Michael Moore's 'Sicko' and american anarchism

SEIU ain't on the defensive. Just reached over a million healthcare members and launched SEIU Healthcare in Baltimore this past weekend.

http://p-crac.blogspot.com/2007/06/seiu-healthcare-launch.html

Nate wrote:

Economically speaking. But in terms of health outcomes it'll be huge. That'll be a role for lefties, to help struggle for as much local control over health outcomes and assessments as possible.

Exactly, as a health care worker and anarchist i've thinking/working on this in my brain. I think the realistic demand to fight for is collective local control over healthcare adminstation. That is, the state will already be extracting the wealth for healthcare, but we can push to take administration, allocation, and organization out of its hands.

Quote:

As Sam Dolgoff used to say, when anarchists are asked tto choose between two options, they can usually present a third. I don’t see any reason why any anarchist would not opt to instead present other ideas for the health care system – for example direct popular control of medical services.

"Despite the force and unquestionably positive character of anarchist ideas, despite the clarity and completeness of anarchist positions with regard to the social revolution, and despite the heroism and countless sacrifices of anarchists in the struggle for Anarchist Communism, it is very telling that in spite of all this, the anarchist movement has always remained weak and has most often featured in the history of working-class struggles, not as a determining factor, but rather as a fringe phenomenon. "

If you are trying to make an argument for socialised medicine in a country where such a concept is at a very charitable best hugely impractical and unrealistic you are pigeonholing yourself into being a vocal irrelevance, or worse (if your ideas are taken seriously) actively dangerous. In most countries the concept that popular organisations could somehow take over the huge burden and responsibility for the provision of healthcare, with all that entails in terms of the necessary huge aggregations of capital and a logistical network that is required to maintain a healthcare system, is definitely problematic. For a start it would kill people as they'd be crap at it, and on a strategic footing it would absorb so much energy that I would be surprised if it didn't detract from the more serious proposition of actually taking over the existing means of production, which includes that of healthcare. It would also be forced by definition to work within the constraints of capitalism, turning people's movements into an effectively 'franchised' arm of the state in relation to this.

Anarchists should fight for state provision of healthcare in most circumstances. They should fight for ever increasing investment in healthcare of course, and they should fight for more and more democracy to be built into the provision of that healthcare, but outside of a revolution or a collapse in society attempting to provide healthcare I think would be seriously misjudged, and also will make you look completely loony.

The UK's NHS is the second largest employer in the world. It has been an absolutely massive step forward for the working class in this country. If the 1930s and 40s labour movement had attempted to provide healthcare it would have been completely crap and definitely would no longer exist. Life expectancy for the poorest people in this country, and the quality of life of society as a whole would have been vastly different to today. Furthermore as our American comrades have pointed out unions (while by no means perfect, but definitely mass organisations of the class) in the 'States do effectively provide healthcare for their members, as you are advocating - as our comrades point out, it's crap. Healthcare, like high tech or military engineering systems research, is, because of the necessity to run it centrally with massive concentrations of capital - which the private sector can never provide - something the state is, by definition, really fucking good at.