The mentally damaged and unemployed may be capitalism’s next revolutionary class.

Evidence

That is why British students are, potentially, far more likely to be agents of revolutionary change than are their French counterparts. The depressive, totally dislocated from the world, is in a better position to undergo subjective destitution than someone who thinks that there is some home within the current order that can still be preserved and defended. Whether on a psychiatric ward, or prescription-drugged into zombie oblivion in their own domestic environment, the millions who have suffered massive mental damage under capitalism — the decommisioned Fordist robots now on incapacity benefit as well as the reserve army of the unemployed who have never worked — might well turn out to be the next revolutionary class. They really do have nothing to lose… — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk, 508

Categorization

• SEED: Possible essay: the neurodivergent and structurally-depressed as a vanguard class — analyzing how a political reading of mental illness as dispossession could retool Marx.
• STORYSTEM: A novel or film built around an unlikely collective of the incapacitated and never-employed rising as a political force precisely because they are beyond recuperation.
• XREF: connects to: Resisting the middle-class death of closed society makes one a revolutionary — Frantz Fanon, Constance Farrington, Black skin, white masks, 821; Mental illness is captured discontent that points toward a constructive austerity. — Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism: Is There No…, 164; Capitalism produced revolutionary classes at both poles of its expropriation — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 1286

Broader Connections

• Mental illness is captured discontent that points toward a constructive austerity. #expands (0.80) — Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism, 164
• Capitalism produced revolutionary classes at both poles of its expropriation #corroborates (0.80) — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 1286
• Resisting the middle-class death of closed society makes one a revolutionary #complicates (0.75) — Frantz Fanon, Constance Farrington, Black skin, white masks, 821