Health Workers Fight for Reforms. Let’s fight for Communist Health Care
LONDON, UK, July 3— Health care workers took to the streets on the seventy-third anniversary of the National Health Service (NHS). They demanded a 15% pay rise for NHS staff, improved patient safety and an end to the privatisation of NHS services.
This is as far as the union activists go. They don’t challenge the capitalist relations of production which remain at the heart of the Covid crisis and all public health issues. Neither do the pseudo-leftists (actually moderate reformists) chanting for the Tory government to resign.
Communist political leadership is required—and ICWP was there. The pseudo-leftists ridiculed Red Flag’s slogan ‘Mobilize the Masses for Communism’. But others were keen to read Red Flag, including a Belgian student on his way for a vaccine and several other young people.
Bosses Created National Health Service Because They Feared Working-Class Revolution
The working class created its own ‘free’ health provision in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. In South Wales and elsewhere, workers formed ‘friendly societies’ to provide medical care. In Tredegar, South Wales, the Miners and Steel workers formed the Workmen’s Medical Aid Society. They would provide their own free health care where the government and mining companies would not.
The National Health Service was founded in 1948 by the Labour Government. It was partly an attempt to ensure that the wage slaves were healthy enough to work. It also mimicked some aspects of these friendly societies. Capitalists aimed to stop the working class from forming its own organisations of welfare, which would by their nature run into conflict with capitalist relations.
The idea of universal health care, free at the point of use, was becoming acceptable to members of the British ruling class. They feared revolution, seeing the popularity of the Soviet Union and that many workers who were conscripted, now possessed and were trained in arms.
Older people remember that when, during World War II, Stalin or the Red Army appeared on the newsreels, cinema audiences would give a standing ovation. The British government even celebrated ‘Red Army Day’ during the war years to gain the support of the masses.
Dominant sections of Britain’s ruling class saw the benefits of having a healthier work force and armed forces for the continuation of capitalism. The Labour Party was a good vehicle for maintaining illusions that capitalism could be beneficial by slowly reforming it. But the ‘free’ health care of NHS soon began to show its limitations.
After the war, the British government encouraged workers from places it had colonized to migrate to Britain to staff the NHS, among other public institutions. Many came from the Caribbean, were given the lowest paid jobs and were subjected to other forms of racist discrimination. In nursing, Black women were pushed into midwifery and other lower-paid jobs.
The British ruling class joined its US partners in attacking Korea, while the Labour government secretly began the British atomic weapons programme. This cost hundreds of millions of pounds, a phenomenal sum, with the country in the grip of post-war austerity and food shortages. The Labour government admitted this was to finance the slaughter in Korea. As a result, free eye care and dentistry were removed from the NHS. This is still the case today.
The ruling class likes to use the NHS as a symbol of ‘Britishness’. Some reformists tail this nationalism, calling for saving ‘our NHS’ from ‘foreign corporations’. One placard on the demo read ‘Keep American greedy corporate hands off our NHS’, a chauvinist response.
But it makes no difference where the corporation or organisation is based. It is all capitalist and based on international imperialism.
While the reformists just call for more spending, ICWP has a vision of a communist society based on common ownership and cooperative relations without commodities or wage labour.
Instead of “National Health Service,” we need International Communist Revolution!
Only Communism Means Good Health Care for All
USA—Millions die preventable deaths every year. It’s not just lack of access to healthcare. It’s because capitalist healthcare, like capitalist everything, is built to serve the bottom line – profits. Medical research, distribution of medicines, our understanding of how our bodies work, access to healthy, safe food and decent shelter – and certainly our wage labor —all serve the capitalists’ profits.
Racism and sexism mean that people of color and women suffer disproportionately from the ravages of capitalist healthcare. That includes not only reduced access, but also horrors such as the sterilization of Indigenous women, the US Public Health Service syphilis experiment at Tuskegee, higher death rates of people of color from COVID-19, the shortage of primary care physicians in areas where more Black people live, and on and on.
No reform of capitalism will solve these problems. We need communism.
Medicare for All is no solution.
Most countries have some kind of national health service that provides publicly funded healthcare with minimal charges to patients. Medicare in the US is a form of national health insurance, but only for citizens 65 and over or with disabilities.
“Medicare for All” has become popular in the US. Many people believe that somehow capitalism dosed with a bit of “socialism” can provide decent healthcare for all Americans. But this capitalist reform will continue racist, sexist, anti-working-class healthcare rationing. It won’t end capitalist health care or capitalist relations of production that put profits above human life and well-being.
A segment of the US ruling class is pushing “Medicare for All” because they want to calm the concerns of the US masses. Many are angry that outrageous health care costs are making a few people billionaires while good health care is more and more out of reach.
One healthcare worker declared, “Medicare is not free! The average senior pays $2000/year excluding copays and uncovered expenses. The government is always recommending that seniors should save approximately $250,000 for non-covered expenses. Medicare often does not cover very basic medications, causing seniors to choose between food, rent and meds.
“Pretty pathetic that this is their solution. With Medicare you are battling the same profit-driven health care system but with a government-run insurance laced with private insurance.”
Communism, not socialism, is the solution.
Some think that Medicare for All is a step toward socialism, which they believe will solve this problem. But socialism maintains wages and will always lead back to capitalism.
The Russian and Chinese revolutions brought dramatic advances in the health of the masses.
The Chinese National Health Congress in 1950 adopted the basic political tenets of Chinese health care policy: Medicine should serve the workers, peasants, and soldiers. Emphasize prevention. Integrate Chinese traditional medicine with Western medicine. Mobilizing masses should be an integral part of China’s health care.
These leaps gave a glimpse of what masses mobilized for communism can do. A million “barefoot doctors” were trained soon after the 1949 revolution. Workers in rural China, selected by their workmates, received six months of medical training each year. They spent the other six months working with their crews. Soon they were teaching certified MDs how to treat agrarian workers, who numbered in the hundreds of millions.
However, these gains were limited and then reversed because these revolutions instituted socialism, not communism. Socialism promoted collective responsibility, but its material basis – wages and commodity production – undermined collectivist ethics.
Through the 1970s, the main income source of barefoot doctors was from their villages’ collective economy. But the program largely fell apart when the central government provided less financial support and the country’s emerging capitalist system began forcing farmers to pay for their health care.
Communism will completely eliminate money and exploitation. Collective social relations will replace market relations. We will constantly be struggling to end racism and sexism in all aspects of our lives. We can win these struggles because we will eliminate the wage system, the material basis of racism and sexism.
Health Care in Communism
All science, including biology and medicine, will become the property of the masses—who will advance them. We will share responsibility for everyone’s mental and physical health:
In healthcare institutions everyone will help diagnose and treat disease as well as clean up. Everyone will learn and teach. Communism will unleash humankind’s vast potential.
There will be no lack of health care workers since many will be trained in preventing, detecting, and treating diseases. Every production center will include such and the equipment needed to deal with emergencies.
Important parts of good health are food, housing, meaningful work and relations with others; these can only be guaranteed with communism.
The time has come finally to end the ravages of capitalism. For the health and life of the working class, we need to mobilize the masses for communism.
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