The latest episode of Beyond Gender, hosted by Stella O’Malley and featuring Emmet Connor, author of The Red Pandemic, raises a worthwhile question but arrives at an unconvincing answer. The worthwhile question is how apparently separate cultural changes have emerged across Western societies at roughly the same historical moment. The unconvincing answer is that they can principally be explained as manifestations of an organised, international Marxist project.
Connor’s argument is expansive. He connects gender politics, feminism, immigration, environmentalism, anti-racism, non-governmental organisations, universities, the European Union, the United Nations and other international institutions through what he regards as a continuing Marxist revolutionary tradition. Early in the discussion, he describes globalism as essentially a transformed form of international communism and argues that nationalism provides its necessary antithesis. Later, he describes contemporary gender politics as evidence of a coordinated international agenda operating particularly through education and institutional culture.
There are genuine historical questions within this argument. Marxism has influenced political movements, academic thought and cultural criticism. Communist states engaged in international political organisation and ideological competition. The Frankfurt School included Marxist thinkers, while Fabian socialism explicitly sought gradual rather than revolutionary political transformation. None of that is especially mysterious.
The difficulty begins when intellectual influence, institutional organisation, cultural diffusion and historical causation are collapsed into a single explanatory system.
The Missing Dialectic
Connor presents Marxist influence largely as though it were the active ideological force transforming a relatively passive Western society. Yet, the history of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries contains at least one enormous countervailing force: liberal capitalism.
Capitalism and liberalism did not simply sit waiting while Marxists organised themselves internationally. They developed intellectual movements, policy networks, foundations, universities, multinational corporations, think tanks, lobbying organisations and international institutions of their own.
Friedrich Hayek’s Mont Pelerin Society, established in 1947, explicitly brought together economists, philosophers and other intellectuals concerned with defending and developing economic and political liberalism. Its membership became international. Today, the Atlas Network describes itself as connecting nearly five hundred organisations around the world committed to individual freedom and free enterprise.
None of this demonstrates a capitalist conspiracy. That is precisely the point.
Ideas organise themselves socially. People establish institutions around them. Money crosses borders. Intellectuals correspond internationally. Governments negotiate treaties. Campaigners form alliances. Businesses lobby for favourable conditions. Universities reproduce schools of thought. Political parties borrow ideas from neighbouring countries. Think tanks deliberately attempt to influence public policy.
These activities occur across ideological traditions.
If the existence of internationally connected organisations promoting socialist ideas constitutes evidence of an international socialist conspiracy, logically the same standard would require internationally connected organisations promoting market liberalism to constitute evidence of a liberal-capitalist conspiracy. A better explanation is more ordinary. Modern political societies generate networks of institutions competing to define reality, distribute resources and influence policy.
This missing counterforce matters because Marx himself developed his thought through a dialectical intellectual tradition. He was profoundly influenced by Hegel, although the frequently repeated claim that Marx’s class theory derives specifically and straightforwardly from Hegel’s famous master-servant, or master-slave, dialectic is disputed by scholars. The broader Hegelian inheritance is beyond serious doubt.
Nevertheless, the dialectical insight is useful here. Historical change occurs through tensions, contradictions, reactions and counter-reactions. It is rarely adequately understood by identifying one side of a conflict as the hidden author of the whole process.
Globalisation Without A Globalist
The same problem arises with Connor’s use of “globalism”.
Globalisation is not simply an ideology. It is also a material condition produced by technological and economic change.
Containerisation, aviation, telecommunications, satellite broadcasting, inexpensive computing, digital networks and increasingly sophisticated logistics have radically reduced the practical significance of geographical distance. Digital technologies continue to lower the cost of international trade and make economic exchanges possible that previously could not have occurred at comparable scale or speed. OECD research, for example, describes digitalisation as substantially reducing the costs of participating in international trade and altering both what is traded and how trade takes place.
Global manufacturing developed alongside these technological changes. Corporations discovered that design, finance, manufacturing, assembly, distribution and customer services could be separated geographically. States negotiated rules intended to facilitate those exchanges. The World Trade Organisation openly describes itself as an international system concerned with establishing rules for trade between nations. Its agreements are negotiated by governments and ratified through political processes, rather than imposed by an invisible ideological directorate [obviously this is contested on both the Left and Right of the political spectrum, and is an example of the Horseshoe Theory].
One can reasonably oppose aspects of this system. One can argue that economic globalisation has weakened democratic accountability, damaged local production, transferred power to multinational corporations or encouraged governments to prioritise mobile capital over settled communities. These criticisms, moreover, actually become stronger when they are separated from conspiracy thinking.
The People Globalisation Left Behind
One major omission in Connor’s account is the reaction of communities that have borne the costs of global economic restructuring.Western resistance to globalisation has not arisen only because populations suddenly discovered Marxism, nationalism or some concealed political programme. It has also emerged from the lived experience of deindustrialisation.
Research into the so-called “China shock” found substantial and persistent effects from increased import competition in manufacturing regions. Local economies exposed to these changes experienced falling manufacturing employment, depressed labour-force participation and long-lasting adjustment difficulties. Later research found that some adverse regional effects persisted years after the original trade shock.
This matters psychologically as much as economically.
A factory is not merely a mechanism for producing goods. It can organise family expectations, social status, occupational identity, intergenerational continuity, masculine and feminine roles, neighbourhood relationships and the symbolic identity of a place. When industries disappear, something more complicated than employment disappears with them.
The political reaction to globalisation therefore contains a psychological dimension that economic statistics alone cannot capture. People experience the disappearance of familiar structures through which identity and belonging were previously mediated. This is where Stella O’Malley comes closest to a more convincing interpretation of what the episode is attempting to describe.
O’Malley’s Cultural Explanation
At one revealing point, O’Malley suggests that contemporary elites may not be consciously coordinating anything at all. They may instead be shaped by prevailing cultural assumptions, fashionable ideas and an increasingly expansive understanding of tolerance. She describes her interpretation as psychological rather than primarily political.
Connor partly accepts the observation. He says the ideology has “taken on a mind of its own” and that ordinary people can reproduce its assumptions without consciously identifying themselves as Marxists. He simultaneously retains the proposition that organised international groups are deliberately pushing the process.
That moment exposes the fundamental weakness in his argument.
If a cultural pattern can reproduce itself without conscious coordination, then conspiracy is no longer necessary to explain its reproduction.
Culture already possesses mechanisms through which ideas propagate. Prestige imitation, professional incentives, education, media framing, social conformity, technological networks, peer-group identification and institutional path dependency can produce striking similarities between societies without requiring a central organising committee.
A Jungian interpretation would take this possibility considerably further.
Jung And The Danger Of The “Ism”
Carl Jung was deeply suspicious of political and intellectual “isms”. His objection was not confined to communism. His writings discuss collectivism, nationalism, socialism, liberalism, materialism and other ideological systems because the psychological danger lies in identification with an abstract collective idea rather than exclusively in the content of one particular doctrine. Jung repeatedly placed the development of individual consciousness against the psychological power of mass identification.
From this perspective, Connor correctly senses a genuine psychological phenomenon, but attributes it too exclusively to Marxism.
Jung noted that human beings can become possessed by ideas, both individually and collectively.
An ideology can provide a total explanatory framework. It can divide the world between perpetrators and victims, purity and corruption, insiders and outsiders. Events that contradict the system can be reinterpreted as further proof of the system. Opponents cease to be mistaken and become manifestations of the underlying pathology the ideology claims to reveal.
But this capacity belongs to the psyche before it belongs to Marxism, liberalism, nationalism, capitalism, environmentalism or any other political doctrine.
Jung’s concept of the collective unconscious offers a very different way of thinking about apparently synchronised social movements. Archetypal patterns can become activated across populations when historical circumstances constellate them.
Jung’s controversial 1936 essay Wotan, for example, attempted to understand National Socialism partly as the eruption of an autonomous collective psychological factor rather than simply as the successful dissemination of a political manifesto. Subsequent scholarship has examined precisely this aspect of Jung’s political psychology:
Jung’s attempt to understand societies as capable of being seized by archetypal forces operating beneath consciously articulated political programmes.
This does not mean mysterious psychic forces replace economics, institutions or political responsibility. Jung’s approach is useful because it adds another layer of causation.
Ideologies provide names, concepts and political programmes for psychic energies that may have deeper origins.
Conspiracy As Psychological Symptom
This distinction becomes particularly important when the discussion turns towards concealed coordination.
Connor tells listeners that international communism is moving the world towards a new political order “under our noses” and that most people have failed to recognise what is happening. Later he describes society as having been penetrated by an ideological “pandemic” that has become part of the cultural furniture while remaining largely invisible to the population.
This produces an epistemic structure that begins to resemble cultic or conspiratorial thinking.
The initiate sees a pattern invisible to ordinary people. Apparent disagreement demonstrates ignorance. Evidence against the theory becomes evidence of how successfully the hidden system disguises itself. Diverse institutions are interpreted as parts of the same apparatus. Increasing amounts of social reality can consequently be assimilated into a single explanation.
The psychological temptation is substantial because the theory transforms bewildering complexity into narrative order.
Jung might ask a different question: what psychic need is being served by imagining history this way?
Globalisation is profoundly disorientating. Familiar boundaries weaken. Technologies transform childhood, sexuality, work and communication. Traditional institutions lose authority. Economic production moves across continents. Communities become more heterogeneous. Media expose individuals continuously to competing ways of life. Established categories of identity become objects of conscious negotiation.
Under those conditions, the fantasy that someone must be controlling events can itself become psychologically meaningful.
The conspiracy restores intentionality to history.
Someone knows what is happening. Someone has a plan. Someone can therefore be identified and opposed.
The alternative is considerably harder to tolerate: modern societies may have created technological, economic and cultural systems that no individual or organisation fully controls.
The Gender Question Within A Larger Transformation
This provides a different context in which to consider the gender conflicts at the centre of Beyond Gender.
Gender politics did not arise in a historical vacuum. Its emergence coincided with profound changes in family structure, reproductive technology, women’s economic participation, sexual norms, medicine, consumer culture, individualism, digital communication and the relationship between the body and identity.
None of these developments requires us to accept every contemporary proposition about gender. Nor does questioning particular clinical practices, educational policies or theories of sex require a theory of communist coordination.
A Jungian approach would instead ask what these conflicts reveal about the contemporary psyche.
A Jungian critique might ask:
- What happens when traditional symbolic structures governing masculine and feminine identity cease to command widespread confidence?
- What happens when technologically mediated culture encourages the self to be understood as something constructed, curated and continually revised?
- What happens when adolescence occurs within digital environments where identity can be experimented with publicly and collectively?
- What happens when societies become simultaneously more individualistic and more dependent upon collective validation?
Those are psychological questions before they are ideological ones.
Beyond Counter-Ideology
Connor ultimately proposes nationalism as the principal antithesis to globalism. From a Jungian perspective, however, replacing one totalising “ism” with its opposite risks repeating the psychological structure of the original problem.
Enantiodromia, Jung’s recurring concern with psychological movement into an opposite when one side of a polarity becomes excessive, is relevant here. A culture that becomes excessively abstract, internationalised and detached from local belonging may indeed generate a compensatory desire for place, nation, continuity and inherited identity. But compensation is not necessarily integration.
The opposite can become another possession.
The task is therefore not to defeat one ideological totality by constructing another.
Jungian individuation depends upon sustaining tensions that ideology tries to abolish. Individual and collective. Universal and local. Masculine and feminine. Tradition and change. Freedom and obligation. Material reality and symbolic meaning.
A psychologically mature culture has to learn how to hold those tensions without immediately dividing the world into revolutionaries and counter-revolutionaries.
A Collective Therapeutic Task
Jung did not formulate a contemporary political programme for resolving gender disputes, and it would be misleading to pretend otherwise. But his psychology suggests another orientation.
The collective problem ultimately has to be worked through in individuals.
Jung’s therapeutic model attempts to bring unconscious contents into consciousness and then integrate, rather than merely repress them. His account of individuation similarly emphasises the difficult reconciliation of psychic opposites, rather than victory by one side over another. Summaries of his Collected Works describe therapeutic development in precisely these terms: unconscious material becomes conscious and must then be assimilated into a more differentiated personality.
Applied culturally, this suggests the need for something resembling a collective creative therapeutic process.
We need spaces in which fears about identity, sex, technological change, migration, economic insecurity, belonging and social fragmentation can be expressed without immediately being absorbed into predetermined ideological narratives.
We need art, conversation, community, education and media capable of helping societies imagine what they are becoming.
We also need to understand that resistance to rapid cultural transformation is not necessarily evidence of backwardness, while enthusiasm for change is not necessarily evidence of conspiracy.
Both can represent psychic responses to historical conditions that remain only partly conscious.
The Issue Behind The Issue
There is therefore something important in the episode’s recurring suggestion that “the issue is not the issue”. Connor interprets the wider issue as global Marxist revolution. A Jungian interpretation would locate it somewhere deeper.
The issue behind the issue is the difficulty human beings experience when symbolic, economic and technological worlds change faster than the psyche can comfortably assimilate them.
Gender becomes one location where that disturbance is expressed. Nationalism becomes another. Environmental anxiety, identity politics, populism, nostalgia and utopian technological thinking may represent other responses to the same transformation.
The danger is to interpret these phenomena only through the ideologies that temporarily carry them.
Jung’s warning about the “isms” points towards a more demanding task. We have to understand the psychic forces that make ideological possession possible in the first place.
The answer to ideological possession is therefore unlikely to be an equal and opposite ideology. It is greater consciousness.
That means recovering the capacity to distinguish political disagreement from psychological projection, institutional influence from conspiracy, historical patterns from secret coordination, and genuine social grievances from the totalising narratives constructed around them.
The transformations associated with gender, globalisation and identity will not finally be resolved by discovering which hidden faction has been controlling history. They will be resolved, if they are resolved at all, through societies becoming more capable of understanding the individual and collective psyche responding to a world transformed by technology, commerce, culture and collapsing boundaries.
That process will inevitably be political. But it must also be psychological, cultural and creative. Otherwise, we simply exchange one “ism” for another.
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