A good article in the Guardian about the way the planned cuts by the ConDem government in Britain will devastate women throughout the country:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2010/aug/08/women-public-sector-cuts-pay-freeze
However, it doesn't go far enough, of course. As I try to make clear in my comment:
Look (as Thatcher said):
Unemployment, insecurity and poverty are endemic (part and parcel) of capitalist society, even under Welfare State concessions made to blunt the threat of socialist rebellion.
In 1963 it was impossible for me to get work in Middlesbrough - and they were the golden years! Want to dig ditches as a navvy - get on the short list first!
Splitting different parts of the working class against each other is endemic in capitalist society. You name it, they've done it. Ethnic origin, national origin, age, gender, religion, housing, region, neighbourhood, education, skills, unionization, industry, pay scale - individually and in every possible combination.
This is combined with scapegoating of the most vicious kind - first they create the victim through poverty and discrimination, then they blame the victim for problems they've caused themselves, and enforce this ferociously by means of the police, the courts and the jails - oh, and the sewer media
As if this wasn't enough, working people in different countries are split on the same lines - and they can be shredded to pieces and have their homes smashed by the military, and be forced to endure starvation and disease thanks to "sanctions" or just plain greed and brutal indifference.
All this is well-known, but just not talked about in public.
What isn't known at all, thanks to the demonization of free thought in economics, and in particular of Marxist theory, is that the public sector does produce value. It's work produces the most valuable commodity of all - namely, labour power - the only commodity that can generate more value than it takes to produce.
Which makes you think when you compare this kind of productive work with the work put into useless and destructive production like weapons, surveillance equipment and luxury crap of all kinds.
It isn't just this vicious government that needs to be turfed out like Churchill after world war 2. It's just one in a string of vicious governments. The whole system needs to be turned on its head, all the parasitical blood-suckers shaken out, and run by us for our own benefit and the benefit of those like us worldwide.
And the change needs to be permanent, not just temporary and vulnerable to claw-back by governments who first make concessions like the Welfare State (or New Deal) to save their own (s)kin, and then ratchet them back as the threat recedes.
1 August 2010
Therapy in Britain - healthier attitudes towards mental health
An article in the Observer reports on changed attitudes to mental ill-health and seeking therapy.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2010/aug/01/counselling-psychotherapy-survey
I commented:
Britain is a catastrophic place for kids to grow up in. Everything around you conspires to crush your spirit and warp your emotions. Fighting is the only healthy way to live in these conditions, and that's often wearing and leads to shell shock and PTSD. (That re pit villages in the 30s and world war 2.)
Education during the concessions to the working class known as the Welfare State has created a kind of free space for a lot of us to question what's going on. You've just got to read RD Laing to see how it developed - and to see how vicious the role of a "normal" family is in the authoritarian clampdown on young minds, bodies and emotions.
Freud laid out the outlines of successful therapy. You have to nurture trust and love in the patient, where none has been before. The patient must experience this and express it - which means the therapist has to accept it, and return it in a way that empowers the patient to relate to the outside world using these emotions as firm ground to stand on. There are terms for this, but they are a technicality compared to the essence of the process.
So, how many therapists are able to pull this off? Not many, obviously, cos most therapists are in the same boat as we are. BUT, what they often can do is remove some of the most painful and crippling nightmares by clearing out the pus from around the roots - we can't have firm teeth to bite back at the world until their roots have had the poison drained, and then been filled. Given the state of society, this isn't too bad. It's a start.
If you've sunk into an emotional cesspool, you stink when you're dragged out of it. If you're cleaned up, and feel you're clean, and realize that the cesspool isn't inside you as you imagined, but only something filthy engulfing you - then you're ready to step out on your own, with new clean friends, and enjoy the fight.
Emotionally healthy people in an emotionally healthy society must be the goal. And anything that gets us closer to that is valuable
http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2010/aug/01/counselling-psychotherapy-survey
I commented:
Britain is a catastrophic place for kids to grow up in. Everything around you conspires to crush your spirit and warp your emotions. Fighting is the only healthy way to live in these conditions, and that's often wearing and leads to shell shock and PTSD. (That re pit villages in the 30s and world war 2.)
Education during the concessions to the working class known as the Welfare State has created a kind of free space for a lot of us to question what's going on. You've just got to read RD Laing to see how it developed - and to see how vicious the role of a "normal" family is in the authoritarian clampdown on young minds, bodies and emotions.
Freud laid out the outlines of successful therapy. You have to nurture trust and love in the patient, where none has been before. The patient must experience this and express it - which means the therapist has to accept it, and return it in a way that empowers the patient to relate to the outside world using these emotions as firm ground to stand on. There are terms for this, but they are a technicality compared to the essence of the process.
So, how many therapists are able to pull this off? Not many, obviously, cos most therapists are in the same boat as we are. BUT, what they often can do is remove some of the most painful and crippling nightmares by clearing out the pus from around the roots - we can't have firm teeth to bite back at the world until their roots have had the poison drained, and then been filled. Given the state of society, this isn't too bad. It's a start.
If you've sunk into an emotional cesspool, you stink when you're dragged out of it. If you're cleaned up, and feel you're clean, and realize that the cesspool isn't inside you as you imagined, but only something filthy engulfing you - then you're ready to step out on your own, with new clean friends, and enjoy the fight.
Emotionally healthy people in an emotionally healthy society must be the goal. And anything that gets us closer to that is valuable
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