VII
Documentary chapter
37. About the
political economy of the identity of suicide = murder
1. Patients' Info
No. 35 - New University's Mirror No. 6 [Neuer
Uni-Spiegel]
SUICIDE = MURDER = SUICIDE =
MURDER = SUICIDE
Material misery is progressive
in the sense that it generates revolutionary potential. As we know, Marx claims
this function (moment) for the (industrial) proletariat (subjective factor).
Social proscription, however, is the mark of the "riff-raff
proletariat" (the unemployed, the sick, the criminals = “it’s their own
fault”). These people are – caused by the ruling ideology – outcasts and as
such excluded from both the social process and the revolutionary movement.
Their political honorary title varies between anti-social and anarchist ...
"It's no shame to be poor" ... "Money lost, much lost / honour
lost, all lost” … and as the related dicta (objective spirit) are otherwise
called.
Capitalism
generates material misery through exploitation (dialectical moment, as follows from
Hegel, Philosophy of Law, analogously: capitalism is too poor to abolish the
poverty it has produced).
Along with every person’s inner development
capitalism produces the fear of, or respectively because of and by social
proscription (historical process of a person in which the consciousness is
always and essentially programed long before birth in such a manner to avoid at
any rate each occurrence and each situation in which could arise any kind of
social proscription).
Both factors, material misery
and social proscription, are deadly, are instruments of murder of the
capitalist society, by which this society continues to make us suffer until it
is crushed between these its own millstones. The Faculty of Medicine, the
Rector of the University, Rendtorff, and the Minister of Culture, Hahn, made use
of these millstones until they had achieved to murder an SPK patient, a use as
we know with rather dubious success. The lockout, the dismissal and the ban on
entering the clinic, aimed equally at causing physical annihilation and social
discrimination (public instigation to hatred by the press, television and so on).
From the first day of her appearance in the SPK, the now murdered SPK patient was confronted with these murderous instruments perhaps more directly than most of the others. It had been her urgent want to join our work as soon as possible. She had to materially safeguard her spontaneously expressed wish to join our work by continuing to go on sick leave. But leaving the city where she had come from (Cologne) she had got no money except a sickness benefit which the health insurance and the physicians at Heidelberg now refused to pay if she should continue to stay at Heidelberg instead of turning back to Cologne. Labelled as being a "schizophrenic person", she felt herself tainted by a hereditary disease up to the stigma of total inferiority, and she now also had to face the risk of being politically discriminated if she should continue to join the SPK, her intention, that as an upright personality she couldn't but express even to the authorities. Therefore, she was right with her fear that her participation in the SPK would be put on record due to the sick leave and that this could result in further disadvantages caused by this discrimination (rejection when looking for a job, compulsory hospitalization in a mental hospital, if she should continue her struggle for the sickness benefit to which she was legally entitled, etc.). And that was exactly the fear she expressively associated to the fact that the Minister of Culture, Hahn, had so far denied the legitimation to the SPK to become an institution of the University. As is well known, all her attempts to avoid her being politically discriminated, i.e. to avoid contact with the authorities, resulted in increase in material hardship.
Also she had experienced, when she visited the Medical Policlinic of the
University, that it lacked any efficiency, even if she had been willing to take
the stigma of social proscription ("schizophrenic") upon herself and
to get along with it, and thus the failure to secure her immediate needs could not
but reinforce her impression that her own situation in particular could only
become more and more hopeless in the future ("to schizophrenic persons I
never give any medical certificate" – so she was told by the assistant
physician of the University's Medical Policlinic).
When she undertook her second
attempt to get a job on her own account, the now murdered SPK patient had been
praised for her efficiency when submitting a working sample. But she despaired all
the more
because of the great expectations placed on her by her employers because she
felt socially inferior. The material situation of the SPK, caused by Rendtorff
and Hahn, can't offer any chance of survival, let alone the possibility of any
"rehabilitation", be it only by small steps. But we'll never forget
that we have to struggle by all means to change this situation!
The physical annihilation, pushed
ahead by the instigation on the side of our enemies, is expressed in the last
letter of the now murdered SPK patient by the significant words: "I am
dead". Her fear of her being socially proscribed seems to have been her
companion even with regard to the time after her death: "I don't want to
be buried along with Marx and Lenin". "I didn’t understand anything"
means: I’m honest enough to know that I cannot behave actively against the murderous
weapons of hunger and misery, and that's why I think that the behaviour I have
chosen is now understandable and making sense. If KuMi Hahn (KuMi = abbr.
signifying cowshit, instead of KultusMinister,
ie. Minister of Culture), Rector Rendtorff and the pig compulsory physicians (Schweinepflichtaerzte
instead of physicians bound to confidentiality = Schweigepflichtaerzte;
NB: physicians paid with hush money) of the Medical Faculty (fucking medicine;
German abbr.: Med.Fak.) believe that now they could wash their hands in innocence,
it’s a huge deception of their perception (more about that in Hegel’s Phenomenology
of Spirit, chapter II).
Murder is murder. But Schreibtischmoerder (desk murderers,
wire pullers behind the scenes) can't be compared with ordinary murderers, they
are worse. They are body snatchers, greasy vampires. Anyone who has experienced
that and suffered this on their own bodies (SPK) knows what is meant by that.
But the murderous acts of the killer
clique that pulls the strings behind the scene, namely of Hahn, Rendtorff and the
pigs of the Faculty of Medicine will strike back on them according to the
principle of dialectics determined by capitalism.
SOCIALIST
PATIENTS’ COLLECTIVE April 16, 1971
at the University of Heidelberg
Rohrbacher Str. 12
2. Patients' Info
No 37 – New University’s Mirror No. 8
ABOUT THE POLITICAL ECONOMY OF
MURDER
"A crime can be
ruled out" – is what is written in the "suicide note"
of the Heidelberg newspapers
April 10, 1971. The newspapers, just like the bourgeois
science must exclude the crime, namely
the permanent destruction of human
beings by the capitalist system of exploitation.
Freedom of the press is the freedom
of those in power to veil connections and contexts.
Many readers of our first
communication about "suicide = murder" have got more appetite for more
details after having consumed that leaflet. No thought
about that they could have
gone to the press on their own initiative in order to insist resolutely on the
publication of a coherent report; they also lacked any drive to feel stimulated
to actively correct such murder shit, variations of which have been exhaustively
analyzed for decades
already. Their little bit
of bad conscience can't but make them
feel some remorse when they read the word "murder". Due to the pseudo-critical
mentality they have acquired through conditioning habitually inculcated
during their childhood and through education, they are fond of feeding that sort
of conscience with some more details so that they can continue to sleep all the
more peacefully afterwards. To comprehend connections is easy, you can learn to put them down
in writing in a suitable adequate manner, but to act consistently
is a very heavy task for those who still believe that they are healthy and fear
that there might
be something they might risk to lose;
objectively, the exploited
ones
don't possess
anything
anyway that is not in the power
of the rulers to dispose of. Long before our birth, all decisions with regard
to our feelings, thoughts and even our body functions have already been made. You
only get exactly that kind of body that you could have got under the conditions
and under the dictatorship of the capitalist relations of production. So what
does the exploited
ones
have to lose if one regards and notices this most important
fact that everything (this means: each person’s potentials of development,
the world, everything) is taken
away from him anyway right from the start?
Back to the public opinion
makers.
As they themselves are subject
to the regime of capital accumulation – they must print advertisements and
therefore they must dance to the tune of those who pay for the advertisements –
the commissioned work of these opinion makers cannot be anything other than the
result of being stuck to the codes of the ruling science. For them the duty to
inform means: to feed the newspaper reader = omnivore and ready to swallow
anything with some fucked up scraps (facts) – sex and age of the
"culprit", place and time of the crime, etc. As a savory and tasty
supplement to the reporting also may serve hints like "commune" and
"pill poison" and soon to the reader’s mind will come the story
belonging to it (German: dazugehoerig, hoerig
wem? = belonging, also “be a slave to” whom?), an ideologically fashionable
product that lacks any historical context. The so-called common sense (non-sense,
ignorance) is the most reliable collaborator of capitalism (= crime).
From the "sui"cide,
then, remains nothing but a tale, i.e. something that lacks any effectiveness
as long as the deadly effects of the relations connected to it are registered in
a template-like manner without the reader becoming conscious about them. The lack
of consciousness prevents the reader from getting the related matters and
their connection (suicide = murder)
clear
and therefore all consequences that otherwise
would result from this insight are prevented likewise. It’s only when the
historical connection and context are added that this suicide = murder becomes
significant, that is dangerous for the "stability" of the currency,
for it turns into murder, no longer into murder against human beings, but
rather into
murder against capitalism and its advocates.
Caused by the capitalist process
of wear and tear combined with the capitalist practice of social proscription
the murdered M. had been turned into a person who had become worthless in the
eyes of the bureaucracy (sphere of distribution). Nevertheless, she too was under
the compulsion to offer herself for sale in order not to starve to death either
immediately or by and by caused by social proscription. Death is the consequent
pursuit of the mass murder which is inherent
in
the plans and projects
tied to
capitalism by causal connection. Before she came to the SPK, M. had regarded
herself as being "ruined" and as a "wreck". No wonder! The
psychopharmaceutic pill poison, the body-destroying electroshocks, in general
all kinds of special treatments used against her in abundance had shaped her
consciousness, which was in no way schizophrenic, to the point of total
comprehension of reality. Due to the permanent refusal of
the society to give her
what she needed to live her life, she was right to feel herself determined and abandoned.
Therefore, M. suffered permanently from a life-threatening situation, which in
our society is usual enough for millions of people up to the point that they are
even unable to understand their situation in a reality-adequate manner, thus
being unable to initiate the appropriate behaviour against this situation.
There was another patient who once said that only special circumstances had
made it possible for her to survive in a situation comparable to that described
here. But "strokes of luck" like hers are produced by the capitalist
bureaucracy as reluctantly as rarely. With M. it was different, that means, it contained
more truth: the jungle of bureaucracy made her headless with fear.
But that doesn't count!
The count-down triggered by the state and by the
Rector for the last meal before
the execution was running
Though being forced to surrender
to the material emergency, M. had got a transitory occasion to breathe again due
to the working conditions currently realized in the SPK and nowhere else. She
always knew and
said that, since she had joined the SPK, for the first
time in her life she had got the feeling of being truly alive and that she could
be herself in connection with other patients like her, despite all other
difficulties she had suffered from outside the SPK. Only a few days before she
was murdered, M. declared during a discussion that she was fully on the side of
the SPK, because for her the SPK had represented the only possibility to find a
way of realizing and developing her activities. From a report of her mother (written
after the death of M.) we were informed that M. had expressed in her letters,
again and again, that the time she had spent in the SPK was the
"happiest" time in her life. The further stabilization of her
political identity – because only that kind of identity can be achieved in the
capitalist system, which is a schizophrenic system itself – a political
identity, which she had sought in vain in a communist youth organization before
joining the SPK, this further stabilization of her political identity,
therefore, could only be stopped by the utmost pressure from outside (hunger
blockade). Not only did she feel burdened by the label "schizophrenic",
but she had also suffered for many years from the reproaches of other people
and even of the family's physicians who
did all they could to make her believe that in future
by her illness
she would cause the end of her
family "ruining it". Although she had
realized pretty much that the miserable conditions on the general labour market
are caused by the mechanisms of the capitalist system, she transferred the feelings
of guilt, acquired by inculcated conditioning, to her “employers”,
by whom
she expected to get punished because of her illness. She was also afraid of
disadvantages that could arise because she now belonged to the SPK. From the
fact that the Minister of Culture, on the initiative of the Faculty of Medicine
and the Rector, had denied the SPK the legitimation to become an university
institution, inevitably for everyone in the SPK
results
the total lack of any protection
against the measures of state violence and their being totally exposed to the
social proscription associated to these measures. M. not only had to reckon
with rejections when applying for a job, but she was also confronted with a
merciless alternative: either to apply to Dr. Kretz (!!) (and indeed,
that’s what the doctors and staff physicians of the medical policlinic proposed
her to do) for her sickness benefit to which she was legally entitled and thus
running the risk of being transported to a mental hospital
by force
for a
psychiatric examination, a mechanism established to separate her and other
patients from the SPK, a mechanism established long before, or to remain in the
SPK, which had become the basis for her survival, at the price of her being
exposed to material impoverishment that was increasing day by day. The nonsense
of the proceedings related to a sickness benefit to which she was entitled
would
only shock her to an extent that even all promises and arguments by
the
whole
SPK that, based on active solidarity,
it would prevent
or undo by all means any compulsory hospitalization in a mental hospital, just
like the evidence of a contraindication well assured under all conditions even
from a psychiatric and neurologic point of view, could not help anything. Generally
speaking, it is simply a matter of fact that all the twists and turns [German: Schneckentaenze, literally: snail dances],
staged by psychiatry since it exists, performed on the back and with the money
of the exploited people, together with all the twaddle from psychoanalysts,
existence-analysts up to the hereditary-biologists, the
whole
twaddle
(= "science") has never succeeded in lowering the suicide rate, not
even in the hospitals, much less in abolishing it.
Rather, recently a "modernistic" ("progressive") branch of psychiatry came up that seems to be very proud of its finding that the only way to help "suicide candidates" is to kill them, according to the rules of the medical art, in special hospitals which have been built with the money of the same exploitation that finally drives people, destroyed by this very exploitation, to their death (see Frankfurter Rundschau of February 2, 1971: “We would be forced to choose hangmen"). That a change for the better is possible, namely how to abolish all psychiatry here and now, this has been proved by the SPK in its more-than-one-year-experience. For our work, the murder committed against M. can only mean that we have to struggle against the machinery of destruction and especially its bureaucratic functionaries (Faculty of Medicine, Rectorate, Ministry of Culture) even more decisively and effectively. Since this is a matter of life and death, we cannot wait and we are not allowed to wait until, perhaps one day in the distant future, the private ownership (private property) of the means of production will abolish itself.
Belonging to the SPK, M. too, had
to defend herself against the attacks that the SPK had to fight against from
its beginning: lack of means – the
University withholds even the
so-called donation account for the SPK; the chief of the Psychiatric Hospital of
the University, von Baeyer, and the Rectorate of the University contrived a
boycott against each patient of the SPK consisting in the
rejection by all pharmacists in Heidelberg
to whom they present a prescription for medication, although they are insured with the general health insurance, that
means they have paid in advance through compulsory contributions for the pills
they now can't get; for 450 patients (1-3 newcomers per day) there are
only five rooms
available; the patients being under a constant threat because of the
eviction action brought against the SPK by the Rectorate and therefore in uncertainty
about how long the continuation of their work in the SPK can be guaranteed; the
Administration Board of the University broke the agreement to provide the
houses promised to the patients with all the means necessary to continue their
work. As a whole, these conditions constitute a permanent hunger blockade
against the SPK and moreover they are a true mirror of the system of mass
murder that is specific to capitalism. But in the judgement of Professor
Häfner, the boss of the Policlinic, Kretz, and the forensic psychiatrist,
Professor Leferenz, announced in the session of the Senate of the University on
November 24, 1970 regarding the SPK this risk of suicide is "a risk that
can be neglected". Rendtorff, the Administration Board, the Senate etc.
permanently provide
evidence
to the fact that those who, based on their position in the social production process,
are allowed to take decisions pro and contra the murderous conditions, do
nothing but reproduce the contradictions of capitalism,
acting according to their
own will and
by their own fault, pushing aside
any historical context, what
makes them guilty and responsible in any case. The re-actor of the University
of Heidelberg (Reaktor – instead of
rector is a play on words, related to nuclear danger), instead of presenting the
SPK-project in a scientific way to the members of the Senate in order to
enable the SPK to continue its scientific work within the scope of the University
– reacts to the commands from above (decree of the Minister of Culture) with
the cowardice typical of civil servants and comrades (Rendtorff was a member of
the Social Democratic Party). He left the stage to the infamous Häfner, not
even a member of the Senate but a
ill
famed specialist in social euthanasia
(suicide = profit), where Häfner then pushed ahead with the liquidation of the
SPK in the interest of his 45-million-project. At that time, it was the lives
of about 250 patients that were at stake. Should one really ask whether the
risk, regardless of any risk whatsoever, has become more dangerous since those
responsible completely threw off their masks and since the number of SPK patients
has approached the first half thousand?
The
abolition of these relations is possible. Others who preceded us, have already
demonstrated it. The self-organization of patients on its social basis
corresponds to the radical-critical consequence that has pointed the way for us
since the times of Ernesto Che Guevara (he himself an asthmatic but using his medical
skills against the capitalist jungle).
As an inhibition, illness is a
weapon of capitalism. But it is completely up to the exploited
ones to commit this
weapon and all other weapons to the scrap heap of history. Only for capitalism
and its advocates, illness is a hell of a murderous pleasure.
ATTACK THESE CRIMINALS
AND YOU DO NOT ONLY PROTECT YOURSELF FROM KIDNEY-STONES
BUT ALSO AGAINST POLITICAL MURDER!
SOCIALIST PATIENTS' COLLECTIVE April
30, 1971
at the University of Heidelberg
Rohrbacherstr. 12
38.
About the difference between a patients' self-organization and
democratic centralism
1. Subjective necessities
Historically, we are in the
transition phase between Nazi concentration camps and labour camps à la Grand Coalition.
The aggravation of the contradictions in late capitalism – economically
manifest in the economic crises that are piling up and, on the level of
consciousness, in the fading away of future prospects in view of both existential
and social life issues – are causing the rulers to take a series of preventive measures
to overcome these crises, measures that, on the one hand are very intensive
while, on the other, they hardly have a chance of being noticed by the public
consciousness. Such measures are, for example, the drug-prohibition-law against
the drop outs, the central registration of so-called mentally disturbed people,
labour camps for political drop outs and finally life-long imprisonment on
installments against those whose resistance to capitalist crime does not
exhaust itself by sitting around in debate circles. Under these conditions it
cannot be said that the existing forms of organizations of sick-care (= exploitation
of illness) don't work. Rather, they work to the best in accordance with the
measures described above. The functionaries of the hierarchically organized health
system, in association with health insurances, medical associations,
conferences of assistant physicians and last not least, in ideal
competition
with them, the bureaucracy of the Ministry of Culture as administrators and
executors of science following the needs of capitalism, try to resolve the
contradiction between what is their subjective conviction and their objective
doing, a contradiction that concerns them indirectly and the sick ones directly.
The medical plot treats this contradiction as if it did not exist and tries to
conceal it from the public by lavish talk about the freedom of science and ostensibly
necessary measures "for the well-being of the sick people". For those
who need help, that is the sick people, this twaddle is only good for tying
their consciousness closer and closer to the medical plot and its false
promises of help from above.
Corrupted by material privilege
or the prospect of it, those of the medical plot are always ready to spread their
stupidity on to the public in mass scale and against the masses. They all refer
to the so-called well-being of the sick, but objectively they work in favour of capitalism and thus necessarily
they work against the sick
population and finally against themselves, though without admitting it, but one
can’t but notice it.
Under these circumstances, only
those who are affected themselves can
learn what they need to know and develop the necessary knowledge about these matters
and they themselves must feel obliged to begin activities that may create a
counter-public in order to bring about a change of the general public opinion.
Illness is the true
mirror, adequate to reality, of the basic antagonism (collective production – usurpation
by single persons): on the one hand collective production of illness, and on
the other management and exploitation of ill people who are taken for and who
take themselves for being nothing but single, lonely and atomized persons.
2.
Objective
obstacles
(that is to say: the reason why the sick people themselves have to take care of
their needs)
In the capitalist process of producing
surplus value, i.e. the capitalist process of exploitation and valorization (CPV),
the production process and illness are conditioning each other in a dialectical
manner, that means illness is at the
same time both a prerequisite and a result of the CPV. It makes the crippling
of the worker to its condition. Its maintenance implies the reproduction of
the worker as a social cripple. The consumption
of labour force in the production process means therefore the production of illness. For all work
happens "under conditions in which never
the health of the workers is
important, but only the way how to facilitate the production of products" (Marx, Capital III,
chapter 5). All measures to veil this fact on the part of the ruling class only
serve the purpose "to prove that killing is no murder when done for the
sake of profit" (Marx, ibid.). In present-day capitalism (neo- or late
capitalism*) the pivotal point of crises
management is illness. This results from the following connections:
so-called social contributions amounting to 35% of the take-home-pay are paid
over to the state's treasury. These funds are put at the permanent disposal of
the organized capital as a whole, that is the state, and used for the
regulation of economic cycles by means of economic control, prevention and
management in case of economic crises. By that these funds are not at the
disposal of those who have worked for them.
* Additional note by SPK/PF(H): Today we
call it: Iatro-Capitalism
Only a very small part of this
money flows back to the health machinery where it is used to repair the defective
labour forces. Secondly, the function of stabilizing the economic cycles consists
in the maintenance of the ability to consume of the defective working machines
(= sick people), of the working machines that are out of service (= unemployed
people) and also of the ability to consume of those working machines that are now
forever useless because of their having been subject to wear and
tear all their life (= annuitants). In particular, illness is used and exploited in the
interest of capitalism by means of the quantitative and qualitative alteration of the structure of unemployment:
instead of mass layoffs, workers are dropping out of the production process in
installments (because of illness) and seemingly there doesn't exist any
connection between the exploitation of workers and their dropping out of the
process of production. Their dismissals are done administratively, for example
in the form of sick leaves and through forced admission to detention facilities
by the agents of the health
care apparatus if they are given the opportunity to do
so.
For the person affected, illness seems to be
nothing but a fateful event commonly brought about by their own failure and
guilt. Quite in contrast to the unemployed, it is not easy for a sick person to
realize that there exists a causal connection between the misery that has apparently
hit the single person individually and the process of capitalist exploitation. This
connection, which is veiled in subjective and objective view, also favours the
tendencies of politically left groups to get stuck in abstract approaches by producing
abstract conceptions which are without any use at all. The working class is
under intense subjective pressure from suffering (mass misery). But there is
also the “prosperity” in objective terms, the working class is not willing
to connect with any sense of responsibility, let alone with an insight into the
accumulation of suffering on the part of the people in the Third World and the
suffering on the part of the ill people here (imperialism towards the interior)
associated with this relative “prosperity”. The democratic-centralist left, for
a lack of insight into the congruence of their own needs with those of the industrial
working class, rather prefers to appeal to an abstract proletarian instead of
being prepared to go into the concrete living conditions of everyone which of
course contain misery both material and mental.
3. Sick
people have no rights whatsoever
Regardless
of
the social security contributions
that have been forced out of him, the sick person has got no right to treatment for
his illness. Rather, it is the other
way around. The right to treatment is on the side of the established health
care
system. This apparatus is based
on the principle of profit maximization, both in terms of its structure and its
function, and from that follow the criteria by which the Whether and How of a
treatment is determined in any case from the beginning. In this context, the ill person is placed in, he is deprived
of
his constitutional rights and of the human rights either by the treatment
itself or by some other kind of manipulation. Thereby the legally enshrined health
care machinery makes use of the "administration of justice" also
established by law and, in turn, the latter makes use of the health care
machinery in the same way. The modernization of the criminal law, at present in
preparation, provides that all the sick people, who are prisoners in any case
by their inner prison they
are carrying
with them (in the form of inhibition)
for all their life wherever they go or wherever they may live, through their
registration in a central register will have best chances to become life-long
members in a ghetto of antisociality. The university legislation of the federal
state of Baden-Württemberg, e.g., excludes people from studying if anyone else
considers them to be sick. Here the wording: “Enrollment can be refused if the applicant
suffers from an illness that seriously endangers the health of the other students or threatens to seriously impair the
regular course of teaching or if the
state of health of the applicant precludes proper
study; to check the state of health, the submission of a medical
certificate may be required" (University's Law – HSchG § 43.2). On
the same ground the applicant can also be taken off the university register.
For the patients, the deprivation
of their rights is based on their separation and isolation as single, lonely
persons. The only possible way out of their being single, isolated and therefore
lonely objects cannot be anything else but their joining together by forming
self-organizations. However, this way is not provided for in the ruling system.
From this it clearly follows that a self-organization of patients also has the
task and is legitimized to create and claim rights by themselves and for
themselves, and if need be they can only refer to their constitutional rights. However,
these constitutional rights are in turn restricted by special laws, as it is said:
"details are further regulated by law". If, by this clause, it is
not already made almost impossible for anybody to make a progressive use of
those constitutional rights, the state authority soon will find itself obliged
to deny to the patients, who have become active by organizing themselves, the
right to refer to the Constitution, that means that the forces of the state
will attempt to eliminate the patients’ organization, all the more the state
authority can never be sure whether they have really succeeded in protecting
the constitutional and the human rights against the self-organized patients who
in their eyes are neither human beings nor do they belong to any constitution, right
from the beginning. The consequence for those
like this exploited and deprived of
their rights is that they must bring about a radical change in the material basis
on which the violence of the state is founded.
4.
On the
political implications of the self-organization
The principles of a patients'
self-organization, which are its most important basic prerequisites, are to be
determined as follows: characterized by the mark and stigma of their deprivation of rights, the patients are
the exploited class par excellence. As it is the same everywhere, those allowed
to make use of the "free democratic" legal order are only the capital-strong
persons, the commanders within the capitalist system. But those who belong to
the sick people don’t possess any
right at all. This mark of belonging to the exploited class, in the Federal
Republic of Germany, even if only in the view of psychiatrists, is distributed
to ten million people with a manifested mental disturbance. However, the total number
of those who are struck by illness is much higher. A relative measure of the power
of illness as a productive force is offered
by the fact that the total amount of money of the health and social insurance funds
corresponds to the size of the federal budget.
From the connection with the
production follows another second important principle for the patients'
self-organization: the capitalist economic system draws from illness – as explained
above – in the form of social contributions the unlimited buffer capacity for the
economic crises INHERENT In the capitalist economic system. That is, only
in reference to the specific criterion of illness, and by this criterion alone,
the proletariat represents a revolutionary category both subjectively and
objectively in the highly developed late capitalist systems, and nobody else
but K. Marx has assigned the proletarian class this basic definition in the
Communist Manifesto. Subjectively
because of the possibility to
conceive illness and to use it as protest, objectively
because surplus value can be generated only through the exploitation of human
labour. This, however, results in the increasing misery of the masses and the intensification
of illness. The immiseration of the masses and the aggravation of illness
represent the inner barrier of capitalism. "The capitalist production, if
for a moment we don't care about its being superposed by the mechanisms of
competition – the tendency of the rate of profit to fall [tendenzieller Fall der Profitrate] –, handles in a thoroughly
economical way every kind of work that has been realized as objectified work which
is incorporated in commodities. Yet, compared to all the other modes of
production, the capitalist production is far more than any other mode of
production a squanderer of human beings and of living labour; a squanderer not only
of flesh and blood but also of nerves and brains. Indeed, it is only by
spoiling up to a huge extent the development of human beings that the
development of mankind as such is a guaranteed and maintained in the epoch of history
immediately preceding the consciously performed
reconstitution of the human society" (Karl Marx, Capital III, Chapter
5). With this, Marx has given illness an essential
determination precisely as the inner
barrier of capitalism while expressly disregarding the tendency of the rate
of profit to fall, a diminution which at any rate is counteracted by
augmenting the exploitation of the labour force – intensification of illness. As
the outer barrier of capitalism,
illness becomes significant because of the increasing number of sick people who
drop completely out of the capitalist process of production (the so-called
incurable psychoses, increasing number of people who incurably suffer from
damages caused by drugs and medicaments).
By the substantial determination [Wesensbestimmung]
of illness as being the number 1 crisis buffer in the capitalist economy and
thus contributing necessarily to the stabilization of this system, illness,
however, includes also a moment (tendency) which is objectively
counter-revolutionary. Within the sectors of industry and administration this
connection of exploitation cannot be broken. The counter-revolutionary factor
of illness as far as it is determined as a crisis buffer predominates in these
sectors. There, the moment of illness which otherwise is driving forwards, namely
the sick people’s lack of rights, is
inhibited by being veiled by trade unions, apparently worker-friendly social courts
and similar institutions. Due to the determination by this constraint, which
can be characterized as double
exploitation, there results also the necessity for patients, who under
those conditions are indeed revolutionary subjects, to form patients’
organizations. Double exploitation means:
the sick person is a product of the production process that creates surplus
value; the surplus value is divided into profit and crisis buffer capacity. As
a patient, the sick person is functionalized by the health system to serve both
as a means of production and as a crisis buffer.
5. Dialectics
of centralism and decentralism = Multi-Focal Expansionism (MFE)
Before we go into the organizational
form of the patients' self-organization and its further perspectives, here a few
basic comments on Democratic Centralism (DC). The democratic element of Democratic Centralism consists of decision-making
based on the votes of the majority, that means all qualities are based on the
category of quantity, just as in the capitalist process of valorization, in which
all quality is reduced to the quantity of time and measured in working-hours.
The centralistic element appears in the
form of a pyramid-like organization with graded competences, thus as hierarchy. All the activities of the single
ones are already organized before they appear and take effect; again a rigid system, totally
corresponding to the capitalist exploitation and valorization process, which
produces all the demands and requirements to which the activities of every
single person must be oriented (– the person has to serve the economy,
not the other way
around
–), instead of organizing the activities according to
the concrete demands and needs with their focus on the solution of specific
tasks, so that the organization changes with the task that has to be resolved
and only exists as long as the work on the specific task requires it. The
dialectics of subject - object (in the polarization between leader and the rank
and file), of being determined - being spontaneous (spontaneity as a constituent
element of the organization; also to think of the revolutionary productive
force, the so-called “revolutionary instinct”, as it is called by Lukács), the
difference between being produced - producing (objectified as the contradiction
of passivity - activity), these dialectical contradictions can never be
developed within Democratic Centralism; just as little as the dialectics of
needs and production.
From caring for the needs of the
single ones or in small groups that mutually control each other collectively follows
the principle of multi-focal expansionism (MFE) as the specific characteristic of
organization. There has to be developed the consciousness based on the unity of
needs and political struggle, that is the
political
identity, in everyone. Within a non-centralized organization, every productivity, every initiative of the single one has
to be promptly connected to the whole organizational scope through constant
collective working on the respective productivity. Everyone can express herself
or himself and also everyone should do so in order to get influence on the collective
work and no one can escape the consequences of this work, because these
consequences follow from the needs of everyone. For the class-enemy it will
be definitively
impossible to break an organization of multi-focal expansionism.
In order to coordinate the activities developed in this way, the centralist
element in this dialectics takes as a necessary moment the form of a collective
memory. This memory can be used by the single ones, but the memory itself does
not use the masses in turn (non-centralist element). In an organization determined
in this way, centralism is dialectically abolished and transcended [dialektisch aufgehoben].
6. History
and future of the patients' self-organization
The development of the SPK can
serve as an excellent mirror of what is meant by the formula of the dialectical
abolition [dialektische Aufhebung] of centralism.
There are several periods.
The first period consisted in the preparation of the patients'
self-organization under the conditions of capitalist-hierarchical centralism.
Only because the SPK started at the level of the university medicine, there
could be clearly worked out what we have called above the contradiction of double exploitation. "It is
practically impossible for workpeople to insist upon that which in theory
is their basic sanitary right – the
right that whatever work their employer assembles them to do, shall, so far as
depends upon him, be, at his cost, divested of all needlessly unhealthy
conditions; … while workpeople are
practically unable to exact that sanitary justice for themselves (sanitary
justice = care for health), they also (notwithstanding the presumed intention
of the law) cannot expect any effectual assistance from the appointed civil servants
[Beamte],
whose duty is to apply the Removal of Grievances Act" (The Capital III,
MEW 25, p. 106). Well then, it was exactly this kind of contradiction between
the workers as patients and the "civil servants" that emerged in
the very beginning of the SPK at the
University, and the working out of the
contradiction in what we have conceived as double exploitation there found its
most appropriate occasion: in spite of their being exploited and in spite of
their paying the social contributions, the patients are not legally entitled to
claim medical treatment there. Of course, in this context the question cannot
be that the legal claim to medical treatment is of no use other than to further
perfecting the exploitation, regardless whether this treatment is given or
refused. But what is important in this context is the fact that the medical
representative of the
University (e.g. the physician as a civil servant on
revocation
[Beamter auf Widerruf, whose task is to "remove public
grievances"), confronted with the mass of the patients, can and must ensure that the privileges of the
University available to him are used for the benefit of the mass of patients.
In this way, he connects the
masses to the
University and thus works out the contradiction between the pretention of the university to be an
institution that, based on the fundamental rights, has to realize the freedom of
science on the one hand and, on the other, its function of serving capitalism by preparing and supplying patients for
their exploitation, valorization and consumption and as a legitimation agency
of capitalism. By dealing with this contradiction, the medical doctor as a
civil servant of the university makes the class-antagonism transparent, e.g. by
working out collectively with the patients
the kind of science they need. By doing
so, he can't but abolish the violence that is at disposal against the ill
people and thereby abolishing the power at disposal against illness, a power
which is defended and assured by the capital-oriented science of the rulers.
Through his total commitment to
basic matters he must stimulate a situation which, from the viewpoint of the
ill people, equals to the abolition of their role as objects to which each ill
person has been condemned to for their being conditioned by the constraints of
the system. As to the abolition of their being conditioned, the ill persons
having become aware of their situation, now will act against all influences
which before they had taken for unchangeable symptoms and phenomena of their
illness. However, as long as the organization, administration and containment of
illness continue to function in a capitalist-centralist way, the crisis can
only become concrete in the form of apparently non-directed violence. Exemplary
for this is the system as a whole in its functioning as a crises buffer on a
large scale. On a small scale, it was the hunger strike at the beginning of the
SPK, this hunger strike which indeed was in the eyes of some of the enemies
nothing but the manifestation of a weakness, demonstrated by some disturbed
people. The
tranquil result of such apparently non-violence is the compromise, the
development and realization of which led to renewed polarization in the second period. This polarization no
longer took place at the level of
the University medicine, as it did during the
first period, but presents itself as a confrontation between science – directly represented by the
patients – and power – directly
represented by the
University.
During the third period takes place a decentralization towards the interior of the patients’
self-organization
by the socializing of the therapeutic functions in the
form of mutual self-control done within the personal and group agitation; the
decentralization towards the outside is
achieved
by the spontaneous foundation of more patients' collectives,
which have been stimulated and inspired by the work of the SPK. This
decentralization is supported by constant self-objectification, which is mainly
carried out in the scientific study groups. From the process of decentralization
and self-objectification results the political identity* being the concept [Begriff] of
the identity of needs and political struggle.
* Additional note by SPK/PF(H), March 1997:
Here is
a
necessary
and
more precise
extension:
Within
the political identity SPK/PF(H) distinguishes three identities:
1. Political identity: stable against separation with
respect to spatial distances and distancings. Today we call this identity: pathopractical identity.
2. Ideological identity: stable
against external temporal
influences and affections. Today we call this identity: diapathical identity.
3.
Revolutionary
identity: stable in its effects with regard to completeness, definitiveness and persistence.
Today we call this: utopathical identity.
Marked by the attacks of the
reactionaries using the judiciary machinery (eviction sentence –
prohibition of scientific work by withdrawing the institutional and the immediate
means of production) there follows the fourth
period containing the deprivation of the patients both material and
juridical, now completely realized.
The result of this development
in four periods is in the fifth period the
release of violence, which up to now consisted of illness tied and kept under
control by capitalist-hierarchical centralism, in the form of a total
separation of powers [Gewaltenteilung]:
the state's machinery serving capitalism as a perfect mass murderer of his most
vulnerable products, the latter representing at the same time the truest mirror
reflection of what both the capitalist destructive force and the state’s
machinery are.
Thus, in this fifth period,
capitalism and its state-machinery – now both occupied with the annihilation of
patients – find themselves in direct confrontation with illness as their essential
product (which objectifies and concretizes their totality) – that is, they are
in confrontation with themselves.
In the sixth period, the self-organization is dividing itself into two
moments: into a militant activity on the one hand and into a propagandist
moment
on the other*. The first for the purpose to establish an effective self-defence against the reactionary
forces of capitalism and the neo-fascist state machinery, the second in order
to start a productive attack on the
revisionist left in the FRG (Federal Republic of Germany), especially in order
to socialize the SPK experiences in matters of organization and agitation.
While in the sixth period the element of propaganda,
“the party”, that is the unity of collective memory and coordination, gets its
progressive signification in relation to the expansion of the mass base, in the
perspective seventh period this moment
(“the party”) which is concerned mainly with the class antagonisms as they
represent themselves in the people's war, then, because of its essential
reference to the past, only has the task to engage in the confrontation which
starts from the reactionary forces. The primary form of the propagandistic
moment and, at the same time, its most perfect accomplishment becomes manifest
in the political identity which is achieved in the process of decentralization,
expansion and self-objectification. It is only because of the inimical violence
against the patients' self-organization that this division of functions into
two poles of a militant and propagandist moment will become a question of
survival.
SOCIALIST PATIENTS' COLLECTIVE
Heidelberg,
June 12, 1970
at the University of Heidelberg
Rohrbacher Str. 12
* Regarding the relationship SPK and Patients’
Front compare also: division between militant and propagandistic pole (this
means and meant: division in time but never in the matter). Observe as well the
difference between militant and military. In the strategy of illness (pathopractice)
there is no militarism. With regard to militancy in prison see also The Concept of Solitary Confinement
in PATIENTENFRONT: SPK Documentation IV, especially the
methods of patients' resistance in prison, compare also 6.11.1975:
Unconditional and unlimited SPK/PF(H)-hunger strike, not for release, but with
the purpose of confrontation against the physicians and their responsibility
for prison and torture.
Militancy as pathopractice is the direct confrontation, sought after by
front patients against the physicians. The prototypical situation in its pure
unadulterated state is pre-conceived nowhere in a more exemplary way than in
the prison hospital, where also the invisible and all traces erasing torture of
solitary confinement and visible and perceptible torture tools (instruments of
treatment) are set directly one into another under medical responsibility. Also
this in so far certainly and not without propagandistic moment
(dialectics, no:
diapathics!).
In the history of the PATIENTENFRONT there were, by the way, two
further confrontations in a prototypical situation: the hunger strike by
another front patient in the prison hospital of Wittlich in 1977. This
confrontation came to an end in such a way that the responsible physician had
declared himself mad and the front patient was set free.
The other one was the hunger strike in 1978: the responsible physician at the
prison Hohenasperg was unmasked one year later by the front patient and
his advocate during a public trial as being a former, temporary participant of
SPK and thus a "gangster". Thereupon he quit his service. This may
sound strange, but it
was done just like this. Anything else may be right or
wrong, better or worse, but this anything else at least was not and does not
remain SPK/PF(H).
And again: The SPK was propaganda (propaganda and militancy,
"naive and militant", students’
saying). Propaganda is impulse and
propagation, consequently also transmission and not only the so-called
"channeling". These are the hallmarks and distinguishing features
that belong to a species that really deserves the name of human organism, or
better said: human bodies, but not in the sense of racism (biologism,
genocide-genetics), but in the sense of diapathic efficient knowledge [diapathisches
Wirkwissen], a diapathic "science," which is therefore closer
to authentic Marxism than any other sort of technological science
("humanities" and all the rest included, of course), for every
science is nothing more than a normois and
iatrarchic pseudo-science.
As opposed to the "science", to the existing "logic", there
is urgently needed an epoché also in the sense of E. Husserl, that is
basing everything again in a prehistoric situation, in which the developed
mechanisms of the money economy still did not exist, but of course without
resorting to the mythology of those remote times, because it is essential
nowadays and in the future to actively change the individual illnesses of the
human beings and
to create, in this process, from the individual illnesses
the human species, thus raising the human
species to the status of an event. And that is precisely why we need the
diapathics, which replaces the "science" and the technology,
that still exist and which
therefore
are used as tools that are not yet
expendable, but only under the strict control of the diapathics.
Hey you, who are reading this,
how does that strike you? We have tested it and recommend it, and
it urgently needs
to be done, because the present world we live in is nothing less than a
disaster, and for you it is more urgent than it is for us.
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Chapter VIII
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