Honolulu Nurses Weather Long Lockout and Win Staffing Ratio Language

By Nurse Erica

October 29, 2024

Source: Labor Notes

Image by Nurse Erica



In a malicious ploy, a hospital in Honolulu locked out its nurses after a one-day strike—and not just for a couple days, as hospitals often do, but indefinitely. The message was, you can come back only when you accept our demands.

But the nurses stuck it out. They kept building their support with daily demonstrations. And in the end, amid public outrage after elders got arrested in a solidarity protest, management agreed to nurse-to-patient ratio language, a first for the state.

The 630 nurses at Kapi’olani Medical Center for Women and Children struck on September 13 over unfair labor practices—specifically, ongoing retaliation against nurses who report unsafe staffing conditions, as documented by their union, the Hawaii Nurses Association.

I had traveled to Hawaii to support the strike, and I witnessed the subsequent lockout. When nurses attempted to return to work on September 14 for their scheduled shifts, they were stopped outside by unknown hospital personnel who read a prepared statement: “Kapi’olani notified HNA nurses that the lockout would occur at 0700 today and that the nurses would not be allowed to work until further notice. I’m asking you respectfully to leave the property.”

The hospital administration was contending, without evidence, that this was an economic strike, rather than an unfair labor practice strike, paving the way for a legal lockout. This was the first lockout in Hawaii in 22 years.

ALOHA SOLIDARITY

Kapi’olani Medical Center is the only specialty women’s and children’s hospital for the state. It plays a crucial role in the health care of Hawaii’s children and families.

Management’s actions shocked me, because they ultimately affected sick children, and because we are in the midst of a national nurse staffing crisis. Unsafe nurse-to-patient ratios lead to more and more nurses leaving bedside positions.

As a nurse advocate, I’ve attended countless nursing strikes around the country, often centered on staffing demands, but this one stands out—not only for the retaliation the nurses endured, but also for the solidarity among them.

The meaning of Aloha is deeper than a greeting. To Hawaiians, it is a spirit of mutual compassion, respect, and caring for one another. I felt that spirit each time a nurse hugged me and thanked me for coming.

Their energy and gratitude on the strike line was palpable. And as I listened to their stories, it was clear how deeply they cared about their patients and community.

I believe it’s because of this spirit that the nurses felt betrayed when the hospital announced the indefinite lockout. That morning, union President Rosalie Agas-Yuu spoke for the nurses: “We are ready to work. We want to go up there to our patients, but if Kapi’olani does not want us in there, we want to hear it from your mouth personally.”

Afterwards the nurses peacefully exited hospital property and gathered on the sidewalk. Many were in tears, as the reality of being without a paycheck began to sink in. And the bitter irony of a retaliatory lockout in response to a strike about retaliation was not lost on them.

TRAGIC RESULTS OF SCAB NURSING

In the days that followed, union members held powerful daily actions, including demonstrations, vigils, and a march from the state capitol to Hawaii Pacific Health headquarters. They were often joined by other nurses, members of other unions, and community leaders.

It took six days before management met to negotiate with the union. Members stood united even when the hospital threatened to cancel their health insurance at the end of the month. Eventually federal mediators were brought in.

At the same time, the Department of Health conducted an investigation inside the hospital, and stories of alleged patient neglect under the care of scab nurses began to come out.

Parents of a four-year-old patient who tragically passed away during the lockout told local news they believed “it wasn’t her time to go,” and described the poor care their daughter allegedly received. Parents of an 11-week-old infant reportedly opted to have their child transferred out of state for care.

HNA also appealed to the National Labor Relations Board for an injunction when the union first learned of the indefinite lockout; it is still awaiting a decision.

TIPPING POINT: GRANDPARENTS HANDCUFFED

But a turning point came on September 23, when 10 community members, dubbed “the Kapi’olani Ten,” were arrested during a peaceful civil protest in front of the hospital. Among those arrested were senior citizens, as well as State Representative-Elect Kim Coco Iwamoto and State House Candidate Ikaika Hussey.

The images of grandparents and community leaders being handcuffed and taken to jail sparked public outrage, and became a tipping point in negative publicity.

The lockout lasted 22 days. On October 1, the union and the hospital reached a tentative agreement that reportedly includes language addressing nurse-to-patient staffing ratios, making Kapi’olani the first hospital in Hawaii with ratio language.

I’m grateful to have witnessed this struggle—a lesson in the strength of solidarity.

Genocide as Colonial Erasure

By Francesca Albanese, Chris Hedges 

October 30, 2024

Source: The Chris Hedges Report

“The crime of all crimes.” That is how the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda declared genocide in the final judgment of Prosecutor v. Akayesu, the case against the mayor of Taba, Rwanda for crimes against humanity. Today, that crime repeats itself as UN Special Rapporteur on the Occupied Palestinian Territories Francesca Albanese painfully details in her latest report.

Albanese joins host Chris Hedges on this episode of The Chris Hedges Report to break down her report and present the indisputable evidence that Israel is actively committing a genocide of the Palestinian people.

“The acts of killing, the mass killing, the infliction of psychological and physical torture, the devastation, the creation of conditions of life that would not allow the people in Gaza to live, from the destruction of hospitals, the mass force displacement and the mass homelessness while people were being bombed daily, and the starvation—how can we read these acts in isolation?” Albanese asks.

The UN Special Rapporteur clearly outlines the steps and conditions required to meet the classification of genocide, and in the case of Gaza, it’s undeniable. Albanese tells Hedges, “What is relevant in order to establish that there is genocide is not just the intent behind these crimes, enunciated in Article II of the Genocide Convention; it’s the overall intent, specific intent, to destroy the people—the group as a whole, or in part, as such. And what is the group here? It’s the Palestinians.”

Throughout the rest of her report, Albanese details the harrowing death and destruction Palestinians endure on a daily basis in countless forms, alongside the horror suffered by non-Palestinians in Gaza. Albanese documents record-breaking numbers: The highest number of journalists killed, the highest number of UN officials killed, the highest number of hospitals targeted, the destruction of all universities, the fastest rate of population starvation. It’s clear, according to Albanese, the scale of devastation the Israelis are inflicting is one of scorched-earth catastrophe.

Project 2025 Creators Have a Plan to ‘Dismantle’ Pro-Palestine Movement

By Ryan Grim, Murtaza Hussain 

October 30, 2024

Source: Dropsite




The plan, dubbed “Project Esther,” casts pro-Palestinian activists in the U.S. as members of a global conspiracy aligned with designated terrorist organizations. As part of a so-called “Hamas Support Network,” these protesters receive “indispensable support of a vast network of activists and funders with a much more ambitious, insidious goal—the destruction of capitalism and democracy,” Project Esther’s authors allege.

This conspiratorial framing is part of a legal strategy to suppress speech favorable to Palestinians or critical of the U.S.-Israel relationship, by employing counterterrorism laws to suppress what would otherwise be protected speech, legal experts told Drop Site News.A demonstrator argues with police officers during a pro-Palestinian demonstration in Washington, D.C. / Source: Probal Rashid / LightRocket via Getty Images

Dylan Saba, a staff attorney at the legal advocacy organization Palestine Legal, said the invention of concepts like the “Hamas Support Network” or “Hamas Supporting Organizations,” another term that the authors use to describe pro-Palestinian activist groups, is intended to construct a narrative justifying the use of counterterrorism and sanctions laws to do suppress the First Amendment rights of individuals involved in the pro-Palestine movement, along with their funders and supporters. “They need to make a claim that these organizations are being directed and controlled by Hamas, which they’re not,” Saba said. “So their claim now is that these organizations are effectively serving as a propaganda wing for designated terrorist organizations.”

To achieve its goals, Project Esther proposes the use of counterterrorism and hate speech laws, as well as immigration measures, including the deportation of students and other individuals in the United States on foreign visas for taking part in pro-Palestinian activities. It also advocates deploying the Foreign Agents Registration Act, a law placing disclosure obligations on parties representing foreign interests, against organizations that the report’s authors imply are funded and directed from abroad.

In addition, the document also suggests using the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act, or RICO, to help construct prosecutions against individuals and organizations in the movement. The RICO act was originally created to fight organized crime in the U.S., and particularly mafia groups.

Project Esther’s authors envision their campaign unfolding in a series of stages: first, the purging of “propaganda” from school curricula, followed by an intimidation campaign to dissuade students from joining demonstrations, and restrictions on social media communication, gatherings, and other forms of coordination between pro-Palestinian groups. The end of the process leads to a moment when both the U.S. public and a “preponderance of Jewish community perceives HSOs”—short for Hamas Support Organizations—“as a threat to their safety.”

These steps, Project Esther’s authors pledge, will break the pro-Palestinian movement in the United States “within 12 to 24 months.”

Many of the tactics Project Esther proposes represent an escalation of current practices rather than a wholesale departure, legal experts said. Authorities brought charges under the RICO act, for example, against demonstrators protesting against a police training facility in Georgia last year. And only weeks ago, the Biden administration designated Samidoun, a Palestinian prisoner solidarity group, as a terrorist organization.

“They’re not making up new tactics. They’re just talking about comprehensive, deliberate and better resourced types of attacks,” said Diala Shamas, a staff attorney at the Center for Constitutional Rights. “This is about equating pro-Palestinian groups with a foreign terrorist organization, which is a tried and true tactic that has used for a very long time. All you need to do is try and paint a nebulous connection with Hamas, and then invoke these expansive laws.”

The document targets several groups, including George Soros’ Open Society Foundation, the Tides Foundation, and the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, whom the report blames for providing “financial resources and other material support such as equipment, training, and advice and consulting services,” to supporters of the Palestinian cause. The document also tags National Students for Justice in Palestine, American Muslims for Palestine, and Jewish Voice for Peace as key players in the Hamas Support Network.

“People have the right under the First Amendment to express political views, associate with each other, and criticize the U.S. government,” Saba added. “If you find that politically threatening and dislike it, you need to come up with a way to do an end-run around the First Amendment. The end -run that they have crafted for themselves are counterterrorism and material support laws.”

The architects of Project Esther include conservative organizations like In Defense of Christians, the Family Research Council, the Philos Project, the America First Policy Institute, Coalition for Jewish Values, Concerned Women of America, the Latino Coalition for Israel, National Association of Scholars, Regent University, and The Steamboat Institute.

Project Esther is framed around the important goal of fighting antisemitism, even taking its name from a Persian queen reputed to have saved Jewish subjects in the Hebrew Bible.

Yet it makes no mention of right-wing antisemitism, which is often grounded on direct racial stereotypes and overt hostility to Jewish people, and appears concerned instead with combatting “internal political pressure to compel the United States government to change its long-standing policy of support for Israel,” a policy change that the report’s authors deem antisemitic.

Support among Jewish American organizations for Project Esther’s proposals appears to be limited. Many Jewish organizations that were listed initially as supporting Project Esther have distanced themselves from the document following its release, Jewish Insider reported, citing the politically partisan character of the project. Despite these setbacks, Project Esther represents a concrete statement of intent from a major conservative think tank enmeshed with a potential future presidential administration.

“Our intent is to organize and guide all willing and able partners in a coordinated effort that employs all available resources to combat the scourge of antisemitism in the United States,” the report states, adding that it hopes, “this effort will represent an opportunity for public–private partnership when a willing administration occupies the White House.”



Ryan Grim
Ryan W. Grim is an American author and journalist. Grim was Washington, D.C. bureau chief for HuffPost and is the Washington, D.C. bureau chief for The Intercept. He is also a political commentator for Breaking Points and appears frequently on The Majority Report with Sam Seder. His writings have appeared in several publications, including Rolling Stone, The Washington Post, and Politico. He is the author of This Is Your Country on Drugs and We've Got People. He cofounded Strong Arm Press, an independent progressive publishing house.

Does a Trump Win Mean Fascism? 

The Socialist View

By Eugene Puryear, Brian Becker 

October 31, 2024

Source: BreakThrough News

Kamala Harris and Donald Trump appear to be neck and neck in the presidential election, bringing the possibility of a second Trump term closer to reality. But would a Trump victory really bring the end of democracy and the rise of fascism? Brian Becker and Eugene Puryear put election 2024 in its historical context, reviewing key moments to understand this moment such as the U.S. Civil Rights Movement, the rise of Hitler’s Germany, and the George Floyd uprisings.

The Slow Birth Of The New World

WE ARE BUILDING THE NEW WORLD IN THE SHELL OF THE OLD

IWW PREAMBLE

By Progressive International

October 30, , 2024

Four major multilateral meetings have come and gone. Together, they exposed the increasing brittleness of Western power, the fictitiousness of the “International Rules-Based Order” designed to uphold it, and the blindness of its architects to the system that is slowly dislodging them from their seats in the high castle.

In Washington, D.C., the World Bank Group held its annual meetings from 25-27 October. The World Bank and International Monetary Fund — resented globally for enforcing austerity, keeping countries in debt penury, and undemocratically favouring the US and its subordinates — are attempting a rebranding. However, like most PR exercises, the changes remain largely rhetorical. In her curtain-raiser speech, IMF Managing Director Kristalina Georgieva told the assembled delegates that “countries need to relearn how to work together” and that the IMF would “play a vital role” in a “revival of cooperation.”

These words rang hollow to the dozens of countries in debt distress, especially when in 2023 countries paid more to service debts than they received in new external finance. The Fund’s marquee announcement for the Global South was a policy change that might collectively save Southern countries a paltry $1.2 billion annually. Instead of scrapping the predatory policy of charging debtor countries additional fees when under duress, it merely trimmed the charges. Insiders say the United States, which effectively controls the IMF through its anti-democratic governance structure, blocked further reforms.

Meanwhile, high-ranking representatives of 36 countries, including Palestine, travelled to Kazan, the capital of the Republic of Tatarstan in the Russian Federation, for the most significant BRICS Summit to date. The BRICS bloc, originally comprised of just Brazil, Russia, India, and China, with South Africa joining in 2010, covers more than half the world’s population. And it is continuing to grow. Last year, Egypt, Ethiopia, Iran, and the UAE all joined as members with Saudi Arabia participating short of membership. This year, Algeria, Belarus, Bolivia, Cuba, Indonesia, Kazakhstan, Malaysia, Nigeria, Thailand, Turkey, Uganda, Uzbekistan, and Vietnam joined as partner states.

China is already the world’s largest bilateral creditor and the BRICS countries now make up a larger share of Global GDP (at purchasing power parity) than the G7. But the BRICS members aspire to be more than the sum of their parts. In Kazan, they began to outline the contours of a truly alternative international system. Among the most ambitious proposals debated and endorsed in principle at the Summit were detailed plans for a BRICS Clearing and Depository system that would sidestep the US-controlled dollar system, allowing states to trade in their national currencies.

If this succeeds, it could be a groundbreaking move for nations whose dependence on the US dollar exposes them to blackmail. There are many examples of the injustice of that system. Just years ago, when the Iraqi Parliament overwhelmingly voted to expel US troops from the country, it was forced to back down after the US government threatened to cut its access to the dollar. The potential for a break with the imperialist order is why the outcomes of Kazan were welcomed with enthusiasm across the Global South.

In response, Western elites repeated the same “words-not-actions” playbook that Georgieva deployed at the IMF. Charles Michel, the President of the European Council, told reporters that the lesson he learned from the participation of so many states in the BRICS was that the EU needed to stop “lecturing” developing countries. The lesson is reflective of the West’s deepening myopia. Southern states are, in fact, less interested in dodging the West’s lectures than in seeking material solutions to the centuries-long injustices they have faced at the hands of Western powers.

Over 16,000 kilometres away from Michel’s press briefing, the same act was on display from the UK when the Commonwealth Heads of Government met this week in Samoa, an island nation in Polynesia.

The Commonwealth is a club of 56 member states and a hangover from British colonialism that does very little. Judging by the presence of new Prime Minister Keir Starmer and King Charles in the Pacific, the British state believes it can mobilise the bloc into force in Britain’s geopolitical struggle — on behalf of the US — against China, Russia and other official enemies.

Yet, rather than rallying to the British flag, the leaders of South Africa and India chose to be in Kazan. And despite Starmer’s attempt to block discussions on reparations for slavery and colonialism, Britain’s former colonies forced it onto the agenda and into the final communiqué, albeit in watered-down form. The UK’s official line is that it understands the “strength of feeling” about reparatory justice for imperial crimes but that it would rather look “forward, not back” — even as it continues to cling to a system of imperial domination long past its due date, most notoriously by underwriting the colonial genocide in Gaza.

The fourth of the meetings took place in Cali, Colombia, where nations are gathering for the COP16 UN biodiversity summit. Last week, a new UN report said the world is currently on track for over three degrees centigrade of warming based on current policies. That level of heating blasts straight through the 1.5 degrees agreed in Paris in 2015 at the height of faith in the current multilateral system’s ability to do anything of consequence. 2023 was a year of record temperatures, emissions and biodiversity loss. But, in Cali, once again we see the stark gap between the ambitions of the South and the inaction of the North.

The host government, led by eco-socialist President Gustavo Petro, has placed Colombia’s Indigenous communities at the centre of the summit. It is championing a greater role for Indigenous people in protecting the country’s rich ecosystems. Last week, the environment ministry announced it will create Indigenous-led environmental bodies.

But this welcome and necessary shift of power within one state is not mirrored globally. This summit is the first since the 2022 agreement for all UN member states to produce nature action plans and for rich countries to deliver $20 billion per year to developing nations to protect nature. The funds have not been forthcoming and only around 10% of countries have published their plans.

The current multilateral order, built by US power after the Second World War when much of the world was still formally colonised, is driving humanity off the edge of a cliff. From climate collapse to proxy violence, gaping global inequality to genocide, it cannot answer the needs of the majority of the world’s people. And so, this order is beginning to wither away as a new one cautiously emerges to take its place.

The Cost Of Corporate Profit In U.S. Health Care Reaches $2 Trillion

By Pete Dolack

October 30, 2024

Source: Systemic Disorder




As has long been the case, the U.S. health care system is by far the world’s most expensive while providing the worst results among the world’s advanced capitalist countries. And that expense continues to get larger and more unaffordable.

Just how large is the cost of private profit in health care? Almost two trillion dollars! Unbelievable? It certainly seems so. But that is indeed how much more money the people of the United States spent on health care in 2022 than they would otherwise have spent if the U.S. had a single-payer system. This is the direct result of a health care system that is designed to extract maximum profits rather than deliver health care. A system unique in the world in the extent that corporations such as insurance and pharmaceutical companies are allowed to play such a large role.

Health care spending in the U.S. is so extreme that the spending by the U.S. government alone is higher than total spending (as a percentage of gross domestic product) by any other country. Incredibly, the government was banned from negotiating drug prices until the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022 was signed into law, but only some drug prices in some programs can be negotiated, an incredible windfall for Big Pharma. Spending on health care in the U.S. in 2022 reached 16.6 percent of the country’s GDP with government spending alone accounting for 14 percent of GDP. The country with the next highest total, Germany, saw total health care spending account for 12.7 percent of its GDP.


Organizing for health care in Iowa (photo by IowaPolitics.com)

Where does the total of nearly two trillions dollars come from? To calculate that figure, I took the per capita health care spending of the three largest EU countries — France, Germany and the United Kingdom — and the neighbor of the U.S., Canada, and compared that average of those four countries to U.S. per capita spending, each for 2022, the most recent year for which statistics are available. The composite average for Canada, France, Germany and the United Kingdom is US$6,613 per capita, converted to U.S. dollars adjusted to create purchasing power parity as reported by the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). Per capita health care spending in the U.S. for 2022 was US$12,555, or not far from double the composite average of the four peer countries to which it is being compared. The U.S. population in 2022 was 333 million, so multiplying that total against the per capita figure gives us a total of $1.979 trillion.

That is the cost of private profit in health care. And that total is steadily increasing. When I last did this exercise, in 2017, I calculated that the excess money paid to obtain health care for United Statesians was $1.4 trillion for the years 2011 to 2016. As a comparison, excess health care spending averaged $1.15 trillion for the period of 2001 to 2010 and $685 billion for the 1990s. Those ever higher insurance premium payments you are making as your employer forces you to shoulder more of the cost each year — if you are lucky enough to even have health insurance — are most definitely not your imagination.

And unlike other countries, where national health care systems cover everybody, there were 27 million people without health insurance in the United States. And for those with insurance, that does not mean the results are something to be proud about.

The most expensive and the worst results

In a survey of 10 countries — the five countries under discussion here along with Australia, Netherlands, New Zealand, Sweden and Switzerland — the U.S. ranked dead last in health care system performance. This survey was conducted by the Commonwealth Fund, an institution more than 100 years old that supports “independent research on health care” and seeks better health care outcomes. The Commonwealth Fund’s report, “Mirror, Mirror 2024: A Portrait of the Failing U.S. Health System,” pulled no punches in its conclusion: “The U.S. continues to be in a class by itself in the underperformance of its health care sector. While the other nine countries differ in the details of their systems and in their performance on domains, unlike the U.S., they all have found a way to meet their residents’ most basic health care needs, including universal coverage.”

The Fund assessed the 10 countries’ health care systems through 70 health system performance metrics covering five areas: access to care, care process, administrative efficiency, equity and health incomes. Among the five broad areas, the U.S. was ranked last in access to care and health outcomes, and next to last in administrative efficiency and equity. Australia came out first among the 10 countries in this survey; interestingly, by a narrow margin Australia spent the least.

Another sobering result of U.S. health care is that United Statesians “live the shortest lives and have the most avoidable deaths.” The Commonwealth Fund reports pulls no punches about this sad result:


“The U.S. ranks last on four of five health outcome measures. Life expectancy is more than four years below the 10-country average, and the U.S. has the highest rates of preventable and treatable deaths for all ages as well as excess deaths related to the pandemic for people under age 75. The ongoing substance use crisis and the prevalence of gun violence in the U.S. contribute significantly to its poor outcomes, with more than 100,000 overdose deaths and 43,000 gun-related deaths in 2023 — numbers that are much higher than in other high-income countries.”

The report notes that physicians in the “uniquely complex U.S. system” necessitates that all must “spend enormous amounts of time and effort billing insurers. Denials of services by insurance companies are also common, necessitating burdensome appeals by providers and patients.” In contrast, “High performers on equity, including Australia, Germany, and the United Kingdom, have limits on cost sharing (or in the case of the U.K., no cost sharing at all) to ensure that the ability to pay does not constitute a significant barrier to obtaining needed health services. In Germany, out-of-pocket expenses are capped, with the cost of coverage being income-based.” Australia offers free care in public hospitals, something unimaginable in the U.S., and Canberra regulates medicine costs.

The Commonwealth Fund report points to several factors that make the U.S. health care system perform so poorly, including lack of investment in primary care, administrative inefficiency, consolidation of hospitals, underfunding and decentralization.

There is nothing new here; a 2011 Commonwealth report ranked the U.S. last among 16 high-income, industrialized nations when measuring deaths that could potentially have been prevented by timely access to effective health care.

Delivering profits, not health care

What is not said directly in reports such as the above is the very fact that health care in the U.S. is designed to deliver corporate profits, not health care for individuals. Endlessly propagated capitalist ideology tries to convince us that the private sector is always better than anything provided by a government. So it is ironic indeed that the health care system with the most private-sector involvement performs the worst. But when we stop and think about it in a logical manner, freeing ourselves from ideology, this makes sense. Government doesn’t have to earn a profit; private enterprise expects to and will pack its bags if it doesn’t. Just as privatization invariably results in higher costs and often poorer quality than when the service was provided by a government agency as a public good, health care is provided far more efficiently when in public hands.

It’s the “magic of the market” at work. And if you are in need of health care in the U.S., that magic converts your money into fantastic profits. One big way this magic works is to steer as many seniors into Medicare Advantage. Medicare is the government-funded health care system that all who are 65 years of age and older are eligible for. The Medicare Advantage is a privatization of Medicare whereby insurance companies get their hands on health care money provided by the federal government. A June 2024 article published in Journal of the American Medical Association found that — surprise! — this corporate intervention provides less care at higher cost.

The three authors of the report, Adam Gaffney, Stephanie Woolhandler and David U. Himmelstein, flatly declare the health insurance industry’s trade group proclamation that Medicare Advantage is a good deal for taxpayers is false. The authors note that the non-partisan agency Medicare Payment Advisory Commission reported to the U.S. Congress that Advantage “overpayments added $82 billion to taxpayers’ costs for Medicare in 2023 and $612 billion between 2007 and 2024.”

Following up on this report, Corporate Crime Reporter interviewed Dr. Ana Malinow, who works with National Single Payer, a group working toward a single-payer system in the United States. In this interview, Dr. Malinow said, “The Medicare Advantage companies want to pick the healthiest patients out there, because you know that those patients traditionally are not going to cost you a lot of money.” How it works, she explained, is that Medicare Advantage pays a set amount per patient, with more for sicker patients, so that the incentive is to “make their patients appear as sick as possible, often without providing additional treatment.” As a result, “a program devised to help lower health care spending has instead become substantially more costly than the traditional government program it was meant to improve.”

Because of these systematic overpayments, Medicare Advantage is a cheaper option than traditional Medicare. Several of the biggest insurance companies have been charged with fraud by legal authorities, but Dr. Malinow notes that paying fines is merely a cost of business for them. A separate report, by the research group KFF, calculated that insurance companies’ gross margins per enrollee is roughly double the profits made on ordinary group and individual insurance plans.

And providing health insurance is highly profitable. For 2022, UnitedHealth Group reported profits of US$28.4 billion. Cigna had $6.7 billion, Elevance Health made $6 billion and CVS Health made $4.2 billion. “All told, America’s largest health insurers raked in more than $41 billion of profits in 2022,” the Pennsylvania Capital-Star reported. Denying care is one way for these insurance companies to boost their profits. The Capital-Star report said, “An American Medical Association survey found 94% of physicians surveyed said that prior authorizations lead to delays in receiving care and 80% said that prior authorizations can lead to treatment abandonment.”

Big Pharma grabs big profits

Let us not leave out the pharmaceutical companies. Another article in the peer-reviewed Journal of the American Medical Association found that the profit margins for pharmaceutical makers was “significantly greater” than for all others. To determine this, the article’s authors, led by Fred D Ledley, compared the annual profits of 35 large pharmaceutical companies with 357 companies in the S&P 500 Index from 2000 to 2018 using information from annual financial reports. The Big Pharma outfits had gross profit margins (the difference between the cost of goods sold and total revenue) double those of other corporations and net income close to double.

Want more? A report put out by the University of Southern California (not peer-reviewed) found that, adjusted for inflation, pharmaceutical company revenue more than doubled from 1979 to 2018:


“Based on 4,923 firm-year observations, we find that U.S. drugmakers’ sales revenue has increased from $139 billion in 1979 to $321 billion in 2018 (both numbers are in 2018 dollars). A large portion of the increases went to profit, increasing from 15.3% of sales in 1979 to 23.4% of sales in 2018. A much larger increase went to research and development (R&D), which increased from 4.6% of sales in 1979 to 19% of sales in 2018. Expenditures on acquiring drugs developed by other companies also increased from 0.1% of sales in 1979 to 5.2% of sales in 2018. These two categories represent the total costs of developing new drugs, both internally and externally.”

An investigation published by NYRequirements, a provider of health care education, found that the pharmaceutical industry, on a global basis, racked up an astonishing $1.4 trillion in profits for 2022. Pfizer topped the list with $31.4 billion in net income, with five more reporting more than $10 billion. And with that a lot of lobbying to keep themselves in the saddle can be done — Big Pharma spent $372 million on lobbying the U.S. government in 2022. Another €40 million is spent by the pharmaceutical industry to lobby in the EU.

How do these companies grab so much money? Corporate Watch offers five factors:Research and development is directed to “patients who are high-value and who will use the drugs long term.” On the other hand, “one-shot vaccines for epidemics that mainly affect poorer countries” are of no interest.
The patent system prevents cheaper generic medications from being produced so that original manufacturers can collect windfall profits.
“Price much, much higher than costs.” Although the industry spending 20 percent of revenue on R&D is higher than almost any other industry, “sales cover costs many times over.”
Big Pharma spends less than it suggests on developing new drugs; most of what they ultimately market was developed in university and government labs, or in those of smaller research companies, and then bought. The U.S. National Health Institutes provides $39 billion a year to universities, medical schools and other research organizations.
Massive lobbying, both in the U.S. and the European Union.

Corporate Watch provides examples of unconscionable profiteering. They write:


“Insulin usually costs less than $6 a vial to make, but sells for as much as $275 in the US (one example given by the campaign group Patients for Affordable Drugs). In Europe, pharma giant Gilead charged an average of €55,000 for a 12 week Hepatitis C treatment — when pills cost less than €1 per pill to manufacture. Such extreme examples illustrate a general pattern. One academic study found US pharma companies have an average 71% “gross profit” margin on drug sales — the money they make from a drug after the cost of producing it, but before company-wide costs such as marketing, taxes or executive bonuses.”

Medical corporations invent new ways to profit off you

There is one additional culprit in this sad story. Another unique aspect of U.S. health care: pharmacy benefit managers (PBMs), who are “driving up drug costs for millions of people, employers and the government,” according to a report in The New York Times. The Times report, published in June 2024 and written by Rebecca Robbins and Reed Abelson, said the job of these pharmacy benefit managers is to reduce costs but “frequently do the opposite.” These PBMs are “middlemen overseeing prescriptions” for more than 200 million people and owned by giant health care companies such as CVS Health, Cigna and UnitedHealth Group. The Times authors explain:


“They steer patients toward pricier drugs, charge steep markups on what would otherwise be inexpensive medicines and extract billions of dollars in hidden fees, a New York Times investigation found. Most Americans get their health insurance through a government program like Medicare or through an employer, which pay for two different types of insurance for each person. One type covers visits to doctors and hospitals, and it is handled by an insurance company. The other pays for prescriptions. That is overseen by a P.B.M. The P.B.M. negotiates with drug companies, pays pharmacies and helps decide which drugs patients can get at what price.”

Instead of saving money, more money is extracted. Overcharges for drugs, well beyond ordinary profiteering, are frequent, while small independent drug stores are underpaid, driving them out of business. (The PBMs are responsible for paying pharmacies on behalf of employers.) “[T]he P.B.M.s’ business practices touch virtually every American family,” the Times report says. “Even people who don’t take prescription drugs end up paying higher insurance premiums and taxes as a result of inflated drug costs.”

Perhaps none of the above should come as a shock considering that, last decade, when U.S. life spans were beginning to shorten, this was cheered as a “silver lining” because pension costs would be lower and in this decade, the Covid-19 pandemic was delayed being brought under control due to corporate greed. Huge profits were racked up as governments heavily subsidized newly developed vaccines but the pharmaceutical companies kept all the profits; in the case of Moderna minting several billionaires.

Vaccine makers refused to loosen their patent rights, clinging to intellectual property (IP) law, heavily skewed in their favor, to maintain a monopoly. Capitalist governments have rolled over for corporate interests for decades, making IP laws ever more rigid. It is unconscionable, or should be, when IP rules are used to keep life-saving vaccines away from most of the world’s people. A comprehensive waiver of World Trade Organization rules would have, even if temporary for the duration of the emergency, set aside Big Pharma’s IP rights and allowed all manufacturers of vaccines, wherever they are, to produce Covid-19 vaccines. The governments of India and South Africa proposed, in October 2020, just such a waiver to allow the production of one or more of the Covid-19 vaccines with most of the world’s governments behind them. The world waited in vain; the EU openly and the U.S. more subtly ensured IP rules were not touched. Corporate profits were more important than millions of lives.

What do these numbers and dispiriting results tell us? That health care should be a human right, not a good to be exploited for massive profiteering. The more private capital injects itself into health care, the more expensive it becomes with worse results. When denying care is what boosts profits, should we expect anything different? Some years ago I met a Canadian woman who complained about how much she disliked her country’s health care system. I told her of a friend of mine who had recently died. He had a bad heart and was in need of heart medication but the insurance company refused to allow it for him and he died because of that. “Does that happen in Canada?,” I asked. I was met with silence. It’s one thing to have to wait for medical attention sometimes in a non-emergency situation, upsetting as that can be, and not being able to access health care at all. Tens of millions can’t in the U.S., even those with insurance.

More than 26,000 die in the United States yearly because of a lack of health insurance and hundreds of thousands go bankrupt due to the costs. That is the price of private profit in health care. Or, more to the point, the price of capitalism.

Pete Dolack  is an activist, writer, poet, and photographer. He has been involved in various activist organizations, including Trade Justice New York Metro, National People’s Campaign, and New York Workers Against Fascism, among others. He has authored the books "It’s Not Over: Learning from the Socialist Experiment," which examines attempts to create societies outside of capitalism and explores their relevance to the present world while seeking a path to a better future and "What Do We Need Bosses For: Toward Economic Democracy," which analyzes past and present efforts to establish systems of economic democracy on a national or society-wide basis. He authored the book "It’s Not Over: Learning from the Socialist Experiment," which examines attempts to create societies outside of capitalism and explores their relevance to the present world while seeking a path to a better future.

The Crisis of the Neoliberal University and the Need for a Working Class Alternative

As the contradictions of universities organized for capitalist and imperialist interests become more clear, the new student and worker movement in higher education has the opportunity to clearly articulate and fight for the type of university we want: one that defends the interests of the working class and oppressed.

By Maryam Alaniz, Tatiana Cozzarelli 

October 31, 2024

Source: Left Voice





This past year in the U.S., a new chapter in class struggle has been written. Students, many from the Palestinian diaspora, anti-Zionist Jewish people, leftists, and people of conscience of all stripes have stood up against the genocide in Gaza. They have built encampments and questioned universities that run like businesses with investments in Israel. They have faced off the repression of university administrators while unmasking the imperialist character of both the Democrats and Republicans in office who help to send the police to beat up students and workers.

Broader sectors of U.S. society have also witnessed the unprecedented curtailing of democratic rights and the rise of a 21st-century McCarthyist witch hunt. Led by the Far Right, these anti-democratic attacks are supported by the broader regime, targeting anyone who dares to speak out against the genocide in institutions that are technically supposed to be bastions of free speech and academic freedom. These attacks have led professors and community members to defend basic democratic rights as the student movement came under attack this past year.

These conflicts have erupted in a specific context: the neoliberalization of universities. For years, government officials and university administrators have drastically cut university budgets, resulting in layoffs, the elimination of entire departments, and the increased adjunctification of university professors. After years of passivity, academic workers have been fighting back against precarious conditions with increased unionization and strikes at universities.

Universities carry an important weight in U.S. society and the economy. After all, they are where over 18 million people study and 4 million people work. But on a deeper level, recent events have opened up debate and discussion over the role of universities — from the historic revitalization of a student movement that challenges imperialism, to the right-wing culture wars in which universities and schools have become ground zero for unprecedented draconian measures.

Erik Baker, an activist within the Harvard Academic Workers union and a professor at Harvard, recently elaborated on the delegitimization of U.S. universities. As he points out in his essay, universities were once the kind of institution that fostered postwar ideals, like democratic engagement and cultural enrichment. At the same time, he explains, universities and liberal arts education played a pivotal role in the ideological functioning of postwar capitalist society. But in the new asset-based economy, the aims of the liberal arts university are obsolete, from the point of view of large sectors of the capitalist class.

In this context, Baker explains, the university’s hegemonic functions for bourgeois society are less important. “The crude and ruthless, in Bourdieu’s words, seems to serve today’s elites just fine,” Baker writes. Indeed, the modern university is characterized by hyper-exploited and precarious academic workers, an increase in academic policing, and disciplinary measures that are cheerleaded by the bipartisan regime, and a curriculum that is too “woke” for the Right. On the Left, meanwhile, activists have rightfully begun to question a curriculum that is all too often linked to the oppressive norms of capitalism.

At the root of the exploitative, authoritarian, and ideological characteristics of the modern university is the fact that universities are ultimately dominated by the interests of the capitalist class. Institutions of higher education, especially the elite universities, reproduce the dominant ideology while producing science, research, and knowledge in the interests of the capitalist class. Further, through the purchase of bonds and investments in Zionism, fossil fuels, and the military-industrial complex, universities often directly contribute to and help perpetuate a system of capitalist exploitation. And, of course, many universities, including publicly funded state universities, have adopted a business-like model of operating that includes increased tuition, draconian austerity measures, and the hyperexploitation of workers in a tiered labor system.

As a result of the recent movement in solidarity with Palestine, the contradictions of universities under capitalism are becoming more clear. At the same time, tensions are deepening between college administrators, who are subservient to the interests of Wall Street and the bipartisan imperialist regime, and a new generation of students and university workers who are increasingly anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist.

As the traditional university model faces exhaustion, the new student and worker movement in higher education has the opportunity to clearly articulate and fight for the type of university we want: one that defends the interests of the working class and oppressed.

The struggle for free, public universities — that are organized by and for the working class and the oppressed, where there is academic freedom and freedom of expression, where Marxism is not censored, and where knowledge is put in service of workers and oppressed sectors, also implies fighting in the here and now for basic democratic rights and against the current attacks that limit our ability to fight.
The “Golden Age” of Higher Education under Capitalism

The landscape of higher education in the United States has undergone a profound transformation over the past century. Originally, universities served as elite institutions, accessible only to a privileged few, as historian Ellen Schrecker explains in her book The Lost Promise. After World War II, however, when the GI Bill expanded access to higher education for millions of veterans, universities began to be seen as integral to the pursuit of the American dream, and a “passport to the middle class” in the height of postwar prosperity. For the U.S. regime, this professionalized workforce was key to producing cadre for its project of economic expansion at home and abroad.

But this kind of education was not equally accessible to all. While many Black Americans served in World War II, the GI Bill exacerbated racial disparities in education. Under segregationist policies, most Southern colleges excluded Black students, while in the North, Black student enrollment was kept purposefully low. Historically Black Colleges received significantly less funding and could not admit all Black students.

The postwar education system was shaped by the Cold War, in which the strategic competition with the Soviet Union was at the center of the national political agenda. This competition required innovations in the realm of science and technology, as well as a newly educated workforce for the industrial era of the postwar boom. Eisenhower’s 1958 National Defense Education Act provided low-interest loans to students in defense-related fields of study. But it wasn’t just the sciences: language-area studies were also framed as a way to combat communist influence and culture, while also producing skilled and fluent employees for the burgeoning intelligence sector.

Universities were also on the forefront of McCarthyist attacks: “administering anti-communist loyalty oaths, banning politically controversial speakers, and, most regrettably, purging their ranks of politically tainted faculty members,” as Schrecker explains. From the late 1940s to early 1950s, over 100 academics were fired in a coordinated campaign led by the regime’s apparatuses, like the FBI. The state exerted influence over academia in very explicit ways — leading congressional witch hunts that threatened firings and social excommunications — but it also used the softer pressures of reputational damage, blocking research or professional advancements, and chilling free expression by faculty. In this way, the U.S. ensured that its universities would continue to serve the interests of imperialism during the Cold War.

The 1960s and 1970s marked another pivotal moment in the evolution of higher education. As the postwar compromise began to strain and crumble, the universities were swept up in the era’s social upheavals. Enrollment in universities nearly tripled during this time; mass universities emerged, with more heterogeneous student bodies. The trend toward including students of color in the university was strengthened with the passage of affirmative action programs in the 1960s. Black enrollment in college nearly doubled from 1960 to 1980.

An ideology developed around the idea that education is the solution to all social ills and that it can eradicate poverty by developing human beings into more valuable human capital. This is precisely the ideology that Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis criticize in Schooling in Capitalist America. But it is on this foundation that President Lyndon Johnson passed the so-called Great Society programs, which “saw the start of individualist, even consumerist, federal support for public higher education, which comes from tuition subsidies for students, not direct funding for universities,” as the authors of Lend and Rule argue.

Simultaneously, this era was marked by the emergence of a student movement that grew out of the civil rights movement, and became its most combative during the movement against the war in Vietnam. In many ways, this movement was set off by the massacre at Kent State University and, just 11 days later, the killings at Jackson State University. Activists of this period demanded a university that was more than a means to individual success, but was by and for the most oppressed sectors of society. They called for the curriculum to be revolutionized, along with the university’s undemocratic structures.

In response to the massive student uprising in the 1960s and 1970s, universities made concessions to the movement. While many of students’ most radical demands were denied — like open admission, democratization of the university, and the adoption of a radical curriculum related to issues of oppression — other major shifts did occur. For example, by 1972, Black studies programs existed in over 1,000 campuses, and according to a report called Higher Education and the Black American, Black studies filled “a standard, if insecure, niche in the curriculum.” Women’s studies departments sprang up all over the country as well, and universities were forced to diversify their courses and faculty.
The Neoliberal University

By the late 20th century, however, the higher-education landscape began to shift again, influenced by the rise of neoliberal ideology and the adoption of market principles into higher education. Neoliberalism emerged at the end of the 1970s as a response to a crisis in the postwar economic order. In the neoliberal epoch, capitalists managed to find limited but real mechanisms for accumulation by reopening markets to capital in China and in the former Soviet bloc. In addition to finding new sectors of the working class to exploit, the capitalists, particularly in imperialist countries, led a wave of attacks to discipline their own working classes and guarantee even more surplus value from workers in the context of a crisis of capitalist accumulation. This took the form of privatizations, attacks on workers’ rights, and austerity measures. Trickle-down economics and low tax rates for the wealthy meant a vast increase in income disparities and, increasingly, a debt-based economy.

Universities were not exempt from these new pressures, setting them on a course of transformation from the institutions for the public good, as they were once widely seen, to the austerity-battered, admin-heavy, overpriced degree mills we know today. One of the hallmarks of these kinds of universities is the shift from public to private funding sources and higher tuition that put the financial burden of attending a university on the student.

As Michael Fabricant and Stephen Brier explain in their book Austerity Blues, from 1990 to 2010, the real dollar value of per capita student funding per state at public institutions declined 2.3 percent. CUNY, the “People’s University,” saw a 40 percent drop in state funding per student from 1992 to 2012, and a 17 percent drop from 2018 to 2015 in real dollars.

Thanks to austerity measures and the lack of public funding, universities themselves have also taken on debt. As Lend and Rule highlights, long-term debt held by public institutions increased by 482 percent from 1989 to 2021. Their institutional debt creates a profit for banks and financial capital, leveraged by the promise to increase student tuition whenever needed. In this sense, public universities are, increasingly, a myth: they are not publicly funded by taxes but by debt, taken on by both the institution and the students.

Private universities are even more cozy with financial and corporate funders, growing their endowments through a proliferation of private equity investments. Elite universities like Brown have as much as 43 percent of its endowment allocated to a portfolio that includes investments in fossil fuel companies and industries linked to Zionist interests.

The links to private industry became even more pronounced under neoliberalism with legislation like the Bayh-Dole Act of 1980. This act incentivized universities to patent discoveries and profit from research. As a result, research agendas were increasingly shaped by corporate interests, aligning academic programs with the needs of industry rather than the needs of society.

Throughout most of the neoliberal period, university enrollment continued to increase. From 1980 to 2010 — the height of university enrollments — the number of enrolled college students went from 12 million to 21 million. Since 2010, university enrollment has dropped 11 percent, but it remains well above 1980 levels. “As enrollments increase,” Fabricant and Brier explain, “especially among students of color, an increasingly stratified hierarchy of separate and unequal tiers has grown within 4 year colleges and senior and community colleges.” This stratification means that the “value” of having a college degree has depreciated.

Working class and poor students of color disproportionately carry the burden of debt to attend college, a type of “predatory inclusion,” “a process where by members of a marginalized group are provided with access to a good, service or opportunity from which they have been historically excluded, but under conditions that jeopardized the benefits of that access.” In other words, “inclusion” offers only limited benefits for marginalized groups, but it provides significant benefits for the capitalist class, which profits off that inclusion.

Further, there is evidence that debt was used to discipline the student movement, especially in California, where then governor Ronald Reagan raised tuition at the UCs to punish students for their activism. He went on to impose this all over the country once he became president, doing so with bipartisan support. This is precisely what Milton Friedman, doyen of the Chicago school, had proposed just a few years before.

Another key aspect of the neoliberal university is that it relies on highly precarized adjunct labor. Previously, about three-quarters of postsecondary teachers worked on the tenure track, but as universities have expanded, they increasingly rely on adjunct faculty and graduate students — part-time instructors who typically receive lower wages and fewer benefits than their tenured counterparts. Most professors are no longer tenure tracked and have no hope for job security and higher wages. At public universities, adjuncts grew by more than 300 percent from 1975 to 2011; by 2014, they represented three-quarters of the workforce at public universities nationally.

Alongside the adjunctification of labor, administrative positions at colleges and universities grew 10 times faster than tenured-faculty positions, according to Department of Education data. This reflected an expansion of university bureaucracy as part of the university’s shifting focus to administrative efficiency and corporate-like governance. In other words, universities have become more bureaucratized as a way to siphon “power away from instructors and researchers,” as a recent article in the Atlantic noted.

The sciences at universities have increased their ties to the military-industrial complex, and the structure of grantmaking creates competition among coworkers, pitting professors and lab scientists against each other and often leading to the hyperexploitation of grad students working in labs.

But neoliberalism was more than just economic policies; it came along with an ideology that was, according to Perry Anderson, one of the most successful ideologies in the history of the world. Under this ideology, capitalism stood triumphant and without any alternatives. Universities played a central role in perpetuating this idea.

While the Democratic and Republican Parties were a duopoly of neoliberalism, the Republicans represented a reactionary neoliberalism that rejected the cultural shifts that resulted from the movements of the 1960s and 1970s; anti-feminist and anti-queer, it harkened back to “traditional family values.” On the other hand, the Democrats came to represent progressive neoliberalism. As Nancy Fraser explains, progressive neoliberalism is


an alliance of mainstream currents of new social movements (feminism, anti-racism, multiculturalism, and LGBTQ rights), on the one side, and high-end “symbolic” and service-based business sectors (Wall Street, Silicon Valley, and Hollywood), on the other. In this alliance, progressive forces are effectively joined with the forces of cognitive capitalism, especially financialization. However, unwittingly, the former lend their charisma to the latter. Ideals like diversity and empowerment, which could in principle serve different ends, now gloss policies that have devastated manufacturing and what were once middle-class lives. … Identifying “progress” with meritocracy instead of equality, these terms equated “emancipation” with the rise of a small elite of “talented” women, minorities, and gays in the winner-takes-all corporate hierarchy instead of with the latter’s abolition.

And the university was tasked with churning out a slightly more diverse elite to govern an increasingly unequal society. As Jodi Melamed argues in Represent and Destroy, “Knowledge about minoritized difference — especially racial and cultural difference — was made to work for post Keynesian social and economic policies. To this end, U.S. universities used their capacity to adapt and produce knowledges symptomatic of and productive for the new circumstances of the 1980s and 1990s.” In this context, as Malamed explains, “an essential function of the academy … was to manage minoritized difference — to run difference through its machinery of validation, certification and legibility to generate forms that augmented, enhanced and developed hegemony rather than disrupted it.” In other words, under neoliberalism, the university was made to justify the increasing race and class stratifications while incorporating students of color into the neoliberal university under the guise of “merit-based” admissions.

The university became a bastion of progressive neoliberalism, which is usually linked to the interests of the Democratic Party, since it feeds a pipeline of workers for the nonprofit industrial complex, supporters of Democratic politicians, and builds an ideology that connects progressive politics to voting for Democrats. It is no wonder that today, one of the biggest divides in politics is between college-educated people who vote Democrat and non-college-educated people (especially non-college-educated white people) who vote Republican. Other universities or even specific departments are bastions of the neoliberal, hawkish Republican Party, creating a steady stream of workers into the military-industrial complex as well as into the Republican Party. In both cases, however, students are taught to accept capitalism as the best way to organize the economy.

As a result, during the height of the neoliberal offensive, there was a proliferation of anti-Marxist ideas in the university, and they became essentially hegemonic even among more progressive sectors. As Terry Eagleton explains in The Illusions of Postmodernism, dominant ideologies of postmodernism, postcolonialism, and identity politics all in their own ways erased the working class as the strategic subject for overthrowing capitalism, denying the possibility, desirability, or general framework for such a goal. Marxism as a revolutionary weapon for class struggle was thrown away as anachronistic or dismissed as perpetuating the myth that it was class reductionist and economistic. Thus, the university acquired a haughty, “transgressive” veneer while upholding the capitalist system.

While the neoliberal university included more people in higher education than ever before in U.S. history, that inclusion did not mean equalizing the social hierarchy; rather, neoliberalism made the rich richer and the poor poorer while promoting the ideology of schools as the great equalizer. The neoliberal university made the university not only an instrument of hegemony for the capitalist class, but also a source of profit, whether by debt, investments, privatization, or adjunctification.
The Crisis of the Neoliberal University

The 2008 economic crisis opened up broader questioning of capitalism and its institutions, including the universities. This marked a crisis of neoliberalism more broadly and has expressed itself politically through a crisis of traditional parties and the emergence of left- and right-wing populisms. The crisis of progressive neoliberalism has also meant a crisis for the university, its bastion, whose administrations had promoted a type of neoliberal consensus, or “extreme center,” as Tariq Ali calls it. Now we can see more divisions both at the top and at the bottom within universities as well.

For example, both students and workers can see that universities’ former ideals are matched with the reality of significant debt for degrees, debt that may not provide a clear path to employment, or at best pitiful wages from adjunct labor that forces professors to live out of their cars. And as the revitalized student movement has shown, student activists now also face outright repression in the face of genocide.

The veil is being lifted even among broader sectors as universities face a crisis of prestige. As Barker notes, only 19 percent of Republicans expressed at least “quite a lot” of confidence in higher education — and for Democrats, it is down to 59 percent. Only 47 percent of college graduates had more than “some” confidence in the university.

As part of the broader crisis of neoliberalism, we’ve seen less ideological consensus when it comes to the commonsense ideas of neoliberalism and more polarization. For the Far Right, which views the disappointments of neoliberal capitalism as a problem of “cultural Marxism,” universities and schools have taken center stage for their reactionary attacks. In a speech to the National Conservatism Conference, J. D. Vance recently proclaimed, “The professors are the enemy.” These kinds of culture war attacks on universities were strengthened after the Black Lives Matter movement and have continued to do so amid the movement for Palestine. This has resulted in policies such as Florida governor Ron DeSantis’s attacks on LGBTQ studies, Black studies, and diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) programs.

Most recently, the movement for Palestine has profoundly challenged the neoliberal university — testing the limits of its “progressive” veneer. This has meant a McCarthyist attack on free speech at the university, impacting both student and worker protesters for Palestine. In fact Columbia University, the center of the university protests, came in last in annual college free speech rankings by Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression.

At the same time, the movement for Palestine is questioning many pillars of the neoliberal university: first and foremost university investments in Israel, but also cops on campus and, in some institutions, speaking about the need for free, public universities. Even before the movement for Palestine, which marked a significant leap in the radicalization of the U.S. student movement, we could see shifts in the ideological questioning of the status quo at universities with the outgrowth of the #MeToo movement in universities and a profound questioning of the rampant reproduction of patriarchal norms affecting both students and workers at universities.

In addition to the student movement, the labor movement in higher education has also been showing its potential to organize itself and go on the offensive. This was evidenced most recently by the UC workers strike and the CUNY rank and file assembly during the encampment movement. There was also the New School strike of 2022, which was the longest adjunct strike in U.S. history — during which students showed solidarity with workers and organized an occupation.

Alongside these actions, there has also been a movement to unionize at universities amid a general shift to a more favorable view of unions across the country. While the unionization rate has held steady or fallen in recent years, unionization rates at universities have skyrocketed. A recent report revealed a 133 percent increase in unionizations among graduate student employees in the U.S. since 2012.

Against this backdrop of growing tensions from the student and labor movement on one side and an increasingly active Far Right, which has the backing of sectors of capital, it’s clear that the neoliberal university is facing a crisis of sustainability. This is most evident in the recent ousting of Columbia president Minouche Shafik, who brutally repressed Columbia students, but not soon enough or rigorously enough for the Zionists on her board, who ousted her over the summer. Shafik’s resignation is a key example that the center cannot hold.

The convergence of rising costs, political attacks, working class and student activism, and the suppression of dissent points to the contradictions of the neoliberal university’s model, which is ultimately driven by the needs of capitalist greed and imperialist oppression. What is the alternative model of universities that can genuinely serve the interests of working class and oppressed people here and around the world?
Universities for the Working Class and Oppressed

As Bowles and Gintis have highlighted, schools are not only a space to create hegemony for the state, but also a space to create the rebels who will question it all. That is happening right before our eyes. The movement for Palestine opened a period of intensified crisis for the neoliberal university, which has meant the formation of a revitalized repressive apparatus at the university, and the erosion of some of the academic freedoms and democratic rights that were won out of the struggles of the 1960s and 1970s. The bipartisan regime, hand in hand with the university bureaucracy, is seeking to impose a new relation of force at the university.

It is essential that the Palestine movement and our unions stand up to fight this wave of repression, defending our right to protest, to speak up in solidarity with Palestine, and for academic freedom. It is essential that more professors join the struggle, including tenured faculty, whose academic freedoms are also being curtailed. Our struggle for Palestine and for the university must be organized from the bottom, in democratic assemblies where university workers and students can discuss and decide next steps democratically. We are seeing mass assemblies that model this in the movement of student occupations in Argentina; this type of mass self-organization can strengthen the movement for Palestine and the movement for the universities we need and deserve. We should fight for the right to unionize workers across universities, for coordinating committees with the surrounding communities, and for student committees in solidarity with workers’ struggles across the country.

We have the potential to recover both the combative traditions of the student and labor movement in this country and harness the power of students and workers across the country, who are increasingly seeing the limits of universities under capitalism. In this framework, it is strategically key for the student movement to unite with workers, both inside and outside universities, especially in strategic sectors where workers have the power to shut down society. We are inspired by the great examples of student-worker unity throughout history, including the French May, when students and workers built barricades, formed a general strike, and were poised to overthrow the president of France. In that sense, student-worker unity is a strategic question in the fight for our common struggles as working class and oppressed people. We got a small taste of the possibility of a workers’ and peoples’ university during the encampments but we don’t want just the margins of the university, but the whole thing.

But, while we defend our democratic rights at the university, we also fight for a different kind of university — a university that does not serve capital but the working class and oppressed. One that does not function like a business, run by university presidents with exorbitant salaries, but that is run by and for students, faculty, staff, and the community.

Universities must be free and public for all; private universities must be nationalized and made public. All universities must be free and fully funded by progressive taxes on the wealthiest. Being a full-time student should not be a privilege for students who can afford it: it should be a right of all students, who should get stipends that are equivalent to a real living wage to dedicate their time to study so that no one drops out of college due to lack of funds.

This means an end to all student debt, including forgiveness of all student debt held by millions of people around the country. Having the chance to study and produce knowledge should be a right afforded to the entire working class; it should not be a profit-making enterprise for finance capital.

We must also fight against the precarization of university workers. We should demand an end to tiered labor, in which adjuncts teach the majority of classes but are not paid a living wage: every professor should have access to full-time employment and benefits.

We should demand that our universities be fully funded to meet the needs of students and researchers, restoring the dilapidated infrastructure at public universities such as CUNY, which pales in comparison to the facilities at expensive and private universities.

We should get the cops off campus. They do not keep us safe, but harass Black and Brown students, as well as all movements for social justice. We should demand that the military stop recruiting on our campuses, in the spirit of the Vietnam War protests that fought to kick the ROTC off campus. We should demand that our job fairs not bring in the military-industrial complex, recruiting our students to do violence in working class neighborhoods or in semicolonial countries. And we demand an end to outside military funding for science and research — science and research should be publicly funded, not by corporations and much less the military.

The presidents and higher-ups of our universities have shown themselves to be the enemies of students and faculty; they send police to beat and arrest students. They evict students within days of their arrival on campus. We must demand a different kind of university: one organized democratically at the rank and file, with democratic decision-making. Students and workers are the ones who make universities run and should be the ones who make decisions.

Rather than shape curriculum and research agendas around the needs of capitalist imperialism, we can leverage advances in technology, science, and culture at the service of the masses. This could even include leveraging the specialized knowledge of economic planning to be put into use for the planning of a socialist society. With a looming environmental crisis, wars around the world, and the potential for more health crises like the pandemic, we need a university that addresses the critical issues that affect the working class and oppressed people: science that addresses climate change, that researches trans medical issues, or that seeks to study and preserve indigenous languages.

In that spirit, a university of and for the working class and community would include students and faculty of color beyond tokenism as a justification for racist and imperialist policies. Rather, the university would address the issues affecting oppressed people: research centers that create solutions for the problems created by structural racism, sexism, homophobia, and transphobia. Against the right-wing distortions of Marxism, we demand a university that includes and studies leftist thought and ideas, posing the foundations and roots of the complete rot that is capitalism and strategies for the way out. For us, this is the study of Marx, as well as the contributions of Rosa Luxemburg, Lenin, Trotsky, Gramsci, Mariátegui, C L R. James, and others. For us, Marxism presents not only a theory and explanation of class society but a practical guide for transforming society and liberating humanity.

Ultimately, universities should be institutions where we can reflect on how, together, we can build a society free from exploitation and oppression. But they are also important sites of struggle.

Amid a revitalized student movement and reactivated labor movement in the heart of imperialism and in other countries around the world, students and workers have the opportunity to not only “interpret the world,” as Marx famously said, but also to “change it.”


Maryam Alaniz is a socialist journalist, activist and PhD student living in New York City. She is an editor for the international section of Left Voice. Follow her on Twitter: @MaryamAlaniz