swampman posted:Well it may be a little radiolab of me to say, but any honest conception of mental illness has to come from the starting point that capitalism is either the major or sole contributing factor. It's not that people won't have say, manic episodes under socialist government, just that the solutions will actually be effective because they won't have to turn a profit or fear community involvement.
I have been skimming an english translation of SPK: Turn Illness into a Weapon. There is a materialist middle ground in between the "everyone is sick, terrorism is the cure" and the liberal psychological viewpoint that looks only at the person's physiology or immediate surroundings, with greater examinations of societal structures affecting mental health being left to sociologists.
Cure - this is self-evident - can’t be understood in our system to mean the elimination of illness: it serves exclusively as the maintenance of the ability to go to work where one stays sick. In our society there are the well and the cured (two categories of unwittingly sick people who fit the norms of production), and on the other hand those recognized as sick, who are rendered incapable of performing wage work, and whom one sends to the psychiatrist. This ‘policeman’ begins by placing them outside the purview of the law by denying them the most fundamental rights. He is clearly an accomplice of the atomizing powers: he approaches individual cases as if psycho-neurotic disturbances were the personal flaw and fate of an individual.
This is the kernel where a materialist analysis of mental health must begin, our very conceptions of mental health or sickness are based on whether they are able to produce commodities through labor, produce children through domestic labor, and produce culture.
There are a couple ways that you can branch off from this starting point. The SPK takes the line that almost all things conceived of as mental illness stem from capitalism:
Paranoid “delusion” is one of the most common illnesses; it is, in the broadest sense, pure and simply the social illness. The term paranoid “delusion” is only a label which already shows the misunderstanding of those who came up with it. When all or almost all of an individual’s impressions lead him to perceive there’s a threat in his environment to his existence, his life, if he creates fantasies in his imagination (hallucinations) for which there are no immediately evident, concrete causes in the present, then he’ll be declared paranoid and delusional by the medical diagnosticians. Agoraphobia (fear of traversing open spaces), fear of bridges, claustrophobia (fear of crowded spaces), hypochondria (fear of the breakdown of his own body), erythrophobia (frear of blushing) etc., are merely specific forms in which paranoid “delusion” takes shape. Paranoid “delusion” is nothing other than the labeled, ostracized, marginalized, defamed flipside or extension of what in popular speech is called “healthy mistrust.” Paranoid “delusion” is the product of the individual’s objectification in capitalist society, it’s the expression of the polarized relationship of life and capital, of organic and living matter with inorganic, dead matter.
This is a topic that requires deeper investigation. Numerous leftist groups have tried to fix addiction as a petty bourgeois influence through socialist study and practice with mixed results. The SPK started with building small communities as a weapon against capitalism's effects on the mind then veered into ultra-leftist adventurism with bombs being the cure that would help people break out of their mental chains.
tpaine posted:or alternately why i still post here
The desolation of social life which results from this means that urban areas quickly become investment targets of additional industries. The entertainment industry fills this wasteland with arcades, juke boxes, nude bars, etc., and thereby produces: prostitution, street crime, rock bands, and those forms of asocial behavior which the system’s defenders pass off not as the result of capitalism but of industrialization.
The individual in capitalist society is thus the object of a double exploitation, both in the realm of production and in consumption. He’s like that man in Greek mythology whose wishes are filled by the gods so that everything he touches turns to gold, but as a result he dies of hunger and thirst. Not only activity in the workplace but also leisure activities turn to gold for capital - the stroke with the tennis racket, the trip with the car, the tossing of coins into the juke box.
Eleven Theses on Illness
1) Illness is the presupposition and the result of capitalist relations of production.
2) As the presupposition of capitalist relations of production, illness is the productive force for capital.
3) As the result of capitalist relations of production, illness, in its developed form as the protest of life against capital, is the revolutionary productive force for humans.
4) Illness is the only form of “life” possible under capitalism.
5) Illness and capital are identical: to the degree capital is accumulated - a process which goes hand in hand with the destruction of human work, known as ‘destruction by capitalism’ - the spread and intensity of illness increases.
6) Capitalist relations of production involve the transformation of living
work into dead material (goods, capital). Illness is the expression of
this continually self-expanding process.
7) Illness is, like concealed unemployment, the crisis buffer of late
capitalism in the form of social security contributions.
8) In its undeveloped form illness is a limitation, the inner prison of the
individual.
9) If illness is taken away from the administration, exploitation, and
custody of health care institutions and emerges as the form of patients’ collective resistance, then the state has to intervene and patients’ lack of an inner prison will have to be addressed with external, “actual” prisons.
10) The healthcare system can only deal with illness under the premise that patients lack any rights at all.
11) Health is a biological, fascist fantasy whose function in the heads of the stupid and stupid-makers is the concealment of the social conditions and social functions of illness.
This (and the flood of amphetamines, benzos, and marijuana) is a bigger deal than any kind of psychological insight we can come up with. We have to stop people medicating themselves into compliance with a life of chronic pain and stress. The right approach as usual is meet people's basic needs and give them democratic control over their lives. Also there are a lot of messed up people including me who are basically going to be this way forever, even if Communism Pro Plus sweeps the globe tomorrow. The only way we can guarantee mental health is to raise children in a healthy environment, that's the kind of participatory cure that is achievable and elicits the support of sufferers of mental illness. i think
Edited by swampman ()
swampman posted:http://www.wvgazettemail.com/news-health/20161217/drug-firms-poured-780m-painkillers-into-wv-amid-rise-of-overdosesThis (and the flood of amphetamines, benzos, and marijuana) is a bigger deal than any kind of psychological insight we can come up with. The right approach as usual is meet people's basic needs and give them democratic control over their lives. Also there are a lot of messed up people including me who are basically going to be this way forever, even if Communism Pro Plus sweeps the globe tomorrow. The only way we can guarantee mental health is to raise children in a healthy environment, that's the kind of participatory cure that is achievable and elicits the support of sufferers of mental illness. i think
Good points.
The role of alienation and illness derived from alienation does have a profound impact on political organizing. One example is the role that this has had in causing political expression to take an adventurist turn. A more modern example is the Black Bloc, and AK Thompson in Black Bloc White Riot does a good job at identifying the white petty bourgeois nature of this tactic as being rooted in the white petty bourgeois existing in an alienated space.
However, Thompson, like the SPK, believes that acting on this rage through redemptive violence is the cure. This alienation combined with structural and ingrained racism has led to an idealistic petty bourgeois force demanding revolution without being a revolutionary force in motion.
tpaine posted:or alternately why i still post here
during the final push of the revolution you'll be asked to provide moral support to our comrades by telling fart jokes and "misplacing" whoopee cushions under prominent leaders that laugh and clap before quietly whispering "gulag" into their earpiece