Anti-Wage-Slavery, Pro-Freedom Quotations Of The Week 324-326

I have always said that February is the Tuesday of the year. Monday is cool because it has a great reason for sucking, being that it's the beginning of the work week. Wednesday is cool because it's "hump day", and who doesn't like anything that has "hump" in it. But Tuesday? It just sucks. It's pointless. Just like February. A black hole of despair that you hope will get better, but never does.
mental meatloaf

The core of oppression is economic; oppression theory always begins and ends in economic terms. The relevant term today is classism. It was once slavery, later it was feudalism. It is now separation of people by class, the fundamental division being between those who make their living by their own work (working class) and those who make money off other peoples' work (owning class). Other divisions (poor, low, middle-class, professional, etc.) are sub-categories of working class, reflecting varying degrees of privilege or advantage in our society. It is absolutely necessary in thinking about psychiatric oppression to be very aware of economics and money. For a full and powerful exposition, I refer the reader to Thomas Szasz' book, 'Cruel Compassion', in which he shows how psychiatry serves a societal function in modern times, analogous to prisons and poorhouses of the recent past. Large numbers of people are drugged, confined and supported by the state, not because they are sick, but because they are unproductive and unwanted. "From the sixteenth to the nineteenth century adult dependents were coerced primarily on economic grounds, because they were a financial burden on the productive members of society. Since then, they have increasingly been coerced on therapeutic grounds, because they are mentally ill and hence are a danger to themselves and others. Both remedies aggravate the problem."

The bottom line is that economics is the linchpin of all oppression, including psychiatry. Psychiatry serves a major societal control function by dealing with unproductive and unwanted citizens. A related point is that oppression thrives on separation, division and fear. Fear of "mental illness" is huge. Diagnosing, labeling and treating a class of "mentally ill patients" is a powerful way of maintaining separation and division among members and segments of our society. The cloak of benevolence may protect the consciences of psychiatry's agents and their supporters, but it in no way protects the bodies and psyches of its victims.

The Necessity of Madness and Unproductivity:

Psychiatric Oppression or Human Transformation

by John Breeding, Ph.D.

Perhaps 20-30 percent of the people in the developed world are doing just fine financially. They are either professionals, technical experts who are indispensable in making the world economy function, former government employees on pensions, or a small minority who live off compound interest —i.e., the bankers and the rich. Most of this 20-30 percent, particularly the latter group, do not seem to have a great deal of compassion for the majority within their own nations and even less for the billions of less privileged people around the world.

For the remaining 70-80 percent who realize, with the recession now having arrived, that their livelihoods are on a slippery slope downward, possibly taking them toward personal and family catastrophe, they need only one thing —MONEY!

For many of these it would be nice to have a job, or a better job. But jobs are not the answer, even though any time a politician, economist, activist, or commentator offers an opinion on how to improve the economy they say MORE JOBS!
…
The way to generate income security is not to give someone a job. It is to put money —cash —in his [sic] pocket. If we began with this simple fact the economy would soon generate far more jobs than people could fill. Of course some of these jobs would be low-paying or even volunteer jobs, which would be acceptable provided that people still had enough to live on and had opportunities to earn more.

For the world economy to function and for there to be enough produced to support everyone at a decent standard of living, not everyone has to work. In fact too many workers get in each other’s way.
Richard C. Cook

Bailout for the People:
Dividend Economics and the Basic Income
Guarantee