ILLNESS AND CAPITAL

without the police, rendering them unnecessary. A pragmatic,
circumstantial approach would simply examine all the excesses and
atrocities of the police and seek to find ways of ameliorating those
atrocities – through lawsuits, the setting up of civilian police review
boards, proposals for stricter legislative control of police activity,
etc. Neither of these methodologies, in fact, questions policing as
such. The programmatic methodology simply calls for policing to
become the activity of society as a whole carried out in a selfmanaged
manner, rather than the task of a specialized group. The
pragmatic, circumstantial approach actually amounts to policing the
police, and so increases the level of policing in society. An anarchist
projectual approach would start from the absolute rejection of
policing as such. The problem with the police system is not that it is
a system separate from the rest of society, nor that it falls into
excesses and atrocities (as significant as these are). The problem
with the police system is inherent to what it is: a system for
controlling or suppressing “anti-social” behavior, i.e., for





conforming individuals to the needs of society. Thus, the question
in play is that of how to destroy the police system in its totality.
This is the starting point for developing specific actions against
police activity. Clear connections have to be made between every
branch of the system of social control. We need to make
connections between prison struggles and the struggles of the
exploited where they live (including the necessity of illegality as a
way of surviving with some dignity in this world). We need to
clarify the connections between the police system, the legal system,
the prison system, the war machine – in other words between every
aspect of the system of control through which the power of capital

and the state is maintained. This does not mean that every action
and statement would have to explicitly express a full critique, but
rather that this critique would be implicit in the methodology used.
Thus, our methodology would be one of autonomous direct action
and attack. The tools of policing surround us everywhere. The
targets are not hard to find. Consider, for example, the proliferation
of video cameras throughout the social terrain…
But this is simply an example to clarify matters. Anarchist
projectuality is, in fact, a confrontation with existence “at daggers
drawn” as one comrade so beautifully expressed it, a way of facing
life. But since human life is a life with others, the reappropriation of
life here and now must also mean the reappropriation of our life
together. It means developing relations of affinity, finding the

ABC POLITIC

ILLNESS AND CAPITAL
by
Alfredo M. Bonanno
Illness, i.e., a faulty functioning of the organism, is not peculiar
to man. Animals get ill, and even things in their own way present
defects in functioning. The idea of illness as abnormality is the
classic one that was developed by medical science.

The response to illness, mainly thanks to the positivist ideology
which still dominates medicine today, is that of the cure, that is to
say, an external intervention chosen from specific practices, aimed
at restoring the conditions of a given idea of normality.
Yet it would be a mistake to think that the search for the causes
of illness has always run parallel to this scientific need to restore
normality. For centuries remedies did not go hand in hand with the
study of causes, which at times were absolutely fantastical.
Remedies had their own logic, especially when based on empirical
knowledge of the forced of nature.
In more recent times a critique of the sectarianism of science,
including medicine, has based itself on the idea of man’s totality: an
entity made up of various elements – intellectual, economic, social,
cultural, political and so on. It is in this new perspective that the
materialist and dialectical hypothesis of Marxism inserted itself.
The variously described totality of the new, real man no longer
divided up into the sectors tat the old positivism had got us used to,
was again encapsulated in a one-way determinism by the Marxists.
The cause of illness was thus considered to be due exclusively to
capitalism which, by alienating man through work, exposed him to
a distorted relationship with nature and ‘normality’, the other side of
illness.
In our opinion neither the positivist thesis that sees illness as
being due to faulty functioning of the organism, nor the Marxist one
that sees everything as being due to the misdeeds of capitalism is
sufficient.
Things are a little more complicated than that.
Basically, we cannot say that there would no longer be such a
thing as illness in a liberated society. Nor can we say that in that
happy event illness would reduce itself to a simple weakening of
some hypothetical force that is still to be discovered. We think that
illness is part of the nature of man’s state of living in society, i.e., it
corresponds to a certain price to be paid for correcting a little of