SPK-Documentation Part 3

Preface

The specific, species-creating characteristic of the human species which, by the scholastic-patristic tradition, was covered up as atomon eidos and differentia specifica and handed over to the responsibility of the therapists who, unfortunately, did not limit themselves to split only hairs and such alike (in the Greek ecclesiastical doctrine the term therapeutes means cleric), and which was determined biologically by L. Feuerbach but discovered and generalized as labor only with Marx, this specific, species-creating characteristic of the human species has now become entirely the medical profession’s secret cause.

Thus, over the past decade, it has become evident on many an occasion that the students thing, then the neighbourhood thing, then the prisoners thing, then the marginalised thing, then the kids thing, then the working class thing, then the military service thing, then the military-political thing, then the woman’s issue, then the environmental issue, and the trip-, joint- and alcohol issue, and the psycho issue anyway, are all hermetically regularised and locked up.

And that in a medical way. In case one has actually overstrained oneself on the one or the other thing, be it by the seizure of power in the Third World or be it in the serial powerlessness of some torture cell, one sends for the doctors.

Medicine does not only just program the human species in general and in particular –: all medicine is industrial medicine. Every one takes part and contributes to it, and more than only taxes. And where does that journey go to? Certainly not back to Old Alexandria, to the classical country of medical tyranny (Iatrocracy), where doctors prepared the single one by vivisection (dismembering him alive) for his execution. Where automation and computer technology are leaving the species-creating principle labor to the past, more speedily in Capitalism and more thoroughly in Socialism, there Iatrocracy needs no longer restrain itself to find its limited fulfillment in the treatment of sick labor force (medicalised industry, industrialised common nuthouse). Iatrocracy is setting itself up as the species-creating principle, is becoming labor of labor, labor as such, the one and only labor. It creates and finishes off Man: as a test-tube cross-breed in its own image, finishing planetary imperialism up to brain-imperialism, and makes the productive proletariat go to the dogs via its dick/tail by the means of coercive differential euthanasia. Just as before. Dying without end is a politically programmed species-universality, if not under the venture’s trade mark of the staff of Aesculapius so under the MO Chief of Staff (medical officer in command).

But it wasn’t always like that. The political patients’ line that is getting hold of illness with superstitious fanaticism, comprehending and surviving it, as long as it is attacking the medical doctors (magicians, shamans, archiatrists), is as old as the Stone Age. The phantasm of an illness of extra-societal origin (holy, naturally inevitable, willed by God, "psychical", "somatic", "holistic") is just as old as the transformation of man into a commodity, as old as the fully developed monetary society: only some three thousand years. And if the upright walk of man evolves and declines by growing up among human beings walking upright, a circumstance exclusively established by societal conditions, a circumstance that has stigmatised the lying, birth-giving woman as the first ex-posed and a-bandoned patient, and, by consequence, patients as men and women as the racial persecuted security risk number one, – then, at those times already, it must have been the medicynical in power that the strategy of subversive attack was directed against firstly and lastly.

Prior to the artificially produced test-tube cross-breed commodity-medical doctor under the banner of truncheon and snake, as monopolistic producers of the "species" death, the living conditions since primeval times have set man himself to be his own birth attendant and accomplisher of the human species: ARTEMIS, being through with any false doctrine of the "natural inheritance of destiny", being through with any established upper society, skilled in the art of using weapons and thus skilled in the art of healing, homeless, but unalienated, night-sighted and dark-skinned, hermaphrodite of life-in-fusion, in the sign of an illness-liberated society [cf. Françoise d’Eaubonne, "Frauen vor dem Patriarchat" (Women before Patriarchy), German, unpublished].

An enumeration, also readable as a condensed summary of the patients’ resistance, which is staying alive until into and between the lines of this book.

Wounds that the patients have struck to the concerted iatrocracy, no doctor can cure, no nature can heal them. Once the trust from below has gone, and along with it the first medical doctor as such, then reaction has lost its most attractive phantasm, and its monopolistic claim to its central economic productive force, the power in white.

Some readers say they were "fascinated by the directness and the concreteness of the statements". The point is, however, that communication about the ineradicable phenomenon of resistance, the symptom, is nowadays increasingly surpassing any aesthetics. The old Renaissance has now definitively had its day. The capitalist chaos and its remains can only be unerringly deciphered by and through the wounds of resistance. Communication becomes true, credible and essential, wherever it discovers illness, this capitalist greenhouse culture, as a countering explosive power; hypocritical, false and reactionary, in short: fascinosum, wherever it is still being carried by a free-floating culture, by that archē from which, not by coincidence, the complementary concepts of archiater (medical doctor) and anarchy are formed.

Preface to the SPK-Documentation Part 3, 1^st edition 1977

Patients' Front / Socialist Patients' Collective, PF/SPK(H), 21.01.2014