December 30— One hundred thousand nurses, members of the United Kingdom’s biggest nursing union, are on intermittent strike in England, Wales, Scotland, and Northern Ireland. This strike against the National Health Service (NHS) is the largest in the union’s 106-year history.
To care for patients, these workers are forced to skip breaks and work overtime for free. Many must sell back their annual leave to make ends meet. Some even sleep in their cars, unable to afford fuel to and from work.
A 15-year nursing veteran stated, “What we are left with is a group of workers carrying the entire burden of keeping patients safe, while the government washes its hands of any responsibility or accountability for the state of the service within which they work.”
The nurses, along with ambulance drivers, rail workers and mail carriers, are part of the largest series of labor actions in the United Kingdom in over a decade.
We support workers fighting back against terrible working conditions, low pay, and other horrific aspects of wage slavery. But a strike for better conditions under capitalism can never get real change. Many strikers will come to see that a system that thrives only when it derives profits from our wage slavery can never meet our needs. We need communism.
The NHS, like any capitalist employer, does not function in the interest of the working class. The working conditions of the employees make it clear that even a “free” healthcare system must respond to capitalism’s bottom line: money. Medical research, access to medicines and healthy food, clean water, and decent shelter – and certainly our wage labor —all serve the capitalists’ profits.
Union leaders lie that we can win under capitalism. They don’t challenge the capitalist relations of production which are at the heart of all public health issues. Only communism can provide what humans need. Only communism can destroy the racism and sexism that make healthcare under capitalism so deadly, especially for women and people of color
A US healthcare worker, hearing about the strikes, said, “Healthcare will always be limited under capitalism. Hospitals are run by business majors and the bottom line is always profit!”
With communism, we will share the responsibility for each other, as well as sharing the emotional, mental, and physical rewards of a united working class. This sharing of both responsibility and rewards will eliminate much of the stress that underlies many illnesses.
We will also be healthier because we will have access to clean air and water, safe housing, and uncontaminated food. We will work to understand healthcare in a whole new light: one which emphasizes the health of everyone in our working-class family. Keeping us healthy will be the bottom line.
Chinese Communists Began to Show What’s Possible
Away with All Pests, by English surgeon Dr. Joshua Horn, describes his time working in Chinese hospitals from 1954-69. It is revelatory, giving a window into what is possible when healthcare focuses on the well-being of our class, rather than on making money.
Horn discusses the struggles to eliminate medical hierarchy. Everyone from doctors to nurses to janitors were involved in discussing and providing patient care.
A million rural workers were trained as “barefoot doctors” after the Chinese revolution. Their education included half a year of classroom work. Then they labored in the fields alongside their co-workers, taking their knowledge straight to the masses.
But the Chinese Communist Party never moved beyond socialism, retaining markets and wage slavery. With a real communist vision and the knowledge and work of our mass party, we will be able to respond quickly to the healthcare and other needs of our class. This could include quick, efficient training of medical personnel when there is a crisis, such as the current pandemic. The masses of workers would decide what is needed and when and how.
If readers have ideas about what medical care might look like with communism, please share them in a letter or an article for Red Flag. We begin now to envision and plan for a communist world.
We urge the UK strikers to see that the best they can hope for is not the pittance they might wrest from the capitalists. We invite them to join the ICWP and fight for a world without bosses or money or for-profit anything! We have a healthy, communist world to win.
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