Capitalists Should Be Removed From All Our Systems, Not Just Health Care
Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair
Imagine that your household was regularly broken into by a sadist who systemically beat-up everyone in your home. He’d start by punching folks in the stomach. Then he’d smack people on the both sides of their heads. Then he’d kick your legs out from underneath you and pound you all on your backs and necks before kicking you all in the jaw and punching your noses.
In forming a response to this outrageous oppression would you tell this monster that the next time he breaks into your home with his fists balled he’s going to have to forgo one of the shots he takes at people – say, the head smacks. Would you say, “listen, bully, you can punch us in the stomach and kick our legs out and pound our backs and necks and kick our jaws and smack our noses but you can’t smack our heads anymore!”
Hell No! You’d join forces to subdue him and call the police to have him hauled off to jail.
Which brings me to a 2019 Chris Hedges statement that has been making the rounds of the Internet in connection with the supposedly surprising amount of support Americans have voiced for Luigi Mangione, the young “folk hero” assassin of the CEO of United Health Care. “Capitalists,” the statement says:
“should never be allowed near a healthcare system. They hold sick children hostage as they force parents to bankrupt themselves in the desperate scramble to pay for medical care. The sick do not have a choice. Medical care is not a consumable good. We can choose to buy a new or used car, shop at a boutique or thrift store, but there is no choice between illness and health.”
This Hedges quote is typically put up in support of Single Payer national insurance and the longtime progressive argument that “health care should not be a commodity” and should instead be a human right.
Please note that Hedges’ statement references the whole “healthcare system,” not just health insurance. The entire healthcare system includes providers, hospitals, drug makers, medical device manufacturers and more, of course.
I agree with the statement. Look at the nightmare that is the entire US “healthcare” regime, combining the highest medical costs in the world with horrifically bad outcomes while capitalist “healthcare” investors rake in obscene profits. It’s a racket with rewards beyond the wildest Mafia Don dreams!
But let’s go further. I get the difference between (a) having no choice but to pay through the nose (and go into crippling debt, far too often) when it comes to sickness and injury and (b) having the choice to buy a less pricey car rather than an expensive one. And yes, “capitalists should never be allowed near a healthcare system.” Damn straight.
Okay, but, dear progressives, what major US societal system under the commodifying command and control of capital/capitalists/capitalism isn’t a disastrous racket? Just what systems should capitalists ever be “allowed near”?
The transportation system, which capitalism has turned into a carbon-spewing and accident-ridden calamity?
The food system, which capitalism has turned into an obesity-, cancer-, and pollution-generating catastrophe?
The educational system, which capitalism has degraded in service to mindless nationalism and soulless profit-seeking?
The electoral system, which capitalists have fashioned into a noxious vehicle of oligarchy and tilted towards fascism?
The communications and media system, which capitalism-imperialism has harnessed for relentless sale of commodities and the manufacture of mass consent to empire, class rule, and police statism?
The earth — air, water, climate, biodiversity, and soil, etc. — systems that capitalism relentlessly destabilizes and poisons, placing livable ecology at ever-more grave risk?
The “international relations” and weapons system that are a recipe for war and mass murder on a monumental scale under the command of capitalism-imperialism?
The work and labor systems that pervert and crush homo sapiens’ remarkable capacity to create and produce wonders beneath the wheel of the alienating and mind-numbing capitalist division of labor?
The despotic capitalist work regime, where human labor power is exploited as itself a commodity — a commodity with the core function of producing surplus value and hence profit for employers in a system where people are seen as disposable once it is no longer profitable to keep them on the payroll?
The for-profit housing system that helps render millions homeless?
The distribution system wherein prices regularly run ahead of wages, helping keep most Americans living from paycheck to paycheck.
I could go on. I could write a book or three on how capitalists and — more fundamentally — capitalism ruins all of these and other human and societal systems. (A worthy project perhaps, but I suspect that the gestation period for such an undertaking is longer than the amount of time humanity can continue to live under this exterminist system.)
No health care system, no matter now socialist and wonderful, can keep people healthy when their Earth, political, labor, media, educational, cultural, and broad social systems are captive to and poisoned – both literally and figuratively – by the capitalist system.
The anti-communism/anti-revolution-ism that is so sadly prevalent among US-American lefties ends up miring them in this endless cul-de-sac where they lose the ability to forthrightly critique and propose alternatives to the whole damn system.
Which brings me back to the analogy I suggested at the outset of this commentary: what good is it to get the vicious bully to stop smacking us upside the head when he still gets to punch us in the gut, kick our legs out, and do all the rest of the horrible stuff I mentioned in my opening paragraph? Why stop at the healthcare industry when it comes to walling off key societal and life systems from capitalists and capitalism?! As a revolutionary communist friend recently wrote me, “every damn thing is a commodity under capitalism, including people! These endless attempts to construct arguments for why one or the other necessity of life should be exempt from the workings of the profit system are delusional, tiresome and just lazy. Marx figured this out — what? Something like 150 years ago?! As you put it, the whole lethal system is way past its overthrow date. Let’s get to work on THAT.”
Yes.
De-commodify health care? Yes, and everything else, including ourselves!
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