In New York the city administration is planning a 10% cut in the already under-funded public hospital system. In Chicago they already laid off hundreds of doctors, nurses and other frontline providers from the Cook County Hospital system and closed half of the County’s public clinics, with further cuts planned. In Los Angeles they downsized, then closed Martin Luther King Hospital, leaving thousands without care.
All these facilities serve largely black and immigrant working-class patients, but their existence means that there is a safety net for all workers who get thrown out of work by the inevitable ups and downs of the capitalist economy. Now the politicians in the big cities are dismantling public health, just like they are destroying public schools, public housing and public transportation. They use racism of different kinds to blunt the fight-back against their attacks.
The capitalist TV and newspapers create the myth that anything with the word “public” in the name is for black people. That’s one of their tricks to confuse white workers. Then they try to get black workers to go along with Obama’s “health reform” with the lie that “only” immigrants will be left out in the cold when the public hospitals close. That’s to build anti-immigrant racism, especially among blacks. Racism is the cutting edge of fascism, and a black “liberal” is now swinging the axe.
But many workers already see through these tricks. Demonstrations involving thousands of people have opposed these racist attacks. Workers have denounced the cuts in public meetings as well as picketing and marching outside as the rich “civic leaders” solemnly try to “save our public institutions” by downsizing and privatizing them. In California nurses’ strikes have forced the politicians to make concessions by improving the ratio of nurses to patients. But like most reforms, the bosses then turned this victory into its opposite by simply reducing beds and kicking out the patients.
The unions can be a useful place to organize fight-back, but the reforms they fight for will never satisfy workers’ healthcare needs. There is lots of anger about these attacks and workers need a stronger and more far-reaching counter-attack.
The public services under attack are the remnants of the “welfare state.” Public hospitals and other things workers need to survive were created when millions of workers in the U.S. and Western Europe started getting ideas of revolution from Russian and Chinese workers in the early to mid-20th century. At that time the Soviet Union (now “Russia”), and later the People’s Republic of China, were the only countries that guaranteed jobs and healthcare to all.
The capitalists in the West were scared to death of revolution in their own countries. They fought the threat of communist revolution in the West in two ways. First, they allowed a few reforms so that revolution wouldn’t seem like the only alternative to the misery of capitalism. Reforms silence the workers and further bar the workers from uniting as one. Then they fired, blacklisted, arrested, beat up and killed communists who led the workers in fighting for reforms.
These measures defused and tamped down the revolutionary energy that had been building in the working class. Now, the capitalists are under more pressure to cut costs as they prepare for bigger and bigger wars. And with the return of Russia and China to capitalism, the pressure is off for making reforms, at least for the moment.
Workers need a two-pronged counterattack. We need to sharpen the contradictions of the reforms wherever we can, and we need to recruit more and more workers into the PLP. The working class needs to go all the way to communist revolution. We need to understand that anything short of destroying capitalism and replacing it with communism will not offer the future we and our children and grandchildren desperately need.
Reforms will ultimately lead back to fascism. Revolution, not reform, is the only solution to the horrors of capitalism. Fight for communism!
