Asylum: the magazine for democratic psychiatry

We publish this magazine with a disclaimer. Whilst it claims to be "the magazine for democratic psychiatry", it is nothing of the sort, and psychiatry never can be democratic. Psychiatry is always punitive and attempts to impose the authority of capital over labour power.

This magazine is firmly aimed at what is colloquially known as health professionals and activists. Whilst it gives various proscriptions for tweeking the system it is ultimately the users of the healthcare sector, i.e. the abused proletarians, that will overturn this vast and vastly growing capitalist institution. Let me give an example from working class life. I recently had a conversation outside the Chinese Takeaway, with a former warden of childrens' "homes". When he started the job one of the children in his custody laid it straight just how things worked, If we don't like you you'll be out in a week. That is truly democratic, i.e. the despotic rule by the proletarians. With that in mind, the worker soon quit and procured productive labour.

The reactionary role of psychiatry is best observed at times of proletarian insurrection. During the August 2011 insurrection across Britain, the number of people interned in psychiatric facilities saw a massive upturn. The term asylum in this context reverses its root meaning even more dramatically. Far from being a place of sanctuary — asylum: a- "without" + sulon "right of seizure" — from the state, these secure units become supplementary places of confinement for proletarians lifted up by the nascent proletarian state forming through its collective action of insurrection.

The path to universal well-being is the process of destruction of the whole of capital and its state. One key agent to this destruction has been, is, and always will be the mental impatients themselves; until humankind has written the postscript, The End, on this whole sordid little affair: capitalist, classical, civilisation.