To talk about what people should do, we have to create the sense of a social that people would contribute to.

The trap of idealism is not in having an established aim that isn’t a 1-to-1 match with concrete conditions. It’s to have a goal that you likewise think all current activity should be detached form. Yet what we hear about idealism is the opposite, that you must honor the goal by obeying conditions without mediation of purpose. You do war, commit violence, obey military command, all in the hopes that after all the fighting is done, there will be space to then live the utopian goal. We have to mediate our actions by the values of a practice that negates capitalism, but this is a two-step process: you are lifting your foot off the ground concurrent with the aim of establishing a society that does not exist at all. By the time you put your second foot down, you are planting an activity that in its practical lived space is in alignment with your goal. You are moving your actual body mediated by that goal, but hinging it to reality as it is. Which means uncovering what is latent in reality that can give push to the direction you’ve chosen.

For all of us, the avowal of principles is helpful in finding the social space together, and the obedience to image cuts against doing so or defeating capitalism. The logic of communism— that everyone should have their needs met—honors, as best as possible, what could be the natural priorities we would have as individuals, that any of our consciously acquired principles could be tethered too. We have to eat, and we should be able to, and that is a two-way street of social reciprocation. We require the social to accomplish this task in the world we live in. That is even always true in capitalism, but disavowed. We must make that inescapable reality of society conscious, and it is a good bet that such a standard likewise syncs up with what we all understand as people, and most likely repress when we are young: there is no justification for centering capital over basic human need.

The post-Stalinist notions of communism center obedience to the image of the laborer, which is conservative and even at times, weirdly pre-liberal. Because it lines everything up in politics behind stoic images of the worker, it traps us in mediating society’s problems image-first, even when it claims to be abandoning the liberal image. It is instead only adopting liberalism’s more conservative, reactionary image, that takes over in times of economic downturn. We must destroy these kinds of image-based formations. That comes with centering communism on transcending current conditions, and living in that very transcendence, which is, paradoxically, the elimination of a hope for transcendence to come. Our subjectivity, in mediating social affairs through self-image, constantly seeks the culmination of that self-image in life to come, and so the coming transcendence in the future grounds all activity.

The transcendence found in Christian heaven fits in this psychic space, as does the promised transcendence of communism in its idealistic form. Likewise, the commodity’s promise in capitalist society reinforces this mode of transcendence. This false transcendence itself is the domination of ideology under capitalism and the realm of the superego’s sadism. To not take that step into living transcendence is to always obey the living order of domination, which demands adherence to what is. Christianity, capitalism, and the prior modes of socialism and communism all structure this command to obey reality. To be a slave to what reality exists on its limited terms is ideology in its most unconscious dimension. To push reality in this or that productive direction without altered practice would be to produce capitalism under its logic in an endless sequence. Capitalism can absorb whatever direction production takes. It is only the altered political practice underneath the production that ends capitalism. That practice must demand every human being be granted their needs without question, which also means no political order can survive that utilizes deprivation as a means of coercion. The practice must be subsumed by communist logic.

The only conceivable communist practice is a freely associating one, that does not manipulate through force, at least internally in its own social boundaries, based on forced scarcity. Yet this does not mean the end of strife. Yet enduring strife is only communist if our actions are likewise facing strife while practical enclosed in a communist logic. A group could have few resources. If it utilizes those resources on terms of fairness and not hierarchy, its group psychology and realm of social possibilities will be other than the group who filters their social bond through patriarchal modes of hierarchical function.

20th century Communism warped itself so bad in blind adherence to reality that it reversed the meaning of materialism, into becoming a command to eliminate practice mediated by legitimate communist orientation. That Communist’s mutilated materialism says we can only achieve communism by obeying a living social order that itself refuses to bring transcendence into practice. It makes the order of Things, as in produced objects and their regimented divide between laborer and bureaucrat, our only standard for change. We build up the productive forces. We then have a bunch of produced objects with hammers and sickles on them, but no practical logic that mediates the use of those objects on communist terms. The only reality that could ground that mediation would be one of freely associated people. In that case, it is the relation that matters. The relation must be emphasized as you lift the first foot off the ground, and then practically established as the second foot lands.

Communism must be a claiming of the current moment. To make that clear, and to make it obvious where we must “do something” as individuals who are trapped in alienated conditions, we have to make a society visible across our atomized channels. People must see that when they “do something,” they will find allies, and not only a bunch of floating individuals blindly bumping into each other, only capable of comparing total amounts of good deeds against one another in a moral competition. We do not have to know what we will do as a collective. To just do something, the “something” has to start as open-ended, and move in the direction of other people. We all must forgive each other for not knowing what to do as individuals. That is the only way will be able to come up with various collective procedures. But to follow this open-ended act is to point practice in the direction of communism as well. It is a practice that asserts that there is no leader telling you what to do, but that you also cannot inscribe an ultimate social meaning to action without the help of others. This is the space of collapsed liberal subjectivity, and a practical embrace of capitalism’s beyond.