Next to the pawprints are some notes on 'Turn Illness into a Weapon', the program of West German patients front SPK (Sozialistisches Patientenkollektiv).
SPK understand illness as a condition and result of the relations of production in capitalism. Not only that capitalism produces and relies on docile bodies and subjectification to undertake its shabby, meaningless acts, but that it implicates us all in a cycle of suffering since the rules of capital (most urgently alienation) are ubiquitous and inescapable. (In this sense, illness is similar to the first Noble Truth of Buddhism, Dukkha.) Illness is identical to capitalism, and is the greatest hope in thwarting it. "The power of the body corresponds to the exercise of power over it. Hence the possibility of a reversal of that power" (Sheridan on Foucault). Biopolitics and somatic resistance therefore provide examples of what SPK describe as the protest of life against capitalism and the revolutionary productive power par excellence.
In the introduction, Sartre quotes Engels' view of the world created by capitalist industrialisation as one "in which only that species of mankind is able to feel at home, which is dehumanised, degraded - both in the intellectual as in the moral sense - sunken down and humiliated to the level of a beast, somatically ill".
Illness is the method by which capitalism is able to sustain its dominance. It sickens, weakens you into compliance until you are made to feel grateful for its assistance in numbing your pain.
This is Holger Meins being captured by West German police.
Holger Meins was imprisoned along with Andreas Baader and Gudrun Ensslin, and died in Stammheim prison after a hunger strike during which he was force-fed. The image of his emaciated cadaver, which is viewable on the internet, reminds me of John Lennon's bed-in.
