Capitalism and Mental Health

When discussing depression and Capitalism, we often turn to the Wall Street Crash of the 1920s, or perhaps the recession of 2008. Depressions, in the economic sense as Lenin said are inevitable and frequent, such is the nature of the Capitalist system. However, there is an even greater link between mental health and the plutocratic regimes which we find ourselves prisoners in.


Our minds suffer, perhaps more than anything else, living, and especially working in a capitalist environment. We are, as slaves, restricted as to what we say, what we do, how we do things, and so forth. This does not appear to those who as Engels liked to put it were 'unconscious beings in another reality'. Therefore workers are reduced to mere vegetables in both their mental and physical capacities.


Marx's most in depth analysis of the repercussions of capitalistic employment come in the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, where he famously introduces the concept of Alienation, an idea which still shapes Marxist thinking today.  Alienation is the process by which workers become estranged from the world in which they are living, an inevitability under Capitalism. To Marx, alienation caused great damage to one's mental health because it removed the characteristics of what it takes to truly be a human. Nobody enjoys working in a capitalist environment, not because every kind of work is mundane and tiresome, but because in Capitalism, you cannot feel and experience love, passion, desire and so forth. When confronted with an alien world, the Capitalist work environment erodes you in four ways, alienating you from the process of labour, from the product of labour, from one's Gattungswesen (species essence) and from your fellow worker. Through this quartet, men, women, and children are exposed and exploited so that they can no longer feel joy and passion in the world, their drive is destroyed along with other attributes which define a human being. Marx claimed that this left us as nothing but prehistoric chimps who relied on only food and water, and that Capitalism had halted centuries and centuries of evolution.


Suicide and poverty go hand in hand. And poverty can be seen no greater than the capitalist heartlands of Western Europe and the US. An independent study, between 2000 and 2011 found that of the hundreds of thousands who took their lives in this period, over 45,000 done so because of unemployment and the poverty they had been plunged into. With Capitalist workforces now reliant on machinery and technology more than ever, and furthermore with no emotional compassion (as Marx said we are robbed of this), the bosses choose to prioritise profit over their fellow humans, and thus unemployment soars. The Lancet calculated from data obtained from 2009 that there had been a spike of nearly five thousand suicides directly linked to the financial crash of 2008. Corporatism is a killer in more ways than one, and with private companies only being given more and more leeway by Western governments, these tragedies shall only increase.
In the USSR, with industries nationalised and state controlled, unemployment was non existent alongside poverty, and thus suicides linked to these causes were unheard of.


Furthermore, during the peak of the Black Civil rights movement, the numbers for Black Americans taking their lives was almost four times more than their White counterparts. As Malcolm X famously remarked, "You can't have capitalism without racism". Racial bullying in schools and the workplace are rising, with hate crimes against Muslims quadrupling in Britain in the last year alone. Racism is in many cases is the catalyst behind a deterioration in mental health, something I know all too well.


The stigma of depression and other illnesses in the west is often criticised, but rarely do media outlets seek to amend their crimes.

n Cuba, a Marxist haven as strong as ever, more money is invested into mental health than any other medical department. The Cuban Constitution states that health care is a right of every citizen and the responsibility of the government. Upon the successful Communist revolution, the Castro regime ordered that mental health patients should not be experimented on any longer (a practice which lasted in Western Europe until the 1980s) and instead a therapeutic approach was adopted, the first programme of its kind in the world. Despite the US embargo in 1961, this tiny country has emerged as the world's leading medical researcher, and a heartland for breakthroughs. Cuba has the greatest mental health professional- patient ratio in the world, and the country's doctor's are only increasing in both quality and quantity.

Fidel and his Comrades broke barriers in 1960s Cuba that are still in place in Britain and America today.