Is there anymore fanciful fantasy than Communism?
“Yuri Brzmenov’s Ghost” tells the tall tale (quote in full below due to the limitations of Twitter’s/X’s embed).
Heres the left fairy tale. Once upon a time, there was primitive communism, an immediate, low communal unity. Common life has not yet fractured into antagonistic classes. People were just vibing, maaan.
Then the common world starts to break apart. Shared resources become property. Authority becomes hierarchy. Social differences harden into class. The deeper rupture comes when powers once embedded in common life separate from it and confront the people who sustain them as independent forces.
That’s alienation. Human beings sustain social powers through their own activity, but those powers separate from the people and relationships that sustain them and come back as something external they have to answer to. Think of your dream job becoming a grinding job. Your own work comes back at you as schedules, hierarchy, metrics, and rules you have to obey. Alienation is the separation of human social power from the people whose activity sustains it.
Reification goes a step further. It encases that separated human social power in a thing-like form. The living human activity and relationships remain underneath, but the form hides them and appears to have a life and authority of its own. The job becomes “the position.” Cooperation appears as a power of “the company.” Hiring and wages appear as “the labor market.”
Alienation separates the power. Reification gives that separated power a thing-like shell that hides the human activity inside it. The shell then appears independent and self-standing, as though the power belonged to the form itself. Workers cooperate, but the company appears to possess the productive power. People exchange goods, but “the market” appears to set prices. People make and enforce rules, but “the institution” appears to command.
So, in the left frame, you live inside the inversion and mistake it for reality itself.
The inversion lies in where the power appears to reside. Human beings sustain social life, but the powers generated through their activity appear to belong to the forms organizing it. Capital “creates jobs.” Markets “demand” cuts. The economy “needs” growth. The social form becomes the apparent actor while the human activity sustaining it fades from view.
The forms themselves are real. The company, market, wage relation, and institution actually exist. Human capacities organized through these forms come to look like powers inherent in the forms themselves. Marx repeatedly describes labor’s own powers confronting labor as powers of capital. Lukács calls this apparent independence “phantom objectivity.”
Taken together, these hardened forms make up “the system.” Nobody has to design it. Property relations, markets, laws, institutions, bureaucracies, and habits accumulate historically, and each generation inherits them as the world already in place. People reproduce them simply by acting inside them: workers sell labor, firms compete, owners invest, bureaucrats apply rules, consumers buy and sell. The result here is a social order sustained by human activity that confronts people as an external power, organizing their capacities and then appearing to be the source of those capacities itself.
