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