The Socialist Patients' Collective (in German: Sozialistisches Patientenkollektiv, and known as the SPK) was a patients' collective founded in Heidelberg, Germany, in February 1970, by Wolfgang Huber. The kernel of the SPK's ideological program is summated in the slogan, "Turn Illness into a weapon", which is representative of an ethos that is continually and actively practiced under the new title, Patients' Front/Socialist Patients' Collective, PF/SPK(H). The original group, SPK declared its self-dissolution in July 1971 as a strategic withdrawal.
The SPK assumes that illness exists as an undeniable fact and believe that it is caused by the capitalist system. The SPK promotes illness as the protest against capitalism and considers illness as the foundation on which to create the human species. The SPK is opposed to doctors, considering them to be the ruling class of the capitalism and responsible for poisoning the human species. The most widely recognized text of the PF/SPK(H) is the communique, SPK – Turn illness into a weapon, which has prefaces by both the founder of the SPK, Wolfgang Huber, and Jean-Paul Sartre.
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