Song of the Patients' Front

Backcover

Illness and revolution

It is a matter of fact that today’s relative economic and material “prosperity” of the working class in the western industrial nations is the result of class struggles and does not represent a "fair" share of the working class in a "natural" evolution. This matter of fact has been veiled more or less successfully by the agents of capitalism until today.

As we know from Marx, it is a historical necessity that from the contradictions of capitalism there must result socialism. This necessity, which constitutes an intrinsic factor inside each person, is illness, the subjective suffering, the internal contradictions that bring about a change of consciousness and urge the suffering subject to act. The necessity is the need of each person consciously experienced as sensuously suffering.

On the one hand illness is productive force, and on the other hand, as the identity of production and destruction, illness is the concept [Begriff] of all relations of production. The basic antagonism [Grundwiderspruch] between productive forces and the relations of production is to be thought in such a way that illness is the comprehensive necessity which produces its own complement [Gegenteil], the revolution. The patients are thus in illness the revolutionary class in themselves (that means, see Hegel, Sartre: in their potentiality, but not yet in reality), but as consciously suffering patients they are also for themselves the revolutionary class. The class warfare represents the life process itself and produces the revolution as the only value of use of the future.