NUMBERS

NUMBERS AND SUPERNUMERARIES

Preface to the Spanish version of Numbers and Supernumeraries

The following text removes definitively every foundation and validity from all science and technology one and all. It discloses, for the first time, to knowledge and consciousness based on illness and through illness capable of being intensified as high as one likes, the view on a world never seen before and common to everybody, the view on the possibility never seen before of a world common to everybody. This text not only constitutes the axis of rotation, the stationary pole and the firm and solid grounds of reasoning around which all our publications are evolving, but for all future changes, including the revolutionary ones, it is setting out the immovable standard against which the level of achievement of their objectives are to be measured.
The reader of this text should know that. We ourselves wrote it down, so that we won’t forget it.

Note by the translators of the Spanish version
Reid Aldeapzoli Loev, MA phil., and P.Hogernig, MA in Sociology and Chemist
PF/SPK MFE Spain
 

"Who dominates the health system, dominates the people." Who has got the power then, according to Lenin? It’s the medical profession. It’s the medical profession (the doctors’ class) from which all political power is derived. The one who makes use of this citation of Lenin is usually a doctor and he’s using it as argument against "communism" and for "the good of his patients". It is certain, however, that neither Lenin neither some one else ever dominated the doctors, let alone the health system. Excepting the people, if they had got the power to do so. But even then, they would be following in the wake of the medical profession. Lenin’s last battle, after decades of insomnia, culminated in threats of boycott against his well-meaning family doctors. Nothing more. But who can prevent us considering precisely in this, already today, his only deed fundamentally revolutionary?

Stalin, at first acting as a striving mosaic God-doctor ("… since I am the Lord, thy medical doctor, thy healer", 2 Moses 15, 26), had all possible people classified and killed as carriers of illness by Stalinists of all price ranges, in painstaking and detailed work which lasted over decades. That’s because illness, as infective as it were, would demand its quickest and healthiest cure. And the cure would certainly demand sacrifices: many, and ranging among the highest ranks. But when he started, at about 1950, one of his notorious relief-attacks against the "cosmopolitan murderers in white coats" (the so called medical affaire), he failed as radically and definitely as never before.
It is said that he had done any possible and thinkable to preserve his health and that he had plaid his political patiences as eagerly as he was used to it. But nevertheless he had died long before his time had come.
By the hand of man, as many a chronicler hints at.
Philoiatrocratically with discretion – of course!

To have attacked the health system as political domination in its absoluteness, this merit we attribute to Lenin. Stalin, at the contrary, was permitted to embody the apparatus of the health system only as long as the doctors had left him this body. Afterwards, they have made use of it only under the form of the SERBSKY-Clinics. Haloperidol (Haldol), the medical drug called even there by the same name, is said to taste even there as politically healthy, and cancer is said to retrograde even there as it does in comparable institutes wherever they are located.

Unlike Stalin, Hitler did not need to take action in health politics on his own. As soon as he had been put in the driving-seat, his international medical backers let him play his favorite art of warfare, which is their hereditary supplier industry. For their part, they leisurely and undisturbed, in highest privacy and not infrequently even gratis devoted themselves to the establishment of an autocratic regime, firstly over patients and sex, then over population and dictatorship. This brought them a good bit closer to their goal of anchoring their millennium-health-system, as being unlimitedly suited to expansion and as being unaffected by crisis and overthrowing, firmly in the population and the political system. And they did so, despite of all the Courts of Nuremberg and Russell Tribunals.

The Norm consisting of health, the archaic creditor-debtor relation and the money-form (Geldform) may be modified politically, economically and ideologically, ethnically, historically and socially as differently as it may be. To have carved it by the means of coercive adaptation as a suchlike in each brain, heart and hormone balance, and be it by killing and, in the near future, by manufacturing mass wise human clones who suit to their standardized design, is and remains both the equally revealed as the most-secretly protected creation of medical doctors; namely from biology to factor "Psy".

The attack against all determination (= medical) is the conditio sine qua non of all subversion and the via regia leading to the unconscious consisting of health and money. In the act of treating-being treated, this is as obvious as tangible. But pathopractice, the practice strengthened by the force of illness, cast it to the winds.

Everyone who has got coins in his pocket and understands their practical use, has got to have conceptual abstractions in his head, be he aware of that or not, because in fact he treats that coins as if they possessed an unchangeable material reality. However, the abstractions, which do not exist anywhere else but in the thinking, do not originate from the act of thinking but exclusively from the money-mediated activity of trading. Rather than to pathopractice, they bear obviously resemblance to medical practice. That the pure concepts of the mind do not have as their subject the act of thinking but that they derive in some way from "outside", is a permanent leading theme of the history of Occidental philosophy. So, Parmenide received the illumination of the concept that represented for him the being, from Dike, the goddess of justice and truth; Plato could not think of anything other but to attribute the ideas to a sort of reminiscence for reasons of a metempsychose (transmigration of souls); for Kant, the non-empirical basic concepts of thinking (Grundanschauungsformen: Raum und Zeit) and the categories take the form of a pre-formation preceding all experience.

The act of equating the owner of commodities with a determined number of monetary units, which takes place in the act of exchange, is "the divine force" (K. Marx) of money: money becomes the real power of and over everything and everybody – "it is both the real separating coin and the real binder, the galvanic-chemical force of society" (K. Marx). What is real for the owner of commodities in force of his money, what his money can buy, that is he himself: the represented (vorgestellte) number of money-units stands for the person (persona = mask, from personare = to sound through). What is sounding here, is not the force of illness but the unconsciously re-moved, diversified in many forms and by that enforced echo of the money business.

In the relation based on exchange, the product of the one is the weapon to seize the product of the other, is the strategem of the notorious pacification.

Conversely, satisfaction would be the perfectly contented revolutionary fulfillment inherent in illness. The value, however, representing the relation of reciprocity between owners of commodities, is referred up to nine tenths to "health", the most inflationary value of all values. Health is the wish-inhibited, omnipresent vanishing. The content of the wishes is – Damned! – illness. Health continues to remain the epitome of ERROR, the fallacy, the phallus, the (clinical) case, and the medical trap (Fehler, Phallus, Fall, Falle). In the meanwhile, however, the owners of commodities are considering their respective own product as the means of power over the other (owner) and over themselves, that is their own product has raised on its hind-legs against them (even according to K. Marx). But in the very end, it’s only health that counts -, the medical tact and beat (aerztlicher Takt) is becoming even for the most faithful ear what it has been already ever since: the sure-fire count-down.

At the unstable point of conversion of production into destruction, therefore, the strategist of pacification of all politics, the bearer of salvation to all domination, enters as the "divine physician" (Kerenyi) into the pathopractic field of vision. Be it as medical-man, shaman, sacerdotal physician or any other medical death-specialist, they always were and are on the spot wherever and whenever the concern is to falsify, to fake and to usurp the revolutionary resistance that, in its turn, is liberation from and unleashing of illness against the socially multiplied forces of nature (gesellschaftlich potenzierte Naturgewalt). – The "other", who amputates the revolutionary fulfillment of illness in order to escape his own supernumerariety, is Iatrocrate. For "health’s" sake. It is him who forms the matrix of every policy of desire and of every economy of profits. And they know what they are doing.

So, in the middle of the 18th century, the "lunatics" to be released from their "asylum" had to put their signature under the following reverse (= reverse side of a coin, written obligation): "As the signatory at the bottom of this, I am reversing myself by this … promising by the word of eternal truth, so help me God to save my soul, that, after having been set free from my previous arrest, I will not take revenge on anyone."

Being brought into line with his value (once a time: sacrificial offers; nowadays: social welfare contributions, and the paper-of-value: health insurance certificate), the sick are being handed over to and left at the mercy of the artificial product "health model", this very medical product and artifact. This is the way the violent power of the doctors' class (Heilsgewalt, Iatrarchy) wants it: "The physicians are learning at our risk, they make experiments and they kill with sovereign impunity, in fact, the medical doctor is the only one who has got a license to kill." This fact of the matter, written down by Plinius Secundus one-thousand-nine-hundred years ago, which, in recent times and as far as we know, has not been hushed up again yet only by Bluechel and Illich, this fact of the matter then, with its lethal consequences since archaic-archeatric times (the Alexandrian anatomist, Herophilos, executed vivisections on criminals sentenced to death and on slaves), not only demonstrates that the doctors' class can practice their homicidal-monopolistic warfare only if supported by the applause of the majority, and that precisely because in the world of scarcity everyone is the other, the anti-human.

But it is only the developed social and democratic welfare state that will completely turn out to be the real domain of the power of the doctors' class. Every democracy is in the last end iatro-democracy, the medical monopoly to homicide raised to the domination of the people. What is dominating is always the sane. And the sane common sense of the people is as swift – as it is healthy.

The above mentioned fact of matter, which had been already familiar to Plinius Secundus, also provides information about the fact that the medical doctor not only acts as a land owner who registers the inalienable substance of the labor-force, the body, in his (land) register (katatrieren, Kataster), but also that he, in a general-staff-like manner, vivisects and maps cartographically thinking and feeling as well.

The "money-psyche, which is implanted in all sections of the productions and movements of the bourgeois society" (K. Marx) is revealing itself above all as being programmed by the violent power of the doctors' class (iatrarchically, iatrarchy). It is not the patient who is cybernetic but it is the medical doctor, through the mediation of the money-psyche.

Without any embarrassment and with a straight away capital cynicism, the doctors' class were exhibiting their entitlement to omnipotence already in the cult of Asclepiad during the classical period, as state cult number one, by putting in circulation their social-synthetic function of guidance and management: they – what a miracle of preventive terror – had their mark of Cain, the verge of Asclepiad, forged on each coin. The origin and the function of the mark of Cain are well known: "… that nobody who encounters in him would kill him" (1 Moses 4, 15). Nowadays, entrenching themselves at secret level no 4 in biotechnological laboratories, they are messing about with the genetic code. And who is disturbing the doctors, takes even the risk of provoking a cosmic catastrophe.

The social-synthetic function of money (Sohn-Rethel*) is, therefore, the mimicry and consequence of that of the medical doctor: to protect oneself from sickness, which is being detected by the medical doctor as supernumerariety, one goes to the doctor and pays in cash (presents, sacrificial offers, social welfare contributions). It is true that K. Marx located the genesis of the "theoretical subject" (soul, psyche, subjectivity) in the economic detaching of the money-function from the money-matter and, thus, in the act of equating man to money; however, this is only one moment, and precisely the economic one. The other moment, precisely the one that is the social-politically primary propelling and the finally decisive moment, is rooting in the act of equating man to "health", to which is attributed a medi-cynical significance, that is in the iatrocratically determined otherness. Racism is the term-camouflage of this otherness by which the medical doctor, shrugging his shoulders, is getting out of it and by which the "political educated citizen" is covering up the homicidal-monopolistic activity of the nice doctor. Any racism is iatro-racism.

* Alfred Sohn-Rethel was the first and only one to overcome the inadequateness 
  of Marxist theory in relation to the science of nature ("Intellectual and 
  manual labor. A critique of epistemology"). While he was still alive (14.12.1985),
  he confirmed as being correct and appropriate all our applications related to 
  illness of his detecting findings. In a script of the SPK, distributed in Austria 
  in 1998, the contents, which had been worked out in the present text, were taken 
  up in an exemplary manner. In that script every attempt of coming to term with 
  the past by the means of the usual scientific activity, is being stopped once 
  and for all (cf. Colectivo Socialista de Pacientes / Frente de Pacientes, 
  SPK/PF(H) y EMF español: ¡Fortísimo por la enfermedad!, pp. 18, cf. also 
  PATIENTENSTIMME Nr. 4/5: Gegen alle Wissenschaft (English version: 
  Against all science).
Huber
Both moments are reconciled wonderfully in the middle of the dominating "concept" of illness by which means they are connected: "Illness … is a irregular state of the body and/or mind, whose occurrence or requires the necessity of a curing treatment – alone or in connection to inability to work – or it has as consequence the inability to work" (so the Prussian Supreme Administrative Court, in its verdict from October 10, 1889, confirmed by the Federal Social Welfare Court of the GFR in its verdict from May 16, 1972).

The medical profession - if one considers the doctors - and be it only on a trial basis - as the unproductive class par excellence - is trying to escape its own extermination by defining, selecting and administrating the "unproductive" supernumerary people (racial hygiene, unworthy existence, unworthy life). In a statement of proposed new law concerning the extermination of life, introduced in 1940 above and behind Hitler, they high lightened as main criteria the "ability to productive work". And the remaining, who are glad to have once again escaped with their life, are being kept by it (bei der Stange halten) by raising their hopes on "medical assistance" and by leading them to believe in "therapeutic idealism" (already the Leader of the SS, Heinrich Himmler, was mad about it, often and readily). To be kept by it (bei der Stange halten), stands here for health, value, wish, fallacy, phallus, case, trap, in brief: error par excellence (Gesundheit, Wert, Wunsch, Phallus, Fall, Falle, kurz: fuer Fehler ueberhaupt).

By the way, already the old skeptic Descartes must have had that sort of thing in mind when he, being "debarred from practicing his profession" and subjected to political censorship, praised to the sky precisely the medical art as the universal remedy (cure-all, panacea) and pretended to pin all his hopes on the future ennoblement of the human species in the medical art alone.

The capitalist form of the medical controlled imperialism versus the interior, which is creating its helots (heilotes = prisoners, slaves of the state in ancient Sparta) in the home country and which is defining them medically, had appeared on the German territory for the first time just one hundred years before: The iatrocracy as "medical police force" (Rau, Baldinger, Frank) declared itself to be competent, at that time already, not only for the "security of the interior affairs of the State" (J. P. Frank) but even more so for the factor "human labor force", which had been re/discovered by the Kameralism of that period. – Modern "health politics" and the programs for "the preservation of public health" have their starting-point precisely there, a starting-point of both the medical profession and the establishment of health power (Heilsgewalt).

Because of its being so obvious as the palms of one’s hands, it is so difficult to get it into one’s head that the pretext of health is being used as the first as well as the last justification of all violent power of the doctors' class (Heilsgewalt), and this goes beyond of and is superior to any ideology and culture, production and politics. As the point of crystallization in the regulative system of purposes (im regulativen System der Zwecke) (KANT), as pure usefulness (reine Nuetzlichkeit) and absolute liberty in the system of dismemberment and disjunction made out of money and language, i.e. the system of the shallowest, emptiest and coldest death (HEGEL), the violence of salus does not need nor ideological nor any other catalyst to convert from the subliminal latency of the medical monopoly of homicide into the virulence of mass-extermination. Because for the sake of health, they are ready to do anything, the people and the victims and the victors … (Volk und Knecht und Ueberwinder).

When it serves the purpose of health, medical doctors are allowed to grant reprieve to their prisoners by killing them. Be they children whose scalps are to be taken (Auschwitz), be they prisoners who are to be denigrated and killed by driving them to commit suicide (SUICIDE = HOMICIDE) (they call that: Action Mercy killing).

When it serves to the purpose of health, they are on stand-by in millions in order to be used as guinea pigs until the predetermined number has been counted out, and each one who is being hit "by chance" first of all thinks of his health, of the warm life, and of his image, and he asks the reason: "Why me, of all people?". And again he thinks of his health, when he privately and silently decides: "Die you just today, but me not before tomorrow". Insights (Weisheiten) from the GULAG. But who of the dissidents of the East and who of the dissidents of the West is already despising health in practice, right away from the start?

Because it serves to health, there is the new euthanasia-campaign. And the commitments against or in favor of it are passing straight across all the media, all the political factions and fashions, all the groups of age, all the population classes and other classes. And is there any social-political study group, and be it even as an extremely leftist one, which hasn’t firmly grounded its reasoning and practising on health? After all, it was namely H. MARCUSE who socio-prophylactically excommunicated each leftist already in 1968, in case he would dare to resist to an improvement of the public health system. Only the medical wire-pullers, exemplarily those in the reform-clinics, in the federations for mental health (WFMH) and social psychiatry prefer to keep in the background. When they say health, they really mean medicynical mass-euthanasia because of its expediency (Zweckmaessigkeit). For with them, as we will see soon hereafter, each error is being excluded with machine-like precision.

Because health, if one follows the "Logic of Life" as it was reflected by FRANCOIS JACOB for certain rizomatic-molecular-revolutionary circles, is the product of the calculator made of proteins and genes.

And this sort of machine-calculated-health is capable to read the Morse alphabet. And it is capable to count as well. Only up to two, of course. And that must do. For wherever it is making a mistake, there is error. Illness would be an error of genetic informatics! Nothing else. According to this machine then, it is of course part of the genetically embodied health-program that each error desires its elimination, and, by consequence, each health-grouch his erasure. Health, now, does no longer fall within the superior values for which the pathologic optics, which here is put on for fun, with Nietzsche, Nietzsche-epigones and with all that goes with it, is looking out. Health is now the calculator-machine of all the desirable death things, the calculator-machine of all death-desires; it is, briefly said, the epitome of the desire-machine.
 

The text above was published for the first time in the Italian periodical CONTROinformazione, No 18 (June 1980), Milan, under the title NUMERI E RESTI.
This new edition of one of our SPK-texts (the former text was published under the title Zahlen und Ueberzaehlige, in Documents of the SPK, volume III, 1976) was chosen by us to be presented against the Congress of Dissidents organized by the Collettivo Freudiano, later renamed "Movimento Freudiano Internazionale MFI" (International Psychoanalytical Association), in Paris, 1978.
As Patients of the Patients’ Front we could not get to like neither the Russian variety of dissidentia, which is seeking its salvation in the medical doctors, nor the Unconscious of Western coinage, which is seeking its salvation in the dissidentia.

A detailed report on the Verdiglione-Congress was published by the Italian news-magazine L’ESPRESSO, under the title: "The schizophrenic revolver" (February, 1978). This revolver was attributed to us. This was done with the intention to hush up the stirring presentation of our text "Numbers and Supernumeraries" (see above). "Schizophrenia" is not a revolver. "Schizophrenia" is one thing; a revolver (turning back) is another. But where it is the scripture to eternalize death (A. Verdiglione), there it must have been "schizophrenia" to have dictated the editor’s pen in his attempt to hush patients and illness up, also according to A. Verdiglione, and regarding L’ESPRESSO as well. In 1978, to the board of directors of the congress around A.Verdiglione who, at that time, was still a supporter of Craxi, and who later was condemned in consequence of a campaign of denunciations which had been hatched against him by Basaglia-communists with and without Schizophrenia-Revolvers, because of their envy as regards to money, our theme "Numbers and Supernumeraries" would not suit at all to the political landscape of the congress. This justification was adduced as excuse for not having published our contribution to the congress "Numbers and Supernumeraries" among those published by him in the reports of the congress. And he added that he would take care for the theme in one of his own lectures. Whether this lecture was ever given, and whether he presented it in written form, the gentle reader might see for himself, if he ever could make a find where we did not.

In Rome, there was published the book "IL TEMPO IMPERFETTO, Dispositivi critici negli anni della restaurazione (1980-1995)" ("The imperfect / unfinished time. Critical devices in the years of restoration (1980-1995)"). In this book, the late Claudio Mutini (1935-1999), in former times a lecturer at the Faculty of Philosophy of the University of Rome, author of several books, founder and editor of two cultural-political periodicals on a scientifically demanding level and an associate author to many other periodicals, is examining, together with Giorgio Patrizi, in a critical review the theoretical and political currents in Western Europe of the eighties and nineties. In the chapter: "Rilettura e proposte della teoria radicale" (Revision and proposals of the radical theory), he begins with a citation from SPK / PATIENTS’ FRONT taken from an Italian periodical of the year 1980 in order to explain on the base of that citation that the so-called "riflusso", that is the reactionary turn in Western Europe’s political and theoretical currents of the eighties and nineties, must be understood as being the consequence of the neo-liberalistic development of Capitalism in those years. Referring to Walter Benjamin, Guy Debord, Adorno, Balthasar Gracian, Ludwig Feuerbach, Karl Marx and Francis Fukuyama, he emphasizes, in that and in the following chapters, that the SPK and the PATIENT’S FRONT [PF/SPK(H)] were the only ones which did not join in this turn ("riflusso") in the Western Europe of the eighties and nineties, but that they continue to be of decisive importance for the development of the revolutionary theory and practice in contemporary Europe.

P.Hogernig, MA in Sociology and Chemist
Final edition: Huber

1978

Translation:

Kurd Ch. Schager, Dipl.-Angl., M.A.soc.ling. , PF/SPK MFE

Final editing:
 

Huber
KRANKHEIT IM RECHT