Socialist Patients' Collective
| Socialist Patients' Collective | |
|---|---|
| Dates of operation | 1968 – June 1971, 1973–present |
| Motives | 'Liberation from Iatrocapitalism' |
| Active region(s) | Heidelberg University, West Germany |
| Ideology | New Left, Neo-Marxism, Anti-psychiatry, Anti-Euthanasia, 'Pro-illness', 'Illness vs. Capitalism' |
| Status | Self-dissolved in 1971. Continued as Patientenfront from 1973, currently SPK/PF(H) |
The Socialist Patients' Collective (German: Sozialistisches Patientenkollektiv, and known as the SPK) was a patients' collective founded in Heidelberg, Germany, in February 1970, by Wolfgang Huber. The kernel of the SPK's ideological program is summated in the slogan, "Turn illness into a weapon", which is representative of an ethos that is continually and actively practiced under the new title, Patients' Front/Socialist Patients' Collective, PF/SPK(H). The original group, SPK, declared its self-dissolution in July 1971 as a strategic withdrawal.
The SPK assumes that illness exists as an undeniable fact and believe that it is caused by the capitalist system. The SPK promotes illness as the protest against capitalism and considers illness as the foundation on which to create the human species. The SPK is opposed to doctors, considering them to be the ruling class of capitalism and responsible for poisoning the human species. The most widely recognized text of the PF/SPK(H) is the communique, SPK – Turn illness into a weapon, which has prefaces by both the founder of the SPK, Wolfgang Huber, and Jean-Paul Sartre.
The group was founded by Wolfgang Huber and became publicly known in 1970 at the Psychiatric Hospital of the University of Heidelberg.
The SPK established a "free space" for political therapy", re-framing illness as a contradiction created by capitalism which could be embraced to bring an end to the system which gave it life. They believed that the sick formed a revolutionary class of dispossessed people who could be radicalized to struggle against oppression. Organizing by sickness instead of socio-economic class allowed middle-class student leftists to articulate their own feelings of psychic and political oppression and to struggle against the status quo in their own right in solidarity with other oppressed groups. Additionally, according to the SPK sickness had the advantage of being familiar to everyone, hence everyone was a potential revolutionary so long as they disavowed the medical establishment. Like other anti-psychiatry experiments, such as Kingsley Hall and Villa 21, SPK questioned the patient/doctor paradigm and ultimately called for an overthrow of the "doctor's class".
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