Afternoon Comrades,
Last week for this substack as of now- not sure how everyone else is holding up but I haven’t even put a damn tree up yet, and at this rate I probably will not either. I was sick most of last week and still ended up going to work and I need to unpack that mental package - something, at some point of time went wrong in my mental development when it comes to work, I will simply not call in sick unless I genuinely cannot walk, and that’s beyond silly, I am fully aware of that. It most likely has to do with a combination of factors, such as starting work in a shitty economy - the late 90s sucked trust me - always being poor and having been indoctrinated with the reality that when one does not work one does not get paid - as well as then having being self employed with employees for well over 15 years - it is the worst combination ever to be honest but here we are. It’s been on mind and so we are going to talk about this today - not so much my own self-destructive idiocy but rather how health, mental health and capitalism are tools and how marxist approach can offer solution to the insanity the our collective serfdom is.
Before that, an end of year playlist for you lovelies. Almost 4 hours of vibes, everything from violence and sex to melatonin and a bottle of scotch.
And Hell, if anyone wants to buy a drink for christmas, here is your chance.
Mental Health and Marxism
The precarity of work, especially manual labour that is tied to physical fitness and productivity as it is in my case is designed, maliciously, to inflict this insecurity in workers in our current system of work. Whilst that is a worthwhile discussion in on itself I wanted to digest a few other ideas & thoughts with you today, predominately the concept of Mental Health.
These days the idea of being mentally healthy is something most of us know of and consider important, but what is mental health under Capitalism. Physical Health under Capitalism is judged by ones ability to perform according to the rules set out by Capitalism, be valued accordingly and rewarded. Plainly, if your behaviour and abilities are found to be non-disruptive and its subsequent productivity is something of value to the Capitalists, you are rewarded. If not, well, we already tried Eugenics and then some.
So what then is Mental Health? The ability of the mind to provide the care to foster and produce the physical abilities to produce anything of value, a value determined only and exclusively by the Capitalists? What if your personality is “anti-social”? Who determines what social and anti-social is? You guessed it. This is where it gets a little wild, because, of course, there has been a great amount of both medical and psychological / psychiatric work done on this subject.
The concept of mental illness has a strategic role in modern societies, therefore, enabling certain contentious social activities by obscuring their political nature, and diverting attention from the failings of the underlying economic system. The analysis suggests the medical view is driven by political imperatives rather than science and reveals the need for a system that is more transparent and democratic. While the mental health system has some consistent functions across all modern societies, this account highlights one of the endemic contradictions of the capitalist system in the way that it marginalises large groups of people by narrowing the opportunities to make an economic contribution to society.
The subject of mental health has perhaps never been more widely discussed than today, and mental health problems more widely accepted as “proper” medical conditions. There has been a huge escalation in the diagnosis and treatment of such problems across western societies in the past few decades.A quarter of the English population report that they have suffered from a mental illness at some point in their lives, and even larger numbers have been persuaded that many instances of unhappiness and discontent arise from biochemical abnormalities and require medical interventions. This phenomenon has been referred to as “psychiatrization”, and also as widening medicalisation or “disease-mongering”, since psychiatric disorders are classified as a subset of medical disorders and often subject to medical-style interventions like pharmaceuticals. In the meantime, there has been a profound reorganisation of provision for the seriously mentally unwell, with care provided by large state institutions transferred to smaller facilities and organisations, many run by the private sector on a “for-profit” basis.
The works of Marx and Engels are recognised to provide important insights into the nature and workings of many contemporary institutions, and systems for addressing mental health problems, particularly psychiatry, are no exception. Several scholars within a broadly defined Marxist tradition have examined mental institutions and treatments, building on the analysis of social deviance, and focusing on the way psychiatric interventions serve as mechanisms of social control, developed to manage behaviour that threatens to destabilise the capitalist system. Other authors have documented how, over recent decades, Neoliberal capitalism has coincided with the trend to medicalise and “commodify” more and more aspects of human feelings and behaviour, in the process turning them into a source of profit for the pharmaceutical and healthcare industries. The ideological consequences of reframing social problems as individual pathology have also been highlighted, in the way this process diverts attention from the structural inequality and injustice that make life difficult for people in the first place.
Marxist analyses overlap with the “anti-psychiatry” position, which argues that mental illness is a strategic, political concept, rather than a scientific one.
In its function, the power to punish is not essentially different from the power to cure.
-Michel Foucault
Anti-psychiatry is the belief that the psychiatric system is a system of social control masquerading behind made-up science. Protest against the mental health system is not a new phenomenon and in fact goes back hundreds of years to the 17th century, when inmates at Bethlem hospital began petitioning the House of Lords for more humane treatment. In the 19th Century, groups like the Alleged Lunatics Friends Society campaigned against the assaults and abuse that were meted out routinely to inmates in the warehouse-style Victorian asylums. There is a lot of literature around this subject and if anyone is interested, please drop me a line and I will send out some resources.
The problem however then remains- if our material, or let’s call them physical in this context, problems, health, frailty, injuries produce mental behaviour that the all encompassing judge of productivity finds invaluable, we’re fucked, materially. Other than burning it all down I actually don’t see a way of reforming this system, and it is systemic, not individual, that will allow us to exist without being reduced to a value. Immediately, I want to say that acknowledging that this is our collective reality is a good step forward, but as always, analysis without action is at best, a bourgeois trap to keep systemic change at bay.
Of course the Capitalists want no systemic change, it’s worked well for them so far but I know, instinctively as well as factually that we are all well beyond breaking point. More importantly, it doesn’t have to be this. Our collective labour produces more than enough value, should be remain within this man-made value system if it was shared accordingly. Beyond that, this Marxist opinion is the same as always:
In a higher phase of communist society, after the enslaving subordination of the individual to the division of labor, and therewith also the antithesis between mental and physical labor, has vanished; after labor has become not only a means of life but life's prime want; after the productive forces have also increased with the all-around development of the individual, and all the springs of co-operative wealth flow more abundantly—only then can the narrow horizon of bourgeois right be crossed in its entirety and society inscribe on its banners:
From each according to their ability, to each according to their needs.
-Marx
Food for thought.
Thank you for your time, attention and support.
Yours, V.