{∅, {∅}, {∅, {∅}}} : Rage Against the Meat Grinder

From Chapter 27:

27.) ALL ABOUT PHYSICIANS, LAWYERS, UNIVERSITY PROFESSORS, HEALTH SYSTEM, JUDICIARY, SCIENCE


Doctor, lawyer, professor belong to the dominant agencies of capitalism. In the self-representation of the System they function as connecting links between the respective suppressing institutions (Herrschaftslnstitutionen) on the one hand and the patients, clients, students, that means the population, on the other hand. The physician lives on the social contributions and on the fees of the patients, the lawyers live on the fees of his clients just as the university professor lives on the taxes of the population.


copy of an original letter to a patient, who is now In a mental hospital:

"Highly esteemed Mr !

("Dear Sir:, Sehr geehrter Herr !)

That you have called Dr. Honeck an agent of capitalism nobody here has taken amiss, because we are accustomed to hear things like that.

We know what a big part have played words like "agent, capitalism, socialism, Mao Tse Tung" in your condition of mental disturbance in those times. At that time you have connected every thing and everybody to the high politics and you demonstrated not much interest in matters of minor detail.

Now you have to do exercises more and more in order to hold tight the simple human interrelations and to throw aboard everything which has to do with delusion and phantasy (alles Wahnhafte und Phantastische).

Your unjustified distrust towards our medical efforts delays your curing. The medicaments, which you dismiss (abqualifizieren) as narcotics are indeed rather psychopharmaca, and by those psychopharmaca the psychiatry was revolutionized in this sense, that nowadays diseases like yours, which were taken in former times as untreatable, now got a chance to get healed.

Yours

Dr.med. Ingo Sonntag"

(Dr. Sonntag is a psychiatrist at the psychiatric hospital of the university of Freiburg - dean of this hospital is Professor Degkwitz)


Following their self-understanding combined to their own class understanding and following their own class rights they have to be ready and available only in favour of the population. But being anchored in the health system, in the judiciary and in the university they get forced to enforce the interests of capitalism against the population, because they are functionaries and agents of those institutions of domination
(Herrschaftsinstitutionen). The latter function they present best and in a quite general manner by bringing into prominence their limits of competence and by keeping their distance ( D i s t a n z ) .

For the physician (Arzt) it is not the patient which is interesting, but only the patient's (un)fitness to work. For the lawyer there is nothing about the client, but only about the law case. And for the scientist there is nothing about the needs of the population, because he works for nothing but for the interests of capitalism, regardless of his understanding about science in each case. In each one of those three cases there is a keeping distance (besteht eine D i s t a n z ) between the needs and sufferings (Bediirfnisse) of the patient or client and of the population on the one hand and between that, what the functionaries (physician, lawyer, scientist) regard and treat to be their sphere of work (Arbeitsgegenstand). Physician, lawyer, scientist themselves are parts and particularities (Teile) in the system of forces, exposed persons (Exponenten) of the social relations, which are permanently again and again producing for them the "matters of work" ("Arbeitsmaterial") by which they benefit.
Regarding their social origins, their education and their economic possibilities (okonomische Potenz) there exists a barrier (Barriere) between them and the population who works in illness, persecuted by criminalization (kriminalisiert) and who is systematically kept under intellectual subdevelopment.