Notes on Emotional Suffering as Social Determination – Barbaria

[We publish here our translation into English of this extremely important and timely article from our comrades in Barbaria.

In this text, Barbaria elaborates their understanding of the present-day mental health crisis in many countries around the world as a necessary consequence of the intensifying contradictions of capital and the society created in its image, which cannibalizes the very requirements for our physical and mental wellbeing in its innate drive to self-expansion.

While palliatives like medication or therapy exist to alleviate the psychological suffering that so many experience under capitalism, allowing them to function within society and work, and these can be life-saving for many, there is also no real cure for what ails us in this society, because, as Marx wrote, “for man, the root [of the matter] is man himself.”

In other words, to conquer our mental pathologies it is not enough to “do the work”—to take our medications and attend therapy (provided that is even feasible for us to do). True recovery would require us to live in a world that does not subject or expose us to trauma.

The path for us to heal from these traumas is an outward process of engaging with the world around us by working to transform society through the communist revolution, and not an inward journey of self-discovery. 

The original Spanish version of this text can be found here.]

Notes on Emotional Suffering as Social Determination

“There is so much loneliness that even words commit suicide.”

 Alejandra Pizarnik

Our lives are experiencing widespread deterioration. A deterioration in the community, as a space for human relationships; in the environment, as a scattered relationship with our natural being; and in our own perception of emotions and desires. A deterioration that falls like a hammer blow on our general well-being and, inevitably, on our emotional well-being.

It is increasingly difficult to feel for oneself and to do so in a healthy way. It is also difficult to feel socially connected to a shared historical project. Grief, anguish, extreme sadness, delirium, emptiness, etc., haunt us, and they do so while we are in the most absolute solitude. All the violence of the world of commodities hangs over us, repeating, like a single, hallucinatory voice, that everything is our fault. For not reaching the productive and adequate standard that corresponds to us, for not being a good child, a good student, a good worker, a good parent, a good consumer. Or for being a failure in a world that envelops us.

In reality, at the center of it all is “capital,” that absolute formless entity that determines and measures human relationships in terms of their value in the production of commodities. “Capital” is an impersonal whole that devours the world and those who inhabit it. The extreme pain of the world of capital is also emotional pain, and it occupies an increasingly important place as its development tends toward emptiness, dragging us into a life devoid of content.

The capitalist totality and the emotional suffering it generates force us to question terms such as “mental health” and “mental illness,” without this implying a denial of the material basis on which these concepts are built. For us, it is not a question of making a separate critique (it is never about that) of a phenomenon such as “mental illness,” which is taking on the dimensions of a plague. It is about understanding emotional suffering in the historical process as part and result of the prevailing mode of production, embedded in its functionality, and separating it from false critiques that can only address the symptoms without understanding the causes.

1. To those who suffer and those who try to understand and confront suffering.

For all the above reasons, we offer our respect and solidarity to those who suffer doubly from emotional pain. All humans are exposed to the same pain, which cannot be the property of any one identity group, but it is also true that there are those who suffer from extreme psychiatric diagnoses and violence. We do not trivialize this suffering in the least; we try to understand it beyond the mechanism in which it is expressed: pharmacological straitjackets, electroconvulsive therapy, mechanical restraints, etc. We believe that without understanding and criticizing these harmful mechanisms at their root, they will never disappear. At best, they will be transformed into new forms of social violence.

We offer our respect and solidarity to the individuals and groups of psychiatrized and ex-psychiatrized people who are trying to understand, support each other, and fight for change and improvement. But we know that these changes and improvements are only a drop in the bucket. They are sandcastles facing the sea of commodities, built only to be knocked down by a world that cannot be reformed, but must be changed from the ground up. We encourage these fighters and critics to go further, to delve deeper into criticism and to engage in a necessary and complex debate on the need for revolution and its preparation as the only definitive therapy against capital, against this world of a thousand oppressions.

Likewise, we respect family members, friends, and “mental health” workers who, honestly and sometimes in the greatest solitude, try to respect and accompany the suffering of their loved ones, trying to understand its causes. We also ask them to take one more step, in step with history, to connect with the red thread of revolution.

Capital functions as an indiscriminate emotional bomb and harms all of us who inhabit the world of commodities. But that does not mean that as an emotional evil it lacks class distinctions. Mentally ill people are not proletarians because they are mentally ill. Emotional suffering does not make us revolutionary subjects. That suffering linked to our living conditions and subsistence (something that undoubtedly affects proletarians more deeply because they are proletarians) is not a condition that in itself brings us closer to subversion. The proletariat suffers because it is the proletariat. It is not the only one to suffer the conditions and categories of this world, but it is the primary object of that suffering, and so, it will not make the revolution because it is mentally ill, but because it is proletarian.

Finally, although we are critical of science in the hands of capital, which transforms it into a commercial and ideological apparatus for its own reproduction, we must affirm here the fundamental human need to investigate and advance. A need that transcends imposed limits and generates true knowledge. Once science is freed from the shackles of commodification, humanity will be able to reconvert and fully embrace that knowledge.

2. Social genesis of disease

According to the World Health Organization (WHO), health is much more than the absence of disease: “it is a state of complete physical, mental, and social well-being, closely linked to the full enjoyment of fundamental human rights.”

Several leftist pamphlets (read: leftist for and by capital) agree on the existence of a mental health crisis that is devastatingly affecting vulnerable people. In fact, every self-respecting leftist grouplet now has its own “reflections” on the subject to once more demonstrate that they are the heart and soul of a system that needs them.

We see the same concern in many governments the whole world over. The latter boast about generating “strategies and plans” that, at best, will have a short-lived development on paper and end up in a proverbial drawer of empty words and useless things.

All of them, the WHO and the left of capital, governments along with their vaunted mental health plans, are concerned, being in agreement and full recognition of a great pandemic evil that afflicts us, about a health problem that affects something called ‘the mind’.

The concept of health in general is not an exclusively “natural” element that only has to do with human biology. Its social aspect develops in relation to the world we live in, its organization, and the prevailing mode of production. Consequently, it depends on the interests of the actually existing mode of production and changes historically with it.

For us, it is a question of thinking about the concept of health from the perspective of social determinations, from the Marxist method, from the positions of the revolutionary program, rather than conceiving of it as an image fixed upon a given time and place.

As we pointed out, understanding health depends upon understanding the mode of production as a totalizing form of social organization. Yet, this understanding is also limited by its antonym: illness. This is another concept that changes according to human thought in relation to its state of euthymia or emotional stability, determined by historical time. It is true that in all languages there are words related to what we generally understand to be “well-being.” This term summarizes the perception of those who enjoy a comfortable life, with their basic needs met and in good physical condition. Well-being (in its broadest sense) would be that state of fulfillment for human beings, impossible to separate from their material conditions of existence. In other words, for human beings to achieve “well-being,” they would have to live in a society whose purpose was to provide it.

In any case, to talk about medicine in relation to a social conception of health as such, we have to go back to the first millennium before the common era (BCE). The first medical text, the Caraka-Saṁhitā, was written by Caraka, probably a physician to Emperor Kaniṣka, in Punjab, India. Approximately one-third of the volume dates back to the 8th or 9th century BCE and contains extensive information on the duties of the physician, major plagues, diet, anatomy, diagnosis, and therapy. Later, in China, we find the first philosophical elements on health, with a holistic and universalist conception. Likewise, all the great empires (Mesopotamia, Egypt) would develop their own concept of health.

Greco-Roman culture also adopted the term, giving it a meaning related to moderation and balance. From Pythagoras to Galen, via Aristotle, the concept clearly reflects the growing influence of philosophy and the political context of the time. We also find traces of it in Judaism, Islam, and Mesoamerican cultures.

During the period that historians conventionally identify as the Middle Ages, medical knowledge and practice continued to be based on the ideas of Hippocrates and Galen. However, on the threshold of the Renaissance, driven by expansion into new continents, a new rising class appeared: the bourgeoisie. Under the guise of the need to explain the world in their own image and likeness, in opposition to the Old Regime, scientific knowledge began to develop as a productive and, at the same time, ideological force that gradually separated itself from religion and philosophy. In this historical process, Theophrastus Phillippus Aureolus Bombastus von Hohenheim (1493-1541), known as Paracelsus, intuited other horizons in medicine after observing a certain analogy between physiological and pathological processes and some chemical reactions examined in his rudimentary alchemy laboratory. We thus entered the antechamber of pharmacology.

Three centuries after William Harvey (1578-1657) developed the research that led to an understanding of blood circulation, Claude Bernard introduced medicine to the world of science. Among the reflections on health that he documents in his book An Introduction to the Study of Experimental Medicine, as an approach to the concept of health, he points out that the necessary condition for life is not found exclusively within the organism or in the external environment, but within both. If any function of the organism is suppressed or altered, life ceases, even if the environment remains intact. On the other hand, if the factors of the environment associated with life are modified, life may disappear, even if the organism has not been altered. Furthermore, he points out that in living beings, the internal environment is a product of the functioning of the organism, preserving the necessary relationship of material intercourse and balance with the external environment.

We must defend the human endeavor to understand human beings and their environment, with all that is positive about this, as part of the effort to improve social life and living conditions in general. That is, with what scientific knowledge has that is human in its communal sense. At the same time, we cannot deny that medicine and the concept of health are totally permeated by the existing mode of production and cannot help but respond to its needs and be determined by its self-interested conception of the world.

It is logical to point out that in primitive communism, health could not be spoken of as a medical and biological concept, even though pain, disease, and accidents existed, since science had not yet developed as a specific (but also separate) field of knowledge, nor had human beings, in their material conditions of existence, been separated from nature. Therefore, the concept itself would be meaningless. In the future communist society, unlike in capitalism, where care time is undermined and commodified, the phrase “I don’t have time to take care of my loved ones” becomes meaningless. On the contrary, caring is at the very root of an emancipated society. It is its primary social and communal task.

In capitalism, however, the sphere of reproduction and care is separated from the rest of social activity, restricted to the private sphere of the family, turned into a market niche, and treated as a matter for state intervention, with its abstract rules and impersonal, bureaucratic, and inhuman criteria. Capitalism is not concerned with the reproduction of life, but with the reproduction of the labor force. This essential fact socially determines what is understood by health and illness in capitalism. Human needs are subordinated and sacrificed on the altar of commodity production and are only addressed as a social issue if the capacity of the labor force to produce value is diminished. To the extent that this social logic is itself a source of physical and emotional pain and distress, it cannot be the source of the solution. On the contrary, both the market and the state can only provide partial remedies and fixes that often prove worse than the disease, regardless of the will and conscience of the workers who specialize in providing them, who are subject to the same demands of commodity production. It is thus inevitable that the communist struggle against political economy implies also a radical transformation of the concept of health, as social well-being within a global human community.

In this way, as with other diseases, which must be understood within the framework of the specific mode of production in which they arise, the concept of “mental” illness has not always existed as such, and its discovery can be dated.

Needless to say, there have always been delusions, anguish, deep sadness, and feelings of emptiness. These have existed in a material sense in the face of loss and death, in the face of basic deprivation, in the face of trauma, as that sublimated evil that separates us from reality as a defense mechanism (what would psychosis be otherwise?). What is new, what capitalism inaugurates in modernity and postmodernity exalts in the form of identity, is the conceptualization of the experience of psychic suffering as something biological and devoid of social determination. It thus becomes an individualized commodity available to all who can afford a diagnosis or who reach the point where the state decides to intervene to give it to them. Far from it, this kind of suffering is not simply an everyday, ahistorical phenomenon linked to human life and its inherent vicissitudes but is rather inseparable from an empty and absurd form of subsistence, which becomes a deprivation of life itself.

Thus, when we talk about “mental health,” we are referring to a much more modern, more capitalist, field of “specialty” which is connected to explanations and treatments at the dawn of capitalism, under the guise of the first “social” policies predicated upon the confinement and/or elimination of marginalized people, and linked to concepts such as “diseases of the soul,” “mood disorders,” or “alienation.” The concept of the “mind” came later, as a practical and material reflection of the soul, a formal modernization of that idea.

The fact of conferring a historical beginning to mental health and its recognition as a medical problem alerts us, even more so if possible, to its specificity as a “science” of capital. It is difficult to find a historical beginning for a broken arm, for the first fever and in any case, it would make no real sense to do so, because the meaning of conferring a history on the concept of mental health itself is a false consciousness of reality, since it is done on the basis of the very categories of capital.

We will never tire of repeating that this does not imply denying the existence of emotional pain, of emotional suffering. Quite the contrary. It is increasingly revealed as an overwhelming response to an unbearable social reality, as a phenomenon that grows as capitalism historically exhausts itself and calls into question any prospect of a future. What we criticize to the core is this system’s ideologizing explanation, its mercantile solutions, the notion of its systemic functionality, whether its provenance is modern or postmodern. And, of course, we reject the notion of “mental illness” as a concept detached from social determinants, as something biological that cuts across all modes of production yet is alien to this one, which, like all others based on the existence of social classes, is not built upon what makes us a species, but upon the denial of that reality.

3. The capitalist mind

We wrote above that health is a concept inextricably linked to the existing mode of production, and that “mind” as a form without content, enriching this approach even more. The concepts of health and mind lead us to a complete dissociation from historical reality as a species, to the construction of a subject, “the mentally ill,” which is the pure reflection of the life process of capital as a social being, as pure dissociation from the human.

We wrote that the concept of mind suffers from a conceptualization linked to metaphysics. One of the definitions we find in the dictionary is something like the “intellectual power of the soul.” And while we’re at it, if we look up soul, we find that it is a “principle that shapes and organizes the vegetative, sensory, and intellectual dynamism of life. […] In some religions and cultures, the spiritual and immortal substance of human beings.” The capitalist “mind” is a continuum within the social vision of human beings in class societies, a vision split when division and exploitation radically separate human beings as a species from the world in which they live (nature), from their communal-being in favor of the commodity, and from themselves in relation to their social production (alienation).

If in slavery this occurs through the appropriation of the slave’s body and in feudalism through the expropriation of the vassal’s labor, in capitalism it occurs through the labor contract, giving the appearance of free choice to what is nothing more than radical blackmail: either you sell your time and labor for a wage, or we condemn you to poverty, prison, or the insane asylum.

Capitalism delves into this division in every way, trying to convince us “scientifically” that its self-expansion is not only inevitable but also socially necessary and naturally determined. It is no coincidence that mental illness is presented to us in the same way as something insurmountable, genetic in nature, and which can last a lifetime. By defining mental illness, the system defines itself. Ultimately, what is being put forth is one of those variables by which a proletarian can cease to be potentially productive, without ceasing to be a proletarian, and that variable is the other side of the coin of being mentally healthy.

We cannot fail to link the emotional fragility that overwhelms us with phenomena typical of our era, which is that of capitalism in crisis, with all that this implies in terms of alienation from our own bodies, the cult of objects, the commodification of emotions through social media, etc. In capitalism, we are healthy if we are productive and do not generate systemic problems, that is, if our problems become medical or social in nature. Thus, the concept of the mind, which is supposedly scientific but absolutely ideological and indebted to metaphysics, gives the logical rationale to construct a kind of historical anti-subject.

4. The atomized individual: the anti-subject of capitalism

Social loneliness is that isolation intrinsic to the very logic of value, in which the only real community is that of money and commodities, and which is invariably linked to democratic atomization. Basically, democracy is presented to us as a way of making decisions together, when in reality it is an individualized way of deciding nothing. It is a formality that avoids “the common” as a political space, that sublimates the individual as an instance of empty decisions and creates a social anti-subject in conflict with its organic and natural sociability as a human species.

The capitalist anti-subject (the individual, the citizen, the sick person) is an isolated entity capable of doing to itself what capital does to it.

As we said above, class society (and capitalism most effectively of all) is capable of dividing us in three complementary ways:

• From our social being, from the community as the genesis of our humanity.

• From the environment, from nature, seen as a foreign entity to be dominated and subjugated.

• From ourselves, dividing us between body and soul, object and subject. In short, reducing us to a solitary and incomprehensible dichotomy.

The atomized individual, as an anti-subject and perpetrator of systemic violence, is capable of breaking and splitting apart. They are capable of turning away from a brutal reality, generating another reality that is no less brutal, a delusional capsule that reproduces another “real” world (the delusional world) that also expels them.

The isolated individual relates to the whole through suffering. It is this suffering that will center the meaning of his existence and to which he owes a recovery, a rehabilitation to return to the norm, something (the norm) as pathological and painful as its margins. The individual who is alone and “sick,” separated from the other human beings, from their own “health,” from production, from leisure, and in a marginal status with respect to the commodity, does not cease to be a commodity themselves in the same measure that they have neither a life nor a future; in that they cannot, without the association of the rest of the proletariat, become a historical subject.

Their marginality gives them a twisted and inconclusive character, turning these people into damaged commodities whose repair is the concern of “psychiatric science.”

5. Capitalism as trauma

Medicine, as a science applied to the achievement of what capitalism understands as “health,” is a means for recovering those damaged commodities that can be repaired for consumption. In psychiatry, this training for the adaptation of the maladjusted is what tends to be called therapy or therapeutic intervention.

In most cases, it is accompanied by pharmacological treatments that are as harmful (although it is undeniably true that they can mask/alleviate painful symptoms) as they are profitable for the pharmaceutical industry. And ultimately, they are inevitable too, not because of the absence of other therapies, but because of the presence of a social context that can only recreate emotional suffering.

Thus, psychiatric interventions, including the most postmodern paradigms of recovery, where the patient’s desire takes on supposed relevance and is combined with pharmacological treatment, tend to become a field hospital. A field hospital is a hospital in the field that heals soldiers, not with the intention of preserving their well-being, but with the intention of making them fit to return to war, to the cause that brought them there and that inevitably ends their lives.

Much is said and criticized about medication as a modern chemical straitjacket, but little criticism is directed at the new psychodynamic trends. While psychoanalysis sought to shed light on the understanding of psychic suffering and could build bridges with social theories that understand “man” as a historical and revolutionary subject, the foolish children of psychoanalysis outline readings and interventions that are as modern as they are systemic. Returning to the new paradigm of recovery, accompanied by that filthy term “empowerment,” where the desire of the individual is supposedly brought to the forefront, one might ask: what can we really desire in a world that empties us of desire, beyond the very reproduction of this world? To desire to be useful as a commodity, to be a factor in production and variable capital, to be exploited in a normalized way and to be consumers capable of swallowing large doses of reified shit so that we can become what we eat.

The world of capital, of the new class of slaves chained to their work, absurd consumption, idiotic knowledge, the market of emotions, etc., is a meaningless world that causes direct harm to those who suffer it, that rots a little more with each turn of the historical crisis, and whose solutions plug wounds that end up bursting open elsewhere. 

In any case, the only paradigm for the world of capital is adaptation through pills prescribed by technicians in recovery and rehabilitation. It is difficult and rare for these treatments to propose overcoming (that is, radical and revolutionary criticism as a starting point) this world as the only real measure possible to put a limit on or begin to treat emotional suffering on equal terms.

And while at first, we criticized the spokespeople of the system, as well as those on its left, for treating the issue of “mental health” as an epidemic, they all build their electoral propaganda on a real basis, which is that emotional and psychological suffering is becoming greater, more painful, and more uncontrollable. In the context of a world in crisis, of a system that in its most perfect realization brings us closer to total catastrophe and the emptying of everything human transformed into commodities, all that nothingness is filled with meaningful pain, pain recognized by the system itself, which amasses statistics on suicides, of young people on pills, of explicit violence of the poor against the poor, and the corresponding need for armies of psychiatrists, psychologists, social workers, educators, etc., to deal with a problem that would otherwise threaten the supply of functional workers for capital, as well as social cohesion itself and its promises that with enough effort and sacrifice, happiness is within everyone’s reach.

Extreme psychological suffering is not a diagnosable entity; it is the social reality in which we live. Depending on its dysfunctionality, it will receive a diagnosis and treatment, but never a solution, which is impossible to provide by those who are part of the problem.

6. The inadequacy and false criticism of reality

There are those who have tried and continue to try to address this need to overcome the existing situation by dealing with psychological suffering. There are different criticisms and critics who have tried to confront the world from the “privileged” position (privileged as a balcony overlooking the most extreme suffering) of “mental health.”

First, and in chronological order, the anti-psychiatry movement of the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s did so. This was a first attempt that we must differentiate from other later inventions where something of the echo of anti-psychiatry remains but filtered through postmodern identity politics.

This movement was born as an effort to understand psychological suffering from another perspective and frame it within a struggle for human overcoming and liberation. It is an effort that we must understand in its historical context, its ideological constraints, and its fundamental limitations in order to make a radical critique of reality.

We understand the mass struggles of the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s as very important struggles, in the sense that they sought to break with the anti-proletarian straitjacket of the counterrevolution. However, they continued to take shape in a counterrevolutionary period dominated by the ideologies of Stalinist capitalism and Marxism-Leninism as the foreign policy of Stalinism, or in its sublimated and Third Worldist forms (such as foquismo or Maoism), as well as Leninism in its various forms of left-wing capitalism.

Anti-psychiatry, as a reflection of the complex and contradictory social protest movement, is not a uniform movement. However, it shares certain common parameters:

• Criticism of the biomedical model and, in some cases, of the concept of mental health and labels such as “schizophrenia.”

• Rejection of psychiatric institutions and questioning of psychotropic drugs and coercive measures.

• The perception of the psychiatrized person as a social subject in their own right, with the capacity for change and, in some cases, with historical centrality alongside other “marginalized” groups.

From this broth, the potions of anti-psychiatry emerge and fork into two paths (which are not pure and constantly intersect):

• The reproduction of the counterrevolutionary discourse of old and new Leninism dressed up in the garb of a new protest (armed struggle, Third Worldism, etc.) which, in any case, offers an insufficient critique, when it is not castrated by its debt to Eastern capitalism or the emerging Third World bourgeoisies. The fact is that criticizing the institution of the asylum, although necessary, is insufficient if we do not conceive of the world of capital as a Russian nesting doll where one institution is contained within another, forming a whole. In the end, as in other aspects, if we only criticize one part, we save the rest. If we partialize the struggle, we stop fighting, because we distance ourselves from the totality that must be challenged. The absence of a critique of the whole precedes the failure of movements that were unable (in that counterrevolutionary period) to connect with the historical revolutionary program. Along these lines, among many other forms of community psychiatry, there are reformist expressions such as that of F. Basaglia and his struggle for anti-asylum laws. Another example, supposedly radical, would be the armed outbursts of the Socialist Patients’ Collective, in the “combative” vein of the German RAF.

• The recreation of crazy paradises, lysergic communes, and similar escapist ways of fleeing from capitalism, which always accompanies them, sticks to our skin, and never ceases to confront them as a totality. Such projects, always present in “anti-capitalist” (but not necessarily revolutionary) utopias, respond perfectly to the reproduction of capital by other means, by novel and “creative” paths: they are part of the Silicon Valley of “mental health,” that alternative asylum which functions as a testing ground from which to launch new products onto the market. One of the leading authorities in this field of psychedelic madness would be the postmodern psychiatrist and philosopher F. Guattari.

Both paths are not without noble desires and critical power, but they are limited. They are doomed to failure not because of their excesses (which did exist), but because they have historically been unable to link the struggle against the continuity of emotional suffering to the struggle for the real liberation of humanity. In short, they never understood that “crazy” people were not rejected because they were “crazy”, but because they were dysfunctional in a mercantile and productivist system that measures human beings by their ability to feed the machine of unlimited value production.

In short, today’s society is capable of tolerating quite a few “eccentricities,” as long as they fall on the side of the commodity and have the quality of being valuable. In the case of “madness,” capital must confront it, not to suppress the emotional suffering it causes, but to alleviate its most disruptive elements for the production and consumption of goods.  It does this with its own logic, through the market, in the form of a wide range of therapies from the most conventional to the most eccentric, and in the form of a powerful pharmaceutical industry that produces as many diagnoses as it releases new chemical products for sale. It also does so ideologically through democracy, encouraging the search for political and civic recognition of the “crazy” identity, riding on the coattails of the latest rebellious fashion, which is acceptable because it is an identity separate and irreconcilable with the historical party of the revolution and the subject that embodies it: the proletariat.

From those muddy waters, the failure of anti-psychiatry as a theory indebted to its counter-revolutionary roots gave way to the current false critique of “mental illness,” to a new-but-old mentality that calls into question the “unattainable” totality of the communist program and ushers in a relativism of everyday life, an old formula cloaked in positive psychology and elementary idiocy. Postmodernity gives a new-but-old dimension to the capitalist anti-subject. It gives it a positive identity, where oppression and suffering go from being an “evil” that must 1be changed to an element of valorization, more so today than ever, since they, speaking substantively, constitute value in its essential sense.

As Guillermo Rendueles predicts:

“With regard to utilitarianism, that contemporary view of the world in which            individuals “communicate” their desires and negotiate them according to their          interests, its origins are so close to the market that there is hardly any need to insist          on the commonality of the vocabulary. It seems that the nightmare scenario in which economic laws leave nothing of traditional sociability is now a reality in which       the economic man cannot do without his “strategies” in the bedroom and in which the relationship between intimacy and public life ends up being a continuum in which labor relations are psychologized and human relations are instrumentalized,         with success and efficiency—in the office and in bed—as the only value.”

In other words, it is not about understanding oppression in order to free ourselves from it. It is about turning oppression into an identity that in itself puts us back on the market (ideologically and economically) in competition with other oppressions, all together reproducing a profitability of suffering in the same market (pills, therapies, social and medical interventions). And it is not that the suffering produced by the system that dishes it out does not exist. We will never tire of saying it. It is just that it is only given a dimension if capital can explain it for itself and address it within its own (re)productive parameters.

Thirdly and finally, we can talk about “new” therapies as “scientific” elements that can alleviate suffering. Perhaps the issue lies there, in that they are “honored” when they only claim to be a relief, not a solution.

In any case, the therapeutic consortium (and its employees) must ask themselves, at the very least, the following questions: Can therapy fulfill its function, understood as freely requested help? What do we understand as a good therapeutic outcome? Reducing suffering, accompanying it until it diminishes? Can psychological suffering, which has a social basis, be eliminated without changing the structural conditions that create it? Can therapeutic intervention contribute to an awareness that brings the individual closer to their communal-being and to class and revolutionary consciousness?

These are questions that new (more democratic, more progressive) therapies rarely ask themselves, and if they do, they run the risk of entering into crisis. This is because their therapeutic approach is not very different from that of older therapies, namely: to promote the process of adaptation to capitalism among those whom the system itself expels from normality, in order to welcome them back into the abstract framework of health and the concrete framework of commercial health systems.

And how can we contribute to a change in the status quo without asking these and other questions? We simply cannot.

7. Do commodities dream of empty desires?

Commodities do not dream, but they do cause nightmares where desires sink into formality and appearance. We live in an empty world. The wet “dreams” of commodities are their human reproduction, commercial humanity. In this framework of frivolity, the most libidinous passion can only be the possession of objects without passion.

In such a world, where the desire for life has not only been crushed by commercial logic but where we cannot even recognize our real desire, dissociation is a guarantee.

We cannot forget that capitalism conceives of us as isolated and democratic individuals, detached from our material community, from the species, as entities without historical meaning, singular inasmuch as we exist without perspective or past.

It seems clear, though not easy, that the solution lies in opposing this process of dissociation as a historical force, in re-associating ourselves, in becoming united as a species and in getting rid of capitalist trauma (expressed in a thousand forms of abuse) in order to be individuals who enjoy collective well-being.

We know that this is impossible in today’s society without definitively overthrowing it, that such human fulfillment will only come with communism, with the abolition of social classes and the destruction of the state, with the negation of all the fundamental categories of capital (patriarchy, value, commodities) along with its supporting cast of social structures elements: the police, prisons, armies, new and old asylums, etc.

And we know that this change cannot happen in small steps, accumulating tiny victories wrested from the system until the day of liberation arrives. Capital has thoroughly demonstrated that it cannot be reformed, that it only grants reforms in order to take them back a thousand times more twisted in its logic of accumulation. We know that the revolution will not be built with small victories. It will explode from the very contradictions of the system and will be led by its greatest contradiction: the proletariat (that immense majority).

And with this we do not seek to deny two obvious facts:

On the one hand, it is absurd to oppose treatments, to deny the possibility of partial improvement in the present world. It would be absurd and arrogant to suggest that people who suffer should not be able to seek therapy, which, although insufficient and functional, can alleviate emotional pain. Using these treatments, even pharmacological ones (why can we use pills when we have a headache but not when we suffer from intense anxiety?), can be useful in the immediate term, and we will not deny that.

It is not a question of taking refuge in supposed militant paradigms in the form of mental coherency or contradiction. Our proletarian existence is not a capricious choice but a social determination; an imposition riddled with contradictions. We cannot, nor do we want to, impose on our people a “coherency” that in itself changes nothing and deepens their suffering.

What we seek is a deeper reflection on its causes and possible radical solutions, but without ceasing to understand and care for our people.

On the other hand, we know that this suffering cannot wait for the revolution. It does not remain in suspense, even though we know that without destroying the causes that create it, it is not possible to put an end to it, or rather, to begin to do so. We can address it now, through solidarity and struggle, partially but resolutely.

We know that these struggles, which erupt here and there, are small for now. We know that these groups, which try to prepare for revolution by clarifying in practice the potentialities of the present moment, are small for now. We know that it is in these spaces that communist society is prefigured as a community of struggle. We know this because we have lived it and seen it, because these spaces are privileged places for confronting the loneliness and pain that this world produces. And we also know that the struggle against the existing order is therapeutic.

We are not talking about participating in organizations that reproduce alienation, e.g., the militant cadre group typical of leftism, but real experiences of struggle and collective life in the course of the communist struggle.

Class struggle and revolutionary militancy (whether expressed in mass movements or in the tiny everyday militancy) displaces the conception of the isolated individual. The fact of collectively linking ourselves to one another in projects that go beyond our own subjectivity helps us to confront the separations of capital that generate so much emotional suffering and reveals the path that, through revolution, will restore us to our selves as a species. A project of struggle, as a project of transcendence beyond all that denies us, shows the power of what communism will make real by overcoming these social relations.

We have seen and recognized, in real movements (still insufficient, still far from revolution) such as strikes or mass mobilizations, people with diagnoses merging with the human content in process, ceasing to be contingent, being welcomed and welcoming as a single identity: the human one. Possibly the beginning of everything involves criticizing everything collectively (which is what this writing invites) and restarting that collective search for a world and a life with meaning.

Barbaria (2025)