Charles Cooley

Charles Horton Cooley

American sociologist

Cooley, the son of Michigan Supreme Court judge Thomas McIntyre Cooley, earned his Ph.D. at the University of Michigan in 1894. He had started teaching at the university in 1892, became a full professor of sociology in 1907, and remained there until the end of his life.

Cooley believed that social reality was qualitatively different from physical reality and was therefore less amenable to measurement [GUSNOTE: STATISTICS! HELL!]. Because of this view, he was more productive as a social theorist than as a research scientist. His Human Nature and the Social Order (1902, reprinted 1956) discussed the determination of the self through interaction with others. Cooley theorized that the sense of self is formed in two ways: by one’s actual experiences and by what one imagines others’ ideas of oneself to be—a phenomenon Cooley called the “looking glass self.” This dual conception contributed to Cooley’s fundamental theory that the mind is social and that society is a mental construct.

In Social Organization (1909, reprinted 1956), Cooley outlined the objective consequences of his psychological views. He argued that the ideal of the moral unity of society, involving qualities of loyalty, justice, and freedom, was derived from face-to-face relationships in primary groups such as the family and neighbourhood or children’s play groups. In his last major work, Social Process (1918, reprinted 1966), he applied the Darwinian principles of natural selection and adaptation to collective (social) existence.

https://www.britannica.com/biography/Charles-Horton-Cooley

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YOURDEMOCRACY.NET RECORDS HISTORY AS IT SHOULD BE — NOT AS THE WESTERN MEDIA WRONGLY REPORTS IT.

         Gus Leonisky

         POLITICAL CARTOONIST SINCE 1951.

PLEASE DO NOT BLAME RUSSIA IF WW3 STARTS. BLAME YOURSELF.

    By Tunç Türel

Slavoj Žižek, one of the Western thinkers who is familiar with Marxist terminology, published an article in Philosophy Salon on January 27, 2025, entitled “Why a Communist Must Assume that Life is Hell.”1 In it, Žižek argues that communists should turn their backs on humanist optimism and embrace radical pessimism, seeing life as an immanent “valley of tears” rather than a process shaped by historical forces. Drawing on the philosopher Philipp Mainländer, he argues that suffering is not just a product of alienation, but is at the core of existence. Drawing on Brassier’s reinterpretation of Marx, Žižek argues that capitalism “neutralizes” human potential but paradoxically produces the revolutionary subject. Seeing Mainländer’s nihilism as a call for radical engagement, Žižek portrays communism ultimately as a coping mechanism to alleviate the pain inherent in life.

Before I try to explain why the ideas in Žižek’s article constitute a dead end in terms of the historical and dialectical materialist method and then try to refute his thesis by drawing inspiration from Marc Bloch’s “Principle of Hope”, Antonio Gramsci’s “Pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will” and the Marxist video game Disco Elysium, I think it would be useful to take a brief look at Philipp Mainländer, who inspired Žižek here.

Mainländer, who lived between 1841 and 1876, was a German philosopher and poet known for his radical pessimism, who both built upon and distorted the ideas of Arthur Schopenhauer, reduced the philosopher’s thought into a metaphysical nihilism. In contrast to Schopenhauer’s will to live, Mainländer argued that existence was driven by a will to die–a cosmic suicide initiated by God himself. For him, the world was nothing but the rotting corpse of a dead god, and existence was an inevitable march towards self-destruction.

Yet for all his bleak ontology, Mainländer was paradoxically a champion of socialism, feminism and workers’ rights. This aspect of Mainländer’s work naturally attracted the likes of August Bebel and Eduard Bernstein to his ideas. However, Mainländer’s philosophy was ultimately idealistic, treating suffering as an ontological datum rather than a historically conditioned phenomenon.

But why can Žižek’s above-mentioned attempt be characterized as a metaphysical dead end in terms of historical and dialectical materialism?

First of all, Žižek portrays communism not as the historical solution to the class struggle but as a response to an inevitable cosmic despair, i.e. he assigns communism a completely different role. However, historical materialism sees suffering not as an immanent feature of existence, but as a product of specific economic and social relations. By arguing that suffering is not historically contingent but ontologically primary, Žižek slips into idealism, exactly what we Marxists oppose.

Second, whereas Marxists conceive alienation as a historically specific phenomenon arising under capitalism due to private property and the division of labor, Žižek treats alienation as an intrinsic feature of human existence rather than a problem that can be overcome through revolutionary transformation. This leads him to a fatalistic view that denies the possibility of communism as a project of human emancipation.

Third, Žižek argues in his article that capitalism is not only a historically contingent formation, but also an inevitable process that “creates the subject” of revolution. But while Marx recognized the role of capitalism in developing the material conditions for socialism, he never saw it as a metaphysically necessary or eternal form. Dialectical materialism emphasizes the internal contradictions–exploitation, crises and class struggle–that drive capitalism to its overthrow, not its supposed role in “revealing” the horrors of existence.

Fourth, Marxism does not propose an idealized, naïve humanism, but recognizes human potential as something shaped by historical conditions. By rejecting the idea that people have any innate capacity for solidarity and cooperation, Žižek denies the basis for revolutionary struggle. This is in direct opposition to Marx’s understanding of human beings as socially and historically constituted beings with the capacity to recreate both themselves and the world.

Finally, dialectical materialism is a method that analyzes contradictions in order to transform them. Žižek, however, treats the contradiction as an eternal wound–that is, as something to be endured rather than resolved through revolutionary praxis. Consequently, Mainländer’s fusion of his nihilism with Marxism results in a static, defeatist perspective that deprives communism of its historical dynamism.

Mainländer’s pessimism rejects the dialectical movement of history and reduces human agency to a tragic attempt to manage an inevitable decline. His brief flirtation with leftist ideas lacks a materialist basis; his leftism is an emotional, existential revolt rather than a rigorous analysis of the class struggle. In short, Mainländer is a symptom of bourgeois decadence–his despair reflects the crisis of a decadent aristocratic order unable to grasp the revolutionary potential of the proletariat.

Žižek’s attempt to bring Mainländer into Marxist discourse is therefore futile. Whereas Mainländer sees suffering as eternal, Marxism sees it as historically produced and therefore historically solvable. Revolution is not a melancholy task in a meaningless universe; it is a conscious struggle to transform social conditions and unleash the true potential of man. In contrast, Mainländer offers almost nothing but a surrender disguised as radicalism.

Plekhanov wrote in 1892, in response to the question of whether the materialist understanding of history could be combined with Kant’s teachings, the following words, which are still valid today, about thinkers and so-called opinion leaders who try to satisfy everyone’s taste buds by adding a little of this and a little of that (and ending up leaving everyone hungry) to the views of Marx and Lenin:

“Eclectic thinkers can, of course, fuse and combine everything in their minds. With eclectic thinking you can fuse not only Marx and Kant, but even Marx and medieval “realist” thinkers. But for coherent thinkers, the illegal union of Marx with Kant’s philosophy must be regarded as something monstrous in the full sense of the word.”2

Thus, by blending Marxism with the philosophical pessimism of Philipp Mainländer, Žižek dilutes the revolutionary optimism inherent in historical materialism. The claim that communism must accept the “inherent hopelessness of the human condition” is not only theoretically erroneous but also politically disarming. Marxism is not a philosophy of despair; it is a science, a guide to action, based on a dialectical understanding of history and the transformative potential of collective struggle. To counter Žižek’s pessimism, we can now take a brief look at the revolutionary optimism of Ernst Bloch, the Gramscian dialectics of reason and will, and the Marxist critique embodied in cultural works such as Disco Elysium.

This fatalistic reading of Žižek is at odds with Bloch’s “Principle of Hope”, which sees history as an open-ended process in which people collectively construct their future. For Bloch, hope is not pure optimism but a necessary dialectical force; it recognizes the horrors of the present but insists that they can be transformed.

Žižek’s Mainländer assumes that the sufferings of capitalism are somehow metaphysically immanent rather than historically specific. The idea that “non-being is preferable to being” is a reactionary rejection of the dialectical process–Marxist hope is about struggle, negation and becoming, whereas Mainländer proposes only resignation.

Žižek dismisses the “implicit humanist optimism of the standard left”–the belief that human beings have the potential for a happy life, solidarity and cooperation–as a naive fantasy. But this optimism is not naïve; it is dialectical. It is rooted in the material conditions of human existence and the historical possibilities they contain. Marxism does not deny the reality of suffering and despair under the capitalist mode of production, but it finds their source not in an immanent “human nature” but in the alienated social relations of capitalist production.

Bloch argues that hope is not a passive wish, but an active, dialectical force arising from the contradictions of material reality. The suffering and despair of capitalist alienation are not eternal realities, but historical conditions that can be overcome through revolutionary struggle. To abandon hope, Žižek argues, is to abandon the possibility of liberation.

As such, Bloch’s concept of hope is fundamentally incompatible with Žižek’s pessimism. Where Žižek sees life as a “valley of tears”, Bloch sees it as a potential site of transformation. For Bloch, the contradictions of capitalism–exploitation, alienation and dispossession–are not only sources of suffering, but also the seeds of liberation. Just like “the seeds” in the Greek poet Dinos Christianopoulos’ couplet “They Tried to Bury Us; They Didn’t Know We Were Seeds”. And as Bloch wrote, “Thinking means venturing beyond.” By contrast, Žižek’s pessimism traps us in a static, hopeless worldview and denies the possibility of revolutionary change.

Gramsci’s famous maxim “Pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will” offers a dialectical approach to struggle that Žižek’s article fails to grasp. “Pessimism of the intellect” means a sober analysis of the harsh realities of capitalist exploitation and oppression. “Optimism of the will” means maintaining the revolutionary conviction that these conditions can and must be changed. This dialectic is essential to Marxist praxis because it balances a clear-eyed grasp of the present with an unwavering commitment to the future.

In his essay, Žižek turns this dialectic into a one-sided (if a one-sided dialectic is even possible!) pessimism. By adopting Mainländer’s view that life is inherently hellish, Žižek abandons the optimism of the will, the belief that collective struggle can transform the world. This is not only theoretically erroneous, but also politically dangerous. As Gramsci understood, revolutionary movements are sustained by the belief that a better world is possible. By denying this possibility, Žižek’s pessimism disarms the working class and undermines the struggle for liberation.

Yes, we must recognize the brutality of capitalist reality (pessimism of the intellect), but the point is not to surrender to it as a cosmic inevitability. Instead, revolutionary action is sustained by the belief that this brutality is contingent and can be overthrown (optimism of the will). Žižek reduces the dialectic to a self-destructive void rather than an engine of transformation.

Disco Elysium is a role-playing video game released in 2019. The fact that its Polish-based authors and producers openly declared themselves Marxist-Leninists, and that when their game took the gaming world by storm and won dozens of awards, they boldly thanked Marx and Engels for their ideological education in front of hundreds of CEOs and shareholders of the gaming industry at the most famous of these award ceremonies is not the point here.3 The point is that this video game offers a powerful cultural critique of pessimism and a reaffirmation of revolutionary hope. The game’s protagonist, Harry Du Bois, is a man struggling with despair, alienation and the weight of his own failures. Yet through his interactions with the people of Revachol, the city in which the game is set, he begins to find meaning in collective struggle and solidarity. Although the game is set in a dystopian world, this world is also a potential site of revolution, reflecting the dialectical tension between despair and hope.

If we take Disco Elysium as a lens, the protagonist–Harry Du Bois–embodies Žižek’s pessimistic figure: He is a decadent man living in a decaying, even rotten world. But Disco Elysium is not a game that ends in despair; it presents a world where solidarity, struggle and the dream of a better tomorrow remain real possibilities even in the midst of destruction. Even the “Doomed Commercial Area” in the game is doomed only because of the dominance of capital, not because the universe itself is collapsing under the weight of nihilism.

Like a cursory player who refuses to engage with the deeper options the game offers the player, Žižek insists that because life is hard, revolution is merely a melancholic task rather than a project of liberation. This is tantamount to choosing the “Give Up” dialog every time among the dozens of options given to the player in the game and claiming that this is something profound.

Disco Elysium is a work that embodies the Marxist critique of pessimism that is missing from Žižek’s essay. It shows that despair is not an internal state, but a product of capitalist alienation, and that hope arises from the struggle against this alienation. The game’s famous line “There is still time to change everything” captures the revolutionary optimism that Žižek’s pessimism rejects. In Disco Elysium, as in Marxism, the struggle for liberation is not just a response to suffering, but an affirmation of the possibility of a better world.

Žižek’s claim that communism should be proposed as a “coping strategy” for unhappiness, like the descriptions of “happiness” in modern self-help books, lies in a profound misunderstanding of Marxism. Communism is not a coping mechanism; it is a revolutionary project that aims to eliminate the conditions that produce despair in the first place. The suffering and despair generated by capitalist alienation are not inherent to the human condition; they are products of a particular historical mode of production. To overcome them, we need not to “deal with” them, but to abolish the system that produces them.

Marxism teaches us that the contradictions of capitalism–exploitation, alienation and enslavement–are not eternal truths but historical conditions that can be overcome through revolutionary struggle. As Marx wrote, “Philosophers have only interpreted the world; the question is to change it.” By treating despair as an immanent condition, Žižek’s pessimism abandons this imperative and undermines the possibility of liberation.

Zizek’s melancholic reading of communism is ultimately a depoliticizing move–it diminishes the urgency of revolutionary struggle and reduces it to a kind of existential therapy. In contrast, a dialectical materialist approach, based on Bloch, Gramsci and the lived experience of the struggle, sees communism not as a balm for an immutable cosmic tragedy, but as the historical project of human emancipation.

The pessimistic mood and understanding of human nature prevalent in most Western left and Marxist thinkers has undoubtedly influenced Žižek’s sympathy for Mainländer’s pessimism. Žižek’s call to “recognize the inherent hopelessness of the human condition” is not an isolated step; it must be seen as part of a broader trend within Western Marxism, especially among thinkers associated with the Frankfurt School. Before Žižek, figures such as Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer and Herbert Marcuse succumbed to a pessimistic view of human nature and history that reflected the despair of the Mainländer. This tendency, while rooted in a critique of capitalism, often veers into a metaphysical despair that undermines the revolutionary optimism at the heart of Marxism. A pessimism that presents communism not as a solution to a historically specific contradiction but only as a response to eternal suffering is reactionary, not revolutionary. If suffering is ontologically inevitable, then why fight for anything at all? Žižek’s position, wittingly or unwittingly, slips into an apolitical capitulation at this point: If capitalism and communism are different ways of dealing with universal despair, then why bother with revolution at all?

In short, the pessimism of Žižek and his ilk represents a profound break with the revolutionary optimism that is essential to Marxism. While such thinkers’ critiques of capitalism and cultural observations are valuable, their metaphysical despair undermines the possibility of liberation. Marxism is not a philosophy of despair; it is a science based on a dialectical understanding of history and the transformative potential of collective struggle. “Thinking  means venturing beyond.” So let us go beyond the pessimism of Žižek and his ilk, never to look back, and internalize the revolutionary optimism that has guided and will continue to guide every liberation struggle. Or, in the language of Disco Elysium, let’s get rid of our obsession with reading bad news on social media for long hours (doomscrolling) and try to grow the working class movement.

https://mronline.org/2025/03/14/against-zizeks-pessimism-hope-will-and-the-dialectics-of-liberation/

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YOURDEMOCRACY.NET RECORDS HISTORY AS IT SHOULD BE — NOT AS THE WESTERN MEDIA WRONGLY REPORTS IT.

         Gus Leonisky

         POLITICAL CARTOONIST SINCE 1951.