In our times, medicine and psychiatry represent the real force of social oppression. In this contest the productive and idle classes clash. The doctors are drawn from a privileged elite which has never performed any productive labour. The working class is discriminated against at ever turn in their contact with the doctors.
In the United States barely 11 million uninsured are claimed to need $1.1 trillion of medical aid in the proposed reforms. The reality is that most of those uninsured do not want contact with doctors, social workers or administrators. The figure of the uninsured at 44 million persons include the medically fit, the soldiers, the federally insured civil servants and those who do not want any contact with the upper classes posing as doctors.
The doctors have forced 114,000 (2006) into welfare dependency and claimed that 30,000 of this number are “mentally ill”. This equates to about one in fifteen of the population. The doctor’s apologists in medical research claim that 22% of Catholics and 20% of Protestants suffer from mental illness at some stage. Other pundits project mental illness as a phenomenon in the life of every person in the North. In the U.S. only 400,000 out of a population of 300 million people are in psychiatric care. These projections and ideas are motivated by an extreme right-wing ideology of those who profit from this trade in idleness, sloth and death. In Sweden, the psychiatric catchment group of a population of eight millions is only 30,000 “schizophrenics”.
The reality is that Paul Goggins, former Minister for Health in Northern Ireland, trimmed a twelve-bed intensive care unit and two 24-bed admission wards to a single 14-bed unit to be opened in 2011 for Fermanagh and Tyrone on the basis of the real needs and situation which I informed him about in 2007. In 1974, the same psychiatric institution had 1,400 inmates.
From 1,400 to 14!
The failure to crush fascism in the universities, the judiciary and medicine in the 1940s and its re-emergence in the slander and poisoning of such a vast number of working and unemployed workers is manifested in psychiatry and medicine.
The rise of sloth is consonant with the decline of British society into panes et circes. Disability Living Allowance i.e. hidden unemployment, mass sport and industrial collapse are the prominent features of contemporary British society. These were also the features of the slow death of the Roman Empire. English society is going the same way under the guidance of a privileged, unaccountable elite. Soul-searching is encouraged by the self-seeking elite of doctors to the detriment of society and the working life. This is psychiatry looked at internally and externally. Psychiatry is discriminating on social grounds and dragging society into the abyss of welfare dependence, sloth and economic collapse.
Like Pitt’s England we need to launch a new era in reform by cutting the medical placemen, social workers and medical administrators to survive the crisis.
Monday 4 January 2010
Socialism and Republicanism (2002)
The question of national independence and self-determination was a burning issue for most countries of eastern and south-eastern Europe and Africa and Asia in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Marx, Engels and Lenin intervened at key times in the international socialist movement to defend the right to self-determination of oppressed nations and to promote a free union of states without privilege or violence.
The basis of national-democratic movements is the economic drive for a home market. The primary need of capital is to expand itself. In 1922, only 4% of workers were engaged in industry in the Twenty-six counties, 96% being engaged in agriculture and commerce. In 2000, 7.9% of workers were engaged in agriculture while 268,400 out of a workforce of 1.7 million were engaged in manufacturing, transportable goods and so on (CSO, 2001).
In Marx and Engels’ early years of political activity, the questions of national independence e.g. for Poland and the socialist stirrings were already top of the agenda. Marx and Engels wrote in the Communist Manifesto that the role of socialists is to support every revolutionary movement while emphasising the social and economic content of the struggle. A revolutionary-democratic struggle is both superseded and given new life by the political and economic struggles for socialism. In the political struggle in the independent countries, Engels remarks that “all the intermediate parties must come to power in turn and destroy themselves” (MECW, Vol 47, Page 35). Revolution is a “lengthy process” where part of the middle class deserts to the side of the working class movement and world history has shown that it is largely the product of external factors. In the twenty-six counties, the impetus for the revolutionary movement from 1914 to 1923 was the slaughter of the First World War (which is nothing worthy of commemoration). This struggle was eventually routed when Britain was in a position to bring its military-bureaucratic apparatus to bear on the Irish revolutionaries with the full force of the leading imperialist power.
The struggle for democracy and socialism is itself only a transitional state between capitalism and communism and is not unique to oppressed classes within imperialist powers.
At the height of the imperialist slaughter of 1914-18, Lenin argued for the right of secession of nations which had been locked into the imperialist vice. He saw nothing contradictory between the socialist revolution and the struggle for national liberation. Lenin was emphatic that the socialists of an oppressor nation must fight for the right to self-determination and succession of an oppressed nation while the socialists of an oppressed nation must emphasise the need for the unity of nations i.e. the “merging of the workers of the oppressed nation with the workers of the oppressor nation” (Lenin, CW, Vol 39, P738). Furthermore, the workers of the oppressed and oppressor nations alike “must uphold, not the federative principle, not the formation of small states, as the ideal, but the closest unity of nations, stressing the harmfulness of all separation of nations, the harmfulness of cultural-national autonomy, the advantage of democratic centralism, the advantage of very big states and unions of states” (op cit).
Writing in early 1916, Lenin said that political democracy “implies complete freedom to agitate for secession and for a referendum on secession by the seceding nation” (The Socialist Revolution and the Right of Nations to Self-Determination). He also stated in these theses that the socialist revolution “may flare up not only through some big strike, street demonstration or hunger riot or a military insurrection...but also as a result of a political crisis...or in connection with a referendum on the secession of an oppressed nation, etc”.
The practical Lenin also foresaw the phenomenon of the (Irish) Tories deceiving the people and creeping into power in quieter times, “The bourgeoisie of the oppressed nations persistently utilise the slogans of national liberation to deceive the workers; in their internal policy they use these slogans for reactionary agreements with the bourgeoisie of the dominant nation...”
When one remembers how the Irish money-farmers sent a huge cash tribute to the English Stock Exchange and finance speculators while embarking on ‘all-for-Ireland’ political forays and preaching “national freedom”, one can see through the Fianna Fáil slogan of “Peace, Prosperity and Progress” which is directed at a working class that consumes less than half of the wealth it produces annually. (The Americans consume over three quarters of the wealth produced in that great country and the British consume over six-tenths of the wealth produced there).
The socialist workers’ parties are small in Western Europe but their influence is much greater. They too must struggle for the “equality agenda” alongside the democratic movement of Europe’s last colony. In a “young” country practice in the form of experience comes before theory. The three decades past have shown that as the struggle for national independence develops, it is the workers who come to the fore as the most determined, ruthless and courageous fighters. The leap from the struggle for national independence to socialist revolution is but a leap in theory while, in practice, it has already been realised nine tenths of the way by the earlier revolutionary mobilisation of the people.
In 1914, Lenin summed up the National Question in Austria, Hungary and Russia (Lenin, CW20, P109-10). The demand for “cultural-national autonomy” i.e. educational segregation is not a socialist demand. Socialists of the oppressor nations struggle for the right to secede for subject peoples. “The class conscious workers do not advocate secession. They know the advantages of large states and the amalgamation of large masses of workers” (op cit). The socialist struggle of the workers of the oppressor countries against oppression and privilege must, therefore, include the right to secede.
The basis of national-democratic movements is the economic drive for a home market. The primary need of capital is to expand itself. In 1922, only 4% of workers were engaged in industry in the Twenty-six counties, 96% being engaged in agriculture and commerce. In 2000, 7.9% of workers were engaged in agriculture while 268,400 out of a workforce of 1.7 million were engaged in manufacturing, transportable goods and so on (CSO, 2001).
In Marx and Engels’ early years of political activity, the questions of national independence e.g. for Poland and the socialist stirrings were already top of the agenda. Marx and Engels wrote in the Communist Manifesto that the role of socialists is to support every revolutionary movement while emphasising the social and economic content of the struggle. A revolutionary-democratic struggle is both superseded and given new life by the political and economic struggles for socialism. In the political struggle in the independent countries, Engels remarks that “all the intermediate parties must come to power in turn and destroy themselves” (MECW, Vol 47, Page 35). Revolution is a “lengthy process” where part of the middle class deserts to the side of the working class movement and world history has shown that it is largely the product of external factors. In the twenty-six counties, the impetus for the revolutionary movement from 1914 to 1923 was the slaughter of the First World War (which is nothing worthy of commemoration). This struggle was eventually routed when Britain was in a position to bring its military-bureaucratic apparatus to bear on the Irish revolutionaries with the full force of the leading imperialist power.
The struggle for democracy and socialism is itself only a transitional state between capitalism and communism and is not unique to oppressed classes within imperialist powers.
At the height of the imperialist slaughter of 1914-18, Lenin argued for the right of secession of nations which had been locked into the imperialist vice. He saw nothing contradictory between the socialist revolution and the struggle for national liberation. Lenin was emphatic that the socialists of an oppressor nation must fight for the right to self-determination and succession of an oppressed nation while the socialists of an oppressed nation must emphasise the need for the unity of nations i.e. the “merging of the workers of the oppressed nation with the workers of the oppressor nation” (Lenin, CW, Vol 39, P738). Furthermore, the workers of the oppressed and oppressor nations alike “must uphold, not the federative principle, not the formation of small states, as the ideal, but the closest unity of nations, stressing the harmfulness of all separation of nations, the harmfulness of cultural-national autonomy, the advantage of democratic centralism, the advantage of very big states and unions of states” (op cit).
Writing in early 1916, Lenin said that political democracy “implies complete freedom to agitate for secession and for a referendum on secession by the seceding nation” (The Socialist Revolution and the Right of Nations to Self-Determination). He also stated in these theses that the socialist revolution “may flare up not only through some big strike, street demonstration or hunger riot or a military insurrection...but also as a result of a political crisis...or in connection with a referendum on the secession of an oppressed nation, etc”.
The practical Lenin also foresaw the phenomenon of the (Irish) Tories deceiving the people and creeping into power in quieter times, “The bourgeoisie of the oppressed nations persistently utilise the slogans of national liberation to deceive the workers; in their internal policy they use these slogans for reactionary agreements with the bourgeoisie of the dominant nation...”
When one remembers how the Irish money-farmers sent a huge cash tribute to the English Stock Exchange and finance speculators while embarking on ‘all-for-Ireland’ political forays and preaching “national freedom”, one can see through the Fianna Fáil slogan of “Peace, Prosperity and Progress” which is directed at a working class that consumes less than half of the wealth it produces annually. (The Americans consume over three quarters of the wealth produced in that great country and the British consume over six-tenths of the wealth produced there).
The socialist workers’ parties are small in Western Europe but their influence is much greater. They too must struggle for the “equality agenda” alongside the democratic movement of Europe’s last colony. In a “young” country practice in the form of experience comes before theory. The three decades past have shown that as the struggle for national independence develops, it is the workers who come to the fore as the most determined, ruthless and courageous fighters. The leap from the struggle for national independence to socialist revolution is but a leap in theory while, in practice, it has already been realised nine tenths of the way by the earlier revolutionary mobilisation of the people.
In 1914, Lenin summed up the National Question in Austria, Hungary and Russia (Lenin, CW20, P109-10). The demand for “cultural-national autonomy” i.e. educational segregation is not a socialist demand. Socialists of the oppressor nations struggle for the right to secede for subject peoples. “The class conscious workers do not advocate secession. They know the advantages of large states and the amalgamation of large masses of workers” (op cit). The socialist struggle of the workers of the oppressor countries against oppression and privilege must, therefore, include the right to secede.
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