Michael Downs on Psychoanalysis, Žižek and the Working Class

This episode is going to be different from prior episodes. Today we’re going to be talking about psychoanalysis. Marx esteemed scientific rationality. Many, including many socialists, reject psychoanalysis as a pseudoscience. I have my own questions, honestly. Nonetheless, there is a significant branch of Marxism grounded in Freudian psychoanalysis, including controversial yet influential thinkers like Louis Althusser and Slavoj Žižek.On Today’s episode I asked Michael Downs to talk about his essay “Wage Labor and Jouissance, Why the Left Needs Žižek to Understand Workers”. Michael Downs is most famous for his theory blog The Dangerous Maybe. The Dangerous Maybe makes philosophers such as Žizek, Lacan, Marx and Heidegger intelligible to people with little to no background in theory. Michael Downs himself does not have a college degree, but his blog posts have been so respected that professors are assigning his them in their classrooms. In his essay “Wage Labor and Jouissance” he talks about some insights he has gotten from reading Žižek, insights that he believes socialists organizers should be aware of: we must meet workers where they are at. We will fail to bring about socialism if we force our values on the rest of the working class. Our job as organizers is to present them with the tools to take their own liberation into their own hands. This aligns with the socialist organizers from EWOC and the DSA National Labor Committee and other places that you have heard on this podcast.Michael Downs' theory blog The Dangerous Maybe.Michael Downs' essay “Wage Labor and Jouissance, Why the Left Needs Žižek to Understand Workers” in Underground Theory (2023).Downs’ courses on Žižek’s “For They Know Not What They Do”, and an Intro to Nick Land. Note: Downs' class on Nick Land is interesting because Land offers a critique of socialism, and yet he influenced some of today’s most important socialist thinkers, including Mark Fisher and Nick Srnicek.Send us Fan MailBecome a member of Democratic Socialists of America.Sign up to receive NPEC's newsletter, Red Letter.