RUTHLESS CRITICISM

“If we have no business with the construction of the future or with organizing it for all time, there can still be no doubt about the task confronting us at present: the ruthless criticism of the existing order, ruthless in that it will shrink neither from its own discoveries, nor from conflict with the powers that be.” — Karl Marx

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US Health Care Reform:
Another Historic Moment in the Administration of the Nation’s Poverty

Joseph Patrick of the German Marxist quarterly GegenStandpunkt
Oakland, California
January 3, 2010

Just in time for Christmas, the Senate has passed its own version of the healthcare reform bill, jumping yet another hurdle on the path to “change” in the way Americans receive and pay for medical care. Yet controversy continues to rage. On the one side, President Obama has deemed the bill the single most significant piece of legislation since the creation of Social Security, and many Democratic lawmakers have solemnly declared that, despite the many bitter concessions they have had to make, this is the moment of their legislative lifetimes. On the other side, Republicans have expressed their utter revulsion at both the substance of the bill and the manner of its construction. And on the liberal left, there is disappointment and even disgust at how politicians have once again failed to put an end to the scandal that is the current American healthcare system.

Meanwhile, average citizens get to follow the ups and downs of the negotiations in Congress, listen to the pleas and arguments of big and small business, weigh the options and come to a conclusion about which is worse: their current inability to pay for the most basic care or their inability to pay for compulsory insurance, the risk of financial ruin posed by a serious illness or by unbearable healthcare costs on the companies that employ them?

These people would do well to pay attention as to why, despite all the rancor of the debate, elites on both sides of the aisle regard healthcare reform to be so urgent. Without far-reaching change, two things they regard to be much more important than the health of individual citizens will face impending doom: the nation’s economy and the solidity of the national budget. On that basis, the population’s poor bill of health raises some urgent questions for the ruling class: Is the health of the nation’s competitiveness in danger? Does the illness of broad swathes of the population represent a disadvantage in international competition that America can no longer afford? That requires a solution. How to extend basic care to a greater portion of the population without imposing unbearable costs on “the economy”, i.e., the profits of employers, while making sure that America’s premier growth industry can emerge stronger than ever?

This gives us no reason for joy or even “cautious optimism,” but raises some unwelcome questions of a more fundamental kind:

The answers to these questions illustrate why the hopes for a “historic moment” in the history of American healthcare are not only woefully modest, but hopelessly wrongheaded. We invite you to find out why.

Supplement: The Democratic Debate


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No Comment!

Don't expect sympathetic ideas from us on whether the American education system bungles its mission of producing human capital or whether collective bargaining still has a place in the socio-political sun. It doesn't make any difference to us whether politicians go on junkets or have affairs when they govern mass poverty here and send American soldiers all over the world. We have no suggestions about what image of itself the left should project, we don't plead for better presidents in Iran or Honduras or anywhere else, nor do we draw up an alternative plan for managing the financial crisis.

We also don't uncover any scandals. Unlike Time magazine or Michael Moore's movies, “Democracy Now” or “60 Minutes,” or any other opinion-forming media, we do not maintain that cutbacks in human services, xenophobic immigration laws or the internment of prisoners at Guantanamo are aberrations from a standard – a standard which is never really valid, but is all the more demanded anyway. When we reflect on the so-called events of the day, we always notice the opposite: the necessity with which these events, and how they happen, belong to democracy and the free-market economy, to the world order and to all the other great addressees of the general will for improvement and beautification. We recognize in these events only cases and sub-cases of the principles and objective compulsions which are really in force and which enjoy a frighteningly good reputation in this society as the highest human rights. If our explanations suggest a certain cynicism, then that is quite correct: this is exactly what it is when American competitiveness consistently leads precisely to the poverty whose extreme cases then shock even its architects, so that the normal poverty thus becomes in line with morality.

What is to be expected from us has nothing to do with original ideas. We don't try to see everything a little bit differently, to add an alternative viewpoint and contribute to the red white and blue spirit of the times. There is too much of this already; the spokespeople of the democratic public are continuously busy submitting reminders and improvement suggestions to their audience and its rulers; and the pluralism of the points of view from which all this takes place – in the name of the environment, social justice or even just the “shock” which spreads across the land – is already big enough. Deliberately and recklessly, they supply interpretations of events which are digestible only by minds with an unreserved bias in support of the system. We offer something else: explanations of really existing capitalism; therefore arguments against this “best of all systems.”

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