CHICAGO, December 22—On December 15, a state review board voted against the racist proposal to close Mercy Hospital on Chicago’s south side. Mercy is a safety-net hospital, the city’s oldest, that treats majority uninsured and underinsured Black and Latin workers.
The board’s decision came as the result of hundreds of workers, patients, and community members organizing for months to oppose the closure. We have participated in rallies and caravans, blocked intersections, shared petitions, and gave countless speeches and testimonies as a means to prevent this racist attack on workers in the middle of the deadly coronavirus pandemic. Members of the international communist Progressive Labor Party (PLP) have been active fighters in this struggle.
But as workers already know, this fight is by no means over. The racist billionaire owners of Mercy, Trinity Health, are already plotting in the wake of the ruling to move ahead with the closure.
The time is now to broaden the base of this struggle, and to include even more workers into the fight. It’s essential that we look past pleading with liberal politicians to guarantee a healthy future for our class, because they’ve only proven themselves to fail and attack us, time and again. It’s time to reject this capitalist system that fails billions of workers daily around the globe, and start organizing for an egalitarian communist future with PLP.
Lesson 1: Trust no capitalist politician
During the campaign to keep Mercy open, a strategy has been to try and create leverage and pressure on some of the leading politicians in the city and state. To this end, there have been regular appeals made to Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot, Cook County Board chief Toni Preckwinkle, and Illinois Governor J.B. Pritzker. But like their Republican counterparts, these pro-capitalist lackeys are no friends of workers.
Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot has been silent on the struggle, claiming that decisions regarding hospital closures are more of a “state issue.” No doubt she has her hands full, trying to perform damage control after video was released of the racist Chicago Police Department (CPD) handcuffing Black worker Anjanette Young while naked in her home, during a botched raid (ABC7, 12/21).
In this regard, she follows in the footsteps of her predecessor, Rahm Emanuel, who similarly covered up the dashcam video of CPD’s racist execution of Black teenager LaQuan McDonald until after his re-election was secured in 2015. One of his first moves after getting into office was to close half of the city’s mental health clinics, which served mostly Black and Latin workers (Chicago Tribune, 6/6/19).
State Governor JB Pritzker has admittedly been more vocal about Mercy, but workers have no reason to trust his “progressive” credentials. His family is one of the ten richest in the U.S., at an estimated worth of over 30 billion (Forbes, 12/16). This massive fortune was gained through the direct exploitation of countless workers.
Lastly, Cook County Board President Toni Preckwinkle has made a reputation of being a queen of cuts, and is actually in the process of phasing out emergency services at Provident, another safety-net hospital on the south side (South Side Weekly, 11/27). This is in line with her decision almost 10  years ago to close Oak Forest Hospital in spite of worker protest (WBEZ, 8/16/11).
All politicians, regardless of race, at the end of the day are loyal to the needs of this racist profit system. We should not expect a different outcome in trusting them with Mercy’s fate.
Lesson 2: Capitalist health care will never meet our needs
As healthcare workers, we have witnessed firsthand some of the worst racist destruction of this pandemic that has killed over 1.5 million workers worldwide, including over 300,000 in the U.S. Yet despite continued surges in cases and facilities overflowing with patients, the healthcare bosses still have gone ahead and closed over 20 hospitals nationwide this year (Becker’s, 12/9).
Healthcare under capitalism is a commodity, a service to be used in order to turn a profit. Actual outcomes in guaranteeing that we as workers lead healthy lives take a back seat to the bosses’ pocketbooks. With this in mind, it makes sense that Trinity Health would want to move ahead with closing Mercy despite having assets in the billions. Capitalism is about maximizing profits and market share.
Paired with a threadbare public health infrastructure in the city, these hospital cuts prove deadly for Black and Latin workers, whose life expectancy can average a shocking 30  years less than those living in wealthier neighborhoods (AP News, 6/6/19).
If the international working class is ever to reach our true health potential, we need to rid ourselves of this racist destructive system. Only a communist society based on collectivity and worker needs – not profit – can guarantee true health equity
Final lesson: Join PLP, fight for communism
Those of us who have committed ourselves to the fight to keep Mercy open have much to be proud about. We have for the time being forced the bosses to pump the brakes on closing, an outcome that will no doubt save workers’ lives.
But with all reform struggles, the bosses hold the upper hand. They hold state power and as such can take away our hard fought gains.
The only way the bosses can’t quickly reverse the outcome is if workers build an international mass movement to forcibly take state power from them and run a communist society in our interests. It’s been done before, and through organizing a mass revolutionary PLP, we will do it again. PLP invites all workers to join our fight to build a better world.