Does a Social Worker Have to Be a Leftist?
Or: How to Help Without Creating Dependence
At some point, a well-known professor of social work (Hans Thiersch, Lebensweltorientierung) made the claim that a social worker must always be a leftist. It was said in an interview with such certainty, such conviction, that one might think it was a fundamental law of nature.
But is it true? Does one’s political stance determine whether one is good at helping people? And more importantly: what is a social worker actually supposed to do?
If we strip away the ideological layers, social work is not about changing society but operating within it.
The term social worker does not mean “political activist” or “engineer of a better world.” It means someone who works with people in their social contexts—not against them, not above them, and certainly not as a self-appointed savior.
Yet, in modern discourse, social work is often framed as an inherently progressive, even revolutionary, profession.
The idea goes something like this: society is broken, people are victims of oppressive structures, and the social worker is there to intervene—not just to help but to liberate.
But here’s the problem: what happens when the help itself becomes a form of control?
Helping Without Handcuffs
Let’s take a step back. What is the worst thing a social worker can do? Simple: make the client addicted to help.
When assistance becomes an ongoing necessity rather than a temporary boost, the entire purpose of social work is lost. A system designed to empower instead fosters dependence.
Gregory Bateson’s double bind concept explains this well: we expect clients to become independent, yet we create conditions that make independence impossible.
The leftist model of intervention-heavy social work often feeds into this paradox—it doesn’t just offer help; it makes sure the client needs it permanently.
A good social worker, then, is not someone who fights the system but someone who navigates it effectively. This doesn’t mean blindly following bureaucratic rules but knowing when to bend them, when to push back, and when to step aside and let people take control of their own lives.
The goal is not to create a permanent support structure but to teach people how to function without one.
The Leftist Social Worker vs. The Pragmatic Social Worker
If we take professor Thiersch’s claim at face value—that a social worker must be a leftist—we run into a logical problem. If social work is about empowerment, about teaching people to solve their own problems, then why align it with an ideology that emphasizes systemic dependence?
A leftist approach to social work often views clients as victims of larger forces, trapped in economic, racial, or societal structures that they cannot escape without external intervention.
At the core of the issue lies a fundamental philosophical divide: free will versus determinism.
Leftist social workers tend to operate from a deterministic worldview, seeing their clients primarily as victims of larger forces—economic systems, societal structures, historical injustices—trapped in conditions they cannot escape without external intervention.
In this view, personal agency is secondary, if not entirely dismissed, in favor of an explanation that attributes nearly all struggles to external oppression.
But this deterministic lens creates a paradox. If people are merely products of their environment, what role does personal responsibility play?
If the system is always to blame, then what is the individual’s role in their own improvement? This kind of thinking not only diminishes the client’s autonomy (and often dignity) but also justifies endless intervention—since, under this logic, the person will never truly be able to stand on their own without continued assistance. The practical result is dependence, not empowerment.
A more balanced approach would acknowledge that yes, external factors shape people’s lives, but they do not define them completely.
Free will, agency, and resilience must have a place in social work, or else it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy of helplessness—where the system’s role is not to guide people out of difficulty, but to institutionalize their struggle indefinitely.
The leftist mindset, while well-intentioned, robs people of agency. It assumes that without a guiding hand, individuals cannot navigate life successfully. But what if—just as an experiment—we flipped the perspective?
Imagine a social work philosophy that starts with the assumption that people are not helpless. That they are capable of making decisions, adapting, learning, and—perhaps most controversially of all—taking responsibility for their own lives.
Suddenly, the role of the social worker shifts. The goal is no longer to provide an endless stream of solutions but to equip people with the tools to find their own.
The Reality: Social Work is Not a Political Identity
If social work were truly about political alignment, then it wouldn’t be a profession at all—it would be an activist movement. But the reality is different. Social work is embedded in bureaucratic systems, constrained by laws, and ultimately subject to practical limitations. A social worker who sees themselves as a political crusader will quickly find themselves at odds with reality.
Real social work means knowing how to work within the system without becoming its pawn. It means understanding its flaws without pretending that an ideological shift will fix them. Most importantly, it means focusing on the actual people in front of you—not abstract theories of oppression or grand visions of societal change.
Social work, as a profession, often carries the illusion that it can fundamentally change society. But this is a category mistake, a misunderstanding of what a system and its subsystems can actually do.
Social work is a subsystem of the larger bureaucratic and political framework in which it operates. A subsystem cannot redefine or overthrow the entire system it belongs to, just as the rules of chess cannot alter the existence of the chessboard itself.
This means that while social work can assist, guide, and intervene in individual cases, it cannot reshape the structure of society. That is not its function. If a social worker is politically motivated and wants systemic change, there is a proper avenue for that: voting, engaging in political discourse, or running for office. But using the profession itself as a vehicle for activism is not just misguided—it misunderstands the role of social work entirely. The job is to help people navigate reality as it is, not to use them as instruments for ideological battles.
This is where many in the field go wrong. They mistake their position within the system as a position above it, believing that through social work, they can implement ideological change.
But real change, if it comes at all, is decided at the political level, not in client meetings, school interventions, or case files. A social worker who understands this distinction is not abandoning their values—they are simply respecting the reality of their profession.
Conclusion: Can a Social Worker Be a Non-Leftist?
Of course. And in many cases, they should be. Not in the sense of being reactionary, heartless, or dismissive of social problems—but in the sense of prioritizing practical solutions over ideological purity.
The best social work is neither left nor right—it is effective. And effectiveness has nothing to do with party lines.
A social worker does not liberate people. A social worker helps them move forward—and then steps aside. Anything else isn’t help. It’s control.