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These two key terms, ‘identity’ and ‘class’, are signifiers. While these signifiers may indeed correspond to entities outside language, the way we discuss and so understand signifiers is freighted with meanings that are given by their relation to other terms and by historical context. There are social theorists who have drawn heavily on psychoanalysis and who have eventually abandoned key tenets of Marxism, claiming that the term ‘class’ no longer corresponds to an economic-political entity (Laclau and Mouffe, 1985). The term ‘class’ is now only seen by some ex-Marxists or so-called ‘post-Marxists’ as a ‘signifier’ that constitutes a form of ‘identity’ (Laclau and Mouffe, 1987).
Inside the clinic we track and intervene in the domain of signifiers, and how we mark them and interpret how they structure and anchor lives will have real consequences as well as therapeutic effects. However, and this is the crucial clinical psychoanalytic point, we do not do this by pinning down their supposed real underlying meaning within our own coordinates as analysts who imagine that they know what is outside language, but we facilitate a different freer relation to language and so also to reality.
To mistakenly spell out what we think the signifiers that appear in the clinic really mean to us and should mean to our analysands is a manifestation of what I call ‘stalinist realism’ (Parker, 2022). Here is a toxic complement to the ‘capitalist realism’ that tells us that this is the way the world is and that there is no alternative (Fisher, 2009). The possible freer relation to language and reality enabled by our clinical work is potentially - and only potentially, for we cannot guide the politics of our analysands - what I call ‘open communism’. Here an alternative is possible, including to the regimes that masqueraded as socialist and were threatened by such practices as psychoanalysis (Miller, 1998).
I say this as a communist who fights politically for an open democratic form