Capitalism is mental (2025)

From the August 2025 issue of the Socialist Standard

Tony Blair emerged from his coffin recently to declare ‘We’ve got to get the younger generation back to work’ and ominously warned against ‘medicalising the ups and downs of life. You’ve got to be careful of encouraging people to think they’ve got some sort of condition other than simply confronting the challenges of life’.

Anyone who’s been through a challenging period knows that of course it can impact your mental health. Yet Blair insists that too many young people are ‘choosing not to work,’ and calls for benefits reform. Now, Labour wants to cut Personal Independence Payments and has signalled it’ll tighten eligibility rules, with shadow ministers suggesting PIP ‘is not working as it should.’

Starmer’s proposed reforms to cut disability benefits provoked a rebellion by well over 100 Labour MPs who argued the plan would strip support from up to 800,000 people, deepen poverty for 300,000–700,000 more (including 50,000 children), and create a two-tier welfare system that abandons the most vulnerable. Critics, including grassroots movements like Disabled People Against Cuts and disabled constituents, warn this is a continuation of austerity, with MPs likening it to ‘the biggest attack on the welfare state since George Osborne’. Charities insisted cuts wouldn’t boost employment and demanded a pause, transparency, and genuine consultation with disabled people. Labour MPs were pledging to vote against and calling for alternative reforms like taxing the super rich instead of penalising those in need.

Since then, following public backlash and intervention by the UN, Parliament voted on 1 July to remove the clauses tightening PIP (formerly Disability Living Allowance) eligibility. These measures are now to be deferred pending a review led by ‘Sir’ Stephen Timms, expected in autumn 2026. Existing PIP claimants are said not to be affected by the current legislation. However, changes to Universal Credit remain in place: from April 2026, new claimants of the Limited Capability for Work Related Activity element will receive reduced support. Existing recipients will continue receiving full payments, adjusted for inflation through 2029.

The Rosenhan experiment

The Rosenhan experiment (1973) exposed flaws in psychiatric diagnosis. Psychologist David Rosenhan and seven others feigned auditory hallucinations to gain admission to psychiatric hospitals. Once admitted, they acted normally, but doctors still diagnosed them with serious mental illnesses and kept them institutionalised for weeks.

The study highlighted the subjectivity and unreliability of psychiatric labels, showing that once someone was labelled as mentally ill, even ‘normal’ behaviour was interpreted as pathological. In a follow-up challenge, a hospital claimed it could spot fake patients and identified several, only for Rosenhan to reveal he had sent none.

Colonisation of the mind

This is not just about a few misguided doctors. The Western medical model has long been, in part, a tool of oppression. Colonisers have always arrived with missionaries, medics, mercenaries, and merchants. Psychiatry was part of that arsenal, often pathologising indigenous cultures, crushing resistance, and justifying forced assimilation. Traditional beliefs and ways of life were conveniently labelled as madness.

Psychiatry helped run residential schools, enforced sterilisation, and packed institutions, all aimed at breaking indigenous communities. On occasion, psychiatric diagnosis was used to pathologise cultural difference, frame indigenous resistance as insanity and justify colonial policies of confinement and re-education. The same logic still operates today. Psychiatric labels are often used to control people rather than help them.

‘Mad bints’

Women have always been prime targets for psychiatry’s controlling hand. Those who refused to fit into patriarchal roles were labelled hysterical or locked away in asylums. Psychiatry became a handy tool to silence women who challenged capitalism, patriarchy, or both.

Colonisation made this worse for indigenous women who were branded insane for practising traditional healing or resisting colonial authority. Today, women—especially those who are neurodivergent or marginalised—are still dismissed, misdiagnosed, and overmedicated. Psychiatry continues to treat women’s distress as personal pathology rather than a response to social and economic oppression.

A true alternative would focus on community care, autonomy, and dismantling the structures that create suffering in the first place. But when the profit motive comes into play it stops being about helping and about making people useful.

Adaptive response to capitalism?

Humans are nothing if not adaptive; that’s how we’ve survived this long. Under capitalism’s relentless pressure, people, especially those who are marginalised, develop ways of thinking and acting that do not fit into narrow boxes labelled normal.

Neurodivergence is not purely created by capitalism; it has always existed and would exist under other systems. But the way it manifests today is shaped by the demands and pressures of this system.

Traits like hyperfocus, pattern recognition, and creative thinking can help people resist the nonsense of capitalism. Yet capitalism only values these traits when they increase productivity. Difficulties with executive function or sensory processing become disabling because of rigid, noisy, and punishing environments.

If we lived in a society structured differently—one that prioritised people instead of profit—neurodivergence might look very different, both in how common it is and how it is understood.

Class war in our minds

Capitalism is not just a class war; it is a war of the mind. It demands conformity, punishes difference, and uses trauma as a tool of control. Still, resistance keeps bubbling up. Neurodivergent people often develop ways of thinking that refuse to follow capitalist logic, question authority, and imagine new ways of living.

The pushback against capitalism is in many ways also a neurodivergent pushback—one that questions authority, re-imagines community, and refuses the dehumanisation that capitalism enforces.

Capitalism will always find new ways to divide us, control us and blame us for the suffering it creates. The only real cure is to get rid of the system making us sick in the first place.

The fight against capitalism must also be a fight for neurodivergent liberation. We need to see the links between capitalism, trauma, and neurodivergence if we want a world where all minds are valued, not just those that keep the profit machine running.

A.T.

The Ire Of The Irate Itinerant (2009)

 From the July 2009 issue of the Socialist Standard

Labour and the work ethic (1997)

From the July 1997 issue of the Socialist Standard

  In the aftermath of that great non-event that was the general election we can soon expect to see what measures the new Labour regime has in store for us in its mission to make British capitalism yet more ruthlessly "efficient" and exploitative.

One person who should know is Labour’s own "Prince of Darkness”, political gangster- extraordinaire Peter Mandelson (Minister Without Portfolio). In BBC 1's On The Record programme (11 May), amid the waffle and lying (and his claim that economic growth could bring “prosperity for all” is a twenty-four carat lie), he dropped us at least one very interesting clue. More than once Blair’s whizzkid identified as a key Labour objective the reinforcement of the work ethic and in so doing signalled the government’s commitment to further putting the screws on the working class.

The “work ethic” has a history as long and as horrible as modern capitalism. With roots in the Calvinist Protestant variety of religion it was swiftly seized on by the capitalist class as a powerful ideological weapon. At the time of the industrial revolution it was all the bosses could do to make their workers knuckle under. Only recently driven off the land by enclosure and made completely dependent on working for a wage, the new working class was not used to the regimentation demanded by industrial capitalism and resistance to it was widespread.

The bosses’ response, alongside the removal of all means of living independently of the wages system, the threat of mechanisation and naked repression, was to hammer home the belief that work for the sake of work was a great and noble thing. From being simply a means to an end, the work ethic held up work as an end in itself, to the point of becoming the meaning of life. This was a convenient ideology for the capitalists as the labour of those forced to work for them was the source of their wealth and power. More convenient still was their success in grinding this belief into the population at large, so that the exploited not only accepted their exploitation, but became more or less enthusiastic about it.

This process has continued to the present day, with the lesson continually drummed into us at every stage of our lives that giving up the bulk of our time and energy to the creation of profit for the ruling elite in jobs we usually hate is somehow a desirable way to live—indeed the only way to live. “Education” in schools and colleges is only the most obvious way we are conditioned (or brainwashed) into accepting the work (or slave) ethic and our subservient position in the system. It was after all no accident that the departments of education and employment were merged.

It is hardly surprising that Mandelson should than have expressed such zeal for reinforcing this ideology. Capitalism likes us to be as cheap, obedient and eager to knuckle down to the job as possible and this has become ever more so as the “global market" and suchlike has forced national economies to get rough, tough and more mercilessly exploitative than ever.

In a world of "flexibility", short-term contracts and job insecurity the work ethic may be more important than ever to the ruling class in securing a working class resigned to the anxiety of slaving away in whatever employment the system chucks at it. That firm bosses' favourite the Job Seekers Allowance is an attempt to cut social (in)security expenditure, but also to ensure that the unemployed are "actively seeking" work, i.e. are firmly locked into the treadmill of work by being forced by sheer poverty to search for absolutely any job going, even when such jobs are non-existent.

At the back of the Minister’s mind may be the fear that capitalism's restructuring and long-term mass unemployment has led many people to lose their identification with a certain “career” and even with the whole world of employment: many people are sensibly asking themselves whether wage and salary labour is really that desirable after all.

To counter such developments, we can expect the Labour government’s commitment to the work ethic to be reflected in their education, social security and law and order policies: in other words a continuation of the Tories’ policies of heightened regimentation, austerity and repression. Whatever they do though they will not be able to stop more and more people seeing how criminally unnecessary this system of exploitation, pressure and misery is in a world where a few voluntary hours a week enjoyable, useful activity is all anyone need contribute to supply what is needed for everyone to lead a comfortable, fulfilling life. Down with the work ethic—a tool with which capitalism has stolen our lives, our energy and our world.

Ben Malcolm

The Right to be Idle (2011)

Book Review from the October 2011 issue of the Socialist Standard

How to be Idle. By Tom Hodgkinson. Penguin.

Here is a handbook for any would-be socialist wondering what life could really be like in a post-capitalist society. Of course it’s not possible to be living a socialist way of life in a non-socialist world, but this book is full of the pleasures to be had from a way of living totally different from the one we see all around us now. Hodgkinson has an insightful grasp of the iniquities of the capitalist system, its stranglehold on working conditions and its tight control of most areas of our lives. He succinctly identifies many of its outstanding features and, with his own particular brand of humour, hands out lots of good advice for the work-weary, enabling us to open our eyes and see more clearly the life we should be living. Are we to live an onerous life created for us by this current controlling system or should we choose how we build and live our own individual lives? Do we live by our rules or theirs?

One clue to Hodgkinson’s outlook on being an idler is found in a description of his routine: he works in the morning, reading and writing; spends the afternoon in the garden chopping logs and suchlike; and gives the evening over to eating, drinking and talking. ‘When work is freely chosen and creative, then it’s not really work at all.’ He claims not to know much about Marx, but having thought that work was at the centre of his philosophy’ he now says he is beginning to understand that Marx’s motivation came from ‘the boredom and misery caused by the Industrial Revolution and by his own dream to replace that system with something more humane.’  

The first step to being idle is to understand our 250 years of indoctrination into the work ethic – a topic Hodgkinson expands on. Understanding that this work ethic is based on guilt enables us to get rid of that guilt and get on with the dreaming. ‘Dreams are not about money – they are about you and about your quality of life and imagination.’  

Co-founder of the ‘Idler’ magazine (www.idler.co.uk) and the Idler Academy, Hodgkinson has spent nearly twenty years attempting (working hard?) to perfect the art of idling. He draws on the work of a host of writers, poets, philosophers and sociologists to support his ideas:  Paul Lafargue, Bertrand Russell, Nietzsche, Tom Paine, Oscar Wilde and Lao Tzu, to name but a few.

Janet Surman

Work — the Only Hope (1943)

From the August 1943 issue of the Socialist Standard

The January, 1943, issue of Time (New York) divulges the contents of a hitherto secret Memorandum prepared by the Allied Governor of Tunisia, General Giraud, presented last Spring to Marshal Petain. After deploring the reduction of working hours in France, before the War, as the explanation of France's "failure," General Giraud speaks most enthusiastically of the German regime.

  Admittedly, he says, the Germans have not perhaps got liberty, but there is certainly neither disorder nor Anarchy. Everywhere it is work, the only hope for a people who wish to live and live happily. May France remember and profit by it.

How on earth the French worker can he expected to support General Giraud, who quite openly expresses his admiration for Hitler in Germany, is hard to understand—to be consistent—he might just as logically be expected to support Hitler himself.

But then, quite a number of other people have said almost the same thing in days gone by; among them Lord Beaverbrook, Lord Croft, Lord Londonderry—and Mr. Churchill.

So, incidentally, did Mr. Charles Bedaux, whom lots of British workers will remember as originator of the notorious "Bedaux" system of speed-up. He said : "I am an out-and-out-Fascist"—he has now been charged with trading with the enemy (in this case, Germany).

It is said that he tried to buy the North Africa orange crop for the Nazis. He was a friend of the Duke of Windsor. He now faces ten years’ imprisonment.

The correspondent of the New York Times, nevertheless, considers that "90 per cent. of Frenchmen here still believe democracy can work."

Chas. Bedaux—like General Giraud—is a self-appointed authority on the great subject of work. So is Sir William Beveridge and Ernest Bevin, and Harry Pollit, with his appeals to the miners. The Socialist Standard is not the first to notice that the one thing all these experts on work never dream of doing is a spot themselves, of the kind they urge on others,

Horatio.

Self-Denial: A Millionaire's Advice. (1925)

From the May 1925 issue of the Socialist Standard

With tiresome regularity the defenders of capitalism from Leverhulme to Lansbury reiterate that a dreadful catastrophe awaits “us" if the workers lose the taste and desire for work. The demoralisation resulting from the drawing of the “dole" or the workers craving for pleasure (heavens!) are themes for daily discussion in the press. Discontent is considered by our masters and Labour politicians as almost criminal, and an attempt is made to counter the weariness of monotonous toil by carefully-constructed appeals for hard work and sacrifice to save "us" from utter ruin. What stinking hypocrisy! To our masters, men and women of the working class are but their beasts of burden or their playthings. Hearken how they voice their contempt for you :—

  Some people, he said, asked what chance there was for the young man when all businesses required so much money . . .  The answer was that what the young man required for success in business was the practice of self-denial. (Lord Leverhulme, “Daily Chronicle,” 14.4.25.)

It is a commonplace to the Socialist that to such lengths are our masters and their agents put to defend their rotten system that they invariably contradict their statements in an effort to give them plausibility. A fuller report of the above specious reasoning was given in "The Grocer,” 18.4.25 but with the addition of the following sentence in the space we have indicated " . . . . an amount of money that even with the greatest care and saving, it might take any man far past the prime of life to acquire."

How significant this omission on the part of the "Chronicle,” considering that the noble Lord shatters the beautiful dream of "self-denial” and damns his case with his own words. How unfortunate too for the soap magnate’s plea that the same issue of "The Grocer” contains three pages of reports of bankruptcies in that trade. Within the present system, the slave condition of the workers is one of finality; only in the most exceptional cases do they ever rise to become masters. Even the rare cases of the self-made man, so-called, are relics of an age of small businesses and small capitals, now almost departed. Leverhulme’s soap trust is itself an example of the wiping out of the small concern. Liptons, Lyons, the multiple stores, etc., are other examples that support our case. No need for harder work while your efforts only multiply the pleasures of the Capitalist loafers; no need for self-denial when for countless generations you have practised it with a brutal and callous indifference to your own welfare. Hurl back the lying insults at those who rob you of all life’s enjoyments. Hurl them back in the only way that will matter by your organised action for the ushering in of a system wherein the Capitalist absurdities of self-denial, over work, and parasitism, can have no place.

W. E. MacHaffie

The Passing Show: Stolen Holiday (1965)

The Passing Show Column from the February 1965 issue of the Socialist Standard

Stolen holiday

How dare you take an extra day off work at Christmas! How DARE you!

Is this the way to beat our foreign competitors and make Britain great again? Well, is it? You ought to be ASHAMED of yourselves. Here we are in the middle of an economic crisis. Exports are down and costs are up. The trade gap is wider and the pound narrower. But what do you care? Absolutely nothing—and to prove it you took Monday December 28th as an extra holiday.

The Daily Mail of the following day threw a purple-faced screaming headline at its readers. Did you know that you had had a stolen holiday? That is what the Mail called it, because Wilson’s government refused to declare it a public one but many firms granted it just the same. And those awful dockworkers actually took it without so much as a by-your-leave. This, at a time when industry in rival countries was allegedly working normally. “ Not exactly the Dunkirk Spirit ” moaned the Mail.

It’s a moot point whether British workers are more or less diligent than those elsewhere, and not one which is really worth much either way. West German workers, for example, get more holidays than British and West Germany is one of Britain’s major European competitors. After all, one day’s work more or less is not likely to make such a tremendous difference to the fortunes of the British Capitalist class, but the Mail is probably concerned least the habit should become more popular and frequent, and aims to knock it hard on the head before this gets a chance to happen.

It’s nothing new for workers to be called lazy. My own memory is long enough to recall the insults of the pre-war labour exchanges with their puffed-up little clerks, themselves dead scared of putting a foot wrong and landing in the queue on the other side of the counter. During and since the war things have changed, superficially anyway, but we still have to endure goading with stick or carrot from press and politicians alike. Of course, the Mail and the Labour Government would like to see a return to the “Dunkirk Spirit"—its self-denial and if need be, heroism, in the task of keeping British capitalism on the map. Do you remember the days of Dunkirk, incidentally? The futile bloodshed and misery, the long tedious hours of war work and short rations?

Dunkirk and 1940 have a nostalgic ring for capitalist politicians. In those days there was always the promise (the carrot) of a better world after the war, of course, and twenty years of post war experience have tarnished the image a bit. But never mind, if only they could recapture some of the spirit, how much easier would life be for them. Costs would be kept down as foolish workers cheerfully sacrificed their wage increases. Profit margins would widen and perhaps more markets be captured. All very desirable for the owners of industry but hardly an exciting prospect for the working class. Now perhaps you can see why we are not very impressed by the promises or threats that are made from time to time to try and get a bit more out of us.

About the same time as the Mail was working itself into such a rage over our laziness, The Duke of Edinburgh and his son were off for a week or two of winter sports. In February he will visit Australia for a week. Princess Margaret and husband went over to Ireland for a bit of a holiday. Perhaps if we scanned the society columns we could find plenty of other rich people doing the same sort of thing.

Quite clearly the Royal Family and the rest do not take the Mail's strictures very seriously and in any case they were not aimed in their direction. For they belong to the ten per cent who do hot have to sell themselves for a wage packet to make a living, and who live a life of perpetual ease and comfort. The rest of us do all the work and have a pretty drab time of it. Just think about that before you get too conscience-stricken over your Christmas break.

The ultimate stunt

Let’s face it. There are some of us who have never been daring or mildly athletic. A jump from the top board of the local swimming baths would be a real trial of courage for many, including me. Even our childhood pranks can only be called slightly audacious, quite harmless in themselves and never very exciting.

To get to the point. This is perhaps the age of the stunt man, highly trained and physically fit, whose job it is to keep giving his audience bigger and better thrills. He is in great demand for the stand-in feats of riding, fighting and falling that enthrall you on the silver screen, and keep the big (and expensive) stars in one piece. He must have nerves of steel and a lion's courage, and early on he has to face the possibility of serious injury or sudden and violent death.

Like the rest of us, the stunt man lives in a highly commercial world, and although he may be comparatively well paid, he has to make his living under particularly difficult and trying conditions. And being a commercial world, it subjects him to its rules and regulations and the same sorts of pressures as other workers. In practical terms, this means that he must never really relax. His eyes must always be open for new feats (“gimmicks” would be a less generous term) to maintain his audiences’ interest and keep his labour power in demand. And just as in other fields demanding intense concentration and devotion, the job can become a pretty unhealthy obsession.

Did you read about the Hollywood stunt man Rod Pack in the Daily Mail of January 8th? His escapade made Blondin and his barrel look like child’s play. He had been doing a lot of skydiving—parachute jumping to you—which you might think dangerous enough. But not Mr. Pack. He heard a writer’s joking suggestion about trying a jump without a ’chute. “It became a obsession,’’ he confessed and with the not entirely disinterested assistance of some enterprising T.V. producer who offered him a contract, he managed to pull it off. He is still alive to tell the tale.

Granting Mr. Pack’s courage, what has been the result of his feat? A lot of worry for his wife and friends, a rake-off for the T.V. producer and some exclusive pictures for the Daily Mail. “Just for the hell of it, just to be first” was his reason, and as far as he was concerned, that was the end of it. But we can be sure there will be others to follow him, risking life and limb in perhaps even more foolhardy and dangerous stunts to satisfy the demands of the entertainments market. It will prove precious little and solve no outstanding social problems. A tragic waste, really, of human skill and strength, but then that is a fitting description of capitalism as a whole.

Eddie Critchfield