Subjects Archives: Psychology

Marx and Engels did not merely theorise in the abstract. They analysed concrete events, corresponded extensively with revolutionaries and thinkers, and engaged politically through journalism, the First International, and personal networks.

Applying Marxist analysis to our daily lives.

When Nietzsche discovered Stendhal it was rather late in his life, but he remarked that reading Stendhal was “one of the most beautiful strokes of fortune of my life.” This is exactly how it felt for me to discover Michel Clouscard. It was Marx who woke me from a dogmatic slumber out of left-Nietzscheanism; Clouscard […]

Some thoughts on Mary Shelley and Frankenstein.

WHERE DO AMERICA’S MASS SHOOTERS COME FROM??–It is extremely easy in the United States to obtain guns, to find places to practice using them, and to find trainers willing to teach you to use them.

There were a few things the Buffalo and Uvalde mass shooters who killed a combined 31 people had in common: Both used AR-15-style rifles bought legally. Both were just 18 years old. But perhaps most overlooked in the corporate press as a shared characteristic worthy of commentary: They were both male.

With the worlds of architecture and video games becoming increasingly intertwined, Gerry Hart examines how video games communicate through their design.

Life under capitalist rule is perilous. We can’t survive on our own, and we can’t rely on society to support us.

Friends and colleagues of Dick Lewontin are sharing their stories and reflections.

When the Democratic Party ends its charade of a primary process and spits out the person most closely aligned with neo-liberal policies, the gas lighting begins.

“If you can actually influence how people think, through social media, then you can have a lot more control” of their political behavior, said Valentine.

Carl Ratner is one of few psychologists working today who aims to develop psychology on an unabashedly Marxist foundation. The dominant narrative in psychology is that our minds and our society are direct manifestations of human biology.

In the West, since at least the myth of Gaea, the earth has been seen as something feminine. For ecofeminists, the linkage has had profound, and malign, consequences for our treatment both of nature and of women.

Proceed with caution: the CIA, NSA, FBI and DOD are your ‘friends’ on Facebook, writes Lauren Smith.

What passes for Critical Theory today is nugatory; it is philosophically weak, and politically compromised. In Thompson’s words, the project has ‘abandoned the search for the real mechanisms and sources of social power’.

The search for explanations of our current political climate, especially the rise of nationalists like Marine LePen in France, Narendra Modi in India, and our own president in the United States, has led pundits to return to the concept of “authoritarian” tendencies as a psychological phenomenon.

How can we understand the way that capitalism comes to be gendered and racialised?

Mental illness is a serious problem, reaching epidemic status, and the problem is increasing rapidly amongst young people not only in South Africa but globally. There is a tendency in society to either: (1) disregard mental illness as a serious problem, or (2) to recognise mental illness as a problem but fail to treat the underlying causes that result in mental illness.

We are, the 1960s radical generation, now once more marching, marching, sometimes it seems mostly with the Millennials by our side. And here comes the ghost of Herbert Marcuse, who was so much with us the first time around.

It is common to understand the diverse “processes” in Latin America — in the period marked initially by Zapatismo in the mid-1990s and later by the emergence of left or popular governments in Venezuela, Bolivia, and Ecuador along with center-left governments in Brazil, Uruguay, and Argentina — within the theoretical framework of a return or […]