Essays

Encountering the decay of legitimacy and the necessity of authenticity

by David Marshall

  • Conversation with Marx

    This dialogue with Marx continues the inquiry opened in the previous essay. It is a living conversation, and I expect it to change as the climate of the work changes.

    Marx: – “You have severed praxis from history. If praxis is no longer the engine of historical movement, then what remains of materiality? What prevents your actor from becoming a bourgeois individual floating above the forces that shape the world?”

    Marshall: – “I have not severed praxis from history. I have severed it from historical necessity.

    “Materiality remains – but not as a determinant. It appears as the prevailing conditions in which the self must act when legitimacy decays. The actor does not float above these conditions; the actor is pressed by them, shaped by them, wounded by them. But the actor is not produced by them.

    “You tied praxis to the movement of history. I tie praxis to the collapse of the practico‑inert – to the moment when inherited structures no longer organise action.

    “Materiality remains. Materialism does not.”

    Marx: – “You have made praxis contingent. If praxis is only a horizon, a possibility, a contingent emergence, then how can it resist domination? How can it transform the world rather than merely endure it?”

    Marshall: – “Contingency is not weakness. Contingency is the truth of action once legitimacy collapses. Domination is not resisted by necessity. It is resisted by authentic action under pressure, taken without guarantees. You believed contradiction would produce its own resolution. I do not. Contradiction produces exposure, not destiny. It reveals the climate in which action must occur, but it does not dictate the outcome.

    “And as for transformation: the dominion of praxis is not knowable in our current historical state. Within the prevailing conditions of An Aimsir, we cannot say what praxis can or cannot transform. We can only say that it becomes possible when the world no longer guarantees coherence.”

    Marx: – “You have removed class. Without class, without collective subjects, without the movement of production, how can you speak of history at all? Have you not reduced history to biography?”

    Marshall: – “No. I have not removed class. I have removed the guarantee that class is the subject of history. Collective action remains. Identification with class remains. But in the present climate, these appear primarily as responses to Wounding – as attempts to find shelter, coherence, or protection when legitimacy decays. I have not denied the collective. I have denied that its destiny is knowable.

    “History is not biography. History is the accumulation of actions taken by selves navigating the decay of legitimacy – sometimes individually, sometimes collectively, always under pressure.”

    Marx: – “You have abandoned teleology. Without teleology, how can contradiction be resolved? How can history move forward?”

    Marshall: – “Contradiction does not resolve. Contradiction reveals. It reveals the collapse of legitimacy. It reveals the weakening of the practico‑inert. It reveals the conditions in which the self must act.

    “History does not move forward. History accumulates. It accumulates the actions taken by selves acting authentically within the pressures of Wounding. It accumulates the consequences of actions taken without guarantees.

    “Teleology is not needed. The world moves because actors act – not because history demands it.”

    Marx: – “Then what becomes of revolution? If praxis is not the engine of history, if the group is not the subject, if contradiction does not resolve, then what remains of transformation?”

    Marshall: – “Transformation remains – but not as destiny.

    “Revolution is not the inevitable outcome of contradiction. Revolution is the rare moment when enough actors act authentically within the same prevailing conditions, under the same pressures, through the same Wounding, and their actions accumulate into structural change.

    “Revolution is not the telos of history. Revolution is the event that becomes possible when legitimacy decays and actors act without the practico‑inert to guide them. You saw revolution as the culmination of necessity. I see revolution as the emergence of possibility.

    “Transformation remains. But it is not guaranteed. It is not promised. It is not destined. It is simply what can happen when actors act authentically in a world that no longer holds.”

    David Marshall
    Montory
    April 2026

    Reader‑facing interpretation: Marx – What the Dialogue Reveals (opens in new tab)

  • The shift in the role of Praxis

    – How praxis appears when legitimacy decays and nothing guarantees coherence

    This essay opens the sequence on An Aimsir – the weather in which legitimacy decays, authenticity becomes necessary, and action must find its form without guarantees. It sets the ground for the conversations that follow, where I speak with Marx and Sartre from within the conditions of the present…

    There are moments in the decay of legitimacy when the self discovers that action is no longer organised by inherited grammars, and yet the world continues to press upon it. In this space, where the practico‑inert has decayed but nothing coherent has replaced it, the possibility of praxis appears – not as a stage of development, not as a historical necessity, but as a horizon revealed when the self acts authentically within the prevailing conditions of Wounding.

    This understanding of praxis differs from the traditions that shaped the modern philosophical imagination. It is not the engine of history, as Marx conceived it, nor the culmination of collective freedom, as Sartre hoped it might become. It is something smaller and more exacting: a mode of action that arises when the self confronts the world without the shelter of legitimacy and without the promise of teleology. Praxis here is neither destiny nor doctrine. It is the form of action that becomes possible when nothing external guarantees coherence, success, or meaning.

    This shift in the role and function of praxis allows a different approach to historical materiality. It makes room for actors – not as heroes, not as representatives of classes or groups, not as bearers of historical necessity, but as individuals acting under pressure, through injury, and within climates they did not choose. It allows us to speak of history not only as movement, but as the accumulation of actions taken by selves navigating the collapse of their organising structures. In this sense, praxis becomes a way of understanding how history is shaped by those who act authentically in conditions that offer no assurances.

    It is from this position that I turn to Marx and Sartre – not to correct them, not to inherit them, but to speak with them. To ask what they saw, what they missed, and what becomes possible when praxis is no longer tied to destiny, class, or collective fusion. Their work remains essential, but the terrain has shifted. The climate has changed. And in this new weather, the actor stands differently in relation to history.

    David Marshall
    Estella
    January 2026

  • On Taking a Position

    – Securing the terrain

    An essay often begins with a claim that feels too sharp, too certain, too easily said. Something like: immigration is destroying the economy. A sentence that appears to know exactly what it means. A sentence that demands to be challenged.

    Irish writers have always understood this tension. Myles na gCopaleen could puncture a confident claim with a single twist of satire; Joyce could unravel it into the private machinery of thought. And Hubert Butler — the one, to whom, I’m perhaps closest — examined statements with a quiet, forensic clarity that left no room for cant. He showed that a position becomes interesting only when you start to test it.

    That’s where the essay begins. To essay is to attempt: to take a statement and follow its logic, not to inflame or reassure, but to understand what lies beneath it. Where did the idea come from? What fear or experience or assumption gives it shape? What happens when we press on it, or turn it around, or look at it from the side?

    Montaigne did this with himself. Zola did it with society. Sartre did it with history. Irish writers have done it with everything from nationhood to nonsense. The essay is not where opinions go to be confirmed. It’s where they go to be examined.

    That’s the work I’m interested in here. Not slogans, not certainties, but the attempt to think through the things we say — especially the things we say too quickly. An essay is a way of slowing down a thought long enough to see what it’s made of.

    This site is where I’ll try to do that. To take a position, hold it up to the light, and see what remains.

    David Marshall
    30 January 2026
    Skerries

  • Dig Where You Stand

    – The beginning of the method

    The moment that set this essay in motion wasn’t dramatic. It was just my phone, rocking gently on the desk, refusing to do the one simple thing I needed it to do.

    I didn’t expect the first words to begin with something so ordinary. But that’s where it began. I was mid‑call, trying to jot a quick handwritten note on my Samsung S26 Ultra, and the device – a flagship of modern engineering – wouldn’t stay still long enough to write on.

    So I reached for the back of an envelope.

    It was such a small thing. A tiny failure. But it was also a signal: a system designed to support my work couldn’t manage the most basic gesture of it, and the simplest analogue tool in the room stepped in to repair the gap. That moment – that reach for the envelope – is the kind of moment I pay attention to. Not because it’s quaint, but because it tells the truth about where we are.

    Technology has outpaced our ability to administer it. We live inside systems whose complexity exceeds our capacity to govern them, and the friction we feel in moments like this isn’t just inconvenience. It’s a symptom of deeper contradictions in how we work, how we live, and how we show up in the world. Like the smart home hub that promises seamless control but can’t turn on a single lamp without a firmware update.

    And in the moment I picked up the pen, a single thought rushed to the fore: dig where you stand.

    An archaeologists’ slogan from the 1970s, now deeply rooted in my social and political thinking. It’s not an abstraction. I’ve seen what happens the first time someone turns a sod – literally or figuratively – and realises the world is different because of something they did. You can see it in their face. It’s visceral. It’s the moment they understand that change isn’t theoretical or distant; it’s immediate, and it’s theirs. That’s the kind of understanding I care about: grounded, embodied, and shared.

    Because the truth is this: the small failures in our tools mirror the larger contradictions in our lives. The rocking phone isn’t just a design oversight. It’s a symptom of a wider pattern – technology racing ahead of our ability to administer it, systems growing faster than our capacity to govern them, complexity outpacing comprehension. And when that happens, we lose something essential: our sense of agency, our sense of presence, our sense of being able to make a difference.

    But I believe these contradictions can be resolved – collectively, through the slow work of understanding them, naming them, and navigating them together. Not through instruction. Not through being told what the solution is. Real progress comes when people appropriate a motion for themselves – when they see the direction, understand it, and choose to move in it because it makes sense to them. That kind of co‑operation is durable. It lasts. It builds.

    My role here isn’t to prescribe answers. It’s to surface the tensions, the frictions, the gumption traps – the places where the world doesn’t quite line up with how we’re told it works. To trace the methods people use to repair those gaps. To pay attention to the small, telling moments that reveal the larger structures shaping our days.

    This is just an introduction – a marker in the ground. There are many arcs to follow, and they intersect in ways that matter for how we live and work today. The longer exploration begins here, with the simplest gesture: noticing when the system fails, and digging where we stand.

    David Marshall
    Navarre. January 2026