Your question on the identity of illness and Capital suggests a hunger for proletarian science and is therefore answered immediately. The collective consciousness has addressed this issue in the SPK-Documentation II. I do not know whether you have got the text, if not, I’ll send you a written copy. But first to your present difficulties.

It is true that the conditions of capitalist production inhibit each activity. On the productive forces this has more or less the effect as if they were compelled to drive an endurance race with blocking brakes. That this is so, they usually notice not because of the wear but because of the lack of acceleration or the falling speeds.

This is how it appears, at least on the subject level. Because objectively it is ensured that the speed is maintained. There are selection mechanisms for this. From KZ-ramp to differential euthanasia. The products, of course, do not show this kind of wear. The reverse is also true: no productivity appears to be in illness and death. The identity of wear and product, that is, the relation by which both merge into one another – in Hegelian: have merged into one another – is Capitalism as form of society in which all the productive forces are unleashed up to total anarchy, and they must be unleashed, because they are kept totally blocked right from the start: the Imperialism as it is developed in the final chapter of "Capital", Volume I.

First is the identity of illness and Capitalism. In the system of wage labour and Capital, wear and product still are just like two identical objects that cannot be made to coincide for the only reason that their common third is not made transparent in relation to them, Capitalism, that has moved on since Marx and thus became more transparent. As Imperialism, it has reached its supreme form of expression. Wear and product are coming closer and closer, and eventually turn into each other.

This point is reached when the product, while it is being produced, turns likewise underhand into immediate wear, as it is all obvious when it explodes in statu nascendi.

This level of unleashed productivity has long been reached: the bomb currently nascent in the free world as a serial product explodes now as merely numerically distinct in Vietnam or elsewhere. Wear and product are therefore identical, the product as a commodity for trade tends more and more to disappear, while the commodity labour force takes its place. Its market value is determined by its specific property illness. As adaptation to destruction ("health" in the sense of functional capability), the commodity illness is prepared, bought and traded freely by the profit economy in the form of wage-dependent slaves of all kind.

As a non-fungible or no-longer-fungible commodity it is taken on lease by the state (owner is indeed the Capital, represented by just under 3% of the healthy-sick) and flows back into the economy for the purpose of recapitalisation or as ground rent resp. differential rent ("Capital", Volume III), in part directly, or through the state budget.

In the collective consciousness, this side of capitalist destruction was called Imperialism versus the interior. The bourgeois ideology shapes this trade in human beings into a true to scale welfare and social state. "Imperialism versus the interior" means tyranny through illness and as illness, and is thus tantamount to economic heteronomy by imposed needs and the related surrogates of need satisfaction.

The identity of illness and Capital, therefore, is a unity of opposites, analogous to the relation between wage labour and Capital (Capital is only possible by wage labour, but (the) wage labour(er) is never Capital(ist), and (the) Capital(ist) (is) never wage labour(er); thus, Capital at the level of Imperialism, is only possible as illness, etc.).

You see, however, that this analogising remains formal, abstracting from the essential content of Imperialism. This content is state power, which is delegated to the people as illness (for the censorship: as it is also written down in the Basic Law: all state authority is derived from the people).

Wage labour and Capital are antagonisms that obviously can be set in a contractual and reconcilable relation to each other by compromises. But illness and Capital – as Imperialism – reveal each by itself as antagonisms the mad residual of bourgeois interiority, whose "regulator" is the untenable turning of the opposites into one another.

To illustrate this with an example: the famous drug wave, as one of the many vehicles, not only sets this turning into each other in motion, but illustrates by the standard situation Vietnam what the identity of illness and Capital as Imperialism is all about. In fact, there are credible reports referring that the bourgeois interiority of US-American stamping could mostly only cope with its capitalist mission of killing, dying and losing when on drugs.

This seems to indicate that the tyranny perishes from illness as embodied and materialised violence against itself. Conversely, however, illness as the productive force No. 1 becomes more and more the surefire tip for exploitation and valorisation of Capital, since it provides for the accelerating exchange of the commodity workforce with profit opportunities even on such sectors of the fabrication of "health", where today, because of legitimate investment anxiety, mass mortality is still the case.

With the disappearance of Capitalism, free wage labour is turned into socially necessary and essential labour. With the disappearance of Imperialism versus the interior, which constitutes itself as ubiquitous institutionalised violence, illness loses its base and becomes the free possibility of social cooperation and social productivity.

As you can see, all of this is not new. Everything already written down in the statutes of the World Health Organisation, in the many blue and red volumes of Marx and Engels, and in the constitution. Take your time in studying them. But try not to stick to details which might not be clear at first reading. The discursive dialectics always targets the whole and always considers the totality of everything, with all its leaps, crab walks, narrowings, zigzag movements.

If some details appear difficult, strange, unusual to you, then take it as a sign that you could not conceive it at the first attempt as a reflection of the whole, but that you still put it in the context of your present experience. The latter may be right against the "whole of the book", but not without it.

Under the given circumstances, by way of exception, the old chemistry professor Kekulé is right once again (for the censorship: he is the "inventor" of the benzene ring, see "Organic Chemistry", Freudenberg, first third): Nothing is more practical than theory.

From: SPK-Documentation Part 3, 1^st edition 1977

 

Translation:	MFE Greece, MFE craencStw
Final editing:	Huber KRANKHEIT IM RECHT

 

Time-line SPK

The state of the world ist illness. What is to be done?

Our theory of revolution (outline)

What we wanted to revolutionise so far?
Answer: the revolution, from our earliest beginnings
up to the present day

Revolution is but illness’ strength, otherwise it was none at all

 

Patients’ Front / Socialist Patients’ Collective, PF/SPK(H), 28.04.2014