Originally Posted by
JamesBond007
What we understand as “normal” and common sense is in fact dominant, capitalist ideas imparted through professional discourse, an issue summated in the famous quote from Marx and Engels that “the ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas". So, mental illness does not exist as an objective scientific disease. Rather , the neoliberal capitalist class seeks to remove itself from the problems it creates in society by changing the locus of change from the community to the individual. What we understand as mental illness are problems of living caused by capitalism.
Psychiatrists should be shot in the head by Marxist revolutionaries en masse , priests should be sent to gulags, teachers sent to reeducation camps and families broken up :
the coercive powers of the state (e.g., the army, police, and the judicial system) are comparatively ineffective and fragile in ultimately halting the communist revolution; instead the capitalist classes had secured a greater chance of survival through hegemonic power—the rule of the bourgeoisie by induced consent. The bourgeoisie must win the hearts and minds of the people, persuading them (without even seeming to do so or to need to do so) that the status quo is natural and inevitable, beneficial for all, and inducing them to identify with it.
The intellectual and moral leadership won by the ruling classes as resides in civil society rather than the state. By “civil society” I mean institutions such as religion, education, the media, and the family, to which Marxist scholars have added the institution of health as a further site of hegemonic power. These civic institutions are much more effective than direct, repressive organs of the state in manipulating the masses due to their perceived detachment from elite control. Hegemonic power is conducted under the guise of objective and neutral institutional practice, though it is in reality nothing of the sort.
Bookmarks