Contents "The internationalist proletarian" n.12
Workers of the world, unite!
THE ONLY MENTAL HEALTH UNDER CAPITALISM:
A PERMANENT INTERNAL REBELLION AGAINST THE BOURGEOISIE
Class for capital
Capitalism murders more than 2.7 million workers a year in the so-called labor "accidents". The medical butchers at the service of capital send thousands of sick proletarians to work every day. The working class has to wait months and even years to be visited by specialists and, when this happens, it is not given the necessary examinations and treatments in order to save the bourgeois state from the general costs of labor. The illnesses the workers suffer due to the exhausting rhythms of work that accelerate the deterioration of their muscles, tendons, bones and vital organs are not recognized as caused by work; the bourgeoisie thus shortens the life of millions of proletarians while raising the retirement age in order to make their slaves die before they become an unproductive cost. The bourgeoisie squeezes the proletariat in exchange for miserable wages in the working centers, real prisons where it is subjugated and humiliated by the despotism of the whole hierarchy of commandments. The bourgeoisie throws the proletariat into unemployment when it does not serve them anymore, imposing a life of precariousness, oppression and frustration, keeping it in a constant insecurity and incomprehension of its very conditions of existence that leads to the consumption of all the drugs that the bourgeoisie itself puts at its disposal. And while the bourgeoisie and its paid servants impose these living conditions and treat the working class worse than beasts of burden, one hears everywhere the great concern the bourgeoisie has for the "mental health" of its slaves.
What class interest is behind the much vaunted "mental health"?
“People always have been the foolish victims of deception and self-deception in politics, and they always will be until they have learnt to seek out the interests of some class or other behind all moral, religious, political and social phrases, declarations and promises.” (The Three Sources and Three Component Parts of Marxism, Lenin, 1913). The campaign carried out by the bourgeoisie to safeguard the "mental health" of its slaves is aimed at having a mass of tame beasts easily exploitable. For the bourgeoisie workers are mentally healthy only if they are subdued.
The formation of a docile and submissive working class was a task that the rising bourgeoisie imposed by blood and fire. This process was described by K. Marx in Chapter XXVI of the First Book of Capital: the primitive accumulation. After centuries of domination, the current bourgeoisie does not even need to exercise a direct, kinetic, daily violence on the working masses for them to act directly against their own class interests and in favor of the interests of the exploiting class, the bourgeoisie.
This is how the bourgeoisie has woven the ideological cobweb of "mental health" to trap the working class: first, athletes, artists, and other well-fed servants of capital cried in front of the cameras confessing having problems of stress and anxiety. Afterwards, journalists and hacks opened debate on the little importance given to "mental health". Thus, they managed to fix the expression "mental health" in all the brains (in the well-fed ones of the bourgeoisie and the working aristocracy; and in the badly fed and smashed ones of the proletariat). Then, the theatrics were taken from the journalistic terrain to that of parliamentary cretinism, whose resolution was clear before the beginning of the campaign: more psychologists and psychiatrists are of vital importance for the protection of the workers' state of mind. Finally, the doctors at the service of capital are the ones in charge of diagnosing the workers and their children with "mental health" problems, who after the whole campaign accept without opposition or resistance the diagnosis and treatment.
The workers are then sent to the modern bourgeois confessional, where instead of priests there are psychologists and psychiatrists. The priest defends that everything happens by divine design, and that in order to achieve a better life in heaven one must resign oneself on earth. The modern priest, the psychologist or psychiatrist trained in the Universities of the bourgeoisie, has the function of preventing the proletariat from recognizing in the present institutions and relations of capitalist production the obstacle to overcome all the miseries and contradictions in which it lives; to suppress the rage and internal rebellion against the present social order. For this, in case of pharmacological treatment, it is narcotized with pills that are supposed to regulate and improve the state of mind and, in general, are addictive. In this way the workers are drugged and anesthetized until they become addicts as a powerful tool of social control by the bourgeoisie.
In 1817, bourgeois pharmacology began to market a medicine called "Morphine" (in reference to the Greek god of dreams, Morpheus, because of the sleepiness it caused); it was prescribed both as an analgesic, antitussive or antidiarrheal and against alcohol addiction. In the USA it was the most commonly administered analgesic to soldiers in the American Civil War, so that its addiction came to be called "the soldier's disease". In 1895 the German chemical company Bayer claimed to have synthesized a drug that caused less addiction than morphine and with benefits they considered "heroic". They patented it under the name of... "Heroin". In 1937 a German laboratory synthesized "Methadone" which was administered both during and after World War II as an analgesic and antidepressant so that proletarians returning from the war could be exploited in the reconstruction of Germany. Current year: "esketamine, derived from ketamine, is already administered as a spray for people with resistant depression (...) the journal Science recognized as one of the great findings of 2021 a work that confirmed the effectiveness of MDMA to reduce the symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder (...) In practice, psychedelic therapy is like a trip (...) they live mystical experiences (...) of disconnection from the world." (El País, 08-07-2023).
The connection with the material reality
This is the most important scientific discovery for the working class: the only source of profit is surplus value, obtained through the exploitation of the working class.
The bourgeois option is the disconnection from the reality of this exploitation by using all kinds of drugs, prescribed and non-prescribed, also including television, religion and psychological consultation. The proletarian alternative is the understanding of the causes of this exploitation and all the miseries it entails in order to confront and combat them.
The first way turns the working class physically and mentally into mere beasts of burden. The second way feeds the HATE against the bourgeois relations of production: “There is, therefore, no cause for surprise if the workers, treated as brutes, actually become such; or if they can maintain their consciousness of manhood only by cherishing the most glowing hatred, the most unbroken inward rebellion against the bourgeoisie in power. They are men so long only as they burn with wrath against the reigning class. They become brutes the moment they bend in patience under the yoke, and merely strive to make life endurable while abandoning the effort to break the yoke.” (The condition of the Working Class in England, F. Engels, 1844).
Certainly, the mass of the potentially revolutionary class, the working class, is today depressed and stressed, it lacks its own vitality, it is submitted to the designs of capital and in most cases when it takes action it is for the defense of the interests of the petty bourgeoisie rather than its own. The terrible consequences of the degeneration of the III International that culminated in the Stalinist counterrevolution broke the back of the workers' movement that has to make enormous efforts to rise again.
This was the diagnosis of 1952, still prevailing in many work centers: "Here is how the bourgeois world presents itself, current year: The dominant class has managed, maneuvering the levers of opportunism, to crush to the marrow the revolutionary movement, in a damn war that concluded the process of counterrevolutionary involution of the worker parties. A state machine of unprecedented proportions and repressive capacities keeps the masses chained to exploitation, worse than the rack to the body of the condemned to torture. The chaotic confusion and the sufferings of the masses are such and so many that the working class is transformed into a bleeding trunk that moves unconsciously: its brain is obscured and intoxicated, its sensibility narcotized, the eyes do not see, the hands writhe on themselves. In the place of the class struggle, there is the horrifying ravage of the intestine struggle, typical of castaways on the life raft at the mercy of the waves. In the factories prevails, and this is not a new thing in history, the spying, the snitching, the rancor, the mean and mischievous revenge, the most stupid and bestial opportunism, the arrogance, the neurasthenic abuse, but in the masses oppressed by the consequences of thirty years of tremendous defeats, there is not even the strength to feel genuine nausea, because this is expressed in the miasmatic exhalations of corporate trade unionism, of corporatism and, on the political plane, of social conciliationism and impotent pacifism. " (Activism, 1952).
But will the vitality and vigor needed by the working class be given to it by the honoris causa dealers of the bourgeoisie? On the contrary, they will lead it to prostration and collapse. The bourgeoisie “has converted the physician, the lawyer, the priest, the poet, the man of science, into its paid wage labourers.” (Manifesto of the Communist Party, K. Marx, 1848). Morphine, Heroin, Methadone... and to prepare the cannon fodder for the third world imperialist slaughter: Ketamine, Fentanyl and MDMA.
The vitality and vigor needed by the working class can only come from a fiercely ANTI-BOURGEOUS atmosphere in which HATE to the existing relations of production is cultivated. Only this atmosphere, which must necessarily be one of real struggle and not of empty chatter, will allow the proletarian to forge a character of rebellion in the heat of struggle. The daily combat against the usurpations of capital, in the class worker union, is a first school in which the proletarians come out of the isolation, selfishness and self-absorption imposed on them by this society in order to better exploit them. Through the clashes against capital, they verify in their own skin and in that of their comrades the class antagonisms, the repressive role of the bourgeois state in all its ramifications: police, judges, functionaries, labor inspectors, medical inspectors, subsidized trade unionism. Through their organization in the class worker union, not integrated into the state, they can see that their individual interest is linked to the collective interest of their class.
Class for itself: the overthrow of the bourgeoisie
The function of the communists is to stimulate this immediate struggle without ceasing to show its limitations, to elevate politically the workers who undertake it, to link it with the higher objective of the abolition of wage labor, of the communist revolution. Only with the party and with the action of the party does the proletariat become a class for itself and for the revolution: "It will be enough to remember that, if the consciousness of human beings is the result and not the cause of the characteristics of the environment in which they are obliged to live and act, the rule will never be that the exploited, the starving, the malnourished, can self-convince of the need to overthrow and replace the exploiter well-nourished and provided with all the resources and powers. This can only be the exception." (Party and Class, 1921).
The real elevation of the material and, therefore, mental life standard of the proletariat will only be possible after overthrowing capitalism: "12. The process of transformation of the relations of production will be accompanied by a vast series of social measures, founded on the principle that the collectivity will take charge of the material and intellectual existence of all its members. Thus, all the degenerative defects which the proletariat inherits from the capitalist world will be successively eliminated and, in the words of the Manifesto, the old society divided into classes which clash with each other will be followed by an association in which the free development of each will be the condition for the free development of all." (Theses of the Abstentionist Communist Faction of the PSI, 1920).
The historical mission of the proletariat is the abolition of social classes, of private property, of wage labor, of mercantile exchange and of the anarchy of production. Through this “organisation of the proletarians into a class, and, consequently into a political party” (Manifesto of the Communist Party), it must violently overthrow the bourgeoisie, take power and exercise the dictatorship of the proletariat to prevent the restoration of social privilege and implement all measures leading to the abolition of social classes and the extinction of the State.
To carry it out, it is a necessity for every worker who gets organized for fighting and for communist militants to reject the ideological and pharmacological narcotization that the bourgeoisie administers to the working class for the purpose of idiotizing numbness: "The revolutionary can only be someone desintoxicated" (Trajectory and catastrophe of the capitalist form, 1957).
FOR THE ANTICAPITALIST SOCIAL REVOLUTION!
International Communist Party – “The Internationalist Proletarian”
www.pcielcomunista.org – September 2023