Atopia Awaits! A Critical Sociological Analysis of Marx’s Political Imaginary

Abstract

Marx’s (1844) estranged labor manuscript maps processes that stultify spontaneous human relations under the division of labor in the regime of capital accumulation. For Marx, negating absolutes would put ‘Man’ back on its natural trajectory toward positive freedom. Such evacuation of mediating ‘substances’ results in either frivolity or pragmatic barbarism rather than positive freedom. Marx’s political imaginary rejected philosophical mysticism but overlooked finer points of Hegel’s dialectic that contribute to an immanent critique of Marxist political ideology. Missing from Marx’s thought is the logic of post-capitalist mediation and a trace of the subjective modalities that correspond with the objective forms of alienation. Lacking an adequate psychology, Marx did not see that he had constructed a communism that mirrored the subjective spirit of bourgeois society. We draw upon philosophical, sociological, and psychoanalytic currents to remap the genome of Marxist political philosophy with a Whitmanesque imaginary congenial to free, poetic social mediation.