You’ve probably clicked onto this video because either you or someone you know is
experiencing, or has experienced, some form of mental illness to one degree or another.
Whether it’s been openly spoken about or not.
But the fact is that over 46% of the population will experience mental illness at one point
or another over the course of their lifetimes.
And that percentage is also skewed significantly as mental illness is increasing rapidly in
younger generations.
So much so that, globally, suicide is the second-leading cause of death among 15–29-year-olds.
Mental Health Ireland states that “Those who are younger, on average, scored lower
on the wellbeing scale than those who are older; […] On average, those who are unemployed
and those who are full-time homemakers have a lower score than those who are in full-time
or part-time employment; [and] On average, women have a lower wellbeing score than men”.
In other words, and perhaps unsurprisingly, the most oppressed groups in society suffer
the worst with poor mental health.
Specifically, those who are most negatively affected by class society, both in terms of
its class-based exploitation at the base level of relations of production, and its superstructural
modes of oppression like patriarchy and white supremacy.
And class society’s negative affect on mental health has been a well-documented phenomenon
for decades: “[A] distinct inverse relationship does
exist between social class and mental illness.
The linkage between class status and the distribution of patients in the population follows a characteristic
pattern; class V [the lower proletariat; lumpenproletariat], almost invariably, contributes many more patients
than its proportion in the population warrants.
Among the higher classes [the bourgeoisie and the upper sections of the petty-bourgeoisie]
there is a more proportionate relationship between the number of psychiatric patients
and the number of individuals in the population.”
The working class, and especially its lower sections, disproportionately experience mental
illness, and beyond that are the least likely to receive the appropriate level of support
for these issues.
In other words, mental illness is not just something that negatively affects everyone
equally, regardless of social standing, but is in fact a class issue - our class issue
– inherently baked into capitalist relations of production.
So, let’s talk about this.
Let’s take a look at the root cause of most of our societal maladies and what we can do
to collectively solve these problems.
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Now, as mentioned earlier, it’s been scientifically demonstrated extensively that the lower one
sits on the socio-economic ladder, the worse off they’re likely to be with regard to
mental health, and with receiving appropriate treatment for ill mental health.
This will come as no surprise to the growing number of precarious workers in the gig economy
who live a life of uncertainty with regard to whether or not they’ll even be able to
pay next month’s rent.
Not only is their work precarious, but under this current economic order, their very existence
is precarious.
And what this really points to is the systemic, class-based nature of this issue.
You are not alone in your anxiety, your depression, the trauma you experience, and any number
of other mental health problems that have been created, or exacerbated, by this system.
Every single one of us, of the class of working people, struggles with this to some degree.
However, as a result of bourgeois ideological propaganda, particularly intensely since the
advent of the so-called “neoliberal” era, we’ve been collectively brainwashed into
seeing our shared struggles as isolated, atomised, individualised problems.
We’ve been hoodwinked into believing that these side-effects of the capitalist mode
of production – its negative effects on mental health disproportionately affecting
the exploited and oppressed masses – are our own individual personal shortcomings;
as though we each live in a vacuum, devoid of any social context.
We’re made to believe that the problem doesn’t lie within the system itself – but that
the problem is instead within each one of us.
In Capitalist Realism, Mark Fisher wrote that, for the ruling class “it [has been] necessary
to reframe the growing problem of stress (and distress) in capitalist societies.
Instead of treating it as incumbent on individuals to resolve their own psychological distress,
instead, that is, of accepting the vast privatization of stress that has taken place over the last
thirty years, we need to ask: how has it become acceptable that so many people, and especially
so many young people, are ill?
The 'mental health plague' in capitalist societies would suggest that, instead of being the only
social system that works, capitalism is inherently dysfunctional, and that the cost of it appearing
to work is very high.”
Yes, I did just reference Capitalist Realism.
No, I don’t agree with all of Fisher’s positions.
But he does make a good point here: why should we accept the individualisation (or “privatisation”,
as he says) of mental illness.
Why should we be okay with the fact that so many people are now mentally ill in the first
place?
As mentioned at the start of this video, nearly half of the population will experience a clinically
diagnosable form of mental illness at some point in their lives.
And this disproportionately affects the working class, especially its members who bear the
brunt of patriarchal and white supremacist oppression.
We take this for granted as just “normal”, but it’s not.
We only perceive it as “normal” because the ruling class has normalised our suffering
as part of their bourgeois ideology.
The individualisation of the collective experience of mental illness is a superstructural method
of maintaining the capitalist mode of production.
This is the capitalists ideologically dividing and conquering us; because, God forbid, we
may recognise that this is a shared struggle, and we may consequently actually take collective
action to solve the problem together …which would necessarily mean the abolition
of capitalist relations of production.
And that’s their real fear.
As Susan Rosenthal put it in Mental Illness or Social Sickness: “We know what is wrong.
A few people accumulate wealth and power at the expense of everyone else.
What is the treatment?
Capitalism must be replaced with a socialist society that puts human needs first.
Who can deliver the medicine?
The global working-class majority.
What’s holding us back?
Lack of clarity and organization.
I don’t expect this diagnosis will ever appear in the DSM.”
So, it’s been made clear thus far already that mental illness disproportionately affects
the most oppressed and exploited groups in society – that this aspect is a feature
of class society in general.
But there’s still a temptation some may feel to simply try and create a friendlier
capitalism – to fundamentally preserve the current economic order but provide better
mental health services with a stronger social democratic welfare system.
But, in fact, where the capitalist mode of production remains – and it does remain
under social democracy – there will always be this problem.
You know that feeling you get at work of being a cog in a machine?
A strong welfare system won’t get rid of that.
That feeling is a result of the fact that the capitalist system is, by necessity, built
on isolation and estrangement, or – in other words – alienation.
And many different types of alienation at that.
As a quick reminder from the recent Socialism 101 video on this topic:
Workers are alienated from the product of our labour.
We produce goods, which the capitalist then takes away from us to sell and realise a profit,
creating an immediate disconnection between us as workers and the products of our labour.
As our labour-power is purchased by wage or salary at a lower cost than the value that
our labour itself produces, we can never afford to purchase back all the products that we’ve
created from the capitalist.
The products of labour are thus permanently detached or alienated from us: the workers
who produced them.
Workers are also alienated from the Act of Production itself in so far as the fact that
we don’t freely engage in production of our own accord, producing what we ourselves
need or desire, but we instead labour in order to gain a wage so that we may survive.
If we don’t work, we can’t afford food, shelter, clothing, or any of life’s necessities.
We consequently sell labour-power to capitalists not freely of our own accord, but are forced
to do so as a result of economic coercion.
Consequently, we perform the labour demanded of us by capitalists who seek nothing more
than the realisation of profit to the detriment of all else, determined by the whims of the
market and the chaos of production.
So not only are workers alienated from the act of production under capitalism due to
the economic coercion which forces us to sell our labour-power, we’re also alienated by
what the capitalist forces us to produce – whether that’s the shoes that are made in the sweatshop,
or the burger that’s prepared in the restaurant: neither are produced in accordance with the
needs or desires of the workers ourselves, but instead in accordance with the requirements
of capital.
As workers don’t control the means of production, we find ourselves controlled by the means
of production – transformed into little more than an appendage of a larger process
of production over which we have no control; merely cogs in someone else’s money-making
machine.
And the final point is that the capitalist system fundamentally alienates us from each
other.
This is demonstrated most concretely in Marx’s concept of Commodity Fetishism which reveals
the way in which the commodities that we encounter on the market mystify us and obscure the real
human relations which are involved in the creation and distribution of these products.
For example, it’s generally impossible for us know the workers in the sweatshops and
the working conditions under which the products we encounter on the market have been created.
The worker who produced the product is detached from it, and we as consumers purchase these
detached products.
This means we as consumers are also detached or alienated from the workers themselves who
produced the products.
Thus, the real social relations between people ourselves are hidden, and in its place appears
to us merely relations between things; the money in our pocket, and the product on the
shelf.
So, we can see in these ways that the capitalist mode of production itself fundamentally makes
us detached, disconnected, estranged, and alienated from one another – and this is
not just a feature of the “neoliberal” period of capitalism, as some would suggest,
but capitalism in any of its manifestations.
You feel detached, isolated, and alone, because the capitalist system depends on this.
Capitalist relations of production fundamentally necessitate alienation – and no amount of
social-democratic welfare programmes will ever be able to prevent that.
The only thing that can stop this, is the working-class, oppressed masses rising up
collectively and transforming the relations of production by transitioning to stateless,
classless, moneyless society – once and for all ending the exploitation of man by
man.
But, of course, the capitalists do everything they can to hide this necessarily revolutionary
solution in order to maintain their exploitative system which grants them wealth and power
at our expense.
So they individualise and atomise our collective struggle, offering solutions that can only
– at very best, on the off-chance they even remotely succeed – simply make the intolerable
feel tolerable: to make our shared oppression and exploitation feel bearable.
“Mindfulness” is now chief among these patchwork solutions – at least here in Ireland
where the government is spending hundreds of thousands of euros trying to promote it.
But, as pointed out in a recent article by the Connolly Youth Movement;
“At its foundation, mindfulness encourages you to adjust yourself to the world as it
is, rather than changing the world.
Mindfulness sets itself up as a viable alternative to collective organising and struggling for
improved wages and conditions.
Where in the past you would correctly identify your well-off employers and their exploitative
practices as the root cause of many of your stressors, now you blame yourself for failing
to cope with them.
How convenient for capitalists that workers disassociate from the systemic nature of their
problems and only blame themselves!”
Nail, meet head.
And we see this same pacifying, atomising approach manifesting in all bourgeois solutions
to mental illness to one degree or another – and often in a way that’s completely
perverted by the profit motive, such as in the pharmaceutical industry, the self-help
industry, and so on.
But where there is a collective problem, there must be a collective solution.
And if the system itself, the economic base of society (the capitalist mode of production),
is making so many of us ill, or at least exacerbating illness, then the only solution is revolution
– superseding the current order and beginning the socialist transition to stateless, classless,
moneyless society wherein the capitalist relations of production that are currently making us
sick no longer exist.
Now, that’s not to say you shouldn’t reach out to get the help you need to meet your
daily demands – and, indeed, many people will find various forms of solutions offered
up by society currently do alleviate some of the harshest symptoms and make their lives
bearable; especially if we’re talking about the most severe forms of mental illnesses
whose causes are biological and neurochemical rather than social.
But, speaking to the more widespread lower-level mental illnesses that most of us experience
to one degree or another, if we seek permanent solutions to these collective problems that
stem from the alienation inherent to capitalist relations of production, then the best thing
that we can do is to join revolutionary organisations and take part in the real movement to abolish
the present state of things.
These issues are taken seriously in all revolutionary organisations that are worth their salt.
In being part of a collective movement, you’ll not only be given support in day-to-day life
by a close group of comrades, but also be working towards abolishing the very conditions
which have given rise to, or exacerbated, your illness.
Again, speaking for many, though not all cases of mental illness.
Comrades involved in the revolutionary movement in the Philippines have spoken openly about
their experiences, showing how revolutionary theory and organising can, in itself, have
a positive effect on those suffering with mental illness.
One countryside peasant organiser, named “si Sam”, spoke of her experience of suffering
for many years with bipolar, self-harm, and even attempts on her own life.
She then went on to join the revolutionary movement, and stated that ““Before I was
organized, I didn’t have Marxist methods to clarify things for me.
I didn’t have a guide on how to analyze my problems, what is primary and secondary,
internal and external, and that’s why I felt I was just this passive mass of contradiction
who knows nothing but [to] feel sorry for herself and be angry at the world” […]
Collective life, criticism and self-criticism (CSC) are important in managing this disability,
Sam said.
Through regular sharing of personal dispositions, like the widely practices “3 check-ups”,
comrades can help those with mental disabilities to objectify situations and resist subjectivism.
This is in contrast to life in the cities where individualism is widespread, where nobody
cares, and where only the rich have access to medical treatment and therapy.
[…] It is important to stand against the stigma against people with MHP [Mental Health
Problems], and unscientific ideas regarding this.”
So, to wrap up: the relations of production inherent to the capitalist mode of production
are inherently alienating – this causes, or exacerbates, much of the mental illness
that we see permeating our society today: particularly regarding depression, anxiety,
stress, and so on.
Capitalists take this fact and attempt to profiteer off it by offering all kinds of
individualised patchwork solutions that merely treat symptoms, while never addressing the
root cause of the problem.
In fact, the ruling class doesn’t want to address the root cause of this problem, because
this situation is very profitable for them.
All they require is a functional working class to maintain the current economic order, and
so the limit to the support they will provide us is the absolute bare minimum level for
our subsistence.
But our class doesn’t want to just survive; we want to thrive.
And revolution is the only solution.
To finish off with one final quote from the practical experience of the Revolutionary
Student Front – Austin: “Capitalist social relations necessarily entail social alienation,
and these relations are at the root of most mental health issues.
Thus, unless the question of how to bring about the destruction of these capitalist
social relations is at the forefront of any attempt to combat mental health issues, our
practice is doomed to be qualitatively no different from the bourgeois mental health
service system or that of the slimy nonprofit organizations.
We instead believe that the more helpful path for any person’s mental health is to become
involved in class struggle.”
So, let’s get active, get organised, join revolutionary organisations, and tear down
this barbaric system once and for all.
Right, thanks very much for watching this video!
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