The Religious Roots of the Socialist Fantasy

Mayb e it’s just the pandemic, but I have always felt afraid for my life when pushed to compete for intellectual attention with the field of economics. This suffocating sensation has less to do with my lifetime of innumeracy than with my deep hostility toward materialistic, and not merely quantitative, analysis. Materialism in thought is as frustrating to me as materialism in action. Economists and the bourgeois deserve each other: and pointing this out, even as a joke, suggests why. What is “the bourgeois,” anyway? An economic class, empirically verifiable, standing in a certain relation to materialism? Or is it a character in a made-up story? Fantasism has always served as what feels like a spiritual twin to materialism, a psychological subtext that throbs and pulses the harder materialism tries to mask it. But the fantasism that follows in materialism’s shadow isn’t a twin at all. It is a parent, not a sibling. Marxism is probably our best demonstration of how materialism is the means to the fantasist end of life as it should be, a life that can only be identified through the imagination. Which should we listen to more closely—socialism’s economic account of the bourgeois, or Marxism’s fantasist one?

Nathan Pinkoski’s rich and searching essay on the trajectories of socialist feeling in America is a welcome entry point to thinking through the relationship between fantasism and materialism on our shores. Pinkoski shows that socialism American style “deepens individualism and statism. It is not the rival but the patsy of state capitalism. It does not resist but serves managerial liberalism. American socialism is neither Marxian-inflected socialism nor Marxism, but it parodies their defects.” For me at least, the radical interpretation of this line of criticism is that, in America, the “bourgeois” does not really exist, not in a way that ought to put an intellectual obligation on us to attend carefully to. Read Full Article »