115

WHAT DOES IT MEAN TO SAY that Platypus is the psychoanalyst of the Left? Thinking through this analogy can provide some clarity about the Platypus project and its relationship to the existing Left. Freud never had a prescriptive conception of health. In fact, for Freud, mental health existed on a spectrum, and was not a difference in kind. In other words, for Freud, the difference between a healthy and an unhealthy psyche was not a difference in two kinds of psyches, but a difference in how the psyches expressed degrees of mental illness on a spectrum. [Read More]

IN LATE 2008 AND EARLY 2009, the world’s financial markets collapsed under the immeasurable weight of unregulated speculative market practices in relation to subprime lending, debt accumulation, and the monopoly of finance capitalism. Labeled “The Great Financial Crisis,” the collapse led to the loss of $7.4 trillion in stock wealth in the U.S., alone. The response to the financial crash arrived in the form of a series of massive government interventions that attempted to offset the consequences of the overarching failures of neoliberalism. [Read More]

“My whole lifetime, every time you think the Left has got somewhere, the Right is one step ahead of it”1 – Mark Fisher (1968–2017) MARK FISHER WAS OFTEN ASKED what “capitalist realism” is. His most interesting answer was that it is “a pathology of the Left.”2 This cut against other definitions of his oft-used concept, which identified it with “neoliberalism.” What ties the two together is implied in the subtitle to his 2009 book – Capitalist Realism: Is there no alternative? [Read More]