Running head: VACILLATING TOWARDS

Vacillating Towards the Proletariat Zack Osheroff 11/19/11 Professor Belkin Martinez

VACILLATING TOWARDS Therapy is a bourgeois institution in a capitalist-imperialist society. Its primary aspects, as we have shown, are bourgeois. It promotes ruling-class ideology. Objectively and subjectively it serves the interests of the people running the country. (Kunnes, 1971, p. 164-5).

I can think of at least a couple of reasons why this excerpt was not included in the Simmons School of Social Work admissions material. This reading shook up my view of the profession and my education; I am not confident that I would have chosen therapy if had read it beforehand. Which is to say, Im glad Im only reading it now. In a capitalist society, all professions have a role in preserving the institutions in society that replicate the situations that favor the production of capital above all else. Otherwise, those professions would not exist, at least not in forms sanctioned by society in general. Social work is no exception. Additionally, it is this emphasis on production that leads to much, if not all, of the oppression and misery of our clients, which means that social workers are complicit in this oppression and misery. We may resist this by protesting we do some good, even if we must cooperate with a corrupt system. But to cooperate with this system is to offer doing the kind of good that puts Band-Aids on severe woundsif it helps at all. This is the same sort of good we have seen time and again from other anti-revolutionary institutions in society that attempt to avoid radical change by pushing tweaks that that are either temporary or oppressive in and of themselves. Doing right by our clients is to recognize the system as corrupt and oppressive, and to assist our clients in being the agents which bring the system down. We can see this is true when we look into the eyes of the truly oppressed when we tell them our profession; or, in my case, my professional ambition. I typically get one of two

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responsespeople either become out right disgusted or nervous, perhaps because they have personal experiences of child removal by DSS or struggling to get their own workers to do anything that was actually fundamentally useful, or they smile and encourage in a way the communicates, You are an idealist and I think thats great, I just dont want to be around when you realize where youre headed. I had always held onto a fantasy that I could set up a radical agency that would rely on State or corporate money as little as possible, and therefore allow me to practice a form of social work that was actually in the interests of clients. This, I believed, would be my ticket out of falling into the anti-revolutionary, non-profit trap. But alas: [Therapists should not focus] solely on alternativeswhich tend to be utopian and (bourgeois) counterculture oriented (p. 167). What I have been reflecting on since reading this piece is, What do I do now? Do I drop out of therapy and get a job in an assembly line, as the author suggests? And if I dont, and continue on my path toward being a professional in a world that needs revolutionaries, am I doing it purely for selfish reasons, as Kunnes suggests? I am still unresolved on these issues of personal motivation. But I do wonder, is there at all a place for therapists in revolutionary work? Paulo Freire described a radical path for another class of petty bourgeois professionals to take: educators (Martinez, 2004). Kunnes could make many of the same critiques of the teaching profession that he does of therapy. What could be more anti-revolutionary than preparing children for a life of factory workwalking in lines, respect for authority, etc.and what use is it to set up alternatives that are counterculture oriented and inaccessible to the most oppressed people in society? But Freire does see a role for educators in the revolution, despite their bourgeois elements. Kunnes does not see an equivalent role for therapists: We dont think its worthwhile

VACILLATING TOWARDS today to encourage the elitist development of a new brand of specialist, the radical therapist. We dont need another petty bourgeois elite to lead the revolution (Kunnes, 1971, p. 167). At most, therapist can try to be not as bad until they leave behind their class status and truly join with the Proletariat. And we can see why members of the petty bourgeois might believe their

place in the revolution is as leadership. We become intoxicated by our own class status. We often mistake our social power in a capitalist society as somehow useful to the working class, and so we are prone to comments like, well, I have to preserve my privilege and skills, because I can use it for the benefit of the working class. But to work to preserve ones own privilege is to work against the interests of the working class, because what the working class needs is the institutions of capitalism challenged and ultimately destroyed, not social workers securely embedded in the petty bourgeoisie, however skilled or sympathetic to workers they may be. Because we have certain freedoms granted by the capitalist class, we can forget that the ability to be the protagonists of an anti-capitalist revolution is solely the territory of those with the social power that comes from being in the working class at the point of production. We become deceived into considering our relative empowerment that exists only in the context of capitalist society as relative empowerment that exists absolutely, and this deception leads us to don the mantle of leadership. The solution to this problem is to reject the training that makes us believe we are special helpers of the working classallied, yes, but separateand instead to work to erase the privileges that separate us altogether. If we are willing to engage in this work, are there other conceivable roles for a social worker to play besides leader? Can we abandon the elitism that is implicitly integrated into many therapeutic paradigms, much the same way Freire asks educators to do regarding educational paradigms? Can social workers aspire to be helper-clients that collaborate with

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client-helpers in the same way that Freire envisions teacher-learners and learner-teachers? If this presents a revolutionary role for teachers, does it likewise present a revolutionary role for social workers? As Kunnes admits, our skills are needed, even if our social position in society is problematic: We see the main task of revolutionary therapists as preserving their skills but changing their life situations (p. 165). He asks therapists to resolve the contradictions between being a therapist and being a revolutionary. Here, as everywhere worthy of deep consideration, we are presented with a dialectic. On an individual scale we have the same dialectical conflict that appears in society as a whole: Bourgeoisie vs. Proletariat. Kunnes is aware of this; he notes the vacillation of the petty bourgeoisie from one side to the other, an inevitable consequence of this dialectic. The real work of this article is to present a way for therapists to vacillate towards the working class, and stay there, which is much the same work in which Freire engaged. But whereas Kunnes identifies mostly ways that therapists can challenge and undermine the agencies they work at as a way of strengthening their revolutionary aspect (p. 168-75), Freire elucidates a theoretical groundwork that can allow professionals to interact directly with oppressed peoples in a radical wayand this groundwork can be extended from education to social work (Martinez, 2004). This groundwork offers grounding for social workers to not only fight the oppressiveness of the institutions of social work by directly undermining these institutions when we come into contact with them, but to empower and raise the critical consciousness of our clients in non-oppressive waysthat is, by not posing as a petty bourgeois leadership. To struggle against our institutions while struggling with our clients may be the greatest expression of the revolutionary potential of therapy: a potential that Kunnes did not identify.

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Kunnes warns that the struggle between the proletarian and bourgeois aspects of a therapist ultimately leads the dedicated revolutionary out of the therapy profession entirely. And maybe hes right. A truly radical therapistone that represents a serious threat to the ruling classwill have troubling holding their jobs, and may find themselves in among the ranks of working class before long. But I think that there is more revolutionary work to do in the meantime: as long as we, as therapistswith guidance from Kunnes and an adaptive Freirean frameworkwork to erase the divisions between ourselves and the working class and never mistake our privilege as something worth preserving.

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References
Kunnes, R. (1971). The Radical Therapist, Ed. Agel, J. New York, Ballantine Books.
Martinez, D. B (2004). Therapy for liberation: The Paulo Freire methodology.