Hedva

The APA has a “topic” page on their website for “Emotional Health” that defines it like this:

Emotional health can lead to success in work, relationships and health. In the past, researchers believed that success made people happy. Newer research reveals that it’s the other way around. Happy people are more likely to work toward goals, find the resources they need and attract others with their energy and optimism—key building blocks of success.

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 There are many nights, when I start up in bed, the fight-or-flight nut of my brain exploding ...and I feel as if the only thing that really exists is being extinguished: “me.” I also feel this sucked-out vacuum of self-extinction in line at the pharmacy, to be told that one of my medications costs $800 USD a month without insurance.

In capitalism, the primary purpose of one’s life—both ideologically and materially—is to accumulate value. This is done through one’s labour, but of course primarily relies upon the exploitation of the labour of others and various resources of all kinds. As Silvia Federici has argued, such exploitation requires an accumulation of differences, beyond Marx’s “primitive accumulation” of natural and labour resources, to justify itself: self/other, white/black, male/female, society/nature, us/them, life/death.

“The order that collects differences, the order that collects what Marx called labor still objectifying itself, is the order of governance,” write Moten and Harney. Governance was invented for that which is ungovernable—I’d like to suggest that it was invented for de-persons...

Johanna Hedva