ABSTRACT
Marxist political economy has been blended with various currents of psychology but hardly ever with Jungian psychoanalysis. This chapter argues that bringing Marxist and Jungian thought together can be surprisingly fruitful. While both traditions are ultimately concerned with human flourishing, they emphasize different aspects of reality, which would need to be combined for genuine emancipation: the social and the individual, the conscious and the unconscious, objectivity and subjectivity, modernity and ancestrality, and science and spirituality. After briefly discussing divergences and convergences between the two authors, I present fragments of a Jungian-Marxian anthropology, around the depth of social struggles, the relations between ideology and the unconscious, the psychological costs of capitalism, and degrowth as the possible political project of this synthesis. If one takes human and non-human flourishing seriously, one can only go post-capitalist and seek to reorganize society around a slower pace, a simpler life, and more sharing and caring. The chapter ends with a plea to bring back the soul to the core of radical activism.
