It is because of an agitative intention if in this text for agitation the words "dialectics" and "dialectical" are used that often: it should be understood as a challenge to produce those conditions in which alone by their permanent application they can become a reality as an aid for the human needs, and this requires the intensive study of the dialectics of Hegel and the political economy, both complementary to each other and closely related to practical matters: the realm of dialectics is the revolution in permanence! At the same time, the emphasis on dialectics and the denunciation of science, which as ruling science is entirely infected by the bacillus of positivism, should work as a radical critique of this science and develop the seed of its radical overcoming and abolition (= socialization).

If we again and again are asked whether it should be necessary to study Hegel at all, we have to call attention to the fact that every understanding of Marx remains superficial, except if it has been realized that it was Hegel who has developed the method of dialectics, which has been applied by Marx. It is much easier to learn dialectics by studying the philosophy of Hegel, instead of picking it up from the texts of Marx. The classic authors of marxism pointed that out again and again. Thus Lukács writes in "The Young Hegel" referring to Engels: "And while during the last years of his life he (Engels) wished the young Marxists to be instructed by studying Hegel, he always cautioned them not to waste time by cavilling at or thinking too long about the constructions of Hegel, but to be very attentive where Hegel correctly develops a true dialectical proceeding. The first should be easily done, ... but the latter should be an important finding for each Marxist." Thus, it cannot simply be a matter of looking down on Hegel and putting him aside as an idealist, as many left groups use to do. The most fruitful method, therefore, is to take as an example the classics of Marxism and to read Marx through the lens of Hegel and to read Hegel through the lens of Marxism. Marx himself has written in "The Holy Family": "But then Hegel within his speculative explanations very often gives a true representation of how the object is to be grasped as a whole and at all. This true explanation within the speculative development can mislead the reader to take the speculative explanation for real and the real explanation for being only speculative." In the scientific work-groups of the SPK, Hegel's dialectics was studied intensively and close to practical matters. As an example, when reading Hegel's "The Phenomenology of the Spirit" the procedure was approximately as follows: after reading together a section of this book (one of the patients read out loud, the others listened while reading the same section) we tried together to find the connection between the contents of this paragraph on the one hand, and between the actual situation of needs in the collective on the other hand, and in the same way we tried to produce a connection between the situation of a certain patient and what was just read to them: for example, if there were problems with the place of work or just in the family relations. This method of proceeding resulted merely from the very fact that most of the participants of the work-groups were not accustomed at all to be concerned with scientific texts and also because there is a socially conditioned "difference in education" between the students on the one hand and the workers on the other. By that we experienced that, after having overcome the initial difficulties of being blocked in their abilities to articulate their impressions starting from the text, precisely those participants who, according to the conventional and outdated scale of classifying the "educational level" were on the lower end, were the ones who produced the most fruitful and propelling comments in the discussion, while many of those who were students had a strong tendency to present an interpretation which followed only the academically required steps combined with the constraint to present nothing but that "knowledge" for which they had been trained until they got stuck. Precisely these fixations, being caused by an orientation tied to the social structures of consuming and believing in authorities, could be worked out and overcome in the scientific work-groups, in which we dealt with scientific matters always close to practical questions and in connection with the personal and group agitations. This all the more so as especially the "The Phenomenology of the Spirit" offers in each of its sections superabundant examples with regard to this (Suppression and Servitude!).

In the beginning, it was intended to present only those contents to the collective for discussion which, according to the opinion of someone in the collective, were completely incomprehensible. This was a demand that resulted from the concrete situation of need which again and again had been expressed in the personal agitation: We have read a lot of Marx etc. but nevertheless we can't get along with the dialectics and therefore our understanding of Marx also remains incomplete. – Then also read Hegel. – For heaven's sake, this guy for sure is an idealist and can't be understood at all – and all the worse: Schopenhauer, who never could be impressed except by those who were positivists, was seriously convinced that anybody who has even a tiny amount of sound common sense at his disposal easily could be turned into a completely stupid person, if somebody lead him to an intense study of Hegel. – Now, just concerning ourselves there is no danger –. O.K., for, in any case, there is no doubt that for Marx, Lenin and Mao reading Hegel doesn't seem to have produced any damage for their mental health ... Besides we had best reasons to believe in the creative power of the negative, or in what else?

Thirdly, at worst, we would still have had the possibility to experience – based on the text – our personal failure as something comprehensible for the collective as a whole, and by that we at least should have broken the barrier between the collective and the personal creativity [Produktivitaet].

Karl Marx, Oekonomisch-philosophische Manuskripte (Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts, Private Property and Communism), MEW EB 1, p. 536

A concise presentation of this fact can be found in Alfred Sohn-Rethel, Geistige und koerperliche Arbeit (Intellectual and Manual Labour), chapter "Reproduktive und nicht-reproduktive Werte" (Reproductive and Non-Reproductive Values), Frankfurt 1971, p. 144.

Karl Marx, Grundrisse der politischen Oekonomie (Basic Outline of the Critique of Political Economy), (EVA), p. 14.

David Cooper, Psychiatrie und Antipsychiatrie (Psychiatry and Anti-Psychiatry), Frankfurt 1971, p. 55.

If a worker of nowadays visits his doctor and complains to him about all kind of symptoms (let's say feelings of nausea, headache, feeling dizzy etc.), then the doctor does all he can to isolate those symptoms from their historic and biographic connections. He measures the blood pressure, the heartbeat and finally diagnoses some "vegetative dystonia" (disturbance of the autonomic nerve system); the situation at the workplace and the situation in the family are, at best, treated as a side issue. Treatment as a business of exchange: the symptoms have to be rigged up in such a way that they, as a demand, will fit to some supply of the medico-technical pharmaceutic industry.

Karl Marx, Die Heilige Familie (The Holy Family), MEW 2

Differential euthanasia means the well planned, systematic destruction of life on a mass scale, which escapes mostly from being noticed and realized because of its sophistically and non-transparent ("scientifically") selection of those to be killed and because of the well-controlled speed and velocity of this process of destruction, thus a process that suits to the definition "differential euthanasia". For the patients of the SPK, there were many occasions to experience the trials and attempts of this kind of killing human lives at the University's Psychiatric Hospital of Heidelberg, carried out especially by the doctors von Baeyer, Blankenburg and Oesterreich.

We are aware that illness has existed for a long time, long before there was capitalism ("The misery is older than capitalism", Wilhelm Reich). Illness results from domination – violence of men against men – a domination which starts with private property.

Based on the researches of Malinowski, W. Reich has pointed out the transition of the matriarchal social order to the patriarchal one, the latter being based on private property (Wilhelm Reich, The Invasion of Compulsory Sex-Morality). In this book W. Reich explains comprehensively how drive suppressing mechanisms develop as a result of the rise of private property. And in this way, then – said in today’s language – there arise "neuroses", "perversions" and other body phenomena of illness. Especially in the epistemological view, the concept of W. Reich is of extreme importance, because it refutes quite striking any "genetic" theory of the neuroses and of the psychoses and explains their connection with the social relations of property. To change illness [die Aufhebung der Krankheit] is the same as to abolish the private ownership (private property) of the means of production [Aufhebung des Privatbesitzes an den Produktionsmitteln – see Marx, theory of alienation]. It was not by contingency and accidentally that we have defined illness elsewhere as life being broken in itself.

Buffer of crises [Krisenpuffer]:

The fascists pervert and corrupt all revolutionary matters (see also Reimut Reiche, Sexualitaet und Klassenkampf). Therefore, in their eyes, illness as a revolutionary force of production must be eliminated. The need for life of the single one is perverted into the biologistic principle of life, that is into "healthy" life, a life "worth to be lived", a proceeding that is indeed a perversion because life has value only insofar as it can be exploited. Each life which doesn't correspond to this demand gets reserved for the mass-annihilation in the form of differential euthanasia. This perversion is reflected by the fact that health as the ability to be exploited appears or at least is expected to appear, in the consciousness of the respective person as his or her well-being.

Are the psychiatry and the health sector in general perhaps subject to inner constraints and antagonisms by which, occasionally in crisis, they see themselves obliged, together with the capitalist machinery of the state, to demonize the sick people in order to make them "marketable" as superfluous gluttons – because of their being obstacles for "research and teaching" – or as lazy bones, evil doing fools and dangerous to the public, wild-growth [Wildwuchs], ripe fodder for the clink or the gas-chamber? If this is true, then we should also expect the phenomenon of its opposite to occur, namely that the ill persons are welcomed and well recommended from time to time as the good, the industrious, in short, as the better people – identity of the opposites.

"Self-abandonment" ["Selbstpreisgabe"]: Schnyder and his accomplices made use of this word (see comparison I, pp. 163/164) – in alignment with the statements of the Professor of Psychiatry, Bochnik, at Frankfurt who, in his "report" about the SPK, first used this word. As to the context according to Bochnik, quoted in his own words: "The psychiatrist Ernst Kretschmer is said to have stated: In good times we are sentencing [begutachten] the psychopaths, but if times are bad, they rule over us. Shall we wish for bad times?" [See SPK-Documentation I, pp. 82/83]

See comparison I

See SPK-Documentation I – reports of Dr. med. D. Spazier, Heidelberg; Prof.  Dr. Peter Brueckner, Hannover; Prof. Dr. H. E. Richter, Gießen.

Campaigns of extermination against things through built-in wear, direct destruction of commodities, the permanent becoming old-fashioned of the products and wars of annihilation against everything human by perverting human-productive life energies into the totality of alienated and mechanic work and greedy consumption in excess through the violent maintenance of those relations of production in order to make the bargain even – that's what we call imperialism against the interior (illness).

See comparison I

See for example the arguments of the Dean Leferenz (Faculty of Law at the University of Heidelberg) in the session of the Senate on November 24, 1970, when he requested the "competent bodies" ["zustaendige Organe"] of the University to execute as promptly as possible the sentence of the Senate that the SPK cannot become an institution at the University and therefore promptly must be eliminated "using all executive means of the state" – say: violence of police – (see also comparison I)

See comparison I

"Formula" belonging to the oath of Hippocrates

Dr. med. Blankenburg – Assistant medical director at the University's Psychiatric Hospital at Heidelberg

See comparison I

Prof. Braeutigam – Director of the University's Psychosomatic Hospital at Heidelberg

See comparison I

"Demands of the Socialist Patients' Collective to the Rector's office" (SPK-Documentation I, p. 19)

The experts: Prof. Dr. Dr. H. E. Richter, Director of the Psychosomatic Hospital at the University of Gießen; Prof. Dr. Peter Brueckner, Director of the Seminar of Psychology at the Technical University of Hannover and Dr.med. Dieter Spazier, medical specialist for psychiatry and neurology and former leader of the University's Psychiatric Policlinic at Heidelberg. Besides of that the SPK made a scientific report about its actual work and a look-out for coming tasks. Those four works have been published in the documentation about the SPK of Heidelberg by the Fachschaft (students‘ body) and the Basisgruppe (action group) of the Faculty of Medicine at the University of Gießen.

 – The child of an SPK-patient was taken hostage by the police in order to enter the house as the first person in which those pigs assumed that they would encounter people who were ready to defend themselves by starting a shootout.

– Detained people were extorted as follows: "We‘re going to search your house now. If you continue refusing to testify, people who may be innocent and who trust you may be shot to death. The responsibility, then, will be on your side."

September 1972

Who takes the word "poisoning treatment" for an exaggeration should be told that the professor in ordinary and Second President of the World Organization of Psychiatry and Neurology, von Baeyer, for socialist politics surely unsuspected, again and again recommended to his assistant doctors the advantages of electroshocks, because, as he told, the danger of damages of the central-nervous system by applying a treatment by medicaments would be certainly greater than the perhaps bad effects being calculated in the case of a treatment by electroshocks. Both treatments, as everybody knows, are causing the destruction of nerve cells, the latter being unable to regenerate themselves quite in contrast to the other cells of an organism.

Von Baeyer, Haefner and others in "Psychiatrie der Verfolgten" (Psychiatry of the Persecuted): "Again and again in few or in many cases there are very skillful scientists, who, influenced by political power, allow themselves to be side-tracked from the path of incorruptible objectivity, and thus show a behaviour which in most cases is unlikely to be caused either by a direct order or by material corruption (bribery), but more or less indirectly-atmospherically by the unconscious want to float along in the main stream of their time", von Baeyer in: The affirmation of the NS-ideology in the medicine with special reference to euthanasia.

Note has been dropped

see Documentary chapter: About the political economy in the identity of suicide = murder, p. 134.

"On Sunday, March 21, 1971, at 6 o'clock p.m. unknown persons announced by telephone call to the Socialist Patients' Collective (SPK) their intention to kill the SPK member Wolfgang Huber ("founder", "leader", "chief-ideologist and chief-activist" of the SPK). The caller announced that he would shoot Huber to death in the following week if the SPK should not agree to fulfil his only condition: to make his daughter (SPK member) leave the SPK and return to her family. This murder threat includes a progressive and a reactionary moment. Because of its protest, it is progressive. – Protest against the existing cannibalistic mode of production, principle of rivalry and competition – the big ones devour the little ones (as we could find out the little factory of the author of the death threat had just gone bankrupt last week). The reactionary moment of this threat consists in directing the protest against those who permanently attack the illness producing cannibalistic conditions and who have organized themselves in the SPK, who fight against those who are responsible for the said conditions ...
It is not least by such threats and their execution that one can understand how ruling ideology becomes material violence. Everybody who uncritically reads the RNZ-press [Rhein-Neckar-Zeitung, local newspaper], the BILD-press or who uncritically watches television thus becomes a potential assassin who, following the ideology instilled in him, can be seduced into such an act." (see SPK-Documentation II, pp. 108-110, patients'-info No 33)

In particular all those relations which have to do with the psychoanalytic way of interpretation, relations as so-called transfer, retrotransfer, projections, inhibition etc. and so-called authority conflicts, if they became manifest during the course of the agitations between two persons or in the group agitation, were taken up, comprehended and resolved by applying the categories of utility value and exchange value and finally completely abolished in the process of emancipation, cooperation and solidarity.

See also Rede an den kleinen Mann (Listen, Little Man) by Wilhelm Reich, 1946

During the weekends – Saturdays and Sundays – three group agitations and three study work assemblies took place, because there were many people in the SPK who were occupied with work or family from Monday to Friday.

Spinoza, Ethik (Ethics) – chapter III Von den Affekten (About the affections)

The agitation repeatedly was called thoroughly into question within the SPK, as well as publicly in the study groups. For instance, one day, during a study group meeting, two patients decided to abolish completely all medical functions together with the connected persons. In the detailed discussion of the SPK methods that followed, the two patients had caught the attention of the others because of their permanently asking and calling for the "doctor". This contradiction instantaneously became evident, also in the group situation which just took place; but not – as one might have expected most probably – in the form of a critique of these "foolish opinions", or the "mistaking behaviour" of both the patients, or even concerning the concoctions of "fixation" or "transference". This contradiction became evident as a problem not recognized until that moment and that concerned indeed every person in the SPK. Even during personal and group agitations, as well as in the study groups, from time to time all of us were reproducing each other mutually without being aware of it, just as if we were merchants, consumers and defrauded fraudsters. That happened because just this and nothing else is the only input we have received by the society we had formerly lived in, lacking any kind of consciousness about this matter of fact. Caused by experiences like those, the main interest of the agitation focused on the behaviour of consumption and domination and its connection to the social relations of a commodities producing society.

The aberrations of Freudian thinking, put in a simple formula, consist in the fact that for all questions that posed themselves to him as materialistic ones, he did not find any solutions other than idealistic ones. Despite all his apparently critical attitudes towards the bourgeois society, he finally remains tied to the bourgeois ideology. His thinking wavers between a mechanistic materialism on the one hand and a metaphysical idealism on the other; also, he is superelevating [ueberhoehen] the bourgeois order of society to the "principle of reality". By this, any working out of the conditions of development of which the present bourgeois society is a result (i.e. its historical dimension) is inhibited. It is precisely here where the epistemological premises and conditions from which follows the pessimism of Freud are situated, which all commentators correspondingly have found in his works.

From the expulsion of Wilhelm Reich from the Communist Party there followed, besides of his being isolated, that he did not develop further his approach to a materialistic-dialectical theory of sexuality. From that it is understandable the relapse into mechanistic materialism, as it appears in Reich’s explanations of the orgone theory developed by him in his last years. On the part of the communist parties, their refusal to understand the sexual misery as being connected to their politics has led to a false sense of shame and a puritanism in the party organizations which then became the base of a doctrinarism and a bureaucratism, just like the one we find nowadays again in the founding programs of communist parties of the left. In their groups, there now are apparently the same structures of doctrinarism and bureaucratism which previously did not exist in the preceding anti-authoritarian protest movement of '68, now smashed.

In the primeval societies the organization of the social units is determined by the necessity to struggle against the violence originating from nature. The findings of Wilhelm Reich in "The Invasion of Compulsory Sex-Morality", based on the findings of Bronislaw Malinowski are of exceptional epistemological importance in this context:

1. They demonstrate the connection between the forces of nature and the violence in the interior of the social units. Where, as e.g. with the natives of the Trobriand Islands – and with them it is an exceptional case – nature is not hostile to the people, there are no social constraints directly within the social unit.

2. The autonomous economic development as such (transition to agriculture) leads to the emergence of private property and thus to property-related monogamy, in which the spouses regard each other as their respective property, and from that are resulting the social constraints suppressing the drives. It is of crucial importance to note here that there might be embedded in this "paradisiac original state" an impulse to develop into another state which is higher from an economic point of view, a transition which – for the inhabitants of the Trobriand Islands – came automatically, that is to say without being induced by external impulses, e.g. the bartering with a more developed tribe that in other cases, but not with the Trobriands, usually brought about a qualitative change in the concerned society.

3. Reich’s work presents the drive suppression as a result of the development of private property and at the same time as a prerequisite to maintain and to augment private property. The book of W. Reich "The Invasion of Compulsory Sex-Morality" also represents a consistent refutation of all those theories which are trying to prove the so-called mental disturbances either pseudo-philosophically as a fact of human existing [Grundbefindlichkeit] or as a consequence of hereditary genetic determination, the latter being taken for a biologically true argument (so-called exact sciences). The symptoms that scientifically have been classified as mental illnesses indeed have nothing to do with anthropology, because they are nothing but dependent variables of anthropology itself, not anthropological categories, but moments of anthropology – anthropology understood as the totality of all the experiences which the human species has ever had, which has to be determined from a Marxist point of view as alienation and the abolition of alienation.

From the struggle for liberation of the people of Algeria, Frantz Fanon has explained in his book "The Wretched of the Earth" how by taking part in the revolution of the formerly colonized people not only especially psychiatric symptoms disappeared but also physical grievances and troubles [Beschwerden. Hier ausdruecklich nicht Symptome] such as damages of the intervertebral discs, chronic intestinal and stomach ulcers, rheumatic and other muscle strains. – Previously and without taking part in the revolutionary process these somatized grievances and troubles obstinately had resisted any treatment and any attempt to remove them, i.e. to adjust the suffering person to the way of life under colonialism, the latter being the cause of his or her suffering.

For the understanding of the terms "partial drives" ["Partialtriebe"], "genitality" ["Genitalitaet"] etc., we refer to the books of Wilhelm Reich: "The Invasion of Compulsory Sex-Morality" ["Der Einbruch der Sexualmoral"], "The Sexual Revolution" ["Die sexuelle Revolution"], "The Function of Orgasm" ["Die Funktion des Orgasmus"], "The Mass Psychology of Fascism" ["Die Massenpsychologie des Faschismus"].
Within the scope of this book it is not possible to develop a coherent theory of sexuality in a materialistic view. Nevertheless, regarding practical matters, it seems to us to be of special importance to point out that we have tried the best we could to reduce quite consciously all psychoanalytic terms which, nevertheless, still occur in Reich’s most progressive works, to dialectical-materialistic categories the latter used by us to substitute the psychoanalytical terms.

Karl Marx – Capital I, pp. 381/382 and p. 384 – MEW, 1971; bold print by the editors.

In this context, the determination of the ill people as being deprived of all rights is an important coefficient in the whole development of the SPK. How this deprivation of rights became manifest during the development of the SPK can be found in section 10-12.

Taken from a leaflet which was distributed by the "Comité d'Action Santé" in February 1969 at the doors of the car factory Renault at Flins.

Karl Marx – Capital I, p. 384 – MEW, 1971

56. The same applies to the dialectics of accusation and defence in the so-called state of Rule and Law (state under the rule of law), with the only difference that here the "defence" (being defended by a lawyer), because of its being restricted by the given and imposed juridical formalism, can't get beyond by turning itself into accusation again and again, as long as the means of execution (as well as the lawyers themselves) are still under the control of those who exercise the legal monopoly.

57. The documentation has been published in SPK-Dokumentation II, pp. 148 to 170, again in an edition of several thousand copies and is available in bookshops.