Towards a New Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere

My rejoinder to Daniel Tutt's foreword in Flowers for Marx

Introduction

The enduring intellectual project of the late Michael Brooks offers a powerful, and often overlooked, roadmap for a Left grappling with postmodern fragmentation. My aim in this essay is to reconstruct his unique vision and argue for its contemporary relevance. This work is born out of my critical reflection on the book Flowers for Marx, which, despite its noble ambitions, lamentably omits an engagement with Brooks’s legacy. That oversight compelled me to revisit a conversation I had with Daniel Tutt from July 2023, a dialogue that now serves as the foundation for this essay.

For those unfamiliar with that discussion, we covered significant ground, beginning with Daniel's unconventional intellectual journey from a conservative, working-class background to a Marxist orientation. Our dialogue delved into his work on "post-oedipal politics" as a framework for understanding the new right and postmodern conservatism, and the complex and unfulfilled historical dialogue between critical theory and American pragmatism. The conversation's central theme—the need for a new structuralism or humanism on the Left—is a conceptual framework that I had previously discussed with Cadell Last and Matt Flisfeder as a means to counteract the undermining forces of today's political discourse.

Drawing on these foundational discussions, this essay will integrate Daniel Tutt's insights with a detailed exploration of Brooks’s intellectual trajectory. This synthesis will lead to an epistemologically grounded understanding of politics—a framework I've termed integral facticity—that offers a substantive alternative that moves beyond the regressive postmodern right and postmodern neo-marxist left. My ultimate goal is to foster a concrete understanding of an integral-praxis—a framework that empowers a Left to embrace pro-social ideas of religion and family, and in doing so, forge a new form of integral humanism.

A Genealogy of Michael Brooks Radical Synthesis

To understand Brooks's unique intellectual project, we must first trace its unexpected lineage. Brooks was not directly influenced by American pragmatism, but rather encountered its core tenets through the work of Ken Wilber. This is a crucial detail because, as Zachary Stein argues in "Integral Theory, Pragmatism, and the Future of Philosophy," Wilber's thought itself can be characterized as a continuation of American Pragmatism. This philosophical movement, pioneered by figures like Charles Sanders Peirce, William James, and John Dewey, arose in the late nineteenth century in response to the profound transformations of a new industrial and technological era. The Pragmatists sought to develop a systematic and cosmopolitan philosophy that could integrate science, religion, and a framework for social emancipation—a project that resonates deeply with Wilber's work.

This intellectual lineage provides the backdrop for a central tension within leftist thought, one that Daniel Tutt explores in his article, "The Rise and Fall of Homegrown American Marxism." In this piece, Tutt, drawing on the work of Brian Lloyd, argues that the influence of figures like William James, John Dewey, and Thorstein Veblen in the Second International era effectively "domesticated" U.S. Marxism. This "generic pragmatism" led American Marxists to embrace a revisionist, economistic theory of class that neglected the importance of class conflict and revolutionary struggle. It reduced Marxism to a progressive liberalism, ultimately making its proponents unable to support or incapable of militant action. This domestication created a form of socialism that was, in essence, unradical, and unable to move beyond a limited, progressive-liberal framework. Brooks's indirect and personal path to these ideas, however, allowed him to bypass this domestication. Coming to pragmatism through a developmental framework and a class-based analysis, Brooks avoided the intellectual compromises of this generic and unradical form of pragmatism, instead forging a synthesis that was both radical and psychologically astute.

Brooks’s journey also echoes a historical conflict between critical theory and American pragmatism, one that Tutt details in his article "The Missed Encounter Between Critical Theory and American Pragmatism." Tutt's article details how this encounter, or lack thereof, was largely defined by Max Horkheimer’s 1947 critique in Eclipse of Reason. Horkheimer argued that American pragmatism was "adjusted to exploitation and the status quo" because it reduced reason to a purely instrumental function—a tool for adaptation to existing conditions rather than a means for critical thought and social rupture. This flawed approach, Horkheimer claimed, neglected the dialectical thinking necessary for real social change and the analysis of social domination. This historical conflict serves as a powerful reminder of the intellectual pitfalls Brooks’s work navigated. By forging a synthesis that incorporated both developmental frameworks and a materialist commitment to the working class, Brooks positioned himself to create a form of leftism that resisted the apathetic tendencies of American pragmatism and critical theory.

Integral Facticity & Epistemic Reliability

My conversation with Daniel Tutt has illuminated a crucial epistemological problem facing the Left today, rooted in what Georg Lukács termed a specific form of "irrationalism." This worldview abandons the Hegelian commitment to understanding history and social totality, instead embracing an "aristocratic epistemology" where truth and justice are not universal, but are reserved for an elite. This worldview is preserved not through natural order, but by the unnatural structures of capitalism, which reify human relations and turn social interactions into impersonal, quantifiable things.

The rise of Jordan Peterson perfectly exemplifies this irrationalism. He presents capitalism not as a changeable, historical system but as a reflection of immutable human nature, rooted in a mythic or biological "order." In doing so, he sidesteps the concrete injustices created by capitalism, such as economic inequality, the exploitation of labor, and the commodification of human life. By denying the intellectual legitimacy of socialist and Marxist thought, Peterson's approach discourages any rational critique of capitalism and its social consequences, instead treating its flaws as a natural, unchangeable part of the human condition.

This is where my own project, centered on integral facticity, becomes a direct response. Where irrationalism denies the possibility of a shared, rational understanding of political and social reality, integral facticity aims to provide a framework for a robust and epistemologically reliable understanding of politics and human nature. This is a deliberate turn towards an epistemology that can map and articulate social antagonisms, not ignore or mystify them. The task of the Left, as Tutt and I discussed, is an epistemological one: to redirect the site of antagonism and reveal the systemic dependencies and relations of injustice that are obscured by irrationalist thought.

This epistemological project is why I find myself gravitating towards the work of Ken Wilber and Jürgen Habermas and away from the Lacanian framework championed by Slavoj Žižek. While Žižek is an unparalleled master diagnostician of ideological pathology, his combination of Lacanian psychoanalysis with neo-Marxism is insufficient to address the problems of subjectivity and extreme relativism inherent in postmodernism. In fact, Žižek, much like Peterson, often embodies the very problems he exposes, albeit from a different ideological position. His work is brilliant at revealing the inconsistencies and fantasies that underpin our social world, but it offers no clear prescription for reconstruction. Critically, his framework lacks the conceptual tools to differentiate between growth hierarchies that are natural and necessary for individual and collective development, and the destructive dominator hierarchies that oppress and exploit. Moreover, his focus on deconstruction and Lacanian analysis provides no comprehensive form of individual or collective praxis beyond philosophical critique. His epistemology excels at critiquing what is, but it offers no systematic framework for building what could be.

In contrast, the work of Habermas and Wilber’s developmental psychology, particularly in his collaboration with Guy Du Plessis, offers a prescriptive and practical epistemology for individual and collective growth beyond our postmodern crisis. Their work on ideological addiction/fixation and aversion/allergy provides a sophisticated set of tools for not only critiquing cultural phenomena but also for actively guiding psychological and societal development. This is a crucial distinction. While Žižek gives us the philosophical tools to understand why a figure like Jordan Peterson is a symptom of our epistemological crisis, the work of Habermas, Wilber, and Du Plessis provides a path for moving beyond that crisis—a path from diagnosis to the creation of a new, more robust epistemology that can ground an empirically-based, and genuinely emancipatory understanding of politics.

Michael Brooks Digital Counterpublic

Brooks's relationship with the integral movement was complex, mirroring the very tensions he sought to resolve on the Left. While he drew from its developmental and religious insights, he was also a fierce critic of its insular, apolitical tendencies. This tension is central to the project of an integral-praxis because it highlights a crucial pitfall: a Left that retreats into philosophical navel-gazing, detached from the concrete struggles of the working class. As I argued in my article, "The Limits of Lifestyle Enclaves," communities like Integral Life often represent a form of "bourgeois spirituality" that fosters superficial connections at the expense of genuine political commitment.

This critique, however, is not a rejection of the integral framework itself, but a call to ground it in a concrete political project. The solution, as suggested by Daniel Tutt in his foreword to Flowers for Marx, lies in the creation of a "worker's counterpublic"—a public sphere rooted in the proletariat that stands in an antagonistic relationship with the dominant bourgeois public sphere. Brooks's intellectual legacy is a brilliant example of this in action. He not only used his platform to critique the flaws of a fragmented Left, but he actively built a new kind of public sphere. His digital counterpublic, forged through new media, became a living experiment in fostering the informed, collective deliberation that Habermas champions.

Brooks’s work answers the key question: "To resist or to create?" His unique synthesis of a developmental, integral worldview with a materialist commitment to the working class provides the conceptual tools for such a project. This perspective is powerful precisely because it is so nuanced: his critiques of the integral movement’s flaws provide a blueprint for what a worker's counterpublic should resist, while his materialist commitments provide the imperative to act and construct a new public sphere and superstructure. Ultimately, this fusion of psychological depth and materialist imperatives offers a powerful intellectual model for a Left that seeks to both critique power and build a new culture of solidarity.

Communication & the Evolution of Society

The intellectual legacy of Michael Brooks is not a matter of historical preservation but of practical application for the future. Brooks’s unexpected intellectual journey—from integral theory to Marxism—demonstrates that a genuine Left cannot be a static ideology but must be a living synthesis, drawing upon the best available tools to build rather than merely critique.

This synthetic approach finds its philosophical anchor in the work of Jürgen Habermas. In his book, Communication and the Evolution of Society, Habermas saw his critical theory as a "research program" aimed at reconstructing historical materialism. This reconstruction moves beyond a purely economistic or deconstructive approach by asserting that social evolution is a "bidimensional learning process (cognitive/technical and moral/practical)". This crucial insight allows us to recognize that progress is not merely a matter of developing productive forces, but also of developing "normative structures", which, in fact, act as the "pacemaker of social evolution". Habermas's work on the development of "normative structures" through a "hierarchical sequence of increasingly complex and encompassing forms of rationality" and Wilber’s theory of a developmental holarchy, where each higher stage is more inclusive and compassionate, provide a powerful intellectual basis for this distinction.

This approach allows for a Left that can critique destructive "dominator hierarchies" without resorting to a flatland anti-hierarchical stance that, as Wilber argues, inadvertently undermines the very processes of growth and integration needed for true social progress. Moving beyond a Lacanian framework that relies on an outdated psychological model and a Hegelian dialectic lacking a robust theory of communication, Habermas offers a constructive prescription grounded in communicative action and a concerted effort to forge a collective political will. This stands as a powerful counterweight to Žižek's brilliant but often insufficient model, which, while a master at diagnosing ideological pathology, provides no systematic framework for building what could be. The synthesis of Brooks’s practice with the reconstructive epistemology of Ken Wilber and Guy Du Plessis offers a comprehensive model for a Left that can build, not just deconstruct, by providing the psychological tools to navigate and overcome the ideological “addictions and allergies” of our postmodern condition.

Michael Brooks embodied a brilliant response to this modern dilemma. As a broadcaster, podcaster, and writer, he masterfully utilized the tools of new media—YouTube, podcasts, and social media—to forge a new kind of public sphere. His "worker’s counterpublic" was a living experiment in fostering the informed, collective deliberation that Habermas champions. It was a space for intellectual rigor and international solidarity, presented with a disarming humor that made complex topics accessible and cultivated a new “normative self-understanding” among a dispersed, active citizenry.

This synthesis of Brooks’s practice, Habermas’s theory, and Wilber’s psychology offers a powerful counterweight to Slavoj Žižek’s brilliant but often insufficient Lacanian framework. It moves beyond the limitations of an outdated psychological model to carry critical thought forward in a truly constructive and emancipatory project—one that is both rigorous and hopeful, and a novel development with the express purpose of building a better future.