Class, Capitalism and the Clinical Encounter: Working with Contradiction in Systemic Practice

'The most revolutionary thing one can do is to loudly proclaim what is happening' 

-Rosa Luxembourg 

Glasgow is a city built both on capitalism, the profits extracted from transatlantic slavery and the radical tradition of working class resistance to exploitation. 

This participatory workshop explores how class and capitalism shape both clients’ lives and the conditions of therapeutic work. 

While systemic thinking often considers context, power, and meaning-making in our socially constructed identities, intersections and relationships, the material context that shapes our world is less explored. 

Drawing on Marxist, Radical Anthropology and Liberation Psychology perspectives, this workshop explores class not simply as an identity or background.  It names capitalism as the totalising and colonising system we all live within, hiding in plain sight in its general absence from both systemic theory and general public discourse. It invites practice which considers the risks of accepting or challenging this in our thinking, relationships and work in a world where inequality is increasing and war and racism resurgent.

Participants will be invited to engage in  practice-based exercises using clinical vignettes to explore tensions between care and commodification, relational presence and institutional pressure, and how meaning-making and material reality are lived and negotiated in clinical encounters with distress, disadvantage and oppression.

The workshop invites practitioners to consider how they may both resist and reproduce capitalist social relations in the moment-to-moment practice of therapy and how ethical practice is possible in this context. 

The exercises will invite reflection on how therapists are positioned within systems, how their experiences shape their responses, and how therapeutic work functions within capitalism, while considering the perspectives of peers in these dilemmas and where space for support and solidarity exists.