Everyday Analysis publishes essays and occasional poetry on culture and politics. Our monthly e-newsletter features this month’s main essay and links to other materials we’ve published. Essays should generally be 1,000 to 3,000 words and can be submitted via the contact form.
Everyday Analysis publishes essays and occasional poetry on culture and politics. Our monthly e-newsletter features this month’s main essay and links to other materials we’ve published. Essays should generally be 1,000 to 3,000 words and can be submitted via the contact form.
Greta Kaluževičiūtė
January 2026
This desire for discursive authority has a genealogy. As Foucault argues in Madness and Civilization (1961), the emergence of psychiatry depended on an epistemic regime in which the clinician assumed the power to classify, describe and narrate the truth of the mad. The psychiatric case transformed lived experience into a discursive object. The subject did not speak; the subject was spoken, written about, and organised. Psychoanalysis, even in its profound critique of this medicalising gaze, inherited the classificatory impulse: the hysteric, the obsessional, the neurotic, the pervert. These are categories Lacan would later treat with both fidelity and irony (Lacan, 1953/2006), faithful to the structural logic they reveal about the subject’s relation to desire, yet ironic about their historical baggage and any temptation to reify them as clinical diagnoses rather than theoretical positions.
But here a crucial distinction must be preserved. For Freud, these psychoanalytic categories were not pathologies to be corrected; they were theoretical structures, paradigmatic cases that go beyond the described individual (Flyvbjerg, 2006), through which psychic life as such could be understood. They reflect modes of relation to desire, to the Other and to the impossibility of symbolisation, not diagnostic boxes but conceptual prisms. In this sense, psychoanalysis, unlike psychiatry, uses its categories to think in cases rather than to normalise or correct so-called maladaptive behaviours or symptoms. The hysteric, for instance, is not a patient type per se but a social and discursive position: the one who interrogates the Other’s knowledge, who asks insistently, “What am I to you?” A hysteric society is one in which this position becomes widespread and emblematic, a society structured around demands such as “Tell us who we are”, “Tell us what we should desire”, “Tell us what you want from us”.
What emerges today is a transformation of this very demand. Instead of turning to the Other for answers, the contemporary subject turns to psychological discourse itself, seeking to occupy the place of the one who knows. The hysteric’s existential question “What am I to you?” is translated into the therapeutic idiom of self-diagnosis: “Define my suffering”. The demand persists, but its addressee has changed. No longer addressed to the big Other of tradition, authority or expertise, it is addressed to the floating lexicon of psychological signifiers that promise certainty where none can be given.
At this juncture, “mental health” itself becomes the clearest example of an empty signifier: a term that circulates with extraordinary authority and moral weight, yet whose meaning is diffuse, unstable and endlessly contested. On the surface it appears self-evident, an obviously desirable state, an unquestionable good. But the more the term is invoked, the less clear its referent becomes. What counts as mental health? Is it “resilience”, “stability”, “self-regulation”, “autonomy”, “balance”, “productivity”, “happiness”, “adaptation”? The concept expands to include almost anything, and in doing so it ceases to securely refer to anything at all.
And so the classic analyst–analysand, psychiatrist–patient or therapist–client asymmetry has been inverted. The subject, as opposed to the expert, now speaks for themselves, of themselves. They assume their own position in relation to pre-existing terms and theories, in whatever shape or form these have now taken: as hysteric, as traumatised, as avoidant, as resilient, as mentally healthy or unhealthy. And yet, our society has inherited these forms of classification without their content. We retain the vocabulary and authority of psychological categories while discarding the theoretical, clinical and conceptual frameworks that once made those categories meaningful. As a result, the psychological signifier begins to drift. Trauma becomes a universal solvent; narcissism a vernacular accusation; resilience a moral injunction. The signifier ceases to name a lived experience; it names instead the subject’s place within a discourse of expertise.
But this drift cannot be blamed solely on the subject. The expert, too, has participated in emptying psychological life of its density. In contemporary psychiatry and the evidence-based treatment regime, concepts increasingly function as operational categories rather than descriptions of lived experience. Diagnostic constructs become checklists; suffering becomes symptom clusters; therapy becomes a protocol delivered according to manualised stages. In such a system, the concept remains while the experience it was meant to illuminate is silently removed. The clinician, like the patient, comes to inhabit a discourse in which the names outlive the phenomena, where trauma, depression, anxiety or personality disorder designate administrative objects rather than existential realities. What remains is the carcass of a construct: a term that can be deployed, coded, billed and researched, but no longer speaks to the interior life it was once meant to describe. It is unsurprising, then, that the subject eventually took matters into their own hands and became, in effect, the master of therapised speech or, rather, discourse.
In Lacanian terms, the loss of lived experience attached to these concepts points to a fantasy of mastery through naming. “Trauma”, “narcissism”, “toxicity”: these become what Lacan calls master-signifiers, commanding yet hollow, authoritative yet unmoored from knowledge. Their referent is no longer the Real of suffering but the symbolic performance of legitimacy, the attempt to stabilise oneself through language that promises clarity without ever delivering it.
Here Kafka becomes prophetic. In The Trial (Kafka, 1925/1999), Josef K. - a 30-year-old bank clerk of unremarkable appearance and orderly habit, as we are told by Kafka - is condemned by a Law whose accusation is never explained. The charge is pure form. Throughout the entire novel, Josef K. desperately tries to learn what he is guilty of, but the court refuses to tell him. The accusation exists without explanation, yet it still has absolute authority over his life. He must attend hearings, plead his case, consult lawyers and justify himself, all without knowing what he is justifying himself for. Josef K. is not on trial for something he did; he is on trial because the Law has the power to accuse. The accusation is empty, but the system forces him to respond to it as if it were meaningful.
Likewise, modern psychological labels function juridically. The term “narcissist” binds with authority precisely through the vagueness of its meaning. Like Kafka’s Law, the pop-psychological signifier binds without understanding. It imposes structure without accuracy. It creates a world in which the subject is accountable to names that no longer name anything specific.
For Kafka, the catastrophe lies in the structure of the Law: its ability to bind without content. Yet this structural terror immediately opens an existential question: why does the subject submit to a hollow authority at all? Why does Josef K. exhaust himself trying to answer a charge that never explains itself? Why does he seek meaning where none is offered? In Kierkegaard’s terms, this behaviour reflects a self unable to bear its own inwardness, a self that anxiously seeks an external definition to escape the burden of becoming itself, a dynamic he names despair in The Sickness Unto Death (Kierkegaard, 1849/1983). Josef K.’s insistence that the Law must know something about him reveals precisely this existential weakness. Confronted with a meaningless accusation, he prefers the illusion of external meaning to the terror of inward freedom.
Kierkegaard helps us see that Josef K.’s tragedy is not simply that he is caught in a meaningless bureaucracy, but that he responds to it from what Either/Or (Kierkegaard, 1843/1992) calls the aesthetic mode of existence, the mode in which one allows external forces to determine who one is. Faced with an accusation that has no content, Josef K. still demands that the court tell him what he has done, what he means, what he is. He seeks an external definition to relieve him of the burden of defining himself. The same dynamic appears in the modern turn to psychological labels. Whether “traumatised”, “avoidant” or “dysregulated”, such terms function as aesthetic refuges: ways of letting a discourse name us (even if we were ‘masters’ of such a discourse, so to speak), as Josef K. let the Law name him, instead of undertaking the ethical task of becoming a self.
Kierkegaard and psychoanalysis remind us that the deepest forms of suffering resist capture in language. For Kierkegaard, the self is tasked with bearing the weight of its own inwardness, a weight that cannot be shifted onto any external category without falling into despair. Despair is the refusal to be a self, the attempt to substitute a ready-made description for the trembling work of inward becoming. Psychoanalysis echoes this insight when it insists that there is always a remainder, an unrepresentable kernel of experience, that escapes symbolisation. Life, death, love, desire, sexuality, anxiety, the body, the Other’s enigmatic wants: these are not simply difficult to articulate but structurally in excess of what language can hold. The unconscious and the Real both testify to the same fact, that our suffering exceeds the names we give it. To name suffering is necessary, but it is never complete. Something always slips away.
The contemporary demand, “Define my suffering”, is therefore a demand to be relieved of this slippage, to escape the uncertainty that both Kierkegaard and psychoanalysis take as constitutive of subjectivity. It repeats Josef K.’s error: seeking from an external order a final, stable meaning that no discourse can provide. The subject wants a label to stand in for inwardness, a diagnosis to stand in for the unassimilable textures of psychic life. But to indulge this demand is to collude in the very avoidance that Kierkegaard calls despair and psychoanalysis recognises as a flight from the truth of one’s desire.
Drawing from these philosophical and psychoanalytic accounts, the refusal of definition is not cruelty but necessity. No; suffer through the lack of definition. Not as punishment, nor as heroic rejection of comfort, but as acknowledgement of something fundamental: that suffering is shaped by what we cannot put into words; that no discourse can take over the work of facing our own inner life; that meaning arises not from forcing an experience into a category, but from dwelling in the places where categories fail us. Psychoanalysis does not try to close this gap in meaning. It takes the gap itself as the site of truth. And Kierkegaard does not promise a cure for despair. He asks the self to meet despair face to face, without disguises or borrowed explanations. In fact, Kierkegaard gracefully reminds us in Either/Or (1843/1992) that no choice will spare us from suffering:
“Marry, and you will regret it; don’t marry, you will also regret it; marry or don’t marry, you will regret it either way. Laugh at the world’s foolishness, you will regret it; weep over it, you will regret that too; laugh at the world’s foolishness or weep over it, you will regret both. Believe a woman, you will regret it; believe her not, you will also regret it… Hang yourself, you will regret it; do not hang yourself, and you will regret that too; hang yourself or don’t hang yourself, you’ll regret it either way; whether you hang yourself or do not hang yourself, you will regret both.”
The point is not that all choices are meaningless, but that no external arrangement of life can shield us from the fundamental burden of existence. Yet within this starkness lies a different kind of hope: not the hope of avoiding despair, but the hope of choosing oneself within it. The ethical choice does not eliminate suffering; it grants it meaning by making the self its author rather than its passive recipient.
Kafka’s Josef K. died without ever learning the charge against him, and the shame of that unanswered question seemed as if it would outlive him. Yet what Kafka leaves as tragedy psychoanalysis might take as an ethical necessity. The unanswered question is precisely where responsibility begins. To suffer through the lack of definition is not to die like a Kafkaesque dog, abandoned by meaning, but to remain alive to the part of ourselves that no system, no diagnosis, no vocabulary can absolve or fully explain.
REFERENCES
Flyvbjerg, B. (2006). Five misunderstandings about case-study research. Qualitative Inquiry, 12(2), 219–245.
Foucault, M. (1961). Madness and civilization: A history of insanity in the Age of Reason. New York: Random House.
Kafka, F. (1925/1999). The trial (Breon Mitchell, Trans.). Schocken Books.
Kierkegaard, S. (1843/1992) Either or: A Fragment of Life. Penguin, London.
Kierkegaard, S. (1849/1983). The sickness unto death (H. V. Hong & E. H. Hong, Trans.). Princeton University Press.
Lacan, J. (1953/2006). Écrits (B. Fink, Trans.). WW Norton.
Matt McManus
January 2026
This animus towards other traditions of Marxist thought has been especially sharp when directed against “analytical Marxism.” Entire books like Analytical Marxism: A Critique have been written claiming that if “Analytical Marxism represents Marxism’s most consummate expression, then Marxism is finished; if it represents the best hope for the revival of socialism, then it provides socialists with no grounds for optimism, and little grounds for hope.” Ouch. In his recent A Social History of Analytical Philosophy Christopher Schuringa judges the entirety of analytical philosophy to be little more than the ideological handmaiden of bourgeois empiricism and conformism. Echoing these accusations, in a positive review of Schuringa’s book Neil Vallelly argues analytical philosopher’s engagement with radical traditions like Marxism only ever defang them because “liberalism’s common sense always wins the day.”
Singled out for special ire is self-described Marxist and socialist philosopher G.A Cohen, whose very existence as an analytical Marxist and socialist troubles the thrust of Schuringa’s argument. Schuringa dismisses Cohen’s analytical Marxism in little more than 2 pages as defending “liberal marketization” for incorporating insights from non-Marxist economic traditions. He claims that Cohen’s seminal Karl Marx’s Theory of History is “useless in explaining capitalism” and that his socialism eventually boiled down to a “purely moral form of explanation” which is lumped together with “traditional liberal-bourgeois” modes of philosophizing.
There is a lot to criticize Cohen’s analytical Marxism for. But I think sweeping rejections are going way too far and missing the important contributions Cohen and other analytical Marxists have made. Here I want to make the case there is a lot to defend about Cohen’s socialist philosophy specifically and analytical Marxism generally which deserves two if not three cheers for their contributions.
Analyzing Analytical Philosophy
Cohen was born in 1941 and grew up in a Jewish communist household. He went onto become a renowned philosopher at Oxford before passing away in 2009.
In her recent guide G.A Cohen, Christine Sypnowich describes Cohen’s experiences at Oxford as formative to his shift to doing Marxist philosophy using to the tools of analytical philosophy. What exactly constitutes analytical, as compared to continental, philosophy is the subject of intense debate. Critics like Schuringa claim analytical philosophers are united by their commitment to a kind of bourgeois empiricist epistemology and an aligned liberal politics of common sense. But as even leftist critics have pointed out that’s rather hard to square with the actual history of the tradition. Analytical philosophers have been famously willing to contemplate notably eccentric ideas ranging from the plausibility of panpsychism to the metaphysical possibility that there are alternative worlds. Epistemologically one can find Kantians, Hegelians, arch-skeptics, empirical realists and stranger things still. Politically analytical philosophy is also notably diverse. Of course it includes pro-capitalists from Robert Nozick to Jason Brennan. But one can also find socialists, Marxists, radical altruists, Catholics, communitarians and arch reactionaries who’ve written in an analytical vein.
This leads to the conclusion that what distinguishes analytical philosophy is less a core set of substantive concerns than a style of presentation and argumentation. Continental philosophers tend to be more comfortable with writing in a more obscure manner. By contrast analytical philosophers above all prize clarity of expression and elucidation as paramount virtues.
There are reasons to be critical of this emphasis on clarity at all costs. I think analytical philosophers (including Cohen at points) often confuse continental philosophers discussing a problem which is genuinely ambiguous with consciously choosing to write in an obscure way. Hegel, Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Adorno have all been maligned in this way; although analytical philosophers have been ever more receptive to acknowledging their insights. But more importantly I think Adorno is right that making a fetish out of lucidity can risk philosophy becoming little more than an uncritical mirror of status quo thinking. Oftentimes producing genuinely new and challenging ideas will require writing in a way that bucks convention; the form of language has to be reworked to express the novel content adequately. This should be rejected for both philosophical and political reasons; philosophers should aspire to challenge doxa where it is untrue, and especially where it is not only untrue but props up ideological distortions. If doing this means writing in a way that takes work to unpack then so be it.
But on the other hand, analytical philosophers also have a point that needless obscurity gets in the way of philosophical edification. One should add it also gets in the way of political mobilization. From a Marxist standpoint I think we should be very wary of modes of thinking which traffic in abstract speculations and aestheticized self-aggrandizement. The fact that something seems edgy and contrarian does not make it genuinely radical, as the recent history of far right thinking well demonstrates. Not only does excess speculation disconnect us from materialist realism; it also creates the impression of philosophy as needlessly insular and uninterested in engaging ordinary people.
To be clear, I’m not suggesting a boilermaker in Sarnia, Ontario is more likely to pick up and enjoy Karl Marx’s Theory of History: A Defense than Derrida’s Specters for Marx. But I do think that requiring we leftists to think carefully about how to articulate an idea clearly and forcefully helps build a rhetorical skill set that is eminently useful when trying to do more public facing philosophy intended to advance socialist causes. There’s a reason Marx’s journalism for the New York Tribune and his letters for the International Workingmen’s Association read a lot more like J.S Mill than George Hegel. And accessible lucidity is probably at least one of the reasons Cohen’s work remains a constant touchstone for many on the left.
No Bullshit Socialism?
Cohen was unabashed about his own commitment to the analytical style. He became convinced that too many Marxist philosophers wrote in a needlessly cloudy way that occluded the fluffiness of their arguments. In Sypnowich’s telling Cohen concluded that a lot of Marxist theory peddled in “bullshit”; a kind of “unclarifiable unclarity,’ a conception that makes no claims about the motives of the bullshitter-for example, insincerity or bluffing-but rather focuses on the bullshit itself as a kind of nonsense.”
This lapsing into insincerity and bluffing extended to the way too many Marxist thinkers tended to engage other philosophical traditions. Rather than unpacking and arguing against the substance of rival views, very often Marxists would dismiss them as reflecting an ideological standpoint. Schuringa’s work itself often moves in this direction, where the arguments of Russell and Quine and Cohen aren’t so much rebutted as put down. Or when engaging in political debates with libertarians and liberals, Marxists would appeal to the “scientific” status of their predictions. They’d insist that in the long run the desirability or not of socialism was irrelevant, since its triumph was preordained by history’s laws of motion. Cohen referred to this as an “obstetric” vision of history, and in Self-Ownership, Freedom and Equality he criticized such “Marxist inevitabilitarian” claims as letting socialists off the hook too easily. It means that socialists didn’t have to bother with working out moral arguments about the superiority of socialism to capitalism, let alone make a plausible case for its realism. Indeed trying to do either could be rapidly dismissed as an unscientific form of utopianism, writing recipe books for the cook shops of the future. But as Cohen pointed out, this evasion became a very serious intellectual weakness for the socialist cause by the 1990s. Given that only a few hardened believers still thought socialism was inevitable no matter what anyone thought or wanted, actually bringing socialism into being about would require convincing large numbers of people to choose socialism as their preferred future.
What became called “Analytical Marxism” or “No Bullshit Marxism” was in fact quite an internally diverse, even eccentric, tradition. There are two main reasons for this.
Firstly, Cohen et al’s commitment to clarity of argumentation would require being transparent about potential weaknesses within core Marxist doctrines. Where such weaknesses emerged, it would be necessary to reconstruct Marxism by incorporating non-Marxist ideas and arguments; such as those developed in rival social scientific and philosophical traditions. This contributed to a notably undogmatic attitude towards Marxism. Secondly, they recognized that arguing constructively against pro-capitalists would involve more than waving away their views as ideology or periodizing them as part of a reigning historical discourse. It would also require reading the works of capitalism’s most able defenders carefully, acknowledging where they had a point and then rebutting their points systematically while in turn arguing for the superiority of socialists positions normatively and empirically. On this second front Cohen has been acclaimed as uniquely successful; his longstanding debates with philosophical luminaries like the libertarian Robert Nozick and left-liberals like Ronald Dworkin are widely considered models of critical engagement. He did a lot to increase the prestige of socialism by convincing thoughtful liberals and libertarians of its plausibility.
Historical Materialism Rides Again
Cohen bucked 20th century analytical philosopher’s reputation for disdaining continental thinking, so long as he thought it was insightful. His writings on Hegel and Feuerbach are by and large respectful, and he was never one to shy away from asking religious and ontological questions.
Never the less his most impactful work, Karl Marx’s Theory of History: A Defense, is very much the work of an analytical philosopher. There is a perhaps intentional irony to this, since Marx’s own theory of history without a doubt one of the most obviously “continental” features of his writings; in Capital Volume I Marx even called himself a “pupil” of Hegel, that mighty thinker. All this showcases the ambition of Cohen’s reconstruction of the theory of history, which was received with widespread acclaim. Even conservative philosopher Roger Scruton in Fools, Frauds and Firebrands described Cohen’s book as giving the “only plausible answer” to the “fascinating question” of how to make sense of Marx’s theory.
Cohen’s defense of historical materialism leans heavily on the magnificent elevator pitch Marx gives of his theory in the preface to the Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy.
“In the social production of their existence, men inevitably enter into definite relations, which are independent of their will, namely relations of production appropriate to a given stage in the development of their material forces of production. The totality of these relations of production constitutes the economic structure of society, the real foundation, on which arises a legal and political superstructure and to which correspond definite forms of social consciousness. The mode of production of material life conditions the general process of social, political and intellectual life. It is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but their social existence that determines their consciousness. At a certain stage of development, the material productive forces of society come into conflict with the existing relations of production or – this merely expresses the same thing in legal terms – with the property relations within the framework of which they have operated hitherto. From forms of development of the productive forces these relations turn into their fetters. Then begins an era of social revolution. The changes in the economic foundation lead sooner or later to the transformation of the whole immense superstructure.”
On Cohen’s reading it is the productive forces that assume primacy in Marx’s theory of history. Their organization is governed by production relations which compose the economic structure of society; indeed Cohen insists “that production relations alone serve to constitute the economic structure.” Applying a functional mode of explanations which accounts for causes in terms of effects, Cohen reads Marx as saying that at any given time the economic structure corresponds to the achieved level of the productive forces…the structure provides maximum scope for the fruitful use and development of the forces and obtains because it provides such scope.” Or as he puts it elsewhere “production relations have the character they do because, in virtue of that character, they promote the development of the productive forces.” A change in the overall mode of production, say from feudalism to capitalism, occurs when production relations enable such a radical improvement in productive forces that those same relations then become handicaps. Once feudal relations had enabled the development and widespread adoption of the spinning genny, the printing press etc they in turn became shackles on their most efficient use.
For all its acclaim Cohen’s reading of Marx has come in for severe scrutiny, He has been accused of techno-determinism-what Tom Mayer in Analytical Marxism calls the technologically determinist version of historical materialism-because of the centrality placed on the development of productive forces. In Analytical Marxism: A Critique Roberts accuses Cohen of jettisoning too much of Marx’s own thinking in his reconstruction. He snarls that “Cohen’s recent efforts to revise and defend orthodox historical materialism serve to dramatize the inadequacies of this version of Marxism.” In the otherwise far more laudatory The Political Philosophy of G.A Cohen Nicholas Vrousalis acknowledges Cohen’s position has generated “numerous criticisms”-most notably for “downplaying the significance of class struggle” and once more for “overplaying the significance of the productive forces.”
Cohen never abandoned his commitment to historical materialism. But in the revised version of Karl Marx’s Theory of History Cohen softened the sharp edge of many of his claims. This included offering a gentle critique of Marx for being committed to a form of “inclusive historical materialism” which held that most, if not all, social institutions, beliefs and human action “beyond production and the economy, are, in their large lines, explained by material and/or economic changes.” By contrast Cohen held that he was now defending a “restricted historical materialism” much more “modest in reach.” This form of historical materialism doesn’t purport to explain religious, cultural, political etc. developments by reference to the economy, even if it could provide some insight into them from an economic perspective. It was limited to being a “theory about the course of material development itself, rather than about the relationship between that development and other developments.” While a sensible move this purchases plausibility at the expense of explanatory sweep, which can’t but feel like a “retreat” from Marx’s own tectonic ambitions.
There is much to be critical of in Cohen’s reading of Marx that bears on some of the more general criticisms of analytical Marxism. In fairness I think Cohen was right to be critical of Marx for ambiguity on many points. And it sadly remains important to stress that Marx’s works aren’t holy writ. Whether Cohen broke from Marx’s own view is something we should be grateful for if it turns out he corrected a serious error. But I think Cohen’s deepening wariness of his own reconstruction, coupled with his turn to moral philosophy as a preferred vehicle for advancing the socialist cause, is telling.
I‘d argue David Harvey’s rendering of Marx’s theory of history and historical change in Reading Marx’s Capital and Justice, Nature and the Geography of Difference is both more exegetically faithful and ultimately more philosophically satisfying than Cohen’s. Harvey notes how Marx’s philosophy is often misunderstood since readers assume he is telling a causal story; very much like the one Cohen reconstructs. In fact what makes Marx’s dialectical materialism complex is how it eschews uni-directional, mechanical causation for a vision of the social form as a dynamic totality of mutually constitutive relations and practices which in turn metabolically relate to nature. This totality is a unity out of particularity. These mutually constitutive relations continuously influence the others and are influenced in turn.
On this view capitalism doesn’t “cause” religion any more than Protestantism birthed the spirit of capitalism before there were even capitalists. At any given time one aspect of the totality may assume a determinative primacy over the others, and any Marxist will have to be particularly sensitive to forces and relations of production. But this doesn’t mean, for instance, that nature is an inert collection of stuff that is just technologically manipulated by capital. Or that cultural forces are simple reflections of economic relations. Harvey’s rendering of Marx does better justice to the enormous richness of the latter’s view than Cohen’s elegant, but often cold and delineated take.
Freedom and Socialist Community
It’s as a—and perhaps the—political and moral theorist of socialism that Cohen shines most brightly. This is an issue that has received increasing attention-I think deservedly since even thinking strategically the normative case for socialism is often one of the most compelling for ordinary people. Moral philosophers like the late, great Alasdair MacIntyre are enjoying a long overdue renaissance of attention on the left. Marx’s moral philosophy has been systematically reconstructed in Vanessa Wills’ Marx’s Ethical Vision. In her Damage magazine essay “The Need For a Socialist Morality” Ana Mara Cisneros draws on MacIntyre to chide the left for failing to “realize that their politics depend on their views about morality, and by failing to recognize this truth, they have implicitly adopted a moral picture that is both incoherent and incompatible with leftist ideals.”
Cohen argued for socialist approaches to numerous core moral principles, though it is not clear how all are meant to fit systematically together. Unlike Robert Nozick or John Rawls, there is no unified Cohen-ian system. As Nicholas Vrousalis put it in The Political Philosophy of G.A Cohen Cohen’s contribution does not “consist in building a single army of mutually reinforcing ideas and have it parade over the dead bodies of its defeated opponents.” Nevertheless there is considerable overlap between the principles Cohen advocated, including freedom, non-exploitation, community, and above all, equality.
Cohen insisted that capitalism inhibited human freedom in important ways. He was especially keen to push this charge against Nozick and other libertarians, who insisted capitalism was the fullest realization of human freedom. In Self-Ownership, Freedom and Equality, Cohen bitingly remarks that the kind of freedom Nozick really cared about was the liberty of a rich man to light a cigar with a five dollar bill in front of a starving child, who in turn had no grounds to object to what the Monopoly Man chose to do with his private resources. In “The Structure of Proletarian Unfreedom,” Cohen shows why workers under capitalism remain unfree, given that they have no choice but to sell their labor to capitalists or starve. He noted that people often defended this arrangement by pointing out that proletarians needn’t remain in this condition. They might be able to escape it through a combination of hard work and luck. Cohen asked us to consider the following thought experiment:
Ten people are placed in a room, the only exit from which is a huge and heavy locked door. At various distances from each lies a single heavy key. Whoever picks up this key—and each is physically able, with varying degrees of effort, to do so—and takes it to the door will find, after considerable self-application, a way to open the door and leave the room. But if he does so he alone will be able to leave it. Photoelectric devices installed by a jailer ensure that it will open only just enough to permit one exit. Then it will close, and no one inside the room will be able to open it again.
Would we say that those people locked in the room are all “free,” since any one of them might be able to escape? Probably not without bastardizing the meaning of freedom. But as Cohen notes, the same must then be said in response to those who claim that workers are free under capitalism even though most of them have no choice but to sell their labor to survive. In his recent work of analytical Marxism, How Capitalism Ends, Steve Paxton builds on Cohen to make a similar kind of argument about property. For many pro-capitalist thinkers, property is intrinsically related to freedom, and taking away the property one has acquired through free exchange harms liberty. But on that logic, as Paxton notes, capitalism is a notably unfree social order since so many people don’t in fact own any meaningful property outside of their labor power. By the system’s own reasoning conflating property with freedom large numbers of propertyless or near propertyless individuals must be very unfree indeed, meaning they have little to lose but their chains.
In his swan song Why Not Socialism? Cohen argues that we “cannot enjoy full community, you and I, if you make, and keep, say, ten times as much money as I do, because my life will then labor under challenges that you will never face, challenges that you could help me cope with, but do not, because you keep your money.” He illustrates this by asking us to imagine a hypothetical camping trip. On one trip the campers refuse to share their food, goods, or (let’s get real) beers, smokes, and joints unless others directly reciprocate as part of an exchange. The same applies to dividing up work. Cohen notes that this instrumentalizing ethic corrodes the sense of community the camping trip is purportedly all about. Instead he proposes a socialist principle of each person doing their bit to contribute to the enjoyment of their fellows. The free development of each camper would then become a condition for the free development of the others.
This would be combined with what Cohen called “socialist equality of opportunity” which would seek to eliminate all the unchosen disadvantages which individuals are subject to throughout their life. Socialist equality of opportunity would go well beyond “bourgeois” formal equality of opportunity, which only gives all individuals an equal legal right to pursue opportunity. It would even go beyond admirable “left liberal” equality of opportunity, which seeks to correct for unfair conditions of birth and upbringing. This leads us to the core of Cohen’s moral and political philosophy in egalitarianism.
The Centrality of Equality
It was the principle of equality to which Cohen was dedicated above all others. In Rescuing Justice and Equality, Cohen argues that we should be egalitarians the whole way down, including in our interpersonal actions. While no one should be forced to be altruistic, Cohen argues against John Rawls that it is not enough for the basic structure of society to incentivize individuals to work hard so that downstream the least-well-off benefit. Instead, we should internalize a commitment to equality in our personal morality, being committed to egalitarian distributive justice in most every sphere of life. It very much rejects the strong edges of individualistic bourgeois society for one that borders on the self-sacrificing.
This is an extraordinarily demanding standard which Cohen is aware most of us would not be able to live up to. In the latter half of the book he defends his thesis in part by grafting egalitarian morality to an essentially Platonic meta-ethics, which stresses that our moral obligations shouldn’t be dependent on facts about society or human nature. Whether it is easy or not, we should still set out to treat people equally.
How Cohen’s transhistorical meta-ethics and commitment to equality can fit with a Marxist theory of history and materialism is mysterious, and that mystery is not theoretically insignificant for those of us who admire him. Till near the end of his life Cohen worked on revising and improving his seminal Karl Marx’s Theory of History: A Defense. The book reworks and defends a version of Marx’s theory of history, which Cohen continued to endorse even as he argued the explanatory aspirations of historical materialism had to be increasingly restrained. Cohen continued to defend historical materialism as a descriptive account of history and economic development even while arguing for an increasingly transhistorical and fact independent concept of morality that applied well beyond governing social forces.
There is nothing logically incompatible between being committed to a restricted version of historical materialism that describes the development of the social form while holding a view of morality as immaterial principles which transcend history. But needless to say, the latter runs very much against the grain of Marxist thinking. As Cohen notes, plenty of Marxists have rejected the idea that moral theory is valuable, tout court. Meanwhile, those of us who do move into talking about Marx’s ethical thinking usually describe him as a closet Aristotelian or Hegelian. Even if one accepts that historical materialism can’t and shouldn’t explain the nature of capital-M objective morality (as distinguished from mere ideology), most Marxists would think that moral norms should reflect enduring material facts about the human condition and society. On this reading, Marxist ethics have to account for how facts about human nature and society change over history and then demonstrate why and how socialism will enable our flourishing more completely than previous social forms.
This is very different from the transhistorical-even transcendent- morality Cohen eventually comes down on. And while it might not be logically impossible to defend historical materialist description and moral Platonism it would be a very tough synthesis to enact successfully, let alone gracefully. Ironically, Cohen’s liberal-socialist counterpart, Rawls, developed a moral theory which—by making the “basic structure” of society to be the key subject of justice, sign with taking material incentives and the limits of human altruism seriously—seems more responsive to the real world. Needless to say I believe Rawls’ liberal socialist position is a more plausible one for socialists. A combination of Marxist methodological collectivism and Rawlsian normative individualism is the right way forward for socialist moral theory.
An Enduring Division in the Socialist Soul
Cohen’s was in many ways a paradoxical place for a Marxist and a socialist to end up, though it teaches us something important. Cohen captured something important about an enduring division in the socialist soul—a division which showcases how odd it is for authors like Schuringa to portray a defender of an enormously transhistorical morality as a mere mouthpiece for red-tinted bourgeois common sense. There is a sense in which socialists have always been compelled to a kind of transhistorical moral sensibility, since even hardened materialists committed to socialism agitate for a society which they often acknowledge has never existed before-but will none the less be freer and more equal than what has come before. Beyond that it is surpassing odd for Schuringa and others to characterize Cohen as a closeted bourgeois thinker when his personalized egalitarianism is much more demandingly radical than even orthodox Marxism, which demands transformative social changes without insisting that these be accompanied by egalitarian soulcraft.
Cohen defended both a ruthlessly clear-eyed understanding of power, history, and struggle, while at the same time remaining committed to idealizing moral ambitions about finally securing well-being and full, free development for each and all. Cohen staunchly maintains these goals despite there having never been a society in history that has come close to realizing this ideal. This is of course the situation ambitious socialists like Marx perennially find themselves in: simultaneously ruthlessly describing a long history of exploitation and domination without illusion while positing that in the end a better world remains possible.
Like most other generative tensions, this one is simultaneously responsible for some of the worst and best socialist insights. At its worst, it tends to produce a lot of the “bullshit” Cohen and his cohort were keen to rebut. At its best—going back to Marx himself—this generative tension has inspired enormously creative and energetic work. Moral hope is not an opium that tranquilizes. It is a beautiful dream remembered when wide awake. Such dreams sustain life when the real world darkens.
Lucas Ballestín
December 2025
The first point is simple. There can be more than one version of a thing. And the two versions can be valued differently. I state this trivium because I want to suggest that while many of the criticisms that circulate about identity politics are valid, they do not encompass identity politics as such, but only a degraded version of identity politics. In fact, my claim is that identity politics in its liberal corporate representationist form is a corrupted version of identity politics, and that the optimal leftist attitude should be to reject the reduction of identity politics writ large to this degraded version of it. As I’ll soon mention, there is understandable hesitation on the left about accepting any form of politics that isn’t indefatigably radical, but identity politics can be radical, and we are better off re-radicalizing identity politics instead of dismissing it.
Identity politics arises in situations wherein a social group is oppressed and comes to understand itself as oppressed as a group for being that group. Doing politics as a group or in the name of the group in order to overcome that same group-based oppression. In this sense identity politics involves an element of recognition and an element of politicking. Of course, these are interrelated, with recognition of one’s own oppressed condition coming as the hard-won result of consciousness raising work. We may or may not want to call consciousness raising politicking. It may be understood as a precondition, or political education, that is necessary to the conduct of politics. It matters little here.
As I’ll elaborate in brief, the core of identity politics consists precisely in this: bringing a socially oppressed group - an institutional minority - into acknowledgement of its oppressed status and to mobilize this group towards liberation. To do this consciousness raising, identity politics must necessarily rely on the experiences of the members of the group who are oppressed and marginalized on the basis of their belonging to that group. This does not mean, and cannot mean, that identity politics is limited to lament. But the sigh of the oppressed creature, to paraphrase Marx, is a necessary step on the way to liberation. In this case, the sigh is the sigh of one group, or of one individual recognizing their struggles are due to their belonging to that group. Identity politics cannot stay there; it could not be a politics at all.
To be more concrete, when we are addressing, say, racial oppression, it is necessary for members of racial minorities to rely on their experiences of marginalization as the entry points to political consciousness, and therefore to engagement. The Black Panthers could not have found their way to Mao without first acknowledging their blackness and the effects that their blackness had on their lives. Awareness of how white supremacy is inextricably tied with the functioning of other systems of oppression can only come after one is first disposed to engage in systemic consciousness, and this begins with awareness of the oppression of one’s own group.
As Asad Haider already pointed out many years ago, and as Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò has further elucidated, this is not the notion of identity politics has been popularly received. The issue is not that the received popular notion of identity politics misunderstands what identity politics is. It’s rather that they’ve properly understood a purposely distorted mirror fun house image of it. Identity politics is fundamentally radical, both in its description of social reality as well as in its ultimate intentions. It aims to understand the roots of oppression and to dig deeply to extirpate them. It could not get much airtime.
What the public has had access to, though, is what we can call liberal identity politics (LIP). LIP only pays lip service to liberation and sloppily appeals to oppressed identities with little in the way of practical solutions. Again, this superficiality is not accidental, it is symptomatic of the interests of the ruling classes. There might be better ways to defang a dangerous political strategy, but using the same name for a wholly inferior facsimile of the original is a pretty good one.
And it has worked. By and large, “identity politics” has come to mean making superficial cosmetic tweaks to how things look without addressing the underlying structures. Unsurprisingly, anyone coming to be invested in LIP came to be disappointed by its inability to either produce genuine change or even make oppressed people conscious of how their oppression functioned and could be challenged. LIP was, however, the only echo of identity politics that was tolerable to the liberal establishment. It was not only compatible, it also had the benefit of siphoning emancipatory energies into familiar stream beds, where those energies promptly dissipated and desiccated.
Neoliberalism, the reigning form of ideological liberalism at the time, coopted identity politics. Perhaps that is not surprising. The reining ideology can only stay valid by swallowing up whatever new challenger emerges. What is surprising to this author is the way the left allowed one of its more potent tactical tools be so swiftly broken by its ideological opponent. In fact, it gladly helped to bury identity politics at times.
My claim, again following Haider and others, is that the left should vindicate identity politics by fighting to clear its name and return it to its true purpose and function, rather than collude with the dominant ideology to kill it. Instead, the left should make efforts, especially now, to save the baby from the fate of the defenestrated bathwater.
The objective is retention of linkages amongst groups around a common political goal of contesting the system, what bell hooks called “imperialist white-supremacist capitalist patriarchy.” Identity politics proper offers a fabulous tool for both systemic-consciousness-raising and for political action via coalitional politics. As the Argentine political theorist Ernesto Laclau argued – and I really am using him as a political theorist here, not an epistemologist – the point is to build “chains of equivalence” amongst different institutional minorities that bring into relief the ways differing struggles are the result of one system.
The instrumental goal, for Laclau, was to produce a “people” that could be the agent of revolutionary change. Many have found this notion problematic given the racist history of a politics invoking “the people” as the agents of change or objects of salvation. But Laclau used “the people” as a more expansive agent of change that could take the place of “the proletariat” in the wake of the New Left struggles and the shifts in the social terrain that resulted from the new social movements. Given the perceived untenability on insisting on the proletariat as the privileged agents of social transformation, “the people” comes to be that new agent, without invoking any positive notions of racial, ethnic, or national identity. Rather, “the people” are those who are oppressed by the system. Incidentally, an alternative translation for “the people” from Laclau’s native Spanish might be “the town,” which might evoke a more accurate image of the coalitional approach being proposed.
The “chains of equivalence” are ways to articulate what different struggles have in common through political discourse. Or, to put it another way, to show how struggles that appear to be separate can retain their distinctness while recognizing their shared roots in the contemporary political system. Indeed, for Laclau the equivalence between struggles is enriched by their difference. The broader the coalition, the greater the insistence on what makes each form of oppression unique, the better the relief into which the common enemy is brought. This linking of Laclau with identity politics is old hat, maybe, but its timelessness is especially timely today, and worth repeating.
There’s an elephant in the ointment, however, and that is the problem of cooptability. For some, the problem with identity politics is that it is easier for capitalism to coopt it in just the way described above. By contrast, old left movements focused on opposing capitalism through the vehicle of the proletariat is simply impossible for capitalism to coopt. There is no way for capitalism to sell genuine anti capitalism. And because capitalism has a vested interest in defending itself, and remarkable talent for being creatively durable in this task, it will always coopt resistance movements. Given this, the answer might be to put our eggs in the uncooptability basket. To find a pure, incorruptible vehicle.
What’s more, it’s not like (again – for some) an anti-capitalist proletarian struggle wouldn’t also liberate all other oppressed groups. If coalitional theory and identity politics is right in claiming there is one shared system, the overturning of that system will free all. The “on the other hand” here is that a narrow focus on the struggle of the proletariat fails to activate many to struggle. Surely it could be that that style of struggle’s uncooptability have made it a target of both discursive derision and political decimation. But it is also the case that many have felt excluded by a preponderant focus on class struggle as the privileged site of political action and social transformation. And I would argue that the full nature of capitalism would not be fully theoretically intelligible without the contributions of black lesbian thinkers (such as the B. Smith sisters) and others, to give just one example. Some might counter that while these thinkers added more nuance to our understanding, old left style emancipation would have liberated all identities in any case, but I think this view is untenable.
This is all further complicated by the fact that the hegemonic cultural struggle that Laclau derived from Gramsci and championed as a complement to his political strategy has been so effectively adopted by the right. Both in terms of diagnosing political obstacles and in terms of political strategy, the contemporary right wing has effectively adapted the Gramscian playbook. With the added benefit of deep institutional pockets to back it, of course.
So maybe we are stuck between a narrowly focused but broadly applicable class struggle and a diffuse yet unwieldy and (may-be) more corruptible coalitional model. So, what do?
One humble suggestion might be to stop letting the right hamper our discursive and political-theoretical tools with such little fight. Both in terms of allowing them to co-opt terms and tactics that undermining them and in terms of colluding with them to dilute and neutralize the original, threatening versions of those tactics.
Rather than acquiescing and surrendering the radical potential of identity politics to build coalitions and contour the systemic core, elevating institutional and systemic consciousness, the left should have insisted from the jump on the difference between the genuine identity politics of the Combahee River Collective and others, and the empty LIP version so amplified by mainstream loudspeakers. What is needed amongst other things, is redemptive revolutionary recapture of those tools. One might think here of struggles like Sophie Lewis’ to wrestle feminism’s revolutionary meaning away from the conciliatory clawless choice feminism versions propagated today.
It may be true that unlike other tactics, old school organizing along explicitly class and labor lines is the pure and uncorruptible way. However, it also has its obvious drawbacks. And in succumbing to this cooptation the left made a grievous concession for which it continues to pay. Yet the time is not too late. In fact, given the manner that the right has built its own popular front between elite economic interests and patriarchal white supremacy in the last few years…the time for our own broad tent radical-popular front is now. So, to my comrades: you’ve had your good “anti-woke” fun. And what’s better your critiques have been validated and pardoned. It’s time to get serious again.
Alex Taek-Gwang Lee
November 2025
The irony is inscribed in his very name. Diogenes (Διογένης) means “born of Zeus,” a marker of divine lineage, yet he was known to his contemporaries as the Dog (κύων, kyōn), and his followers as the Cynics (kynikoi—literally “dog-like”). What should have signified noble descent became the emblem of shameless simplicity. Diogenes embraced the insult, transforming the dog into a philosophical figure of freedom: faithful to the earth, unashamed of the body, indifferent to hierarchy. The dog lives directly, without mediation or possession; it barks, eats, sleeps, and desires without apology. In this animal openness, Diogenes found the condition of actual thought: philosophy not as mastery, but as exposure to light.
Aaron Schuster, in How to Research Like a Dog: Kafka’s New Science, an original reading of Kafka’s “Investigations of a Dog,” retrieves this Cynic inheritance. As he notes, “it was Plato who established the dog as the ‘philosophical animal par excellence’” (Schuster, 2024, p. 8). In the Republic, Plato praises the dog’s ability to discern friend from foe through knowledge rather than appearance, a trait he calls “truly philosophical,” for “how could the dog be anything but a lover of learning if it distinguishes what is its own and what is alien in terms of knowledge and ignorance?” Schuster goes on to trace how this Platonic lineage continues in the Cynics, those self-styled “dogs” who, led by Diogenes of Sinope, turned shamelessness and simplicity into philosophical virtues.
Whether their name came from the Cynosarges, the “White Dog” gymnasium, or from mockery of Diogenes’s scandalous behaviour, they embraced the dog as a symbol of honesty and natural life. As Schuster recalls, the first philosophical talking dog appeared only centuries later, in Lucian’s Dialogues of the Dead, where Cerberus praises the Cynics for entering Hades “laughing and cursing at everyone,” the true mark of fearless philosophy. Schuster brings Diogenes and Kafka’s dog together to show that the philosophical dogsurvives from antiquity to modernity, but its freedom has changed form: from public defiance to private endurance, from rejecting the master to obsessively seeking him.
In this sense, Kafka’s dog, endlessly questioning the origins of nourishment and the habits of its own species, becomes for Schuster a modern figure of the philosopher: solitary, obsessive, ridiculous, yet animated by a stubborn freedom to inquire. Like Diogenes, the dog in Kafka’s story lives in radical proximity to the world, thinking not from transcendence but from hunger, habit, and vulnerability. Its philosophising is not noble or transcendent but canine, an inquiry sustained by need, perplexity, and the refusal to stop asking.
Diogenes’ command to Alexander, “stand out of my sunlight,” thus echoes through Kafka’s burrowing dog. Both claim the right to think outside sovereignty: to expose thought to the immediacy of existence. In Diogenes, this freedom is solar and public; in Kafka’s dog, it is subterranean and anxious. Yet two distinct modes of freedom give form to what Schuster calls “the dog’s new science of freedom,” a freedom that lies not in domination but in persistence, in the capacity to live and reflect without privilege or protection (Schuster 2024, p. 216). To philosophise, in this lineage, is to inhabit the world as a dog in the sun or under the ground, i.e., faithful not to power, but to the restless movement of thought itself.
This gesture of the dogged philosopher confronting the shadow of Alexander frames Schuster’s book, in which Kafka’s canine investigator inherits Diogenes’ defiance. Schuster’s “new science” resists the sovereignty of abstract knowledge and defends the poetic moment of life as the ground of genuine inquiry. He asks what it would mean to philosophise “like a dog,” treating Kafka’s canine narrator as an unlikely theorist and experimental scientist.
The author argues that Kafka’s story is more than a parable: it outlines a speculative “system of science.” The dog’s investigations into music, nourishment, fasting, and community raise deeper questions about knowledge, language, institutions, and freedom. The “new science” here is a canine philosophy that parallels, and at times anticipates, phenomenology (Husserl) and psychoanalysis (Freud, Lacan). For Schuster, the dog embodies theory’s eccentric hero: maladjusted, melancholic, yet radically committed to truth.
Schuster regards Kafka’s “Investigations of a Dog” as a seemingly minor literature and treats the dog’s inquiries not as curiosities but as the basis of a speculative system: “a cynological system of science” that parodies academic disciplines and reveals philosophy’s persistence in neurotic failure and maladjustment (p. 240). Food science, musicology, ritual, and freedom form the eccentric departments of this canine university. Like Diogenes’s dog, Kafka’s dog insists on the right to investigate outside the grandeur of institutions, embracing the comic dignity of errancy.
While reading Schuster’s book, not surprisingly, the work that came to mind was Vico’s New Science. Vico’s project, like Schuster’s reading of Kafka’s “dog philosopher,” belongs to the same counter-tradition that resists the purification of reason. Two authors defend what might be called the Baroque imagination, a thought that moves through images, bodies, and affects rather than through abstraction or clarity. Vico’s new science is a poetics of knowledge, a philosophy that insists the origins of reason lie in the passions and fictions of human collectives. “Poetry,” he writes, “constituted the first common language of all the ancient nations” (Vico, 1984, p. 151).
The earliest humans, seized by fear and wonder, invented gods, myths, and rituals that shaped the world into intelligible form. Against the Cartesian separation of mind and matter, Vico affirms the continuity of imagination and law, myth and knowledge, body and truth. He claims that “the study of metaphysics and of poetry are naturally opposed to each other: one purges the mind of prejudices, while the other immerses and subverts it in them” (Vico, 1984, p. 183). What metaphysics purges, in his view, the Baroque restores—the flesh of thought.
For Vico, this poetic wisdom is not a deviation from science but its primordial condition, a first science that precedes modern epistemology. It is a science of figures, gestures, and passions: what Deleuze would later call a “logic of sense” rather than of identity. Vico’s world is baroque in its refusal of linearity or transparency; it is made of folds, repetitions, and metamorphoses, where divine and human, nature and artifice, intertwine. Knowledge does not unfold from a pure principle but curls back upon the opacity of life.
For Schuster, Kafka’s dog is not merely an allegory of modern anxiety but a figure of philosophy itself, a creature that thinks from within its own hunger, perplexity, and absurdity. Like Vico’s primitive poets, the dog’s inquiry begins in need and sensation. Its thought is not transcendental but corporeal, not systematic but obsessive and circular. In my terms, this embodies the Baroque spirit of immanent thinking, operating from within the conditions it attempts to comprehend. The mind doesn’t observe from above but rather burrows through its reality, treating its own line of inquiry as a subterranean fold emerging from thought’s very ground.
Thus, the affinity between Vico and Schuster lies in their shared resistance to the metaphysical demand for detachment. They imagine a thinking that is incarnate and curved, a thought that bends toward its object rather than distancing itself. Vico’s poetic science generates reason from the depths of imagination, while Schuster’s dog philosophy engenders reflection out of appetite. Each defends philosophy as an activity inseparable from life’s conditions, i.e., its hungers, absurdities, and affections. Two figures, the Vichian poet and Kafka’s dog, think with the world rather than about it.
Deleuze provides the conceptual topology that binds these two gestures. The Baroque fold is his name for this very curvature of thought: a world in which matter and mind, inside and outside, form an infinite series of inflexions (Deleuze, 1993, p. 24). The fold is both a metaphysical and ethical principle: thought’s refusal to be purified, its insistence on remaining implicated. To philosophise, in this sense, is to inhabit the fold of the world, not to escape it; to think as the dog does, exposed to light and noise, faithful to the confusion of existence.
Suppose Diogenes’s freedom consists in saying “stand out of my sunlight,” and Kafka’s dog’s freedom consists in persisting in its questions. In that case, Deleuze shows that this same freedom belongs to the imagination itself: the freedom of thought to remain folded in the world it contemplates. The Baroque imagination thus becomes the space where poetic wisdom, canine curiosity, and philosophical creation coincide. Thought is not a geometry of clear ideas but an art of folds, a practice of immersion and emergence.
Vico’s divine poet and Schuster’s philosophical dog all resist the Cartesian sun that blinds rather than illuminates. They teach that philosophy’s true light is not transcendence but immanence, the sunlight that touches the dog’s body, the myth that shapes a people, the fold that turns reflection back into life. The resonance with Schuster is clear. Kafka’s dog laments the absence of the “true word” and conducts bizarre experiments in search of it. Still, Schuster reads this as philosophy’s condition itself: “What if Kafka’s dog were an unlikely hero of theory for untheoretical times? What would it mean to philosophise with Kafka’s dog?” (Schuster, 2024, p. 3). Just as Vico insists that human institutions can only be understood through the poetic imagination that produced them, Schuster insists that philosophy survives only through its maladjusted, parabolic form. Their projects reject the sovereignty of abstraction and affirm the necessity of parable, fable, and imagination in the constitution of knowledge.
The figure of Diogenes allows us to see the alignment more vividly. In defending Kafka’s dog, Schuster resists the Alexandrian authority of modern bureaucratic institutions. He returns philosophy to the dog, whether in the myth-making “poetic animals” of the First Nations or the neurotic canine researcher of Kafka. Each transforms what seems marginal, absurd, or irrational into the very foundation of a new science. I would say that Schuster’s contribution is not only a playful rereading of Kafka but also a contemporary continuation of Vico’s gesture. If Vico’s New Science founded the modern human sciences on the recognition of poetic imagination, Schuster’s “new science” preserves philosophy’s future by defending its right to failure, eccentricity, and maladjustment.
The lesson of “new sciences” is that truth cannot be secured by abstraction alone. It must be defended in the poetic, parabolic, and eccentric gestures that sustain life. Whether in Vico’s cycles of nations or Schuster’s canine university, philosophy remains, like Diogenes, a dog before Alexander, claiming nothing but the singularity of life. The dog, then, is anything but incidental. For Schuster, Kafka’s dog extends the lineage of the poetic animal, one that persists stubbornly in its parabolic inquiry, undeterred by institutional neglect. And for Diogenes, the dog was philosophy itself: shameless, faithful to nature, defiant of power.
In the landscape of contemporary philosophy, Schuster’s work stands as a singular effort to think after the exhaustion of critique. Writing through figures like Kafka and Diogenes, Schuster reclaims philosophy’s right to be minor, comic, and errant in the face of institutionalised reason. His project refuses both the transcendental ambitions of theory and the moral sobriety of critique, exploring instead the residual vitality of thought that persists amid failure. Against the procedural rationality that now governs knowledge, from academic bureaucracy to algorithmic mediation, Schuster’s humour and perversity mark a counter-conduct: an insistence that philosophy’s dignity lies precisely in its maladjustment.
Schuster’s thought begins where the humanist confidence of Vico ends. For Vico, poetic imagination founded the world; for Schuster, that world has already decayed into its own commentary. Through Kafka, he locates philosophy not in the recovery of myth but in the refusal of coherence, the right to remain unfinished, maladjusted, and exposed. His writing insists that philosophy’s task is no longer to explain or to found, but to endure its own failure with precision and humour. Vico still believed that the imagination could shape institutions; Schuster inhabits the ruins of that belief. What he calls philosophy survives only as a gesture, i.e., dog-like, minor, obstinate, faithful not to system but to life’s residue. The sunlight that once illuminated the genesis of meaning in Vico now burns in Schuster as irony: a brightness too harsh for reconciliation, a light under which every order shows its cracks.
To read Schuster, then, is to encounter the end of the “new science” itself: philosophy after its institutions, thinking as scavenging, truth as the persistence of error. His kinship with Diogenes lies not in rebellion but in style, a fidelity to the low, the comic, the shameless, against the empire of authority that still calls itself reason. Schuster’s philosophical stance resonates with what might be termed the post-critical moment: the exhaustion of critique as a mode of mastery and its transformation into an art of survival.
Yet where these projects often retain a metaphysical ambition to reconstruct forms of worldhood, negativity, or relation, Schuster’s intervention is more ironic and ascetic. He refuses the consolation of restoration. His philosophy inhabits the point at which critique itself becomes comic: where the philosopher, stripped of institutional authority, must learn again to think from the gutter, in laughter, embarrassment, and persistence. In this, Schuster stands less as a theorist of renewal than as a practitioner of philosophical degradation, a thinker of the remainder that thought cannot sublate. His Diogenes is not an allegory of resistance but of exposure: the insistence that, after the collapse of systems, what endures of philosophy is its capacity to blush and to bark, to live without mastery.
In this light, Schuster’s philosophy reads as a diagnosis of the academy’s own terminal farce. The institutional forms that once guaranteed philosophy’s legitimacy, i.e., peer review, editorial mediation, and disciplinary consensus, now persist only as automated rituals within the algorithmic economy of publication. Artificial intelligence has completed what managerial reason began: the substitution of thought by procedure, critique by compliance. Yet Schuster’s ironic fidelity to failure grants this exhaustion a strange dignity. His laughter is not cynical but diagnostic, exposing the empty core of the academic illusio. In an age when machines can simulate the gestures of reflection, Schuster’s insistence on maladjustment becomes an ethical stance: to think as that which resists optimisation, to remain human not by mastery but by error. Philosophy, in his hands, survives precisely where its institutional body collapses: barking, embarrassed, and alive.
REFERENCES
Deleuze, G. (1993). The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque (T. Conley, Trans.). The Anthlone Press.
Schuster, A. (2024). How to research like a dog: Kafka’s new science. MIT Press.
Vico, G. (1984). The first new science (L. Pompa, Trans.). Cambridge University Press.
Darragh Sheehan
August 2025
Darragh Sheehan is a clinical social worker and psychotherapist. Her primary post-graduate training is in a neo-Reichian somatically oriented psychodynamic psychotherapy (one of the earlier clinical attempts to integrate the political, the body, and subjectivity). She is a co-founder of the Center for Critical and Clinical Analysis. To find out more visit cccacommunity.com
The "left" of the global North may not have firing squads, but it certainly has created psychological ones. In place of robust progressive coalitions, class-based movements, and political parties, we presently have what is referred to as wokeness[1], a groupthink mentality in which the implicit threat of social ostracism serves as a powerful force of conformity. It ironically reflects some of the left’s most historically self-defeating and sadistic tendencies, without necessarily embodying substantive leftist politics at all[2].
The definition of wokeness in brief is what Christian Parenti calls “politics as etiquette” and what Vivek Chibber describes as “social justice politics with class taken out.” Catherine Liu prefers to use the word “irrational.”
While I will use the term woke, I am not as interested in the label as much as what it represents: the current expression, practices, and ideological framework through which progressive movements and dissent have been become compatible with capitalist logic and ruling-class interests.
Wokeness is the residue of once-progressive politics, reconfigured into moral discourses and lifestyle practices suited to the aspirations of the Professional-Managerial Class (PMC). It is, in short, the consequence of the systematic dismantling of the left in the Global North. A process that wasn’t solely the result of overt state repression like McCarthyism or COINTELPRO, but rather unfolded over time through more subtle and persistent forms of co-optation and cultural containment, shaped by the depoliticizing effects of consumer culture (lifestyle capitalism), advertising, media, academic (identitarian) specializations, careerism, professional co-optation, and the non-profit industrial complex (all of which has been intersecting with the rise of digital technologies)[3].
This is hardly surprising: capitalism does not merely repress dissent, it absorbs and repurposes it. Herbert Marcuse (1964) referred to “repressive desublimation” to describe the process where instinctual drives, like sexuality, are “liberated” in capitalism (via subcultural acceptance, specialty marketing, etc.) but as a means of control. Building on this, expressions of rebellion (rage, identity, non-normative sexuality or gender, dissent) are permitted when they can be aestheticized, thus easily commodified.
Mark Fisher (2009) argues similarly that because it is difficult to imagine alternatives to capitalism, it becomes hard to challenge it meaningfully. As a consequence, “anti-capitalist” efforts often end up diffusing capitalism’s harms through what he called “gestural anti-capitalism.” A telling example is a consultant I encountered on LinkedIn who described themselves as an “anti-capitalist business coach,” which felt akin to a self-identified “vegan butcher.” Beyond the irony, Fisher argues that these types of gestures serve to reinforce capitalism by managing its image, much like a PR campaign.
“Gestural anti-capitalism” hints at the reassuring idea that you can “live your social justice values” within the system. This may explain why “decolonization” has become a heavily marketed genre within wokeness in education, therapy, and beyond. Stripped of context as a political project, commodified, and used as a metaphor for our social problems (Tuck and Yang, 2012), the symbolism seems to provide us with a psychological fantasy of moral purity, allowing consumers of lifestyle politics to imagine themselves removed from structures of harm, reducing feelings of complicity.
But the central feature of any socio-economic system (including ours) is that we cannot exist outside the power structures that shape our subjectivities and daily lives. Simply put, we cannot live “social justice” values; from paying taxes that fund war machines, to the reliance on fossil fuels, to the consumption of essential goods produced through exploitation, the systems we participate in implicate us in harm.
Within such a context, the cultivation of a ‘good,’ ‘ethical,’ and ‘polite’ persona functions as a class-based mode of professional development and identity. And this is precisely why commodified ‘ethical’ lifestyles and ideological practices are particularly appealing to the Professional-Managerial Class (PMC)— a class that happens to include much of this readership and myself. This social class lacks ownership of capital, but its relationship to capital is to reproduce ideology through institutions, discourse, and culture. And many progressives (curiously enough, even self-identified “radicals”) remain strangely “class-blind” and unable or unwilling to recognize the tension between their political ideals and their class privilege and/or career incentives/aspirations.
But this isn’t a ‘moral’ or personal failure so much as a structural contradiction, one not only inevitable, but necessary to address for political and ethical growth. Engaging with these contradictions forces us to confront the limits and illusions of self-contained lifestyles and private solutions and recognize the need to strategize for change at a structural level. But in woke culture, the intense demand for moral purity or “cleanliness” (Parenti, 2024) leaves little room for contradiction and ambiguity as a site of development.
In “The Mass Psychology of Fascism,” Wilhelm Reich (1933) argues that the ‘working’ and middle classes (the latter, whom he states resist change despite their precarity) are torn between revolutionary potential shaped by social conditions and reactionary influences from authoritarian society. And this contradiction or tension between progressive and reactionary impulses is key to understanding the psychological realities of political allegiance and class consciousness that influence social and political movements.
In the same vein, in “Fear of Falling: The Inner Life of the Middle Classes” (1989), Barbara Ehrenreich argues that feelings of economic insecurity in the U.S. among the professional-managerial middle class (whose status comes from education, expertise, and professional credentials, rather than solely inherited wealth) generate deep anxiety. The “fear of falling,” she argues, has shaped political and cultural behavior, fostering the adoption of progressive rhetoric while shifting towards conservatism as a defensive posture. This has led to a distancing from the working classes and the poor to maintain status.
In this context, woke culture may serve to help define ‘class boundaries,’ where amid instability, its framework provides psychological comfort with clear in-group and out-group boundaries, easing ambiguity and reinforcing status. Expanding on this, wokeness may be symptomatic of the contemporary (social media-driven) iteration of aforementioned contradictions and tensions in the middle classes. The desire for justice and equality (often animated by moral urgency) is entangled with performative displays of virtue and authoritarian modes of policing discourse and behaviour, which in practice function in reactionary ways to stabilize existing power relations.
Rather than confronting these contradictions and anxieties as sites for growth or collective praxis, the frameworks and practices of woke culture promote and reinforce their disavowal (a psychological mechanism where one distances oneself from truths that are recognized but felt to be unacceptable). Unlike denial, disavowal allows individuals to both know and not know at once, creating psychic tension.
This dissonance or tension is managed through symbolic acts, i.e., the building blocks of wokeness: hypercorrect language, curated consumption, identitarianism, lifestyle capitalism, social media performance, ritualized call-outs, and (micro or larger acts of) shaming of those who fail to conform or who are deemed ‘morally deviant,’ etc.
This interplay of intrapsychic conflict (i.e., anxiety) and group-level conformity helps explain Chibber’s description of wokeness as a “hyperactive and hypervigilant social justice ethos.” This accounts for why, in practice, woke culture functions as a closed system with rigid boundaries (sociologically and psychologically speaking) where members enforce conformity to preserve order and reduce anxiety, resulting in its “strong authoritarian” tendencies.
Within this framework, disagreement is not merely considered incorrect but inherently oppressive. Those who dissent are not ‘mistaken,’ but are ‘morally compromised,’ or, as Chibber notes, even considered “oppressors.” Consequently, dissent is treated less as an opportunity for debate or collective growth than as a threat needing to be silenced, excluded, or “cancelled.”
CANCEL CULTURE: DISCIPLINE FOR THE LESS POWERFUL, BUT IMMUNITY FOR THE POWERFUL
Though “cancel culture” may have peaked years ago, the threat of public condemnation still looms. As the right openly embraces authoritarianism and engineers massive wealth transfers, people are somehow still fixated on some Love Island contestant's racist comments.
The fear and threat of being branded a “harm-doer” continues to haunt everyday people (most of whom have little institutional power) while those with actual economic and political influence consolidate wealth (in unprecedented ways) and increasingly engage in serious civil and human rights abuses with impunity: including a genocide in Gaza the whole world is watching in real time.
That ‘progressives’ and/or liberals would remain concerned with individual behavior and etiquette or ideological and linguistic infractions during a time like this says more about a “left” more fluent in social punishment and self-optimization audits than in resisting authoritarianism and creating political power or concrete structural change.
In addition, I have yet to observe or encounter evidence showing that an increase in social anxiety or “cancel culture” has meaningfully transformed our structural or daily social realities. What I have seen, on the contrary, is that the fear of being “cancelled” generates intense anxiety (particularly among progressives or those with a conscience) about being labeled “racist,” “misogynist,” “transphobic,” or otherwise “morally deviant.” At its worst, the weaponizing of stated labels resembles a tool of social control akin to Scientology’s designation of “Suppressive Persons,” and at best, White Anglo-Saxon Protestant (WASP) etiquette, where surface politeness masks and suppresses genuine emotional expression and conflict[4].
Meanwhile, those with real institutional power and wealth (who are proudly racist, Islamophobic, transphobic, genocidal, anti-social, or otherwise hateful and sadistic) remain untouched by these labels, as they actively pursue regressive, authoritarian, and punitive political agendas. Many now wear these labels as badges of honor, framing them as acts of dissent against the ‘moral norms’ imposed by the professional-managerial class. This reactionary interpretation of “resistance” has gained traction among segments of the working classes, who increasingly experience the predominantly liberal professional-managerial class (not oligarchs) as the more immediate and overbearing authority in their daily lives.
In this context, the failure of a “left” to engage materially leaves a vacuum, where emotional and psychological energies are hijacked by regressive movements. As Wilhelm Reich states: “Fascist rebelliousness always accrues where a revolutionary emotion, out of fear of the truth, is distorted into illusion” (Pg. 4, 1933).
PERFORMING PROGRESS: HOW MANAGERIALISM AND THERAPEUTIC CULTURE SHIFT POLITICS INTO PRIVATE SPHERE
In woke culture, the focus on policing racism, sexism, and microaggressions in our daily lives and in the workplaces, along with the looming threat of public shaming, has clearly failed to challenge deeper power structures. Instead, it undermines the possibility of building a transformative left by fostering self-censorship, conformity, and the absorption of “social justice” into capitalist performance and lifestyle norms.
Consider how “anti-racism” (among other progressive values), was just so recently embraced by corporations. For more see Jennifer Pan’s recently published book “Selling Social Justice: Why the Rich Love Antiracism” (2025).
Furthermore, therapeutic culture reinforces this trend by reframing structural problems as matters of individual healing: as biomedical disorders, emotional hygiene, nervous system regulation, or trauma recovery. This managerial focus on the self— through language policing, behavioral norms, and wellness discourses, and the bootstrapping of your trauma recovery— aligns neatly with neoliberalism, managerialism, and institutional control.
This shift also parallels the broader containment of activism through the rise of “career activists:” DEI consultants, non-profit community organizers, professional (anti-racist, etc.) workshop facilitators, trauma-informed workplace trainers, social media “healers,” nonprofit-sector professionals, identity-based leadership consultants, community organizers, non-profits promising us “new social justice models mental health” and now even an increase in “liberatory” private practice therapists. However well-intentioned, these positions operate within profit motives, branding pressures, and compliance culture. In short, they function more (even if unwillingly) to manage political discontent rather than disrupt it.
This inward turn (toward self-monitoring, therapeutic culture, moral hygiene, and performative virtue) stems not only from institutional, economic, and cultural pressures but is also reproduced by the internalization of woke social codes and expectations influenced by the risk of being shamed.
And in an emotional climate like this, the threat of public shaming can feel like a form of symbolic death or social exclusion. And in an already increasingly alienating existence, this can trigger anxieties, feelings of unworthiness, defensive safety-seeking behaviors, and annihilation anxieties (fears that threaten the stability of the self in relation to the group).
Rather than cultivating autonomy and cooperation, key to collective organizing, these dynamics enforce conformity. People comply, moralize, or withdraw to reduce anxiety, preserve psychic survival, and maintain moral standing; a dynamic that echoes Ehrenreich’s insight into how pervasive anxiety, especially in precarious social climates, drives people toward self-protection rather than solidarity.
In this environment, it is not surprising that therapy has come to be seen as an appropriate space to confront one’s inner “badness” or “isms,” reframed as a kind of social activism of becoming a ‘better person,’ in the context of “doing the work” (Parenti, 2024). This framing helps explain the rise of commercialized “liberatory” or identitarian approaches (mostly tailored to the middle classes) that package political growth as private self-work, further shifting activism from the public sphere into lifestyle experiences that are empathically holding or individualized, less anxiety-provoking gestures[5].
With people’s reputations and livelihoods (even their families’ health insurance) on the line, many choose to withdraw or opt out of progressive spaces or comply by adopting woke language and frameworks out of fear[6]. Others act with genuine conviction, attempting to do the “right thing” in the absence of viable political alternatives.
Regardless of the motive, this is NOT liberation; it can be read as a manifestation of affective capitalism[7] (simply the commodification of emotions as sources of value in workplaces, markets, and politics). Seen this way, the woke “left” becomes the manager of identity and our private emotional worlds, rather than a disruptor of class hierarchy and other forms of domination.
In response to this emphasis on self-monitoring and moral shame, some are driven into a defensive polarization that, at its extreme, pushes people toward right-wing authoritarianism. In that space, shame and self-restraint are rejected in favor of their inversion: the celebration of ‘shamelessness’ and the assertion of a ‘right’ or ‘freedom’ to say or think whatever one wants.
Conversely, caught between right-wing repression and “left-wing” moralism, sadly, many well-intended people opt out of political spaces altogether because in today’s moral economy, leadership and having different ideas are increasingly a “high-risk, low-reward” endeavor.
FROM MORALISTIC FIRING SQUADS TOWARDS A REALITY POLITICS
In a political climate as increasingly repressive as ours, many might ask: why critique the “left?” Or isn’t a critique of wokeness outdated?
On the contrary, there is no more urgent time for critical reflection than the present; what matters is the mechanism not the label. The neutralization of the left has been decades in the making, leaving behind an interpretation of progressivism that preserves the moral and aesthetic sensibilities of “the left” while abandoning its material and democratic commitments.
What remains are characteristics of “the left” most easily aestheticized, commodified, and institutionalized, in addition to the traits that enforce discipline, turning “the left” (or remnants thereof) against itself. As a result, its strongest tools (mass organizing, intersectional solidarity through universal politics and programs, class and systemic analysis) are nearly absent, while its least generative (moral purity, ideological policing, and “circular firing squads”) are amplified.
In this configuration, wokeness doesn’t just neutralize the left; it compels it to police itself into irrelevance more effectively than the state ever could. This is because morality and shame can punish, but cannot build emancipatory mass movements.
Someone from Latin America that I follow on social media offered an assessment: “The problem with much of the left in the United States is that you hate your country and people, and you are ashamed of belonging to an imperial power. But if you want to organize effectively, you have to find a way to love your country and people to build with them.” While perhaps overstated and nationalistic in tone, his observation speaks to a deeper issue within left politics in the United States: an aversion not just to the state or its institutions, but to the very social fabric and relations we must engage with to build a society where the democratic redistribution of wealth is possible.
One cannot organize or build among people one secretly or overtly disdains or seeks to humiliate[8]. While we may envision worlds beyond the violence of the nation-state, neo-colonialism, and capitalism, we must build with the people who exist here and now, in all their contradictions and complexities, because we share —although varying— material and social conditions.
Fantasies of purity and rhetorical posturing won't protect us from the collective effort required to build meaningful solidarity—an effort that demands critically examining the discourses and frameworks we regurgitate without question (and why we get so damn excited when it goes viral, even if it leads to no structural change at all), an analysis of who benefits from these discourses, and a willingness to confront the destructive tendencies of the left.
This is precisely why truly egalitarian projects are difficult, because we are tasked not only with dismantling oppressive systems but also with confronting the sadistic, moralistic, and self-interested impulses that can reside even within the most “liberatory” intentions. When the left abandons this task, we become what we claim to resist and/or cede ground to a right that offers its version of "belonging.”
For better or worse, whether we like it or not, political organizing that aims to generate power on a larger scale requires engagement with the systems around us, even if they are deeply flawed. Political and personal purity is a fantasy; it does not exist, only the difficult, messy work of navigating complexity in the pursuit of a more just world.
It’s time to let go of utopian fantasies that none of us can agree upon anyway. Instead, ideals must be led by concrete projects, goals, and real power; we must focus on the mature, grounded work of orienting ourselves to reality. History shows that the left is strongest and most democratic when it combines pressure from the outside with strategic engagement from the inside: through political parties, policymaking, institutional reform, and coalition-building. As such, institutional power domestically is a prerequisite to addressing injustices internationally[9].
In the end, the psychic life of the woke American “left” (moral posturing, aestheticized dissent, and therapeutic self-management) has made us fluent in performance, self-optimization, and social punishment, conveniently creating a plethora of specialty markets, new career possibilities, and published books, etc. However, it has paralyzed us in action. If we continue to confuse the absorption of dissent into lifestyle capitalism, consumerism, careerism, or performance of virtue by the professional-managerial class, we risk remaining in political unconsciousness, acting out and in, rather than creating power.
Our contradictions and self-interests are not disqualifications but the terrain on which we must organize. If we cannot face them, we cannot face ourselves, and that means we cannot confront power, let alone transform it[10]. Turning on one another in “circular firing squads” only surrenders the future to those who will define it for us. We must move beyond performance and personal “goodness.” Only by confronting the world as it is, not as we wish to appear within it, can we expose systems of domination and create a future shaped by conscious human agency, rather than capital or coercion.
FOOTNOTES
[1] As stated, I am interested in the contemporary function of wokeness, not the word itself. While wokeness is often critiqued as being associated with liberal politics, I have observed that it operates aesthetically along a spectrum, ranging from mainstream liberalism to more “radical” expressions. What may appear “radical” in language, branding, or subcultural affiliation is often liberal in function. In my mind, this overlap makes the phenomenon of wokeness difficult to articulate and untangle precisely because it ranges across different registers of left-identified or progressive discourse, all of which ultimately adapt to institutional needs.
Christian Parenti (2024) has a detailed definition of his interpretation in the essay, The Cargo Cult of Woke.
When dissent or progressiveness becomes compatible, a commodity, a way to
make a profit, a career, a professional identity, or an aesthetic (and in particular well distanced from the working class and poor), who is being liberated? This is the ultimate question I aim to ask, and I hope we can ask ourselves (without shaming each other, of course!).
[2] In my opinion, a “substantial leftist” politics emphasizes universal programs that redistribute wealth and democratize public goods and infrastructure. By prioritizing broad solutions like universal healthcare, free education, and public housing etc., the aim is to improve economic conditions for all. Core to this vision is expanding democratic participation and principles, both in governance and in economics, as they are interdependent. Rather than centering identity (i.e., known as identititarianism), strategic solidarity is built across racial, gender, sexual, and other divides by focusing on our shared economic interests as a foundation for intersectional movements that challenge various forms of social domination and oppression.
[3] See Piven & Cloward, 1971; Schreker, 1994; Frank, 1997, 2016; Cushman, 1996; Saunders, 1999; Herman & Chomsky, 2002; Fisher, 2009; and many more.
[4] This is not to say that all forms of confrontation or social accountability are inherently punitive or wrong; some behaviors clearly warrant ethical scrutiny and / or social / legal boundaries. However, there is a difference between addressing serious harm in good faith and weaponizing shame as a tool of ideological purity or social control. This dynamic is exacerbated in the oftentimes collapse between the private and the public in woke culture: meaning matters that might be more appropriately handled in intimate or restorative contexts are instead aired in highly visible, performative ways (on social media) that are less about justice and more about a spectacle meant to establish dominance. It almost always ends up instilling fear and anxiety in the larger community, as we wonder if we will “be next.”
[5] As a psychotherapist, I affirm the political potential and countercultural value of certain branches of psychodynamic / depth psychotherapies. There’s a rich history of Marxist and other liberatory practitioners whose work has meaningfully bridged psychotherapy/ psychoanalysis and political struggle (Reich, Fanon, Fromm, Tosquelles, Martín-Baró, Black feminism, etc). My critique, however, concerns the increasing commodification of therapeutic discourse, especially when it is marketed as a lifestyle or branded as a “radical,” individualized, and decontextualized response (in the form of services tailored to the middle classes).
In the United States, it’s becoming increasingly more common to see private practices or training institutions adopt the label “liberatory,” etc., yet these approaches often lack grounding in community-based work with the working classes or poor. Instead, they tend to serve the professional and personal development of the professional-managerial class (PMC), especially as economic realities (lack of funding, increased costs of living, etc.) make sustained engagement or creation of community clinics more difficult. By contrast, the liberatory psychotherapists referenced earlier were all directly involved in community clinics, other community projects, and/or social movements that engaged working-class and other populations in material and collective ways.
Take, for example, how in much of Latin America, psychotherapists rarely claim such a politicized identity without direct involvement in grassroots projects serving poor and working-class communities. In the U.S. context, however, economic realities (along with professional and legal constraints) have neutralized these liberatory frameworks and possibilities for cross-class community organizing and service development.
The current systems of mental health provision are in a state of significant crisis, a reality that warrants deeper examination within the profession. Many progressively minded or “radical” practitioners are increasingly responding to these systemic problems by “promoting mental health awareness,” opening private individuals and group (business) practices that claim to be ‘aware of systemic issues,’ and marketing individualized “solutions” (often framed through identitarian lenses), thereby commodifying the very issues they claim to treat.
This is not a personal or moral failure; I do not aim to personally judge individual therapists. This is rather an inevitable structural contradiction, one I explore in my essay The Therapist as the "Good-Enough Commodity": From Holding to Selling. In effect, the merger of therapeutic culture and political action is another mode of absorbing political dissent into capitalism. And without simultaneously confronting the systemic failures (i.e., of insurance reimbursement and the erosion of public (mental) health infrastructure, and failures of the non-profit industrial complex), psychotherapy, even when “politicized,” risks becoming a luxury good. Which will remain out of reach for those who need it most, while therapists, often working in private offices, risk becoming managers of political dissent for the middle classes.
[6] In addition to therapeutic culture, it is not uncommon for people to turn to books like “Conflict Is Not Abuse” by Sarah Schulman or “Against Purity: Living Ethically in Compromised Times” by Alexis Shotwell, perhaps subconsciously, to search for new frameworks to defend themselves against the irrationality of woke culture. Books like these seem to offer us comfort by supplying yet another woke lens; as wokeness endlessly attempts to correct and rationalize its contradictions through ever more refined frameworks and lexicon that are: largely abstract, for the most part ignore social class, and don’t grapple with the reasons for how or why purity and victimhood took hold in progressive spaces to begin with.
[7] Affective capitalism is a concept (used in various fields, cultural studies, sociology, economics, etc.) that explores how emotions have become a source of value and accumulation in capitalism and how they shape areas like the workplace to consumer markets and politics. For example, in the workplace, emotional labor is increasingly managed and monitored to increase productivity, while on the other hand, businesses are cultivating and manipulating what we desire to generate new markets. In politics and social media, for example, emotional engagement (outrage, anxiety, hope, or fear) is strategically used to maintain attention, loyalty, and control. The commodification of affect operates through “emotional norms” that reinforce existing hierarchies and inequalities, shaping not just how people work and consume but how they feel, express, and relate to one another. (Dlaske & Del Percio, 2022).
[8] Catherine Liu’s 2021 book, “Virtue Hoarders: The Case against the Professional Managerial Class,” offers in part an assessment of this class-based humiliation. It’s a must read if you haven’t already.
[9] Refusing to engage with power or concrete change in the name of ideological purity may feel morally righteous, but in practice, it often amounts to political surrender and a form of cruelty toward those who have one life to live and cannot afford to reject reform on principle or ideology alone.
[10] While my language often reflects generalities, particularly around class positions on the left, it’s important to note that this framing emerges from the specific audience I had in mind for this essay: primarily those belonging to the professional-managerial class, and more narrowly, in the mental health professions. Of course, “the left” is not homogeneous, nor exclusively middle-class, far from it. But for the purposes of this essay, certain tendencies are highlighted because they speak most directly to the contradictions I see operating within that demographic.
I’m aware this risks flattening out complex realities and can even be symptomatic of objectifying the poor/ working classes and treating individuals more as symbols or reference points than as active political subjects. That’s not the intention. Rather, the focus here is on highlighting internal contradictions within a particular class, which I am also a member of, to promote dialogue around these topics.
REFERENCES
Chibber, V. (2025, January 29). Confronting Capitalism: The end of wokeness? [Audio podcast episode]. Jacobin Radio. Catalina: A Journal of Theory and Strategy; Jacobin.
Dlaske, K., & Del Percio, A. (2022). Introduction: Language, work and affective capitalism. International Journal of the Sociology of Language, 2022(276), 1–13. https://doi.org/10.1515/ijsl-2022-0046
Ehrenreich, B., & Ehrenreich, J. (1977). The professional‑managerial class. Radical America, 11(2), 7–32.
Ehrenreich, B. (1989). Fear of falling: The inner life of the middle class. Pantheon books.
Fisher, M. (2009). Capitalist realism: Is there no alternative? Zero Books.
Harrington, A. (2019, April 25). On early 20th‑century America’s unhealthy fixation with ‘hygiene’. Literary Hub. https://lithub.com/on-early-20th-century-americas-unhealthy-fixation-with-hygiene/
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Pan, J. (2025). Selling social justice: Why the rich love antiracism. Verso Books.
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Reich, W. (1970). The mass psychology of fascism (V. R. Carfagno, Trans.). Farrar, Straus and Giroux. (Original work published 1933)
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