You can’t fight capitalism with ideology, because capitalism is precisely the ideology realized by market liberalism, which, through Political Economy, has amalgamated all ideologies. In a way, capitalism is the triumph of ideology.

This is what we’re witnessing with what is known as Globalization: regimes initially proposing ideological forms that appear perfectly opposed – let’s cite China, the United States, the oil monarchies and India as examples – find themselves in the same global system, producing the same effects. The great strength of capitalism is that, through its productivist dynamic, its specific form of valorization and its competitive logic, it has been able to recuperate everything that seemed to be contrary to it, precisely by reducing them to ideologies that it was then able to amalgamate.

By way of example, let’s mention religions, feminism, ecology, democracy and fascism. These are all highly diversified forms of expression, none of which can claim to be ideologically separate from capitalism. Some may see in the repeated wars occurring all over the world a contradiction with this particular globalization, but this is not the case. On the contrary, the permanent state of war is intrinsic to capitalist ideology, part of its continuity and renewal, of its changing everything in order to change nothing.

As a realized ideology, and by virtue of its empire over the world and contemporary society, capitalism has every interest in trying to make people forget that it is itself no more than a form of ideology that has succeeded in imposing itself to the point of being able to pass itself off as a naturalism of human society. On the other hand, anything that does not want to fit into its world and claims to resist it will be qualified by its representatives as ideological positioning, meaning by this, in their particular vocabulary, an absence of realism. It’s easy to see what kind of realism is being alluded to: capitalism is also a theology, with its sacrosanct growth and its only god, money (In god we trust). Unless we reduce ourselves to a sectarianism condemned to insignificance, we can’t fight capitalism with ideology, because ideology can only illusorily work against capitalism.

We cannot hope to defeat an enemy by standing on its ground and moving within its categories. Nor should we allow ourselves to be trapped by his language, by his inversion of the meaning of words, which has almost become a modern-day norm. However, to want to situate ourselves within an ideological framework is to limit our field of intervention and the possibilities still open to us, to allow ourselves to be circumscribed within the recoverable, within representation, within the Spectacle.

It’s the fate of all ideologies to eventually collapse in the face of their internal contradictions and what they provoke in practice and historically, and it’s the same with capitalism, whose collapse we’re now witnessing; but with a rather nagging question in view of the current state of affairs: Will this totalitarian ideology, blind to its own negativity like all ideologies, lead humanity to its doom?

In the face of this extremely urgent situation, it’s a completely different kind of realism that requires us to extricate ourselves from any ideological confinement that would only serve to deepen the divisions between all those who understand the need to get out of this world as quickly as possible, aware of the hell towards which it is inexorably dragging us.

We need to understand that overcoming capitalism, really wanting to do away with it, also means overcoming ideology. This is exactly what the communalist project proposes, by using the power of grassroots assemblies, bringing together all diversities, to give birth to a collective intelligence that will have no use for ideologies, and will instead work to overcome them.

This will in no way mean wiping the slate clean of the historical past; on the contrary, it will mean rediscovering all that was living, creative and imaginative at the source of many an ideology, but which, by seeking to transform itself into dogma, very often through authoritarian logic, has ended up turning against itself. Only then will the past be able to nurture the future, taking its place in the collective intelligence we so earnestly desire.

As an extension to this brief article, we invite you to contribute to the debate on this topic on our forum L’Agora.