This one is going to be a bit longer than usual, so take your time with this one and its about giving a shit. Care. Caring. Not as a result of politics, theory but the inherent kind. I have always given a shit, and was more than once told that I care just a little too much and growing up in the 90s, when nihilism was all the rage this wasn’t just rebuked but often landed me in situations that, for what it is worth ( everything ), can explain my rather unshapely nose. The below also isn’t about arriving at this understanding because of political theory, on the contrary, my current alignment with my politics just gave “care” a much denser, more intricate home.
Black Lodges || Among the greatest ideological triumphs of capitalism has been neither the invention of consumerism nor the universalisation of wage labour, but the gradual production of a population increasingly convinced that history has exhausted itself, that politics has become little more than the management of inevitabilities, and that every attempt to imagine a fundamentally different social order belongs either to the dangerous fantasies of the past or the harmless idealism of the young. The defining pathology of the twenty-first century is therefore not merely inequality, precarity or ecological collapse, catastrophic though each undoubtedly is, but the remarkable normalisation of a form of political nihilism that transforms these crises from intolerable contradictions demanding collective intervention into permanent features of reality before which the individual is expected to adapt, optimise and eventually surrender. This surrender rarely announces itself explicitly. It appears instead as maturity, realism, pragmatism or emotional self-protection, cultivating a disposition in which disbelief in the possibility of emancipation is mistaken for intellectual sophistication, while those who continue to insist upon the necessity of radical transformation are dismissed as hopeless romantics incapable of accepting the world as it is.
Yet Marxism has never been concerned with accepting the world as it is. Its purpose has always been to explain how the world came to be organised in its present form and, more importantly, to demonstrate that every social arrangement bearing the appearance of permanence is in reality the contingent product of historical struggle. The capitalist mode of production, no less than feudalism before it or slavery before that, possesses neither metaphysical necessity nor moral legitimacy; it exists because specific material relations have been constructed, defended and reproduced through institutions of law, property, coercion and ideology, all of which remain vulnerable to transformation through collective political action. Consequently, the greatest danger confronting any revolutionary movement is not repression alone, formidable though repression undoubtedly remains, but the successful internalisation of the ruling class’s preferred conception of reality, according to which history has reached its terminus and every conceivable future already belongs to capital.
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It is here that the apparently modest assertion that it is important, worthwhile and good to care assumes extraordinary political significance, for beneath its ethical simplicity lies a profoundly material proposition concerning the conditions under which revolutionary consciousness becomes possible. Caring is not merely an emotion, nor an individual moral virtue detached from social existence, but a historically situated human capacity that emerges within relations of reciprocity, solidarity and collective responsibility. Like every other human capacity, it develops under definite material conditions and consequently can be weakened, redirected or systematically undermined by social structures whose continued existence depends precisely upon its erosion. If capitalism organises production, it necessarily organises subjectivity, because no economic system reproduces itself solely through factories, markets and financial institutions. Every mode of production simultaneously produces the kinds of people required for its own continuation, cultivating habits, expectations and emotional dispositions compatible with its underlying logic. Capitalism therefore requires not simply workers who sell their labour but subjects who increasingly interpret every dimension of existence through the language of competition, calculation and individual survival.
This insight, developed most comprehensively by Gramsci through his theory of cultural hegemony, remains indispensable for understanding the peculiar character of contemporary nihilism. Gramsci recognised that ruling classes do not govern primarily through force, since coercion alone cannot secure stable domination across generations. Rather, they cultivate a common sense through which their interests gradually come to appear indistinguishable from reality itself, establishing forms of cultural leadership that render existing social relations not merely acceptable but almost unimaginable in any alternative configuration. Hegemony therefore does not consist simply in persuading subordinate classes that capitalism is desirable; it consists in narrowing the horizon of conceivable possibility until capitalism becomes indistinguishable from the very structure of existence. When this process reaches maturity, resistance no longer appears impossible because it has been defeated but because it has become unintelligible.
The “contemporary” celebration of cynicism should therefore be understood not as a spontaneous cultural development but as one of hegemony’s most sophisticated achievements. Previous generations of bourgeois ideology promised progress, prosperity and universal freedom through the expansion of capitalist markets, allowing exploitation to conceal itself beneath narratives of national development and civilisational advancement. Such optimism has become increasingly difficult to sustain amid permanent war, collapsing public institutions, accelerating ecological catastrophe and the widespread experience of economic insecurity, yet the disappearance of optimism has not produced revolutionary consciousness. Instead, ideology has simply changed its register. Rather than insisting that capitalism is just, it now encourages the conviction that justice itself is politically irrelevant. The result is an extraordinarily effective political paralysis, because the individual who has ceased believing in the possibility of meaningful change no longer requires ideological persuasion. They govern themselves through resignation.
This transformation was described with remarkable precision by Mark Fisher, whose analysis of capitalist realism identified not merely an economic system but an entire cultural atmosphere in which capitalism presents itself as the only viable framework within which social life can be organised. Fisher’s frequently quoted observation that it has become easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism has sometimes been reduced to a clever aphorism, yet its significance lies in its diagnosis of the imagination itself as a terrain of class struggle. The colonisation of imagination represents one of capitalism’s greatest historical accomplishments because revolutionary politics necessarily begins before the seizure of state power, before mass organisation and even before collective mobilisation; it begins with the ability to conceive that existing relations are neither eternal nor inevitable. A society incapable of imagining alternatives has already surrendered much of its political agency regardless of the objective severity of its crises.
The contradiction is not that capitalism fails despite ideological support but that it continues despite widespread recognition of its failures, because recognition alone does not produce political consciousness. Between suffering and resistance lies an indispensable mediating process through which isolated experience becomes collective understanding.
It is precisely this process that Paulo Freire described as conscientização, or critical consciousness, rejecting educational models that treated oppressed people as passive recipients of information rather than active participants in the production of knowledge. Freire understood that domination depends not merely upon material exploitation but upon the fragmentation of experience, preventing individuals from recognising their private suffering as the social expression of historical structures. Education worthy of the name therefore does not consist in transmitting correct opinions but in enabling people collectively to decipher the conditions producing their own existence. Critical consciousness emerges when isolated biography becomes connected to political economy, when unemployment ceases to appear as personal failure and instead becomes intelligible as the predictable consequence of capitalist accumulation, when anxiety is recognised not as individual pathology but as the emotional register of precarious social relations, and when loneliness reveals itself not as accidental misfortune but as the logical outcome of an economic system that systematically privileges competition over solidarity.
To care within such conditions is already to begin this process of political clarification, because genuine care inevitably exceeds the boundaries imposed by bourgeois individualism. One cannot care seriously about another person’s inability to pay rent without confronting property relations. One cannot care about deteriorating mental health while ignoring labour conditions, housing insecurity, commodified social life and the systematic destruction of communal institutions. One cannot care about refugee children drowning in the Mediterranean without confronting imperialism, border regimes and global inequality. Every authentic act of care eventually discovers structure because human suffering is overwhelmingly organised structurally. Capitalism therefore encourages forms of compassion carefully separated from political analysis, reducing care to charity, ethical consumption or therapeutic self-expression while ensuring that the institutional mechanisms continuously reproducing suffering remain fundamentally untouched.
The consequence is an extraordinary inversion whereby compassion becomes privatised precisely as exploitation becomes increasingly social. Individuals are encouraged to donate rather than organise, to recycle rather than confront capital, to purchase ethically certified commodities rather than challenge the commodity form itself, to cultivate personal resilience rather than collective power. The language of responsibility survives only after responsibility has been relocated entirely onto isolated individuals, while the immense institutional machinery responsible for organising exploitation disappears behind the apparently neutral operations of markets whose outcomes are represented as unfortunate but unavoidable. The citizen gradually becomes the consumer, the neighbour becomes the competitor, and society itself dissolves into millions of entrepreneurial selves whose primary political activity consists of managing personal risk.
Here Lukács’s analysis of reification acquires renewed urgency, for reification describes precisely the process through which historically produced social relations assume the appearance of objective, natural and immutable things existing independently of human activity. Under capitalism, relations between people increasingly appear as relations between commodities, prices, contracts and markets, while the human beings who collectively reproduce these abstractions disappear from view. Labour becomes a cost. Housing becomes an asset class. Education becomes investment. Healthcare becomes a market opportunity. Even friendship begins to resemble networking, while love itself increasingly submits to algorithmic optimisation and commercial mediation. Human capacities are gradually translated into measurable forms of exchange until value itself becomes almost indistinguishable from price.
Reification therefore does not simply distort economic understanding; it transforms consciousness itself. When every aspect of existence appears as an object rather than a relationship, the capacity to care necessarily deteriorates because care presupposes recognition of shared humanity beyond exchange. The commodified subject learns instead to evaluate, compare, optimise and accumulate, gradually approaching both themselves and others as portfolios requiring continuous improvement. Under such conditions nihilism becomes almost inevitable, because the world increasingly appears populated not by fellow human beings engaged in common history but by isolated economic units navigating an indifferent marketplace governed by forces beyond anyone’s control.
The reality of contemporary capitalism lies precisely here, for it simultaneously generates unprecedented opportunities for human cooperation while systematically destroying the emotional and intellectual capacities required to recognise those opportunities. Never have societies possessed such extraordinary productive abundance, technological sophistication and scientific knowledge, yet never has the imagination appeared so impoverished in its capacity to conceive collective futures worthy of these achievements. The problem, therefore, is not simply that capitalism exploits labour or concentrates wealth, but that it colonises the very faculties through which emancipation first becomes thinkable, encouraging people to mistake resignation for wisdom and indifference for strength. It is against this colonisation of consciousness that the revolutionary defence of care must begin, not as sentimental consolation nor as moral exhortation, but as the recovery of a fundamentally political human capacity whose suppression has become one of capital’s most indispensable conditions of reproduction.
Against Nihilism: Why Caring is the First Revolutionary Act (Part II)
If nihilism represents one of the central ideological achievements of contemporary capitalism, then the recovery of care must begin with the recovery of hope, not hope understood as passive optimism or the comforting belief that history will inevitably move towards justice, but hope as a disciplined recognition that the future remains open because human beings remain capable of collective action. This distinction is essential because one of the most damaging misunderstandings of revolutionary politics has been the assumption that hope is simply a matter of emotional disposition, a psychological preference for positivity over negativity. Revolutionary hope is something entirely different. It is not the refusal to see suffering, contradiction or defeat; it is the refusal to accept that suffering, contradiction and defeat represent the final limits of human possibility.
Few Marxist thinkers developed this understanding more profoundly than Ernst Bloch, whose philosophy of hope began from the recognition that human beings are not merely creatures trapped within the present but beings oriented towards possibilities that do not yet exist. For Bloch, the future is not an empty space waiting passively to arrive but a dimension of social reality already present in human desires, struggles and anticipations. The longing for justice, dignity and freedom is not an illusion imposed upon reality; it is evidence of unrealised possibilities contained within reality itself. Hope therefore does not mean believing that liberation will occur regardless of historical conditions. It means recognising that history contains potentialities that can either be realised through conscious collective action or suppressed through resignation.
Bloch understood that domination depends not only upon controlling material resources but upon controlling expectations of the future. A population that cannot imagine a different world will struggle to organise against the existing one. The ruling order therefore has a profound interest in transforming hope into either naïve fantasy or consumer desire, separating people’s longing for a better life from any collective project capable of achieving it. Capitalism is perfectly capable of selling dreams, provided those dreams remain individualised and commodified. The aspiration for freedom becomes the purchase of lifestyle products. The desire for recognition becomes the pursuit of personal branding. The longing for community becomes a subscription service or online identity. Human beings are permitted to dream endlessly, provided their dreams never become political.
This also then explains one of the central contradictions of neoliberal society: it celebrates limitless individual aspiration while denying collective possibility. The self becomes infinitely improvable while the world becomes permanently fixed. Such a contradiction is not accidental; it reflects the ideological needs of capital. A population convinced that it can endlessly reinvent itself but cannot collectively transform its conditions remains trapped within the boundaries of the existing order.
Against this, Marxism insists that the individual and society cannot be separated in this way. Human beings are social beings because their very existence depends upon relations of cooperation, communication and mutual dependence. The fantasy of the isolated individual competing freely within the marketplace is not an expression of human nature but a historical construction corresponding to capitalist relations of production. To recover the capacity to care is therefore to recover an understanding of ourselves as fundamentally interconnected beings whose freedom cannot be achieved through private accumulation alone. The freedom of one person cannot be separated indefinitely from the conditions governing everyone else.
For this reason, revolutionary politics has always required more than anger towards injustice. Anger can identify what is intolerable, but it cannot by itself create the relationships necessary to overcome it. A revolutionary movement requires trust, patience, discipline and the willingness to recognise one’s own liberation as inseparable from the liberation of others. In other words, it requires care. Not care as charity, not care as personal kindness detached from political struggle, but care as a collective recognition that human beings possess value beyond their economic function.
Luxemburg’s conception of socialism was never based upon the passive administration of society by a political elite acting on behalf of the masses, for example. For Luxemburg, socialism required the active participation, creativity and democratic involvement of ordinary people because emancipation could not be delivered to humanity from above; it had to be created through the conscious activity of humanity itself. The working class could not simply inherit freedom. It had to develop the social capacities necessary to exercise it.
This is why Luxemburg’s insistence on democracy was not a liberal addition to Marxism but a deeply revolutionary principle. A society organised around collective liberation requires people capable of collective decision-making, mutual responsibility and active participation. The destruction of these capacities through alienation and nihilism therefore represents a direct obstacle to socialism itself. A population trained only to consume, compete and withdraw cannot suddenly construct a radically democratic society without first recovering the practices of solidarity that capitalism continuously undermines.
The revolutionary significance of care therefore becomes clearer. Care is not an alternative to class struggle; it is the condition that makes class struggle possible. Workers do not organise because they have calculated that solidarity provides the maximum individual benefit. They organise because they begin to recognise one another as people whose lives are bound together by common conditions and shared interests. Every successful movement for liberation has depended upon this transformation, where private suffering becomes collective understanding and individual frustration becomes organised power.
Yet this does not mean that revolutionary politics should ignore despair or replace it with artificial optimism. A politics that refuses to acknowledge suffering becomes empty propaganda. The point is not to pretend that the world is improving automatically, nor to deny the immense power of the forces defending the present order. The point is to recognise that despair itself can become a form of submission when it convinces people that resistance is meaningless. The revolutionary task is therefore not to eliminate pessimism but to prevent pessimism from becoming surrender.
The famous formulation often associated with revolutionary realism, that one must be as radical as reality itself, contains precisely this demand. To confront reality honestly means recognising both the severity of capitalist crises and the historical fact that societies have repeatedly transformed themselves under conditions that once appeared impossible. Reality does not prove that change cannot happen. Reality demonstrates that change has always emerged through struggle.
The question facing the present therefore is not whether there are reasons for despair. There are many. The question is whether despair will become the final political conclusion drawn from those realities or whether people will rediscover the capacity to transform recognition of suffering into collective action. Capitalism has spent decades teaching individuals to survive alone. Liberation begins when people remember that survival has never been a sufficient definition of being human.
To care is to reject the lie that nothing matters. It is to insist that another person’s suffering is not external to one’s own existence, that history is not something that happens above us but something produced through our collective activity, and that the future remains open because human beings remain capable of solidarity. Against the nihilistic claim that nothing is worth fighting for, revolutionary politics responds with a far more demanding proposition: that precisely because the world is damaged, because human potential is being wasted, and because suffering has been organised rather than naturally occurring, we have a responsibility to care enough to change it.
The reality of care as a revolutionary principle ultimately returns us to the central insight of Marx himself: that human beings are not merely economic actors responding to external forces but active historical subjects whose collective practices continually reproduce and transform the conditions of their existence. .
Care represents the lived recognition of precisely what capitalism attempts to obscure: that human beings are fundamentally interdependent. The capitalist subject is encouraged to imagine themselves as self-sufficient, as the sole author of their success or failure, yet every aspect of individual existence depends upon collective labour, inherited knowledge, social infrastructure and the contributions of countless others. The food we eat, the homes we inhabit, the technologies we use, the languages through which we think and the institutions through which we survive are all the products of social cooperation. Capitalism does not create human interdependence; it conceals it.
The revolutionary act therefore begins with making visible what capital attempts to hide. To recognise that one’s life is inseparable from the labour and existence of others is already to undermine the ideological foundations of capitalist individualism.
The challenge for revolutionary politics is therefore not simply to provide more information. The world does not suffer from a lack of facts. The exploitation of workers, the concentration of wealth, the destruction of ecosystems and the consequences of imperial violence are all extensively documented. The problem is that knowledge exists within a social order designed to separate knowledge from action. People know, but they do not organise. They witness, but they do not intervene. They express outrage, but outrage rarely becomes durable collective power.
Care provides the bridge between awareness and action because care transforms abstract knowledge into personal and collective responsibility. To care about distant suffering is to reject the boundaries imposed by capitalist common sense, which insists that moral responsibility ends where personal interest ends. The refugee, the exploited worker, the victim of imperial violence and the person struggling under poverty are presented as separate from one another, but revolutionary politics begins by recognising the social relations connecting them. The same global system that produces wealth for some produces dispossession for others. The same mechanisms that generate profit also generate insecurity. The same structures that create abundance create deprivation.
This is why anti-capitalist politics has always been inseparable from internationalism. Capital operates globally because accumulation depends upon global relations of extraction, labour and domination. A revolutionary response cannot therefore be confined within narrow national boundaries or individual concerns. Care becomes political precisely because it expands the horizon of responsibility beyond immediate personal experience. It recognises that liberation cannot be achieved through private escape from collective conditions.
This is why the question of caring is inseparable from the question of power. Capitalism does not fear individual sadness, individual anger or individual despair because isolated emotions rarely threaten structures of domination. What capitalism fears is organised human connection. It fears workers who recognise their common interests, communities that defend one another, movements that transform moral outrage into political organisation and people who reject the idea that their lives are fundamentally separate from the lives of others.
Revolutionary politics begins with the simple but profoundly disruptive conviction that people matter, that suffering matters and that the organisation of society is a political choice rather than a natural condition. It begins when individuals recognise that their own freedom is inseparable from the freedom of others. It begins when people reject the idea that they are merely consumers navigating an inevitable system and rediscover themselves as historical actors capable of creating something different.
The struggle against capitalism is therefore not only a struggle over wages, ownership or political institutions, although all of these remain essential. It is also a struggle over the meaning of being human. Capitalism seeks to reduce human existence to economic function, to transform relationships into transactions and to convince people that isolation is freedom. Liberation requires the opposite movement: the recovery of collective humanity, the recognition that our lives are constituted through one another and that the future depends upon our ability to care enough to fight for it.
The idea that it is important, worthwhile and good to care is therefore not a retreat into morality in place of politics. It is a political declaration of the highest order. It rejects the capitalist attempt to define value through exchange and insists that some things cannot be measured by profit: dignity, solidarity, justice, community and human freedom. It rejects the nihilistic conclusion that because the world is damaged, nothing matters, and replaces it with the revolutionary understanding that because the world is damaged, everything that matters becomes more urgent.
The enemy of liberation is not merely ignorance, nor even oppression alone. It is the internal acceptance that nothing better can exist. Against this acceptance, Marxism offers not fantasy but historical analysis; not optimism but organised hope; not individual salvation but collective emancipation. The task before humanity is not to discover whether we can care in a world that discourages it. The task is to recognise that our ability to care has always been the source of every meaningful transformation in human history.
Capitalism survives by teaching people that they are alone. Liberation begins when they remember that they never were.
Give a Shit. Always, and deeply.
