By GABRIEL TELES*

The articulation between Marxism and psychoanalysis reveals that ideology acts “not as a cold discourse that deceives, but as a warm affection that shapes desires”, transforming obedience into responsibility and suffering into merit

“What needs to be explained is not why the hungry steal or why the exploited go on strike, but why the majority of the hungry do not steal and the majority of the exploited do not go on strike.”
(Wilhelm Reich).

There are questions that shed more light than a thousand theories. Wilhelm Reich’s does not seek to justify revolt, but to understand silence. He is not shocked by the raised fist, but by the bowed body. In this inversion of the gaze, Wilhelm Reich shifts the focus from external repression to internalized submission, from visible conflict to invisible ideology. It is at this point that his critique intersects with the Marxist tradition: one that is not content with describing misery, but demands that its psychological, social and historical foundations be revealed.

If the world is unjust, why does it continue to stand? Why does hunger not turn into looting? Why does exploitation not produce widespread rebellion? Why do so many tired bodies continue to wake up at five in the morning to sustain the wealth of so few?

These questions force us to consider that domination in capitalist society is not only a relationship of force—it is also a form of belief. Most of the exploited do not rebel because they have learned to call obedience a responsibility, suffering a merit, and failure a personal fault. Ideology acts not as a cold discourse that deceives, but as a warm affect that shapes desires, expectations, and fears. The social order is perpetuated less by coercion than by the daily fabrication of consent.

The fear of freedom and the search for bonds

This anguish in the face of freedom is precisely the central theme of Erich Fromm, in his seminal work The fear of freedom (1941). For Erich Fromm, modern emancipation broke the traditional bonds of the Middle Ages—the authority of the Church, the patriarchal family, and the inherited office—but it did not offer security in their place. The modern individual became free, yes, but also isolated, anxious, and powerless in the face of a world driven by forces beyond his control.

In the absence of solid community and emotional bonds, many prefer to flee from freedom. Hence the fascination with authoritarian figures, rigid hierarchical systems, and orders that promise security in exchange for submission. “Freedom is frightening because it demands responsibility and critical awareness; domination is calming because it dispenses with thought.”

Erich Fromm and Wilhelm Reich, both critical heirs of Freudian psychoanalysis, understand that political struggle is also a struggle for affections. The social structure shapes the desires and anxieties of subjects, and there is no possible revolution without also questioning the subjective formation of those dominated.

Marxism and psychoanalysis – critical convergences

This connection between Marxism and psychoanalysis, although complex and full of historical tensions, proves to be one of the most fruitful keys to understanding the subtle mechanisms of reproduction of power in contemporary capitalism. Unlike readings that treat domination only in terms of economic structure or repressive apparatus, this articulation allows us to understand how power infiltrates the bodies, emotions and psychic life of individuals.

Marxism, by diagnosing “objective” social forms—value, commodity, labor, property, the State—reveals the material architecture of relations of domination. Psychoanalysis, especially in its critical and political aspect, sheds light on the subjective processes involved in adherence to the dominant order: desire, repression, guilt, fear, enjoyment, and repression.

Wilhelm Reich was one of the first to realize that it is not enough to overthrow capitalism from the outside — it is also necessary to dismantle the fascism that lives within each individual. In Mass psychology of fascism, Wilhelm Reich shows how the masses do not adhere to domination out of ignorance, but because their desires have been shaped to desire the executioner himself.

Submission, far from being merely an imposition, is an affective structure. The authoritarian father figure, the fear of pleasure, repressive sexual morality — all of this makes up a device of psychic normalization that is articulated with the capitalist order, ensuring its perpetuation not only through coercion, but through domesticated desire.

Herbert Marcuse expanded this reflection by proposing, in Eros and Civilization, a lateral reading of Freudian psychoanalysis. For him, modern capitalism not only exploits the workforce, but also captures the libido, redirecting the erotic drive — the power of creation, pleasure and freedom — towards the imperatives of performance, efficiency and consumption. The result is an adapted, functional, “one-dimensional” subject, incapable of imagining another form of life.

Repression, which in Freud was necessary for the constitution of culture, becomes in Herbert Marcuse an instrument of historical domination: the capitalist reality principle overrides the pleasure principle, justifying the permanent sacrifice of desire in the name of productivity, morality and order.

This critical lineage, which also includes authors such as Erich Fromm, Michael Schneider, Franz Fanon, and Vladimir Safatle, shows that domination is not only sustained in the legal, economic, or political sphere, but also in the subjective sphere. Ideology, in this sense, is not an illusion that covers up the truth — it is the active production of subjects who consent to, desire, and enjoy their own servitude.

Psychoanalysis, when freed from its function of bourgeois normalization, becomes a radical instrument of social critique: it allows us to listen to the intimate contradictions of subjectivity under capital, to dismantle the devices that link enjoyment and obedience, and to imagine ways of life not colonized by the logic of value.

By recognizing that alienation is not only economic but also libidinal, this articulation between Marxism and psychoanalysis reveals what is most resistant in the machinery of capital: the desire that sustains order. As Slavoj Žižek said, ideology operates precisely where the subject believes he is acting freely; it is in this space of illusory “freedom” that domination becomes most effective. Therefore, radical critique must also be a critique of desire—not to condemn it, but to free it from its unconscious bonds and from the social forms that deform it.

Images of domination – cinema as a mirror of desire

Cinema, as an aesthetic and industrial form, has been a fertile ground for representing the tensions between freedom and submission. In They Live (They Live, 1988), by John Carpenter, this criticism is presented in an allegorical, direct and visually striking manner.

The film follows the story of a precarious worker — an archetypal figure of the “surplus” of late capitalism — who, upon finding a pair of special sunglasses, begins to see the hidden truth behind everyday appearances. Billboards, newspaper headlines, credit cards and urban facades reveal subliminal messages such as “obey”, “consume”, “reproduce”, “don’t question”, “watch TV”. The discovery not only reveals an alien elite infiltrated among humans, but also lays bare the ideological functioning of the social world itself.

The metaphor is simple, but its reach is profound. They Live transforms the fantastic into radical social criticism: aliens do not dominate the Earth through overt violence, but through the invisible control of perception, language and desire. The glasses device functions as a kind of “ideological awakening”, a mechanism that allows the protagonist to see beyond the surface — that is, beyond ideology as false consciousness.

But, as Slavoj Žižek reminds us, ideology is not simply a veil covering objective reality: it is social reality itself as it is lived. To paraphrase Slavoj Žižek in his reading of They Live, “it is only through ideology that we can 'see' reality” — that is, ideology is the structure that shapes what appears as natural, spontaneous, evident.

In Slavoj Žižek's reading, the glasses of They Live they do not reveal a hidden essence behind appearance, but rather expose the mechanism that sustains appearance itself as “reality.” The gesture of putting on glasses is analogous to the gesture of ideological criticism: it is not just about unmasking a lie, but about perceiving how the lie sustains the regime of truth itself. Messages such as “obey” or “consume” are not hidden in the conspiratorial sense — they are wide open, but naturalized. Ideology, therefore, operates less as censorship and more as an active production of subjectivities, affections, and conformed desires.

This perception is echoed in the work of Guy Debord, especially in The Society of the Spectacle (1967). For Guy Debord, capitalist society developed towards the replacement of direct experience by the mediation of images. “The spectacle is not a set of images, but a social relationship between people mediated by images”, states the author. In They Live, this mediation materializes in facades that hide imperatives of obedience, in money that displays the inscription “This is your God,” and in television as a device for collective hypnosis. The city, with its shop windows, advertisements, and skyscrapers, is not just an urban space — it is a spectacular stage on which alienation becomes a landscape.

Guy Debord proposes that life in late capitalism is lived as representation. Reality is therefore aestheticized, masked, atomized. Individuals do not simply consume commodities: they become commodities, sell their image, and spectacle themselves.

Em They Live, the horror is not just the discovery of the infiltrated aliens — it is the realization that domination has been internalized, that submission is experienced as freedom. The protagonist, upon “waking up,” finds no organized resistance, nor emancipated subjects, but a world of indifference, conformism and complicity. The fight against the system is not just against a dominant elite, but against the very structure of socially produced desire.

The scene in the film in which the protagonist tries to convince a friend to put on glasses—and is forced to engage in a long and violent physical struggle with him—is emblematic in this sense. It is an allegory of resistance to critical consciousness. The refusal to “see” is not just ignorance: it is a psychic defense, a need to keep intact the symbolic structure that organizes everyday life. Žižek interprets this scene as a bitter lesson: awakening to the truth is painful, violent, traumatic—and often meets with more resistance from the oppressed than from the oppressors. Seeing reality requires losing the illusions that give us comfort. In his words: “The task of ideological criticism is not to show people that they do not know what they are doing, but that they do know—and yet they continue to do it.”

John Carpenter's film, in this sense, is a pedagogy of suspicion, but also of impotence. There is no organized revolution, no collective strategy, no utopia. There is only an individual gesture of resistance, which culminates in a suicidal act: destroying the antenna that transmits the subliminal messages at the cost of one's own life.

The tragic hero of They Live does not defeat the system — it interrupts it momentarily, in a flash that reveals to everyone the true face of power. But what happens next, the film does not show. Perhaps because the challenge is not just to see, but to desire a different world — and this requires not only critical vision, but organization, political imagination and a break with the enjoyment of servitude.

the lesson of They Live, read in the light of Guy Debord and Slavoj Žižek, is blunt: ideology is not a veil to be torn away, but a mirror where we learn to recognize ourselves as subjects of capital. The spectacle does not only alienate us from reality, but from ourselves. And freedom, as Wilhelm Reich and Erich Fromm warned, is often more frightening than servitude. For it demands responsibility, conflict, and discomfort.

Thus, They Live remains one of the most powerful cinematic manifestos criticizing symbolic domination in contemporary capitalism — and an invitation, still relevant today, to see beyond the images.

We learn to obey — but we can also learn to walk away

Marxist criticism, reinforced by psychoanalysis, teaches us that domination is a total phenomenon—social, economic, symbolic, and emotional. It is not enough to organize the means of production; it is also necessary to reorganize the means of production of subjectivity. There is no lasting emancipation without simultaneously curing misery and fear. There is no radical politics without a desire that is also radical.

The true violence of bourgeois society lies precisely in having managed to naturalize suffering. In having made multitudes believe that their pain is their own fault. In having taught that fighting against exploitation is ugly, that complaining about domination is ingratitude, that the good lies in following rules — even when those rules crush us.

But history shows us that nonconformity is also a possible construction. That obedience can crack, that fear can dissolve in collective action, that criticism can open breaches in the social structure of exploitation. Revolt does not arise from nothing — it germinates in the subterranean consciousness, where one day someone dares to say: this is exploitation. And another responds: it is domination, yes.

Therefore, Wilhelm Reich’s question continues to echo as a call for lucidity: why don’t most hungry people steal? Why don’t most exploited people go on strike?

The answer, perhaps, lies less in human nature and more in the society that domesticated us. We are not born submissive, but we learn — from childhood — to desire that which limits us, to fear that which liberates us, to obey without question. Authoritarian families, disciplinary schools, punitive religions, alienating jobs, hypnotic media — all these devices shape docile, adjusted, resigned subjectivities.

Obedience, far from being an innate trait, is a social technology of domination, a silent pedagogy that teaches us to confuse conformity with security, repetition with stability, silence with virtue.

But if obedience is learned, disobedience can also be taught—and perhaps even more so: cultivated, practiced, lived as a form of existence. Criticism, laughter, refusal, doubt, imagination—all of these can be weapons. Teaching disobedience is not just inciting the gesture of refusal, but nurturing the thought that denaturalizes order, that denounces the spectacle, that reveals the absurdity of what presents itself as normal.

It is in this gesture that the space of freedom opens up: not the abstract freedom of the market or of the isolated individual, but the concrete freedom of a body that refuses to be a mechanism, of a mind that does not allow itself to be colonized, of a desire that does not submit.

To disobey is also to create: new ways of seeing, feeling, and living. It means breaking with the logic of repetition and opening gaps in everyday life where other possibilities of being and being in the world can flourish. And this requires courage — not the individual courage of the solitary hero, but the collective courage of those who, together, choose to deprogram the system.

Perhaps the true political task of our time is this: to rehabilitate disobedience as a virtue, as a method, as a horizon. For as long as there are bodies that rise up, eyes that see, voices that do not remain silent — there will also be worlds to come.

Wilhelm Reich formulated a decisive provocation: the real enigma is not the revolt of the oppressed, but its conformation. It is not the moment when the hungry steal, but the fact that the majority of the hungry remain inert.

Capitalism, for Wilhelm Reich, is not sustained solely by economic exploitation or external repression, but by an incessant work of emotional and psychic molding — an engineering of desire that teaches us to love prison, to fear freedom, and to enjoy obedience. Therefore, every profound social transformation requires more than political reforms or institutional changes: it requires the deactivation of the internal mechanisms that make us desire that which destroys us.

True subversion begins when desire ceases to reproduce the norm and begins to imagine the impossible. And it is at this point—when rebellion ceases to be an exception and begins to pulsate in everyday life—that revolution announces itself, not as a future event, but as a present gesture, radically human, irreducibly alive.

*Gabriel Teles he holds a PhD in sociology from USP. Author, among other books, of Marxist analysis of social movements (Redelp Editions).

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