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Socialist Patients' Collective

April 12, 2024

The Socialist Patients' Collective (German: Sozialistisches Patientenkollektiv, and known as the SPK) is a patients' collective founded in Heidelberg, West Germany, in February 1970, by Wolfgang Huber (born 1935). 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 first collective, SPK, declared its self-dissolution in July 1971 as a strategic withdrawal but in 1973 Huber proclaimed the continuity of SPK as Patients' Front.[1][2][3][4][5][6]

Socialist Patients' Collective
FounderWolfgang Huber
Dates of operation1968 – June 1971, 1973–present
Motives'Liberation from Iatrocapitalism'
Active regionsHeidelberg University, West Germany
Ideology
StatusSelf-dissolved in 1971; continued as Patientenfront from 1973, currently SPK/PF(H)

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.[4][7] 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.[3][4][8][1][9][6][10][11][12]

Rejecting the roles and ideology associated with the notion of the revolutionary as scientific explainer, they stated in Turn Illness into a Weapon that whoever claims they want to "observe the bare facts dispassionately" is either an "idiot" or a "dangerous criminal."[13]

History edit

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".[8]

The SPK collective produced information leaflets, held teach-ins and Heidelberg University studied to recognize SPK as a part of the University.[14] SPK conducted "agitations", called "single" (individual actions) and "group agitations" (collective actions), working from 9 am to 10 pm or later.

However, the SPK experiment was criticized by many within Heidelberg's university and psychiatric clinic and the SPK's funding, salaries and meeting space were threatened. Despite opposition to the SPK, in the autumn of 1970 the university convened an advisory panel of 3 experts who recommended that the SPK should be institutionalized in Heidelberg university. To counter this suggestion, Heidelberg university's faculty of medicine supported the establishment of a counter-panel consisting of 3 critics of the SPK who were mandated to campaign against the group. The Minister overseeing both panels ultimately sided with the 3 SPK critics and decided against implementing any of the recommendations from the pro-SPK panel. SPK's funding was subsequently cut and the group was evicted from the university campus.[14]

The decision provoked a confrontation between the SPK and the university, which led to a sit-in and attracted the attention of a wider audience, including the police. Ultimately, the collective moved out of the university and into the homes of its members. On 24 June 1971, a mysterious shooting at Heidelberg police station was attributed to the Baader-Meinhof group, and based on that unrelated pretext, the police began conducting raids on SPK members' houses.[12] Three hundred fifty officers were charged with finding the shooter. At its peak, the SPK counted about 500 members; of these, seven were arrested in the raids, including Huber on 21 July 1971. Firstly SPK was falsely linked to the Baader-Meinhof group[6] but none of the SPK patients arrested was ever condemned due to any relation with the Baader-Meinhof group[9] and neither was ever proved any relation within SPK and RAF.[15] Accounts notice the brutality,[16] legal irregularities and other sort of abuses which surrounded the case,[12] and they also notice this was part of a disinformation campaign against SPK due to their revolutionary positions,[11][16] and thus SPK was criminalized as part of a political persecution.[15]

The rhetoric denouncing the SPK as engaged in "terrorist activity" and a precursor to the RAF re-emerged after the arrest of Kristina Berster, who crossed the US border illegally seeking asylum from West German counterterrorism operations. Berster was acquitted of all conspiracy charges, and the disinformation campaign was exposed by Greg Guma.[17]

A West German embassy spokesman stated, "By all accounts the SPC was fairly harmless."[18] Kristina Berster explained that "the purpose of the Socialist Patients Collective was to find out the reasons why people feel lonely, isolated and depressed and the circumstances which caused these problems."[17]

GSG 9 raided a facility belonging to SPK, discovering the first documented case of a terrorist organization training radio-jamming techniques. [19]

Dissolution and the IZRU edit

Even before Huber was arrested in June 1971,[20] the SPK dissolved. The IZRU or Information Zentrum Rote Volks-Universität (in English; Information Center of the Red People's University) was founded by former SPK members; however, the IZRU was neither the official or unofficial SPK. It organized international congresses, founded a newspaper: RVU (or Rote Volksuniversität, People's Red University), supported prisoners and reprinted some SPK literature.

The SPK today edit

Since 1973, the SPK has continued as Patients' Front/Socialist Patients' Collective, or PF/SPK(H). The refounding of the collective as Patient's Front was announced by Huber whilst he was in solitary confinement in Stammheim Prison, later called PF/SPK(H).[1][2][5] As the founder of the SPK and PF/SPK(H), Huber entrusted all juridical matters concerning the groups to Ingeborg Muhler, an active member of the SPK since 1970, who is an attorney and holds a MA in Computer Science.

Interest and influence edit

Discussion of the SPK in both German-language and English-language written sources increased during the 1970s, fell during the 1980s, and rose again during the 1990s.[21][22]

Projects that have cited the group include

See also edit

References edit

  1. ^ a b c SPK; Huber, Wolfgang (1993). SPK Turn illness into a Weapon. KRRIM - PF-Verlag für Krankheit. pp. XVIII–XXIV. ISBN 3-926491-17-5.
  2. ^ a b SPK; Huber, Wolfgang (1995). SPK - Aus der Krankheit eine Waffe machen (in German) (6th ed.). KRRIM - PF-Verlag für Krankheit. ISBN 978-3-926491-25-1.
  3. ^ a b "SPK/PF(H), Sozialistisches Patientenkollektiv (SPK), Patientenfront (PF), List of Dates". SPK/PF(H). Retrieved 14 December 2018.
  4. ^ a b c "PF/SPK(H), : SPK. Gossipcide in the case of print media, TV & Co. Text for entries on the SPK in the Encyclopedias of Brockhaus, Duden, etc". SPK/PF(H). Retrieved 14 December 2018.
  5. ^ a b Quensel, Stephan (1995). Irre, Anstalt, Therapie: Der Psychiatrie-Komplex (in German). Springer Verlag. p. 285. ISBN 978-3-658-16210-8.
  6. ^ a b c Parker, Ian (1995). Deconstructing Psychopathology. Sage Publications Ltd. p. 120. ISBN 978-0-8039-7481-4.
  7. ^ "The secret of illness is human species. How to apply the concept of illness". SPK/PF(H). Retrieved 18 June 2012.
  8. ^ a b "Proposal for a text for international use concerning SPK. Overview". SPK/PF(H). Retrieved 2 December 2011.
  9. ^ a b Blake, Trevor (1995). SPK – Krankheit Im Recht. KRRIM - PF - Verlag für Krankheit. p. 159. ISBN 3-926491-26-4.
  10. ^ Spandler, Helen (1992). "To Make an army out of Illness: a history of the Socialist Patients Collective Heidelberg 1970/72" (PDF). Asylum. 6 (4): 3–16.
  11. ^ a b Guattari, Felix (1984). Molecular revolution: psychiatry and politics (PDF). New York, N.Y., U.S.A.: Penguin. pp. 67–68. ISBN 0-14-055160-3.
  12. ^ a b c Genosko, Gary (2001). "Introduction". Deleuze and Guattari: critical assessments of leading philosophers. Vol. 2. London: Routledge. pp. 480–481, 798 of 1503. ISBN 0-415-18678-1.
  13. ^ Cryzine. . Archived from the original on 1 December 2017. Retrieved 21 November 2017.
  14. ^ a b English Google translation: "Turn Illness into a Weapon,". Original German text: "Aus der Krankheit eine Waffe machen!," 18 December 2009 at the Wayback Machine Ruprecht (Heidelberger Studierenzeitung), Number 35 (16 May 1995).[dead link]
  15. ^ a b Boehlich, Walter (January 1972). "Wildwuchs, nicht länger geduldet. Walter Boehlich über: Dokumentation zum Sozialistischen Patientenkollektiv" [Proliferation, no longer tolerated. Walter Boehlich on: documentation on Socialist Patients' Collective]. Der Spiegel (in German) (6). Germany: Spiegel Verlag: 122–124.
  16. ^ a b Kotowicz, Zbigniew (1997). R.D. Laing and the Paths of Anti-Psychiatry. Routledge. pp. 80–81. ISBN 0-415-11610-4.
  17. ^ a b Guma, Greg (2005). Taylor, Philip M. (ed.). "Anything but the Truth: The Art of Managing Perceptions". Propaganda and the Global War on Terrorism (GWOT). 4. The Institute of Communications Studies, University of Leeds. {{cite journal}}: External link in |editor= and |publisher= (help)
  18. ^ Connie Paige "Vermont Town in Uproar over Baader-Meinhof Terrorist Who Wasn’t," The Boston Phoenix (30 September 1978).
  19. ^ Myers, Lawrence W. (1989). Improvised Radio Jamming Techniques: electronic guerrilla warfare. Boulder, Colo: Paladin Press. p. 13. ISBN 978-0-87364-520-1.
  20. ^ In 1971 Wolfgang and Ursul Huber were sentenced to 4.5 years imprisonment, and released in 1976. During their detention, in the infamous Stammheim Prison, they participated in a solidarity hunger strike.
  21. ^ Google Books Ngram Viewer "Socialist Patients' Collective"
  22. ^ Google Books Ngram Viewer "Sozialistisches Patientenkollektiv"
  23. ^ Cryzine "About Cryzine"

Further reading edit

  • Book: Wolfgang Huber, Socialist Patients' Collective/Patient's Front SPK/PF(H). SPK: Turn Illness into a Weapon. KRRIM - PF-Verlag für Krankheit, Heidelberg, 2002. ISBN 978-3-926491-17-6
  • Book: Wolfgang Huber, Sozialistisches Patientenkollektiv/Patientenfront, SPK/PF(H): SPK - Aus der Krankheit eine Waffe machen (6. erweiterte Aufl). Eine Agitationsschrift des Sozialistischen Patientenkollektiv an der Universität Heidelberg. Mit einem Vorwort von Jean-Paul Sartre und einer Zeittafel von den Anfängen ('65 ff) bis heute; Ausschnitt aus einer Rundfunksendung: Aus Krankheit stark Patientenfront. KRRIM - PF-Verlag für Krankheit, 1995. ISBN 978-3-926491-25-1.
  • Christian Pross, Sonja Schweitzer und Julia Wagner. Wir wollten ins Verderben rennen – die Geschichte des sozialistischen Patientenkollektivs Heidelberg 1970-1971. Unter Mitarbeit von Sonja Schweitzer und Julia Wagner, gefördert durch die Hamburger Stiftung zur Förderung von Wissenschaft und Kultur, Psychiatrie Verlag, Köln 2016, ISBN 978-3-88414-672-9. (A synopsis in English)
  • Book: Jillian Becker, Hitler's Children: The Story of the Baader-Meinhof Terrorist Gang, HarperCollins Distribution Services; New edition (28 June 1978) ISBN 978-0-586-04665-4.
  • Book: Tom Vague, Televisionaries: the red army faction story (1963–1993), AK Press; Rev. and Updated Ed edition (9 June 1994). ISBN 978-1-873176-47-4

External links edit

  • PF/SPK(H) - Official website of the Socialist Patients' Collective

April 12, 2024
socialist, patients, collective, german, sozialistisches, patientenkollektiv, known, patients, collective, founded, heidelberg, west, germany, february, 1970, wolfgang, huber, born, 1935, kernel, ideological, program, summated, slogan, turn, illness, into, wea. The Socialist Patients Collective German Sozialistisches Patientenkollektiv and known as the SPK is a patients collective founded in Heidelberg West Germany in February 1970 by Wolfgang Huber born 1935 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 first collective SPK declared its self dissolution in July 1971 as a strategic withdrawal but in 1973 Huber proclaimed the continuity of SPK as Patients Front 1 2 3 4 5 6 Socialist Patients CollectiveFounderWolfgang HuberDates of operation1968 June 1971 1973 presentMotives Liberation from Iatrocapitalism Active regionsHeidelberg University West GermanyIdeologyNew LeftMarxismAnti psychiatryAnti Euthanasia Pro illness Illness vs Capitalism StatusSelf dissolved in 1971 continued as Patientenfront from 1973 currently SPK PF H 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 4 7 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 3 4 8 1 9 6 10 11 12 Rejecting the roles and ideology associated with the notion of the revolutionary as scientific explainer they stated in Turn Illness into a Weapon that whoever claims they want to observe the bare facts dispassionately is either an idiot or a dangerous criminal 13 Contents 1 History 2 Dissolution and the IZRU 3 The SPK today 4 Interest and influence 5 See also 6 References 7 Further reading 8 External linksHistory editThe 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 8 The SPK collective produced information leaflets held teach ins and Heidelberg University studied to recognize SPK as a part of the University 14 SPK conducted agitations called single individual actions and group agitations collective actions working from 9 am to 10 pm or later However the SPK experiment was criticized by many within Heidelberg s university and psychiatric clinic and the SPK s funding salaries and meeting space were threatened Despite opposition to the SPK in the autumn of 1970 the university convened an advisory panel of 3 experts who recommended that the SPK should be institutionalized in Heidelberg university To counter this suggestion Heidelberg university s faculty of medicine supported the establishment of a counter panel consisting of 3 critics of the SPK who were mandated to campaign against the group The Minister overseeing both panels ultimately sided with the 3 SPK critics and decided against implementing any of the recommendations from the pro SPK panel SPK s funding was subsequently cut and the group was evicted from the university campus 14 The decision provoked a confrontation between the SPK and the university which led to a sit in and attracted the attention of a wider audience including the police Ultimately the collective moved out of the university and into the homes of its members On 24 June 1971 a mysterious shooting at Heidelberg police station was attributed to the Baader Meinhof group and based on that unrelated pretext the police began conducting raids on SPK members houses 12 Three hundred fifty officers were charged with finding the shooter At its peak the SPK counted about 500 members of these seven were arrested in the raids including Huber on 21 July 1971 Firstly SPK was falsely linked to the Baader Meinhof group 6 but none of the SPK patients arrested was ever condemned due to any relation with the Baader Meinhof group 9 and neither was ever proved any relation within SPK and RAF 15 Accounts notice the brutality 16 legal irregularities and other sort of abuses which surrounded the case 12 and they also notice this was part of a disinformation campaign against SPK due to their revolutionary positions 11 16 and thus SPK was criminalized as part of a political persecution 15 The rhetoric denouncing the SPK as engaged in terrorist activity and a precursor to the RAF re emerged after the arrest of Kristina Berster who crossed the US border illegally seeking asylum from West German counterterrorism operations Berster was acquitted of all conspiracy charges and the disinformation campaign was exposed by Greg Guma 17 A West German embassy spokesman stated By all accounts the SPC was fairly harmless 18 Kristina Berster explained that the purpose of the Socialist Patients Collective was to find out the reasons why people feel lonely isolated and depressed and the circumstances which caused these problems 17 GSG 9 raided a facility belonging to SPK discovering the first documented case of a terrorist organization training radio jamming techniques 19 Dissolution and the IZRU editEven before Huber was arrested in June 1971 20 the SPK dissolved The IZRU or Information Zentrum Rote Volks Universitat in English Information Center of the Red People s University was founded by former SPK members however the IZRU was neither the official or unofficial SPK It organized international congresses founded a newspaper RVU or Rote Volksuniversitat People s Red University supported prisoners and reprinted some SPK literature The SPK today editSince 1973 the SPK has continued as Patients Front Socialist Patients Collective or PF SPK H The refounding of the collective as Patient s Front was announced by Huber whilst he was in solitary confinement in Stammheim Prison later called PF SPK H 1 2 5 As the founder of the SPK and PF SPK H Huber entrusted all juridical matters concerning the groups to Ingeborg Muhler an active member of the SPK since 1970 who is an attorney and holds a MA in Computer Science Interest and influence editDiscussion of the SPK in both German language and English language written sources increased during the 1970s fell during the 1980s and rose again during the 1990s 21 22 Projects that have cited the group include SPK an industrial music and noise music group in Australia founded in 1978 and dissolved in 1988 which was named after the collective Surrealist Action Turkey Surrealist Eylem Turkiye a group of writers artists and intellectuals from Izmir Istanbul and Ankara founded in 2007 and dissolved in 2013 Cryzine an internet magazine opposed to technofascism and founded in 2017 which refers to the SPK as an important influence as well as Karl Marx the Surrealist Andre Breton and the Situationist Guy Debord 23 See also editOccupational burnout Capitalist Realism Is There No Alternative References edit a b c SPK Huber Wolfgang 1993 SPK Turn illness into a Weapon KRRIM PF Verlag fur Krankheit pp XVIII XXIV ISBN 3 926491 17 5 a b SPK Huber Wolfgang 1995 SPK Aus der Krankheit eine Waffe machen in German 6th ed KRRIM PF Verlag fur Krankheit ISBN 978 3 926491 25 1 a b SPK PF H Sozialistisches Patientenkollektiv SPK Patientenfront PF List of Dates SPK PF H Retrieved 14 December 2018 a b c PF SPK H SPK Gossipcide in the case of print media TV amp Co Text for entries on the SPK in the Encyclopedias of Brockhaus Duden etc SPK PF H Retrieved 14 December 2018 a b Quensel Stephan 1995 Irre Anstalt Therapie Der Psychiatrie Komplex in German Springer Verlag p 285 ISBN 978 3 658 16210 8 a b c Parker Ian 1995 Deconstructing Psychopathology Sage Publications Ltd p 120 ISBN 978 0 8039 7481 4 The secret of illness is human species How to apply the concept of illness SPK PF H Retrieved 18 June 2012 a b Proposal for a text for international use concerning SPK Overview SPK PF H Retrieved 2 December 2011 a b Blake Trevor 1995 SPK Krankheit Im Recht KRRIM PF Verlag fur Krankheit p 159 ISBN 3 926491 26 4 Spandler Helen 1992 To Make an army out of Illness a history of the Socialist Patients Collective Heidelberg 1970 72 PDF Asylum 6 4 3 16 a b Guattari Felix 1984 Molecular revolution psychiatry and politics PDF New York N Y U S A Penguin pp 67 68 ISBN 0 14 055160 3 a b c Genosko Gary 2001 Introduction Deleuze and Guattari critical assessments of leading philosophers Vol 2 London Routledge pp 480 481 798 of 1503 ISBN 0 415 18678 1 Cryzine About Cry Archived from the original on 1 December 2017 Retrieved 21 November 2017 a b English Google translation Turn Illness into a Weapon Original German text Aus der Krankheit eine Waffe machen Archived 18 December 2009 at the Wayback Machine Ruprecht Heidelberger Studierenzeitung Number 35 16 May 1995 dead link a b Boehlich Walter January 1972 Wildwuchs nicht langer geduldet Walter Boehlich uber Dokumentation zum Sozialistischen Patientenkollektiv Proliferation no longer tolerated Walter Boehlich on documentation on Socialist Patients Collective Der Spiegel in German 6 Germany Spiegel Verlag 122 124 a b Kotowicz Zbigniew 1997 R D Laing and the Paths of Anti Psychiatry Routledge pp 80 81 ISBN 0 415 11610 4 a b Guma Greg 2005 Taylor Philip M ed Anything but the Truth The Art of Managing Perceptions Propaganda and the Global War on Terrorism GWOT 4 The Institute of Communications Studies University of Leeds a href Template Cite journal html title Template Cite journal cite journal a External link in code class cs1 code editor and publisher code help Connie Paige Vermont Town in Uproar over Baader Meinhof Terrorist Who Wasn t The Boston Phoenix 30 September 1978 Myers Lawrence W 1989 Improvised Radio Jamming Techniques electronic guerrilla warfare Boulder Colo Paladin Press p 13 ISBN 978 0 87364 520 1 In 1971 Wolfgang and Ursul Huber were sentenced to 4 5 years imprisonment and released in 1976 During their detention in the infamous Stammheim Prison they participated in a solidarity hunger strike Google Books Ngram Viewer Socialist Patients Collective Google Books Ngram Viewer Sozialistisches Patientenkollektiv Cryzine About Cryzine Further reading editBook Wolfgang Huber Socialist Patients Collective Patient s Front SPK PF H SPK Turn Illness into a Weapon KRRIM PF Verlag fur Krankheit Heidelberg 2002 ISBN 978 3 926491 17 6 Book Wolfgang Huber Sozialistisches Patientenkollektiv Patientenfront SPK PF H SPK Aus der Krankheit eine Waffe machen 6 erweiterte Aufl Eine Agitationsschrift des Sozialistischen Patientenkollektiv an der Universitat Heidelberg Mit einem Vorwort von Jean Paul Sartre und einer Zeittafel von den Anfangen 65 ff bis heute Ausschnitt aus einer Rundfunksendung Aus Krankheit stark Patientenfront KRRIM PF Verlag fur Krankheit 1995 ISBN 978 3 926491 25 1 Christian Pross Sonja Schweitzer und Julia Wagner Wir wollten ins Verderben rennen die Geschichte des sozialistischen Patientenkollektivs Heidelberg 1970 1971 Unter Mitarbeit von Sonja Schweitzer und Julia Wagner gefordert durch die Hamburger Stiftung zur Forderung von Wissenschaft und Kultur Psychiatrie Verlag Koln 2016 ISBN 978 3 88414 672 9 A synopsis in English Book Jillian Becker Hitler s Children The Story of the Baader Meinhof Terrorist Gang HarperCollins Distribution Services New edition 28 June 1978 ISBN 978 0 586 04665 4 Book Tom Vague Televisionaries the red army faction story 1963 1993 AK Press Rev and Updated Ed edition 9 June 1994 ISBN 978 1 873176 47 4External links editPF SPK H Official website of the Socialist Patients Collective Retrieved from https en wikipedia org w index php title Socialist Patients 27 Collective amp oldid 1206820276, wikipedia, wiki, book, books, library,

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