MARK FISHER WAS OFTEN ASKED what "capitalist realism" is. His most interesting answer was that it is “a pathology of the Left.” Fisher thought the Left, in its pathology, had capitulated to neoliberalism, and thus to capitalism. This raises the question of whether the end of neoliberalism will mean the end of capitalist realism, and even the end of capitalism.
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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.
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It is my hope that this reflection, comprising a mélange of history and anecdote, will serve the socialist with the patience for a critical perspective in the 21st century. There is no time like the present for the Left to reconsider the Cuban Question.
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This is the first of a two-part article written by Alexander Riccio. The second part, “Towards a new vanguard theory,” will appear in PR #114 in March, 2019.
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In his still unrivalled 1930 History of the Russian Revolution, Leon Trotsky celebrated the type of Marxist revolutionaries who, under Vladimir Lenin’s leadership, carried out the October 1917 insurrection in Petrograd. “Bolshevism created the type of authentic revolutionist,” he recalled, “who subordinates to historic goals irreconcilable with contemporary society the conditions of his personal existence, his ideas, and his moral judgments. The necessary distance from bourgeois ideology was kept in the party by a vigilant irreconcilability whose inspirer was Lenin.”
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