Resisting Capitalist Ideology

This chapter addresses a psychology of community to capitalist ideology, that is, the social processes that obscure the contradictions of capitalism by making them appear as distinctive differences that are to be tolerated and/or overcome with hard work. I outline how psychologists of community can work with community members to re-symbolise ideology, after which I expound upon three modes of re-symbolisation that can be taken up by those involved in an anti-capitalist psychology of community, namely, transforming subjectivities, creating art in accordance with the popular aesthetic, and retrieving cultural memory. Considered together, these three modalities afford us insight into how psychologists of community can make themselves of use to the task of creating new ideological formations that reject capitalism’s oppressive logic. The chapter concludes with a case illustration from the same participatory filmmaking project examined in the previous chapter.