What Hasan Piker Gets Wrong About the American People and Our Current Era
Enlisting Žižek's Critique of Ideology to Help Comrade Hasan
There is a famous quote from the preface of Carter G. Woodson’s The Mis-Education of the Negro which states that “when you control a man’s thinking you do not have to worry about his actions.”[1] In a basic sense he is, of course, correct. Education, and the formal institutions of knowledge production, are certainly not neutral. The parameters of acceptable discourse aim to reproduce the dominant social arrangement. Power is always-already inscribed in what is taken to be “neutral” education.
To put it in the terms Althusser employs in his later writings, the schools, the sites of “education,” are a subset ideological form of a whole set of forms of bourgeois class domination.[2] In this sense, of course, there is a concern with what a man thinks, insofar as those thoughts are seen as emerging from a series of practices rooted in specific institutions which play a pivotal role in the reproduction of the dominant order.
But is not an inversion of the Woodsonian formula operative as well in our cynical age? Is it not the case that, at a basic level, “when you control a man’s actions you do not have to worry about what he thinks?” This is the lesson, in my view, of how ideology operates today.
There is an unprecedented degree of institutional distrust that is operative in American society. By all relevant measures (faith in media, faith in politicians, faith in political parties, faith in major institutions like big pharma, the military industrial complex, the educational system, etc.) the distrust of the American people signals a deep crisis of legitimacy. Anywhere from 75-90 percent of the public experiences lack of faith in these institutions and the reasons they provide for their actions, for why things are the way they are.
There is no Hegelian ethical life (Sittlichkeit) present, people do not feel that their projects in life, their values, their ideals, their aspirations, are aligned with the trajectory of their society.[3] They experience an unhomeliness (unheimlichkeit) which is situated in this crisis of legitimacy or ethical life, not in some ontological predicament.
And so, to get back to Woodson’s formula, today the ruling order has already largely lost control over how people think. No one actually accepts the dominant narratives for the actions taken. The justifications provided for why things are the way they are no longer seem to be considered as authoritative. A cynical distance from dominant narratives, therefore, is already inscribed in the thoughts of most individuals.
This is why the brilliance of Slavoj Žižek’s critique of ideology is even more relevant today than in 1989, when the Sublime Object of Ideology was published. Ideological illusions and distortions are sustained in a cynical age precisely through our actions, through the ways in which our practices – located always within specific institutions or apparatuses – are constituted through illusions, fantasies, and distortions which embody objectified beliefs. As Žižek put it, “what they ‘do not know’, what they misrecognize, is the fact that in their social reality itself, in their social activity… they are guided by the fetishistic illusion.”[4]
The problem today, therefore, is not one of ignorance, “false consciousness,” or miseducation. It is not simply the case that people are “too stupid and ignorant.” Instead, what is absent is the counterhegemonic institutions which could be the locus for alternative, sovereign practices, rituals, and habits which challenge, and not simply reproduce, the dominant order.
This is why, paradoxically, a “Marxist” streamer like Hasan Piker is operating – in a basic sense of the word – in a reactionary fashion when he urges that the American people are too far away from “class consciousness” (a dubious term never sufficiently explained by most who employ it) to support a third party alternative. Instead, per Hasan, the “non-idealist” position is to support the “left-wing” of the Democratic Party – those who want imperialist war with Russia, China, etc. but who support 2SLGBTQI+ rights” (e.g., Kat Abughazaleh). It is with the Democratic Party, according to Hasan, that we obtain a large enough platform to reach people.
For someone so successful at reaching millions of people, this assessment of the situation couldn’t be more incorrect. The problem of the American people is not one of an absence of “class consciousness,” but of an absence of alternative, sovereign left institutions of significant political weight which can structure a new series of counterhegemonic practices that match the cynical distance they already hold to the ruling order at the level of their thoughts. The problem, in other words, is that there is no left (i.e., anti-system) alternative for them to participate in. This is why, in 2016 and 2020, many of them gravitated to both Trump and Bernie. Irrespective of whether they were correct or not (they weren’t – and as a former “Bernie bro” I am a part of that “they”), their support was premised on the belief that these were “outsider” campaigns which challenged the status quo, i.e., the system, “deep state,” the establishment, the swamp, or whatever other signifier was used to signify the dominant order.
The American people, in other words, already desire a third-party alternative to the two-party duopoly. To reference a recent poll (and thereby satisfy the prerequisites of “evidence” in our “scientific” era), up to 63% of the American public supports a third political party in the U.S. And so, when the American people desire a third-party alternative and already see the institutions of the Democratic and Republican Parties as illegitimate, for Hasan – a “Marxist” – to channel them back into the Democratic Party through “progressives” is to (knowingly or not) try to relegitimize a delegitimized bourgeois institution – an institution which has shown what its function and limits are, namely, to be the liberal wing of the bourgeois, imperialist, and fascistic order dominant in the U.S.
There is no “pushing” of this party to the left, that is, to that which lays beyond the structural limits of the function it plays in the reproduction of the system. That was the lesson of the Bernie Sanders movement: even the mild reforms postulated by it laid beyond the limits of the Democratic Party. There was an incompatibility, therefore, between the demands that were being made by the Bernie campaign – the demands that motivated millions of young people (myself included) to fight for what they thought was a socialist political revolution – and the infrastructure of the Democratic Party that they were articulated within.
The lesson of the Bernie movement was that a “left” politics in the U.S. has to be sovereign, independent from the Democratic Party to not be collapsed into liberal fascism/imperialism. The true heirs of the rational kernel of the Bernie moment are those fighting for an alternative left politics outside of the Democratic Party, not those who – like Hasan – seek to spuriously entrap us in the Sisyphus enterprise of repeating 2016 and its assumptions.
If we presume Hasan is honest in his actions and thoughts, and therefore, fail to ascribe any malicious intent behind him, is not the metaphor for Hasan politically precisely that of the kid in high school who is so big and strong that they could easily wipe out all the snarky little bullies which mock him, but who refrains from doing so out of either insecurity or ignorance of their power? Hasan acts as if he, subjectively, isn’t a part of the objective predicament of our era. As if objectivity is something he remains outside and powerless in the face of. Hasan talks about the need to use the Democratic Party as a platform for our ideas as if this institution – and all other formal apparatuses like it – still sustain control over discourse. But in the digital era, they do not.
In our age of social media content consumption, anything which feels like it has an institutional agenda behind it is bound to fail. People are pretty good at spontaneously grasping what is authentic versus what is marketed to sell something (a party, a product, a politician, a celebrity, etc.). Hasan today is infinitely more influential for framing discourse, and hence, influencing that which he calls “class consciousness,” than the whole institutional apparatus of the Democratic Party.
If we cross out malicious intent as a justification; it is clear, then, that Hasan is both unaware of the cynical age we live in (exacerbated by the framing of discourse as it occurs on social media) and of the power he wields within it. What this predicament requires is not a doubling down of the attempt to revive delegitimized bourgeois institutions, but concrete efforts to build alternative new ones. This is what the dual power strategy of the American Communist Party hopes to accomplish.
My message to Hasan Piker is the following: you frequently state that you don’t seek to attack anyone to the left of you (this ignores, of course, how you have attacked and defamed my party, the ACP, since our founding – but I’ll consider that water under the bridge, as we have more important things to worry about than old resentments). Well, show us this concretely. You platform and promote the “left-wing” of the Democratic Party, why not also provide a space for discussion with those on the left who are outside of the Democrats? Why not provide us with a space to explain our thought process, our work, or to discuss, in comradely fashion, our disagreements?
We ask you to simply be true to what you say about yourself. If you are actually not against those organizing a left-wing politics outside the Democratic Party, why not engage with us in discussion (and this “us” doesn’t just have to be my party, the ACP, but genuinely all the others who are also, irrespective of our disagreements, trying to build alternatives outside of the two-party duopoly). Your response, presuming this message gets to you, will be a testament to the seriousness of your commitment to a left-wing politics in this country.
[1] Carter G. Woodson, The Mis-Education of the Negro (Virginia: Khalifa’s Booksellers, 2005), xiii.
[2] Louis Althusser, Philosophy of the Encounter: Late Writings 1978-1987 (New York: Verso, 2006), 89.
[3] Carlos L. Garrido and Christopher Helali, “Hegel, America, and the Crisis of the Sittlichkeit,” Journal of Philosophical Investigations 19(52) (2005) DOI: 10.22034/jpiut.2025.67944.4142
[4] Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology (New York: Verso, 1989), 28.
Dr. Carlos L. Garrido is a Cuban American Professor of Philosophy who received his M.A. and Ph.D. from Southern Illinois University Carbondale. He serves as the Secretary of Education for the American Communist Party and as a Director of the Midwestern Marx Institute, the largest Marxist-Leninist think-tank in the United States. Dr. Garrido has authored a few books, including Marxism and the Dialectical Materialist Worldview (2022), The Purity Fetish and the Crisis of Western Marxism (2023), Why We Need American Marxism (2024), and the two forthcoming texts, Domenico Losurdo and the Marxist-Leninist Critique of Western Marxism (2026) and Hegel, Marxism, and Dialectics (2026-7). Dr. Garrido has published over a dozen scholarly articles and over a hundred articles in popular settings across the U.S., Mexico, Cuba, Iran, China, Brazil, Venezuela, Greece, Peru, Canada, etc. His writings have been translated into over a dozen languages. He also writes short form articles for his Substack, @philosophyincrisis, and does regular YouTube programs for the Midwestern Marx Institute channel. He is on Instagram @carlos.l.garrido
One of the stronger critiques of contemporary liberal “leftism” I’ve read in a while. The point about institutional distrust existing *without* an organised anti-system alternative is especially important. People already sense the contradictions of the system, the real question is what structures can actually channel that discontent into something beyond managed opposition. Well-written.
Canada already has, in its Parliamentary system, at least one alternative party in the House of Commons. I mean both the NDP, ostensibly a social-democratic creature, and a petit-bourgeois Green Party that is somewhat more left-wing in its provincial incarnations.
Neither of these parties provide a genuine alternative to the main parties: Conservatives and Liberals. The entire neo-liberal era has homogenized all of these parties and, for example, on foreign policy matters, there is no "right" and "left" in Parliament. They are all "right". Period.
A much better argument could be made to support parties like the ACP in the USA or, simply, argue to boycott the frivolous and mostly fake elections that we see today. The cosmetic differences are a permanent distraction to substantive proletarian politics.