an>aybe 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? Read Full Article »