Is This Still Capitalism?

Is ‘capitalism’ an adequate term to describe the currently dominant mode of production? I think there would be wide consensus, at least at the New School for Social Research, that it is. But is ‘capitalism’ an adequate description for the leading edge of production? I get the sense that, despite ...
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Physics Envy

The troubles in psychiatry and psychology

These are troubling times for the mental health field in the United States. A variety of historical developments have paved the road to the current predicament. Following World War II, the federal government and growing mental health lobby began an unprecedented expansion of mental heath services. This expansion in may ...

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Physics Envy

Ernesto Laclau, 1936-2014

It is with great sadness that we learn of the death of Ernesto Laclau, the outstanding Argentinean political philosopher, at the age of 78. Ernesto had a heart attack in Seville where he was giving a lecture. He was the author of landmark studies of Marxist theory and of populism ...

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Ernesto Laclau, 1936-2014

Capitalism Never Ends?

A discussion responding to the Capitalism Studies Manifesto and Zaretsky's "How Capitalism Will End" -- One of my frustrations as the editor of Public Seminar is knowing that there have been interesting responses to our posts, but people are reluctant to publish them on the site itself. We are trying to ...
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How Capitalism Will End

The need to organize the economic life of humanity better than capitalism does is well established. Capitalism -- by which I mean the buying and selling of labor power -- breeds inequality, as Karl Marx showed and as Thomas Piketty has just re-demonstrated. Capitalism subordinates collective needs, such as our ...
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Thoughts on Thanaticism

What does it take to inaugurate a new historical epoch, then? A name certainly helps. The “Anthropocene” has gained currency recently, and while its denotation of time is ostensibly geologic, there is surely a political edge to claiming we have moved beyond the Holocene. How many more ways can we ...
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Thoughts on Thanaticism

What’s Left?

A response to Jeremy Varon

Jeremy Varon’s interesting and important response raises three questions: 1) What do we mean by a “Left”? 2) How are we to understand the New Left’s break-up and, specifically the relation of the women’s movement to that break-up and 3) How are we to evaluate the Left today? Let me ...

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What’s Left?

Birth of Thanaticism

Even its adherents have no problem calling it capitalism any more. Its critics seem to be reduced to adding modifiers to it: postfordist, neoliberal, or the rather charmingly optimistic ‘late’ capitalism. A bittersweet term, that one, as capitalism seems destined to outlive us all. I awoke from a dream with the ...
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Birth of Thanaticism