Manifesting the ghost haunting capitalism: Revisiting antagonism in alternative organizations through death and comradeship

Alternative organizations are usually described as anti-capitalist or post-capitalist, as if their relation to capitalism were theirs to choose. Drawing on Mark Fisher and the operaista tradition, we invert this relation by arguing that capitalism is constitutively set against the alternative, while for alternative organizations antagonism is accidental yet necessary. Capitalism blocks the emergence of our collective capacity to produce, care and enjoy by exorcizing the specter of a world which could be free. We need a counter-exorcism oriented toward a communist horizon. We use this term to name a shared emancipatory orientation rather than to require agreement on its political vocabulary. Alternative organizations can summon it. From this communist summoning, we derive two acid tests intended as prompts for collective self-interrogation. The first concerns death, whether an organization aspires to become superfluous. Alternative organizations are creative before they are oppositional; they aspire to a future where their defensive work becomes unnecessary while their creative practices continue. We call this orientation prefiguration with death. The second, following Jodi Dean, concerns comradeship as a mode of political belonging rooted in collective struggle and solidarity, rather than liberal allyship. Drawing on research with the International Network of Social Clinics (INOSC) and a wellbeing cooperative, this paper recenters the prospect of rupture and the antagonism our present still requires. Our aim is to push alternative organization scholarship to openly embrace its political aspirations, and to offer a normative framework for clarifying how alternative organizations might contribute to a shared postcapitalist horizon.