Politicization: “The process through which certain issues become objects of public contention and debate and are thereby legitimized as concerns of the state or political realm.”
(Oxford University Press, Dictionary of Social Sciences.)

The fight over health care reform is not over. With the Democrats proclaiming a historic victory and the Republicans crying socialism, most of us are aware it is neither.
Obama’s presidential victory consolidated a renewed impulse for comprehensive health care in this country, reflecting a new level of political involvement for Americans of all political colors. This fight on the battlefield of nationalization highlights the question –Will government act in the interests of the public, of society as a whole, or of corporate America?

Politics is an expression of economics

The American people need health care, but corporate America needs health care insurance reform. In an age when global speculative capital drives the economy, health care is one sixth of the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) in the U.S., but the current system no longer guarantees corporate profitability.

Health care, therefore, is part of the ruling class’s strategy to re-organize the economy. Both major parties recognize the need to rationalize and restructure the delivery of health care. They have differences about how to do it, but they agree that it must be done. Mandating individual purchases of private health insurance will bolster profitability for private insurance while supporting governmental deficit reduction as part of an overall package of reforms in health care. This package includes restructuring Medicare as well as proposals for nationwide electronic records (health information technology or “HIT”) to help track profitability. The fight for a public option, by increasing competition, was meant to address the total lack of cost control in mandatory private insurance. The struggle over the exact forms will continue. The government has moved from the current dysfunctional employer-based system in the exactly wrong direction. Instead of guaranteeing individual and family security and health, they have left Americans to face the results of the economic crisis on their own. The reality is that given the economic laws of capitalism, they could do nothing else.

Politicizing requires that revolutionaries do more than analyze what’s wrong with a bill or the politics of getting a bill through Congress. Revolutionaries have to understand the needs of our class enemies –not to compromise with corporate needs for reform, nor to criticize from outside the battle, but to focus leaders in our class on what they can do to fight in their own interests from within the process. What can we do to accomplish growth in the political consciousness and organization of our class? We can’t just fight apolitically for policies we want any more than Obama or the Congress can. We have to begin to fight based on the truth that politics is a concentrated expression of economics.

Health care Crisis in Rustbelt

For almost a century, health care in the U.S. was part of the social contract between industrial capital and labor. The destruction of this contract is exemplified by autoworkers in the rustbelt who have historically been at its center.

In 1950 the United Autoworkers (UAW) negotiated health care for retirees. It improved over the years. In 2007, the UAW negotiated the creation of a health care trust, the Voluntary Employee Beneficiary Association (VEBA), freeing automakers from future retiree health care obligations. The head of UAW’s VEBA is the former CEO of Health Alliance Plan.

The fund, negotiated in the name of saving’ retiree health care at GM, Chrysler and Ford, is already on life support. Sold to the membership with promises of solvency for eighty years, the UAW is now scrambling to secure funding, as automakers have not paid the $57 billion promised. The plan took effect in January of this year. Retirees have already lost eye care and dental coverage; co-pays and deductibles have risen.

Analysts now predict that the UAW will make more benefit plan changes. Some have projected that the fund could go broke in the near future. This means thousands of retirees could go without health care as VEBA, unlike pensions, is not insured.

Drawing the Lessons

Workers have gone from negotiating company retiree health care (won in 1950) to negotiating directly with the health care industry. They are now totally dependent on a market-driven trust fund. In addition, millions of other manufacturing workers have lost good paying jobs and the so-called “Cadillac” health care benefits that came with it. No union leader today can deliver the goods to members through collective bargaining alone. The real interests of the workers is expressed by the fact that scores of unions (including the UAW) have endorsed a Single-payer (Medicare for All) health care delivery system as the way forward for union and non-union workers alike. In the name of practical politics, however, the UAW “won” an infusion of cash for VEBA ($10 Billion) earlier this year in the then-proposed House bill, seeming to render them silent on their own position. Furthermore, when the Senate proposed taxes on the “Cadillac” union plans, union leaders were unwilling or unable to remove them, leaving many workers appalled and angry.

Gone are the days when it was in capital’s interest to ensure workers’ health for its own sake. Workers now compete with robots and robots don’t need health care. If nothing else, these workers have gotten a dose of what it is like to have to rely on the Democrats to meet their needs, but revolutionaries have to make sure they draw the right lessons from the experience.

Politicization and the role of the Revolutionaries

As fighters in the social movement we need to participate in the fight to get rid of private insurance. As revolutionaries, we have to politicize it. The process has begun as a de-legitimation of the insurance companies, of corporate control over our health. It has to be taken to its ultimate conclusion, to a demand that our government works for society as a whole. This needs to be a wake-up call to political action along class lines.

Our class is in the process of learning that both major U.S. parties represent corporate interests. Autoworkers in the Rust Belt and others are beginning to see the futility and immorality of corporate-driven health care and are taking up this fight. Dispossessed workers often characterize their plight as “Corporate America is hell bent on destroying the middle class.” These workers are still struggling to see the class nature of their fight. In this context, their fight for Single-payer represents forward motion on this issue. This changes the relationship of the revolutionaries to these workers. The days of appealing to corporate America to “do right” or of “pushing the Democratic Party to the left” are over. The struggle over the role of government provides us with an opportunity to help the combatants to see how to fight in their own class interests. The motion of autoworkers within this struggle presents us with opportunities for work with Single-payer leaders, too. Groupings around the country are finally in motion against profit-driven health care. We are witnessing the beginnings of a fight driven by the needs of those who achieved the best hopes of the working class for stability in the past period. The struggle for health care for all has tremendous potential to escalate if this section of our class begins to lead it.

Lastly, the ugly forms of reaction to this fight for reform are part of the political process and the fight for health care as well. Race-based and anti-socialist attacks on Obama or Congress members are in fact attacks on those who voted for Obama because they wanted real reform, regardless of the level of their political consciousness in doing so. These forms are historically developed and revolutionaries ignore them at their peril.

We are witnessing a break in continuity in the political landscape. It is important to revolutionaries not only because of the breadth of the health care crisis, but for the political education our class is undergoing. We are coming out of a period when politicization wasn’t really possible. Today, the dispossessed are being shaken from the security they once had under capitalism; they are in the process of awakening. In this environment, they can be agitated to support fascism or they can be politicized to become a catalyst to fight for their independent class interests.

 

May.2010.Vol20.Ed3
This article originated in Rally, Comrades!
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