Good
on Mike King for attacking the gutless, shamefaced, official line on suicide as
part of the problem not the solution. And cheers to The Daily Blog for acting
as a forum on suicide with activists like Dave Macpherson and Martyn Bradbury
exposing the failures of the health system. While we agree that we need to
change the official response to suicide, that should be based on what causes
suicide. We will argue that suicide is a desperate act of refusal against a
powerless, de-humanising, alienated life under capitalism. But so long as the
official line of taking the fight against suicide out of the hands of people
and keeping it as a function of the bureaucracy, judiciary and medical
profession remains, the epidemic of suicide will continue. Not until suicide is
properly debated and its causes fully understood can any real solutions be
found. An independent inquiry is a start in that process.
Competing
theories of suicide
To
reduce suicide to a personal choice, something wrong with the genes, or
neo-liberal social policy, is to mistake the symptoms
for the cause.
There is a long trail of bankrupt theories strewn along the painful history of
this subject. First, there is the history of the Church, especially the
Catholic church, of reducing suicide to a sin in the eyes of God. Who would
know? Then there is the mainline bourgeois culture of rampant Western
individualism that suicides are ‘failures’ who haven’t found ‘success’ in the
market. Both of these superstitions form the underbelly of attitudes toward
suicide today. Then there are attempts to find measurable causes that can be
traced back to impacts on the individuals of social relations which can then be
isolated and treated as ‘abnormal’ or ‘deviant’ by medicine or social policy.
Most notable
was Emile Durkheim the French sociologist who wrote ‘Suicide: a study in sociology’
in 1897. Durkheim was a ‘positivist’, someone who observed behaviour and looked
for correlations and patterns to infer causes. He found 4 types of suicide
based on supposed differences in causation. (1) Egoistic: caused by the excessive
individualism of modern (capitalist) society. (2) Anomic: the result of a lack of social
norms and institutions that support the individual. (3) Altruistic: due to a
lack of strong individual traits when facing authority. 4) Fatalistic: suicide
resulting from overwhelming social pressures. The two examples he used were
slaves and married women.
Durkheim
proposed social policies for each type. Egoistic
and Anomic
suicides could he prevented by creating new social institutions to recreate the
mechanical solidarity (eg extended family and village life) of pre-capitalist
society to support individuals. Altruistic
and Fatalistic
suicides were more problematic because they involved critiquing military and
family authority both of which Durkheim endorsed as necessary for capitalism to
function. In fact he supported the authority of husbands over wives and opposed
divorce. In any event, these tinkerings with social policy have failed to get
to the root causes of suicide in the century or more since. The sociology of
suicide has fixated on symptoms while the state bureaucracies and the medical
profession prescribe “good science” but continue to ignore the fundamental
causes.
The most
promising 19th century line of attack on suicide was that of Marx which began
50 years before Durkheim. It was not the social effects of capitalism that were
the causes but the social relations of capitalism itself. For Marx, the basic
cause of all social ills was the alienation of individuals from their labour
though this also affected those who lived off that labour – the bourgeoisie.
Marx never studied suicide as such, but in 1845 he commented
on the work of French statistician and police chief Peuchet, who found an
obvious correlation between three young bourgeois females subjected to extreme
family abuse (spousal abuse and public humiliation for sexual ‘deviancy’) and
their suicides by drowning in the river Seine.
Marx concluded
that the common cause was alienation from one’s labour, but more concretely in
these cases, alienation in the bourgeois family in which women were the
‘slaves’ of their husbands. Proletarians are alienated, but women are also
alienated from their husbands in the bourgeois family. And as the bourgeois
family was the model for the proletarian family, working class wives became the
“proletarians of the proletariat”. So, to clear the way for socialism the
bourgeois “family must be destroyed in theory and practice.”
Does
revolution stop suicide?
Before looking
as more recent attempts to apply “good science” to suicide, it is worth pausing
to consider the “theory and practice” of the Bolshevik revolution and its
impact on suicide. Marx’s theory predicts that the end of capitalism would
bring an end to alienation and the beginning of real humanism. The end of the
bourgeois family would empower women and liberate them from domestic slavery.
What is the evidence? First, the freedom from oppression was such that human
creativity blossomed in all walks of life. Workers’ control of the state and
industry empowered them to make their own lives free of the shackles of
capitalist social relations. The place of women became more equal. The
bourgeois institutions of marriage and the family underwent massive changes.
The result was
that among those who made the revolution and participated democratically in
building the new society, suicides were almost nil. Workers were no longer
alienated from their labour by capital. They controlled their labour
collectively by democratic decisions in the Soviets which planned production on
the basis of need. A new individual began to emerge, the proletarian
individual. The proletariat was within reach of creating ‘humanity’. Such
were the expectations of a new order that the reversal of these conditions
brought the inevitable downfall and with it, waves of suicides.
For Trotsky, the
degeneration of the revolution brought about a reversal of these new freedoms.
Underlying this reversal was the failure of the revolution in Europe and the
isolation of the Soviet Union. The ideals of the revolution came under
increasing challenge. In the attempt to negotiate a peace with Germany the vast
areas of the South were devastated. The civil war against imperialist invasion
required a war economy where the state took more central powers and reduced
those of the soviets. To feed the troops the peasantry had their product
requisitioned. This turned many peasants against the workers state, and in
particular the Bolsheviks. The Kronstadt rebellion was ruthlessly put down. The
New Economic Policy virtually restored capitalism in the countryside to feed
the industrial workers.
The growing
concentration of power in the state disillusioned many and the state responded by
clamping down on dissidents. Stalin and his apparatus ushered in bureaucratic
rule. At each point in this reversal of the revolution, and as the hopes in the
revolution were dashed, the rates of suicide went up. Suicide
in the Soviet Union therefore was a direct result of
the failure to break completely from capitalism, and the inevitable
degeneration of "socialism in one country" as the bureaucracy usurped power from the
workers. Most important, socialist equality was stillborn as workers control of
their labour was taken over by a state bureaucracy. Surplus labour was not
allocated to social needs on a democratic basis, but expropriated by the
bureaucracy. Alienation re-appeared in the unequal social relations of the
bureaucratic regime.
What to do?
We have argued
above that alienation is the fundamental cause of suicide. It cannot be
overcome unless there is an end to the unequal social relations that produce alienation.
The capitalist state is based upon alienation and designed to reproduce it by
legitimising unequal class relations. The state bureaucracy uses its power to
monopolize knowledge and prevent any challenge to capitalist rule in the name of "good science". In the post-capitalist states, a state
bureaucracy emerged to suppress the power of workers and to block the road to
socialism and take the road back to capitalism.
In Aotearoa/NZ, the
first task to stopping suicide is to challenge and expose the state agencies
and the Mental Health bureaucracy. An official inquiry will do nothing to
expose the bureaucracy, plenty of earlier ‘disasters’ such as the police
shooting of Steven Wallace and the Pike River tragedy proves. An independent inquiry is needed to allow
critics of the official line on suicide to be heard and their issues raised and
debated publicly.
But even so,
more urgent actions are needed along the lines of the self-organising of
workers and youth, especially Maori youth, to actively fight against the
official silence and apathy towards suicide. There are lessons that can be
learned from the story of Yellow Ribbon, that created student groups in many
schools to deal with those at risk of suicide and its closing down by the state
agencies. And many more public initiatives to organise the grass roots
communities to campaign against suicide are important developments. Focusing
on the immediate causes of suicide will wake people up to the underlying cause
of suicide – the alienation of individuals from their labour, from their
friends and family, and finally from themselves.
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