Michel Foucault

Anti-psychiatry is the belief that the psychiatric system is a system of social control masquerading behind made-up science. The Marxist anti-psychiatry movement failed because of it's overly intellectual focus and the inability of its key thinkers to put theory into practice. However, with mental health very much on the political agenda, there are lessons that can be learned from the work of R D Laing and David Cooper.

Barely two hundred and fifty years ago man condemned of attempting to assassinate the King of France was drawn and quartered in a grisly spectacle that suggested an unmediated duel between the violence of the criminal and the violence of the state.

Marco Cuevas-Hewitt outlines an emerging practice amongst radical writers; one entailing an attentiveness to intimations of alternative futures arising in the present. This "futurology of the present", as he calls it, represents a significant break with the hackneyed jeremiads and manifestos of earlier political generations, which limit themselves either to a simple negation of the present or to the authoritarian prescription of an idealised future. Delving into questions around the role of artists and writers in social movements and wider society, Cuevas-Hewitt's goal is a re-imagining of radical politics and a re-tooling of radical writerly practice.

“Is it surprising that prisons resemble factories, schools, barracks, hospitals, which all resemble prisons?” This is chapter 3 of Foucault’s seminal work Discipline and Punish, which details the growth of surveillance and disciplinary power alongside the utilitarian logic of early capitalism.