… socially speaking, suicide is contagious, but where exactly do we catch it from? Is it not from capitalism itself, so complacent in the face of planetary disaster? A system that, ideologically speaking, also wants to instantiate a future without secrets? A foreclosed future that validates its own insistence that there is no alternative to its particular way of doing things? Capitalism does not long for its own demise, in much the same way that the suicidal individual hardly desires their own death, apropos of nothing. What defines late-capitalist society as a sick society is that, when faced with its innumerable global crises, it gives in to a certain passivity; a depressive acceptance that this is as good as it gets.
Mental Health is (Still) a Political Issue: On Mark Fisher’s Lost Futures
In reconsidering Mark Fisher’s concept of “lost futures”, Matt Colquhoun examines our contemporary moment. By addressing how our lost futures relate to capitalist realism today, Colquhoun explores ways in which the concept may be rethought positively, rather than depressively.
Focussing not on Fisher’s suicide, Colquhoun instead considers the suicidality of capitalism as a socioeconomic system, and reaffirms why, as Fisher himself insisted, “mental health is a political issue”.
Now more than ever, this is an issue that must be addressed if we are to reclaim the futures that capitalism would deny us.
44 pages | January 2023 | Published by Plan C