I see a lot of critiques of universal healthcare that basically amount to the same thing: It’s not radical enough, we need to add more radicalism, and make it more radical… radicalism.
And that’s ridiculous, I am not some hack looking for a subscription fee from my enamored “adherents”. In fact if you like my writing then as far as I’m concerned you belong in a jail cell. No, I’m a European Marxist author, my job is to make you feel cynical, but not hot topic bullshit cynical, I mean cynical in the classical sense.
Diogenes cynical. Virtue cynical. Pursuit of higher goals cynical. Fight club cynical. Either do that, or find a door and remain on the other side of it forever. I don’t even care where it leads to, that’s your home now.
So, now that we’re on the same page, let’s talk about Universal Healthcare, that beautiful intersection in which pharmaceutical reps and politicians alike can start selling snakeoil.
Now first off, my favorite healthcare system in the world is the Cuban healthcare system. That’s what I think the goal is. And what we refer to as Universal Healthcare, when employed into policy, is not that.
You see when a bunch of social democrats are trying to control the nation’s hospitals, I get nervous, because I’ve read history. I don’t want the people who invented Victorian workhouses and phrenology to be in charge of hospitals. If I were a voter, then frankly I’d consider Sarkozy running on the Al Qaeda ticket to be a more preferable choice. In fact, a discarded colostomy bag from a dying raccoon would be a better choice.
In fact, a discarded colostomy bag attached to the discarded colostomy bag of a dying raccoon who is a registered member of the Posadist wing of the English liberal democrats would be a better choice.
Universal Healthcare under capitalism is, and always has been, decades of struggle which leads to the implementation of a policy that is then functionally reversed within a few years following. It is, and always has been, a way in which reformists can hold the nation hostage and assure that the working class does not forward a democratic mandate to the state.
My point is, you need to examine this dialectically and look at what comes before healthcare. The reason why Cuba has such great healthcare is because Che Guevara would saunter into hospitals and tell them to get their shit together at gunpoint, and we’re not quite at that stage yet.
The policy that should be pushed for by Marxist parties everywhere should be a very simple and singular one: Land reforms.
Before healthcare can exist in any meaningful sense, you need land reforms. Because land reforms cannot be reversed. Because people will fight and die for their homes.
This is not just the most effective economic policy, but also the most effective healthcare policy.
No rent means you can afford private insurance. No fear of homelessness means strike actions are more effective, and can push for better workplace benefits and safety regulations. No constant stress over bills and expenses means less long term health detriments. Wiping out homelessness through housing guarantee also means the people who need healthcare the most no longer have such acute demands for healthcare.
Moreover it also takes a dent out of healthcare costs which lowers insurance premiums.
What should be priority 1 is housing for all. An end to rent, landlordism, predatory real estate speculators, segregation and landgrabbing.
What should be priority 1 is to take the lands that are held by agribusinesses and return them to the tenant farmers who toil under their villainry.
What should be priority 1 is to give people a meaningful and tangible result of their class struggle, and to give them homes to defend. To create a radical commitment to class struggle and to the fight for socialism.
What should be priority 1 is to undermine the very core of bourgeois power in order to permit us to do anything besides making lofty promises that lands marginalised communist parties within the 4% voting bloc.
We must bring back Bolshevism. Land, bread, peace. A simple platform that speaks to the humanity of all. Before universal healthcare becomes feasible in any meaningful sense we need universal housing.
It is deeply unpatriotic to lend and lease land. To separate a people from their country in such a way. Everyone should feel part of their country, and should have land to their name. To have a spot in the world that is inherently their own, where they feel secure, and provided for, and dedicated.
A soldier who fights for a nation where her people are robbed of their land is a soldier who is a fool.
A worker who works for a nation where her people are robbed of their land is a worker who is a chump.
A farmer who tills furrows for a nation where her people are robbed of their land is a farmer who is a peasant.
A republic grants the promise of power being returned to the people, of the monarchy and the nobility being liquidated into a distant memory, as bitter vapors in the winds of time. A republic where land is owned privately by corporations, as opposed to personally by citizenry, is merely a tragic menagerie of tyrants and puppets. A spot of green mold growing in the pallid, neglected double chin of a dying monarch, a joke that stopped being funny centuries prior to it being told.
To make land private is to cultivate a civic wasteland, a barren place deprived of opportunity and freedom. Where citizenship is just a piece of paper given to you by patronising bureaucrats. A place void of revolution and prosperity. Where profits line the pockets of oily robber barons in garish finery who spend their days decadently pawing at the weak and the vulnerable.
People who, in no inherent sense embodies such a vulnerability, but rather has it imposed upon them, violently branded upon their existence in their landlessness. People cast into the trenches of humanity, and who are expected to die there.
Moreover it is urgently useful in an endeavor to build dual power for the workers. To hinder the police with search warrants, to assure an abundance of venues for private meetings, to remove the prying eyes of landlords, who are the government’s best friend. Who will gladly and fervently spy on the private lives of citizens, and who acts like a paid mercenary on behalf of the law with a dedication akin to that of an inquisitor’s rat, chewing its way through the emaciated abdomen of the people.
The distinction between a home and a crypt for the living is one of contract or deed. To imagine every laughter, every celebration, every gathering, every milestone of one’s family history, to be so inexcusably violated by the looming shadow of a grinning devil who feels entitled to, for the rest of their miserable existence, to blackmail, threaten and exploit your loved ones.
To say “Hand over that rent, hand over that money that you worked hard for, hand of the food in your child’s stomach, or I’ll kick you all to the gutter.”
It’s vulgar, it’s obscene, it is a monster made by the darkest impulses of the human condition. A miscreant fostered by the twin sires of greed and decadence. An unspeakable, hideously frightening, unforgivable and despotic order that should enflame the outrage of all moral peoples who seek freedom.
LAND FOR ALL IS JUSTICE FOR ALL.
