THIS TEXT IS BUT A BEGINNING ...

Illness:
Most immediately the need for life becomes sensually manifest experiencing that one's life is menaced and restricted, experiencing illness as the condition of their existence in capitalism [Krankheit als kapitalistischem Dasein], and as the need for change of this condition, that is the need for production, this need being inseparably tied to the pressure of suffering, which is always very close to the need for change, the need for production. Illness in the sense of a contradictory moment in life, carries within itself both the germ and the energy of its own negation, the will for life. But illness is at the same time inhibition of life, the negation of life. However, as negation of life, illness is not only a negation in the abstract sense, as when life is considered to be an isolated fact of biology, which it is only by appearance [erscheinungsmaessig] regarding the life process. Quite on the contrary, illness is both and in quite the same manner the product and the negation of the "living" conditions, and this means that illness is product and negation of the ruling relations of production in society. Determined as negation, illness is at the same time the force of production per se (productive force), which has the power to change the living conditions to which it "owes" its arising. So far as to the function of illness in an objective view.

As to the subjective view, by his suffering the person in illness is forced to make his existence and his life an object for his consciousness. And here it becomes quite clear that the function of health and welfare, combined to their institutions, and especially the relation between physician and patient is a thoroughly reactionary one: the patient’s isolation is intensified, his illness is being taken from him corresponding to "his" expectations, it is administrated like an object and exploited in order to create surplus value. The success of "healing" gets reified in the re-established labour force (fitness for work) of the sick person, which represents his function-ability in the life-inimical and illness-creating social production process of capitalism. In this consists the so-called "rehabilitation" of the ill person.

Physician and patient:
In his illness and in his condition of being a patient, the single one experiences his role as an object quite intensively, and like the focus point in a mirror, in complete defencelessness, loneliness [Vereinzelung] and rightlessness [Rechtlosigkeit]. His inability to act is experienced physically and is sensually certain [sinnlich gewiss] in his looking out for treatment or help. One of the most important functions of the physician in every situation of therapy, as an agent ruling all current social relations, consists in his task to affirm permanently and continuously the constitution of the patient as a person who must be treated in any case; the physician as an agent thereby rules all social relations as they are. The relation between physician and patient, anchored and organized in all institutions, therefore, works best as repression in permanence against the progressive impulsation [Moment] in illness, which is in every case protest and aims to become resistance with substantial effects [materialisierter Widerstand]. The pathogenic role of remaining an object is guaranteed especially by the state in the stage of so-called acute illness.

In other words, in the relationship between physician and patient that characterizes the entire health system both capitalism and the state have established and maintain a top instrument of oppression. While illness is in its acute stage and in need of treatment, the state employs live munition against the patient by delivering him, deprived of all rights, to the physician who is the omnipotent one in the doctor-patient-relationship. The patient lacks all kinds of rights and is unable to influence in any way the Whether or the How of his treatment, the basis he himself has established before, by creating surplus value, paying taxes and social contributions, but who is now unable to control or even to determine the treatment the doctor is carrying out against him. If necessary, the patient is put under tutelage, incapacitated, interned and murdered by euthanasia. The protest in illness, that is its progressive part (progressive moment of illness), therefore, will reach consciousness, articulate itself and become manifest as resistance only if the object role of the patient has been overcome and abolished in and through collective action [in der kollektiven Aufhebung der Objektrolle]. The physician, on the other hand, as ordered, is concerned with nothing but the reinforcement of the reactionary moment of illness by means of his individualizing and atomizing treatment. Nevertheless, the intensification of his isolation and individualization favours the patient's becoming conscious and the setting free of life energy, which is most powerful during the acute stage of illness as a protest and resistance against the conditions of illness in social relations (fever and more rapid pulses as well as the so-called violent tendencies in so-called mental disordered people represent quite drastic hints proving this reinforcement).

Single person - collective:
By realizing relations, circumstances and conditions as belonging to the objective side of my existence, relations which act as determinations against myself [Fremdbestimmung] and by turning those relations first of all into objects of my conceptual thinking, that means researching and investigating them, I turn myself into a subject, be it only germinally; but radically altering those relations and determinations makes me being a subject. – To do the first thing alone and as a single person is nearly impossible, to do the second thing as a single person is not possible at all.

It follows that the individual as a mere individual is damned to the role of always remaining an objective thing (isolation). Only cooperation in connection with solidarity together with other ones renders the movement from the object to the subject able. It follows that all persons who are nothing but isolated objects within the social relations can become subjects only through collective practice based on cooperation in solidarity.

By that the single persons, if cooperating in solidarity, have already changed the social relations for themselves, so far as they form a part of them, and this is due to the simple fact that they now constitute a part of the social relations as a collective – and no longer only as single persons – . Single persons are as objects of the social conditions nothing but victims who are unable even to defend themselves. But being together in and as a collective they represent immediately for themselves the visible – and to some extent real – possibility of becoming a subject of their own. This change of the social relations for themselves [fuer sich] bears within itself already the germ of their change in themselves [an sich].

It follows:

Every kind of intensification or refinement of medical treatment (so-called care for the sick) be it for example by enhancing a community-based deployment of the doctor’s functions, e.g. community psychiatry, Institute for Mental Health, hospitals in which the classes are abolished, so-called one-class hospitals etc., whereas all these medical functions are established by education, tradition and state-control and thus form and determine the relation between physician and patient in one way or another, is objectively nothing but a management that threatens and harms the patients, and every reform or refinement of it objectively serves to stabilize the murderous ruling relations. The relations of one person to another are from the beginning to be understood as relations from one object to another. In the case of the relation between physician and patient, for example, both patient and physician in this partnership, each in a quite specific manner, are nothing but objects of the same subject, that is of capitalism. The patient as the object of the apparent subject physician puts his pressure of suffering and all his needs and wants and his claims for change in the hand of the physician, according to the preset program, and the physician for his part, following his function in its objective regard as administrator of the capital turns himself into the administrator of illness. If the physician is "successful" he produces a change in the form of what is called "health", a matter of superstition which is perhaps regarded by the patient as the real fulfilling of his dreams, and that is achieved by the physician by having "liberated" the patient from specific symptoms: it is for the capitalism that the physician, according to his function in capitalism, repairs the patient’s labour force so that it can be consumed and exploited again in the capitalist process of production of surplus and profits.

All the relations between single, isolated people aim at the abolition of their being objects. This is achieved through a collective practice that is directed against the forces that are determining the historical process until now, namely the forces of capitalism (liberation movement based on solidarity). What is not produced in our collectives is the fetish of "individual health", no mutual appreciation of each other as interchange of values and commodities, called sympathy. What is produced instead is solidarity and the collective need for change. The changed consciousness is equally a prerequisite and a result of the practised political warfare; for only in the struggle for a socialism like that exists the real chance for self-realization.

The role of consciousness now comprehended as being nothing but an object in relation to Being [Objektrolle des Bewusstseins bezueglich des Seins] is resolved in the activity of the developed and developing cognition and consciousness, an activity which, as we mentioned, is bringing about change in the constituted Being, thus constituting the new context of a new, i.e. changed Being [seinsveraendernde Taetigkeit des ... Bewusstseins]. It is thus achieved a qualitatively new level: sublation [Aufhebung] that means negation [Negation] and, at the same moment, affirmation [Erhaltung] of the former lonely person now in collectivity, which constitutes a new quality of existence for the former single and isolated person, on a broader basis and within an extended space for the single one within the collective. The collective now is a new quality from both an objective and a subjective view: objectively, because the relations of production in capitalism now are in confrontation with a counter-power by which those relations of production in capitalism are forced to react by some specific patterns, and subjectively, because the new quality consists in that the former single, lonely, falsified, mutilated and inert consciousnesses come together and they are united and sublated [aufgehoben] by collective practising in the proceeding development of the new quality of the collective consciousness, in the community of all the consciousnesses.

In its confrontation with the counter-power of the capitalist system, the collective is permanently and simultaneously both the object and the subject of the process of change with which it is interacting.

The consciousness of the single one of being an object in the process of capitalist production and exploitation is at the same time the driving force for the abolition of these very factors of the capitalist system.

But this level of collective consciousness has to be worked out permanently again and again and has to be defended against the destructive effects of capitalism in the every-day’s process of production and reproduction, which affect the single person continuously, just as the defence of the level of consciousness achieved has to be conducted in an every-day and every-night agitation-practice [Agitationsarbeit] within the continuously expanding collective.

The ill person entering the collective doesn't remain the single, isolated one he or she was before entering the collective. Also, the goal of his or her participation is not to leave the collective as a "safe and sound" person ("cured") – as would be the goal of e.g. an outpatient clinic, a doctor’s practice or some other support organization – thus being nothing but the same isolated person as before and, furthermore, being left deprived of all protection, as well as defenceless and unarmed at the mercy of the same unchanged persisting principle of reality of the pathogenic and life-inimical society in capitalism. Rather, in the collective each ill person begins to turn his or her illness into a process of objectivization; a process that represents the development of the collective as a whole and this process must be carried out by everybody:

• The object role of the single person in opposition to the relations of production (production of surplus value – destruction of life) is experienced subjectively as a subject role. This contradiction becomes a substantial one and becomes manifest within the quality of illness, pressure of suffering.

• To the socially produced consciousness, illness presents itself only as opposed to the single one, and is perceived as his or her fatum, that is as a self-inflicted destiny for which no one else but the single person himself or herself is to blame. But it is the society in capitalism which appropriates illness for its own purposes in order to exploit it and to turn it into a value by means of the individualizing treatment within the relation between physician and patient, which is controlled by the patient-inimical and illness perpetuating health system (social taxes – "programmed" illness). And this contradiction [Widerspruch] is the essence of the quality which we are used to call patient.

• In the sick person there is represented the contradiction between illness as a protest (= life expression) and the inhibition of this protest. This contradiction is to be unfolded towards the new quality of becoming conscious of one's role as an object, of being a single and isolated person within the process of production and destruction in capitalism.

• And there is the experience of the dialectic interaction between the Being and the consciousness – that is to say: illness as the blockage of life and illness as the not yet articulated protest against the life-inimical relations and against the social compulsive mechanisms. This experience comes to its expression in the collective need for change, combined to the abolition of all illusionary wishes for "health". New quality: socialist self-organization, collective.

• The more the collective expands, the more acute will the confrontation with the institutions of social domination become (health sector, university, ministry, judiciary, police); struggle of the collective against the institutions, public relations work. In these clashes, the collective becomes the subject of the processes of social change. At the same time, both inwards and outwards (by the formation of more socialist self-organizations focused on illness) the principle of multi-focal expansionism [Multi-Fokaler Expansionismus] is unfolded as a new quality.

• In the struggle of the collective against the life-inimical forces of the social system, also the multi-focal expansionism is developed up to the new quality of political identity [politische Identitaet], i.e. to the unity of needs and political struggle.

• This process takes place in each single person, within the collective and also between the collectivities, the focusses of the movement.

Starting from the manner in which the collective works and the way in which it is organized: inter-agitation between single persons and agitation in groups, work-groups in epistemology, political actions and the ongoing expansion of the collective – the principle of the multi-focal expansionism is developed, which is a new quality. This principle of multi-focal expansionism in a germinal sense already exists within the essential structures of the patients' self-organization: each ill person as a such one is a focus (nucleus of crystallization) of the social contradictions on a certain, more or less developed level. By means of the process in personal or group agitation, these contradictions in each single person are worked out and unfolded, so that everybody step by step and in permanent repetition overcomes the stadium of his personal isolation: At first with regard to his or her partner in personal agitation, then with regard to the agitation group, and finally, the former single and isolated person, now part of the collective, for his or her part will experience and shape the reality and effectiveness of the collectivity. In this process, constantly repeated, everybody goes through the stages:

subjectively subject - objectively object,
subjectively object - objectively subject,

and within the consciously enacted production of collective consciousness, everybody will eventually produce the moments of the identity between Being and consciousness, that is the new quality of the political identity will be experienced and produced (Note 37). Focus means, as we know from ray optics: a converging lens, for example, that collects all beams of light that pass the lens in one point, the focal point, the focus, the burning point of collectivity. But focus also means hearth in the certain sense that such a hearth is a starting point for effects, for example of unrest, or that such a focus can be compared also to a simple cooking-stove or range, which produces warmth while working. And by that we have determined the word "focus" in its double sense: to be a point of collectivity, focus on the one hand, and to be a starting point, a hearth on the other hand, "focus" the denomination of a dialectic identity, that means a contradictory one.

Every ill person now represents in a specific way some focus. In an objective view, everybody, as a single person represents the focus of social contradictions. But by means of the process of consciously unfolding of the contradictions of protest and inhibition, collected in illness, the quality "focus" as the burning point of the social relations (contradictions) is turned into a subjective quality, and that means that the ill person – now having become able to handle in a quite clear manner and in full consciousness the social contexts of his suffering – has achieved to change himself or herself from the lonely and isolated person he or she was in the beginning into a focus, who now is really a such one, both from a subjective and an objective viewpoint.

Illness as consciousness of suffering, as known inhibition and suppression, is both the prerequisite and the tendential sublation of the quality "focus", as point of collectivity (burning point), in the new quality "focus" as hearth. Only through the awareness of his or her total object role, through the consciousness of illness as inhibition and suppression, the ill person is enabled to liberate conscious protest, the progressive moment in illness. The process of turning the quality "focus" (inhibition) into the quality "hearth" represents the emancipation of the object, done by cooperation and solidarity. And it is by this and by nothing else that a treated one [ein Behandelter] becomes a subject, an active one [ein Handelnder].

In all societies, formed and organized by capitalism, sexuality cannot be defined except in a thoroughly formalistic and abstract manner; that means that sexuality can't be conceived of as something which exists already. Quite on the contrary, sexuality has to be conceived of as something that, for being achieved effectively, needs to be developed yet.

Freud, in his dullness due to his membership of the bourgeois class, never was willing or allowed to work out a fertile theoretical concept of this approach of his and bring it to the point and to the conclusion, disregarding all the consequences. (Note 38) Psychoanalysis works only on the level of ideas, but sexuality, being an indispensable expression of life, which is setting free life-energy, therefore, in psychoanalysis mostly can't neither be seized and worked out nor realized. What appears as an improvement in healing and treatment, therefore, is nothing but the absence of certain symptoms, especially of the most disturbing ones, an adaption to the norms of a petty-bourgeois behaviour in sexuality.

Wilhelm Reich, then, was the first who attempted to turn Freud's theory from the head to its feet (Note 39). Researching the disturbances in sexual functions, while assuming that these disturbances were caused by "psychologic" factors and vice versa, he by and by succeeds in proceeding to the beginnings of a dialectic and historical view. This view leads him to the ground of the essential contradiction that has always worked between sexuality as a function of life and its permanent being broken by the forces of nature that initially acted against human societies to which were added later on the man-made violent forces of capitalism, nowadays organized and acting as a world-wide system of forces, which are reinforcing in an exponential manner the inhibitions formerly caused only by the forces of nature (Note 40).

Following this conceptual approach of W. Reich, based on his dialectics of history, in the SPK it became comprehensible in a quite self-evident manner that illness itself had to be conceived of as the one ruling antagonism and contradiction in life itself and that therefore illness had to be conceived of as life broken-in-itself through and through, and that all life as being broken even from before its beginning nowadays can only consist of and exist in illness.

To the destructive force of capitalism, which has taken the forces of nature to the highest degree of destruction of any life everywhere at an increasing rate, menacing with death every kind of life with omnipresent growing tendency, corresponds, at the level of the single one, the transformation of sexuality into anxiety in which all the self-destructive impulses are focused, self-destruction being inherent to this anxiety.

If you want to get a concrete knowledge about sexuality in its respective phenomena throughout history, you have to analyze the surroundings, the socio-economic and the cultural conditions in order to comprehend all of its functions. The necessities that arise from the fact that the human beings always have to care about how to reproduce their living conditions, living conditions which in former times mankind had to extort by permanent new efforts from the natural forces that threatened them everywhere; necessities, needs and living conditions for the accomplishment of which the human being of nowadays has to pay by submitting himself to the ruling social order of the capitalist system – all these necessities do not only work against sexuality.

Rather, it must be assumed that the separation between sexuality and the whole of the functions dealing with the reproduction of the economic and cultural living conditions is not possible at all. Whoever speaks of sexuality, or means sexuality when he speaks, can make himself understood only if he at least knows that he moves inside the categorical and epistemological system of economy and administration. Whatever he or she may intend by sexuality – he or she may think, for example, of his or her affective experiences of sexual nature – can of course only be communicated in an abstract and very general manner, since these experiences refer to feelings that already have become conscious enough, but in doing so, he or she is neither able to grasp specific feelings (in relation to sexuality) nor will he or she be able to know if the experiences considered by him/her as sexual, or the experiences communicated to him or her by others, are really more than some sediments of feelings of functional relationships that have nothing or almost nothing to do with sexuality. Consider, for example the extremely strange phenomena of nymphomania or satyriasis (kinds of most exaggerated sexual drive in women and men) and you soon will experience that these phenomena which, at the first glance, seem to be expressive forms of a flabbergasting sexual activity indeed are nothing but the highest degrees of self-defence against sexuality, because sexuality in the cases of satyriasis and nymphomania is based on pleasure-fear [W. Reich, Lust-Angst], wherein this exaggerated "sexual activity" seems to be the only means to inactivate this pleasure-fear. If it were possible to isolate neatly a sexual behaviour like that by putting away all economic and cultural components, what then would remain, would never be sexuality, but the anxiety which determines a sexual behaviour like that.

Who looks out for original forms of sexuality in order to reconstruct them has to refer to descriptions of communities of life which easily could mislead him into thinking they were lost paradises of a quite permissive sexuality, because they are up to the most extent different from today's civilization and culture, apart from their being sometimes a quite profitable source for literature.

The general promiscuity in the so-called primeval horde, which was free of restrictions, had no ban on incest and obviously did not take into account the age difference of the partners, served as a function of the constant maintenance of optimal living conditions for this community. It was not at all liberated sexuality, but rather the result of the impulses urged by external threats that induced community members to give themselves the greatest possible cohesion and to delimit themselves in the face of the attacks of other primeval hordes and their assaults on the material conditions of survival that had to be protected, a necessity that most time required all efforts of self-defence.

It was W. Reich who worked out (The Invasion of Compulsory Sex-Morality!) [Der Einbruch der Sexualmoral] how sexuality is abruptly turned into a complete different one by passing from the primeval communist societies to those of the patriarchal system. To the establishment of the patriarchal system, where, on the one hand, property is being stabilized and perpetuated from the father to the son and so on all along the succeeding generations, corresponds, on the other hand, the uttermost restriction of sexuality, which means in terms of psychoanalysis that, starting from the earliest stages of childhood, all pleasure arising from sexuality [Genitalitaet] is more and more being repressed in order to be replaced by oral and anal pleasure satisfaction. Formerly, the persons firstly needed to be together and to constitute some being together if they wanted and in order to practise sexuality. But later on the same being together took place in order to take the meals together and thus a new habit had been imposed by force, provoked to the sole purpose and the only intention of perverting pleasure from a sexual one to an oral one.

Due to such constraints to form coalitions, the autonomy and spontaneity of the single persons are increasingly restricted and suppressed.

Tendencies of centralization emerge in the form of the allocation of fixed roles and of the subjugation of the single one to the pre-established mechanisms of obedience and prohibition, create artifically hostilities from person against person and from the one family unit against the others, to finally clash violently in the form of a delimitation of these associations of almost totally de-sexualized families, which manifests itself in a crescendo of hostility until to break out in acts of violence.

It is precisely this expression of hostility, either as a hidden one or in a plain manner in the performance of war-games in theatre or reality, that we know up to nowadays.

The personal behaviour since the establishing of the original capitalist and patriarchal system, therefore, involves also sado-masochist tendencies, neurotic anxiety, the need for models and leaders in order to get a so-called "self", a personal ego which can be perseverated and iterated for a lifetime. Modalities of behaviour like these, in the view of W. Reich, have nothing to do with genital drive impulses, but nevertheless they represent in fact sexuality because of having been sexualized in secondary processes of sexual development, sometimes considered as a deviant one in a clinical sense. In any case these mechanisms, which have to do with nonsexual drives since the earliest times of childhood, urge inhibitions and barriers that block the ability to become impressionable especially by genital stimuli, favouring tendencies of oral consumption instead, which, in tendency, can become a more and more aggressive and destructive one (see bulimia), as well as anal perseveration and retentiveness, which appear as the accumulation of possession that has to be defended against everybody else by whatever means and weapons available.

Under these circumstances, therefore, sexual conduct doesn't exist at all, it can no longer be considered as an autonomous, self-expressing component in our behaviour. Rather, it only represents a kind of glue or cement in the context of the relations of economic exchange between men and nature and between men and men. Sexual conduct is in each detail determined and governed by the necessities of the economic system. Where the persons in sexual interaction believe to have made their choices based on primary or secondary signs of sympathy and sexual attraction, it must be assumed, if we regard things from an objective point of view and as they really are, that this choice is pre-determined by upbringing and education, by the respective environment and the stereotypes of everyday life the persons are accustomed to, the origin of which we may find nowhere else but in the interests of the economic system. Any specific sexual attribute, from the biologic constitution up to the perception-structures of everybody, is entirely conditioned by the sexualization of the partial drives [Partialtriebe] mentioned above, the activation of which is the result of the competition between the endeavours deriving from the economic system on the one hand and the suppressed impulses that are striving for genitality on the other.

It is quite clear that the relations of production as a totality are sedimented in the body and in the so-called psyche which is nothing more than a man-made artificial product. Consequently, any approach which claims to cope with the sexual misery is doomed to failure if it abstracts from the totality of the ruling relations of production on the one hand and from their necessary abolition on the other. In the SPK, it was our primary interest to regard any immediate sexual need as a such one which had to be understood as a need produced by capitalism, and that implies that it had to be worked out as such. And for that very reason attitudes such as: "Before engaging in political work, one must firstly overcome sexual difficulties", or viceversa, that "only after the abolition of the private ownership (private property) of the means of production would it be possible to achieve sexual emancipation", had to be replaced as they represented merely an abstract negation [abstrakte Negation]. Quite on the contrary, we tried to look out for concrete possibilities for practicing sexual relations, always taking into account the immediate living conditions of the single person, constituting a determinate, real and effective negation [bestimmte Negation].

The original negation of sexuality [die einfache Negation der Sexualitaet] is an accomplished fact, the sexual energies being split into partial drives caused by their having developed within the relations of production of the capitalist system (voyeurism, commodity fetishism, "perversions" and so on). The splitting of sexual energy into partial drives and their reversal into oral and anal functions and dysfunctions is the material realization of the dominant rule of the exchange value, whereas genitality can be found only far back in history or in early childhood. Submitted to and repressed by the exchange value all so-called "inter-human" relationships are pre-determined and are nothing but relations between objects (= exchange of neuroticisms). To turn object-object-relations into subject-subject-relations is a task and a problem whose solution is possible only if there is a political practice capable of negating and abolishing all exchange values; CLASS-WARFARE! (Note 41).

The process of emancipating sexuality can be outlined as follows in a somewhat schematic way:

1. One must start from the negation of sexuality as a function of life and also from the premise that there exists a dominating control tied to the partial drives (commodity fetishism). The objects sexualized by the partial drives also instill anxiety. From this follows the need to free the partial drives from their frightening contents in imaginary representation. In this first stage, every kind of activity related to practicing sexuality has to be supported and encouraged (for example: masturbation is in no way harmful, but there can result a danger when masturbation is accompanied by self-destructive, namely masochistic and sadistic contents of imaginary representation).

2. Negation of the partial drives through their subordination to the genital function [Genitalfunktion]. The transition from 1) to 2) presupposes a sexual relationship and that the sexual partners are willing to cooperate with each other. Once the anxieties and inhibitions have disappeared, attitudes of sexual promiscuity may occur temporarily, but they disappear as soon as the need for cooperation with those members of the group, who had been the first choice for practicing sexuality, has been recognized.

3. Because sexuality is still split off from the life-function in its totality, it now has to be integrated into the being-a-subject [Subjektsein], determined as political identity. However, we have to keep well in mind that even if we succeed in organizing sexuality in a genital way, be it only at least rudimentary, and if we also succeed in overcoming the partial drives best we can, its practice remains something detached and particular, as long as the alienated life context in its totality, to which the single persons are subject, continues to exist (workplace, family, school, university in their capitalist organizational form), since these conditions permanently and perpetually continue to work against us as long as they persist. But the experience of the possibility to achieve real happiness in sexuality mobilizes precisely those energies (strength from illness) which we need to stand up against the destructive and life-hostile system in order to create the premises we need to regain our bodies in the context where sexuality represents thus the focus from which starts community, but also the danger of its failure and destruction.

The question of whether there is a solution to sexual misery or not is a matter of practical conduct and far away from being a subject of any thesis or theory, that means, this question is not a theoretical one, but a practical one. (Note 42)

		Chapter VI