“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.
Subjects Archives: Psychology
Building a Marxist psychology
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.
Faculty Interview: Alyssa Battistoni on ecofeminism and xenofeminism
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.
Fighting and winning against U.S. psychological cyber warfare
Proceed with caution: the CIA, NSA, FBI and DOD are your ‘friends’ on Facebook, writes Lauren Smith.
The Domestication of Critical Theory – Michael J Thompson
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’.
Stop blaming workers for Trump’s right-wing authoritarianism
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.
Race, gender and social reproduction in British capitalism, 1945-78
How can we understand the way that capitalism comes to be gendered and racialised?
Mental illness and the psychological trap – a political problem
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 […]
Herbert Marcuse remembered
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.
To Recover Strategic Thought and Political Practice
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 […]
Criminal Interest
Debt wedged sharply on the shoulders, necks, heads and bodies of state. A debt to others, burrowed deep, deeper, deeply into caves of criminal interest. Debt composed of mounds of soft bills, notes, and hard-edged instruments of finance, a percussion beating, in a nation’s ears. Clanging sounds of resistance, echoes of agony […]
Richard Levins and Dialectical Thinking
For Richard Levins’s 85th birthday and his career as a scientist for the people. Richard Levins conveys the essence of dialectical thinking through the many examples he offers of its application, in every imaginable domain. Someone earlier than Dick — perhaps it was Hegel — remarked that, in contrast to formal logic, which is static, […]
An Early Activist Critique of Stalin’s 1934 Antihomosexual Law: “A Chapter of Russian Reaction” by Kurt Hiller
Introduction This article, titled “A Chapter of Russian Reaction,” translated into English here for the first time, was written in German by longtime homosexual activist Kurt Hiller (1885-1972) from London and published in the Swiss gay journal Der Kreis in 1946. Hiller had been active in Germany’s first homosexual-rights organization, the Wissenschaftlich-humanitäre Komitee (Scientific […]
What Is Political Will?
Samuel Grove [SG]: For a while now you’ve been working on and defending the old idea of ‘the will of the people’, and you’ve described it in terms of a ‘dialectical voluntarism’; what do you mean by this? Peter Hallward [PH]: I’m not stuck on the terminology, and I’m leery of the way these […]
Statement of Support to CUNY Students Attacked and Arrested in Peaceful Protests Against Ex-Gen. David Petraeus
On September 18, 2013, a press release issued by the Ad Hoc Committee Against the Militarization of CUNY stated: “Six students were arrested in a brutal, unprovoked police attack during a peaceful protest by the City University of New York’s students and faculty against CUNY’s appointment of former CIA chief ex-General David Petraeus. Students were […]
In a Guerrilla Zone: Two Reigns of Political Violence in Bastar
The ambush on May 25 by Maoist guerrillas in the Darba Ghati valley (in the Sukma area of the Bastar region in southern Chhattisgarh), 345 kms south of the state capital of Raipur, of a convoy of provincial Congress Party leaders has shocked the Indian state apparatus. The Z-plus and other categories of armed security […]
Golden Dawn: The Development of Greek Fascism
As was the case in 1930s Germany, Greek liberalism has revealed itself to be politically spent. In dealing with the austerity measures imposed upon the country from outside by an international troika consisting of the IMF, European Commission, and European Central Bank, the government has failed comprehensively in the eyes of its electorate. When the […]
Violating the Privacy and Dignity of “Suspected” Gay Men in Lebanon
I would like to start off by saying that I am not a journalist. However, I do know that there are some common practices in journalism involving privacy. Some investigative journalists use hidden camera footage to raise awareness of issues of vital public interest when there is no other means of obtaining information about them. […]
Class, Psychology, and Capitalism
A young veteran was just arrested for murdering homeless people in Los Angeles. Regardless whether he is actually guilty, a large number of terrible acts have been committed by returning veterans traumatized from the war. None of the studies of which I’m aware accounts for such costs (including the cost of imprisoning them) in the […]
How I Became a Socialist
“Workin’ hard scarred my proletarian flesh I used to go to sleep drunk every night depressed Slavin’ for a check, a couple hundred at best While the boss getting’ rich off my blood and sweat And all the crumbs I get go to bills and rent I ain’t workin’ all my life just to […]
