Rebel Minds: Class War, Mass Suffering, and the Urgent Need for Socialism

by Susan Rosenthal

"What sane person could live in this world and not be crazy?" – Ursula K. Le Guin

Life should not be this difficult.

It is possible, right now, to create a healthful, cooperative, and sustainable world. Because that would not be profitable, the capitalist class force us to live in their sickening and unsustainable world. When our minds and bodies protest, they label us as ‘deviant’ or ‘sick.’ We are neither. We are suffering. We are rebels.

CONTENTS

It’s a mad, mad world

Part 1. The cause of mass suffering

Chapter 1. A world of needless pain
Chapter 2. Class war

Part 2. Concealing the cause of mass suffering

Chapter 3. The managerial class
Chapter 4. Is ‘mental illness’ real?
Chapter 5. How important is biology?
Chapter 6. Eugenics then and now

Part 3. Containing rebellion

Chapter 7. The drive to standardize
Chapter 8. Rebel minds
The deliberately silenced
The preferably unheard
Chapter 9. The State of institutions

Part 4. The battle for freedom

Chapter 10. Inspiring victory, long decline
Chapter 11. We are in deep shit
Chapter 12. We need real socialism

What now?

Genres: Nonfiction, Audiobook

413 pages, Kindle Edition

Published August 12, 2019

Reviews

[Anne Lagacé · Rating 4 out of 5]

Read this and feel better about your problems.
Susan Rosenthal is a brilliant diagnostician, and writes in clear and lucid prose. In her practice as a phyician, Adlerian therapist and teacher she has learned a lot about how people survive in this brutal and profit driven world. This book is a master class in research and the citations on her web site are impressive. She does us all a service in describing the suffering of so many people in clear and humane terms, putting them into a social and political context. The symptoms and suffering of so many, attrivbuted to gender, mental illness and other indivicualized causes are in reality to a large extent caused by a society that focuses on the generation of profit to the complete detriment of human health. Her analysis of what has happened to many of us, and the reasons for it is incredibly useful. The chapter headings are illustrative of the scale of her analysis, and are also funny. Along with Gabor Maté and a few others she brings radical politics and humanism to the work of understanding the political system and how it oppresses and deforms human relations.
Che Guevara states in his celebrated essay, Man and Socialism in Cuba that “...the true revolutionary is guided by strong feelings of love.”
Susan Rosenthal is motivated by love and the desire for a better world for all of us.
Strongly recommend.

[Simon Parent · Rating 5 out of 5]

Packed densely, this could be a good introduction to socialist ideas, but unfortunately at the cost of clarity and nuance. Knowing about the events referenced in this book, I was often cringing at how reductive this book is, sure-footed in its positions, but at the same time, it covers so well the reasons why we need Socialism, what it means, what we should want it to be, that I'll still rate it 5 stars.

The part I learned the most about was how Psychiatry is really pulled out of their funder's asses, resting on an individualized approach to treatment that actually ignores the structural causes and reasons people show symptoms of trauma. Psychology is better, at least it's trying to look at the causes, but it's still up to the client to deal with the shitty hand they received. The solution is to then take these traumas and inform systemic action that will prevent those events from re-occuring.

[Jude Courtney · Rating 4 out of 5]

A brilliant visionary and reflective book which lays down the essential ideas for creating an (almost) truly equal and sustainable society! My only criticism is the complete lack of discussion surrounding the issue of animal agriculture when covering issues such as climate change and equality. Other than our ability to plan far into the future and build complex societies, there is little that differentiates us from our non-human counterparts; to have a truly equal society free of (avoidable) human inflicted suffering we must cut loose animals from the chains which they have had cast upon them since the dawn of the agricultural revolution. The pain they face is far greater than that of many men and women of the modern industrial world. Other than this Rosenthal puts forward an extremely strong argument for "The Urgent Need For Socialism".

Workers of the world, unite!