UP AGAINST mass unemployment, rampant employ. ers with savage anti-union laws, and a war on hard-won public services, the working class in Britain faces a real crisis - an avoidable crisis created by the historic failure of its official leadership.
Socialist Outlook exists to build a new type of working class leadership, based on class struggle and revolutionary socialism.
The capitalist class, driven by its own crisis, and politically united by its need to maximise profits at the expense of the workers, has had determined, vanguard leadership by a brutal Tory high command.
The Tory strategy has been to shackle the unions, and to fragment and weaken the resistance, allowing them to pick off isolated sections one at a time.
In response, most TUC and Labour leaders have embraced the defeatist politics of 'new realism', effectively total surrender, while ditching any pretence of being a socialist alternative. Every retreat encouraged the offensive against jobs, wages, conditions and union rights.
New realism is the latest form of reformism, seeking only improved conditions within capitalism.
We reject reformism, not because we are against reforms, but because we know that full employment, decent living standards, a clean environment, peace and democracy, can never be achieved under capitalism.
Nor, as we argued long before the collapse of Stalinism, could these demands ever be achieved under the bureaucratically deformed workers states and degenerated USSR, whose regimes survived only by repressing the working class.
We are a marxist cur- their rights. rent, based not on the brutof capital and establish its own class rule.
We struggle against fragmentation by building solidarity, to unite the various struggles of workers, the unemployed, of women, of pensioners, of the black communities, of lesbians and gay men, of students, of youth - and of those fighting imperialism in Ireland and worldwide:
Socialist Outlook is above all an internationalist current, in solidarity with the Trotskyist Fourth International, which organises in over 40 countries.
Unlike some other A FAIR, safe and groups on the British left, we do not believe a mass non-persecutory revolutionary party can be built simply by proclaiming welfare is what we ourselves to be one. This degenerates into sectarian posturing and abstention community care is from struggles in the labour something quite movement, playing into right wing hands. different, explains Nor do we believe that the demands of women, black people, lesbians and gays or the national demands of people in Scotland and Wales should be left to await revolution. The oppressed must organise themselves and fight now for their demands, which are a part of the struggle for tify their policies.
But propaganda alone, however good, will not bring socialism. The fight for policies which can mobilise and politically educate workers in struggle, must be taken into the un- hind it. ions, the Labour Party and every campaign and struggle in which workers and the oppressed fight for To strengthen this fight Community care should be democratically controlled and free they were "treated" in various ways, one of them being by system of health and clitoridectomy (surgical removal of the clitoris). The want. The Tory idea of Movement in the 1960s pointed out the resemblance of asylums to prisons and how they accentuate the self-perception of its inmates as PAULINE BRADLEY. "strange"
"anti-social". COMMUNITY CARE was The studies of the Socialist a way the government saw Health Associations have of saving money - where found that most people lathere were 40,000 social belled schizophrenic are workers, there are now women, and/or black and 20,000. They shamelessly overwhelmingly pillaged the radical lan- class. These groups of people were more likely to end up in guage of the 1960's to jusinstitutions and to be given toxic drug treatment rather But it is not just money than therapy or counselling. they're after. Community care In Sanity, Madness and the is an ideological device to Family RD Laing shows how regulate society. It is therefore the child in the family labelled worth tracing the thinking be- "schizophrenic," "manic depressive" or "psychotic" is Theories of madness reusually the scapegoat for the placed those of possessed by other family members. It is in the devil. All Europe was affected by the upheavals in the their interest to keep this person in the "mad" role because mid seventeenth century when dispossessed peasants were thrown into "houses of correction". Those who didn't work were seen as the family can then avoid acknowledging their own inadequacies.
The Anti-Psychiatry Anti-Psychiatry movement sought to expose abuses in the mental health system looking at the power relationship between the psychiatrist and the patient. They talked of "decarceration" (the "weird" and opposite of incarceration) and opened up a theraputic community called Kingsley Hall as an alternative to the oppressive mental hospitals.
Kingsley Hall working Kingsley Hall did not use drugs - as it saw them as merely suppressing symptoms - but instead used therapeutic intervention to stem the damage that society had caused. This should be the model of "Community Care" we should follow - not the farce that the Tories have introduced.
Medication does not "cure"- it just suppresses symptoms. Long term use can cause drastic side effects such as tardive dyskenesia (uncontrollable shakes), stiffness, involuntary tongue thrusts and even death. MIND's survey shows that there is one death per week caused by psychiatric drugs, far more than those killed by the "mentally ill".
If supervised discharges became law then those diagnosed as "mentally ill" have little future. Community Health nurses will be asked to forcibly inject people against their will - they will become a particular gruesome adjuct to the Strong State.
When the Conservatives talk about "communities" they mean white, middle-class suburbs where women do the unpaid caring, there is a neighbourhood watch scheme and people live in nuclear families or individual flats.
When we talk about communities we mean something very different. Everyone would be included in a socialist community blacks, whites, people from all cultural and racial backgrounds, gays, lesbians, able bodied, disabled, men, women and those who would have been previously diagnosed as "mentally ill".
In the future we should be arguing for free therapeutic communities, group homes and crisis centres offering alternative therapies. Community Cale should be democratically controlled and free.
We need to work with survivors groups and put pressure on the possible Blair led government to make community care and welfare something we can be proud of. • Socialist Outlook welcomes letters under 300 words on Community Care. Write to PO Box 1109, London N4 2UU.
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