"For Medical Freedom through Workers Revolution, Not Pointless Populist Panaceas!" by Thomas Buddenbrook

 

For Medical Freedom through Workers Revolution, Not Pointless Populist Panaceas!

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By Thomas Buddenbrook

Our movement for medical freedom is growing. We’ve come to recognize the existing system—or at least its current “globalist” leaders—are bankrupt, and mean us, the vast masses of humanity—no good. We want a better world, where we have the basic right to our own bodily autonomy, and a humane, holistic health system, rather than one based on the profit motive and the maniacal schemes of eugenicist billionaires for depopulation/transhuman enslavement.

But how do we get there? Many of us would like to see a simple restoration to a capitalist democratic republic, where we vote for responsible politicians, who appoint regulators who really do their job to protect the public, and where Banks and Investment Firms, and Big Pharma and Big Tech corporations are tamed, not permitted to control the political process–if not broken up entirely.

But think about it carefully. How did we get here? How did these corporations get so big, and get so much power to corrupt the State, in the first place? The definition of insanity, according to Albert Einstein, is “doing the same thing over and over again, and expecting different results.”

Why hang on to the capitalist system? While no one would deny it has given humanity incredible technological progress, it has also produced much evil over the course of its rule—slavery, colonialism, the exploitation and bloody repression of the working class, imperialism, racism, war, fascism, “regime change,” “shock and awe,” and now: medical genocide.

Its conservative libertarian proponents among us would argue that capitalism’s competitive nature preserves our liberties. Really? Look around you. As Bobby Kennedy has been saying, the ruling class, produced by and benefiting from capitalism, has flushed the Bill of Rights down the toilet.

But this state of affairs, the conservatives will argue, is an accident. These monopolies were created via collusion with and support from corrupt politicians. Put in better officials, or weaken the State, create the “parallel” economic and social “structures” called for by Michael Rechtenwald, and we reduce the power of monopoly. We can even destroy such monopolies, and go back to those heady days of the era of Andrew Jackson, when capitalism was based on small firms, farms, and healthy competition (and slavery, racism, genocide of the natives, women’s oppression, etc. etc.!)

But the growth of the size and the power of monopolies, was not an accident, and it was not dependent upon a corrupt State. This growth is intrinsic to the capitalist system, with or without State aid. As Marx wrote, precisely because capitalism is competitive, the capitalists, to cut their costs, continually replace workers with machines. This not only increases productivity, and provides them both a competitive edge, and a temporary “technological rent” their competitors will not in the meantime enjoy, but also, monopolization, or what Marx called the “centralization of capital”:

…there is an increase in the minimum amount of individual capital necessary to carry on a business under its normal conditions. The smaller capitals, therefore, crowd into spheres of production which Modern Industry has only sporadically or incompletely got hold of. Here competition rages…. It always ends in the ruin of many small capitalists, whose capitals partly pass into the hands of their conquerors, partly vanish[i]

So, attempt to weaken the State, break up the monopolies, all you want (or can). Like the many headed hydra, new monopolies will form, and use their tremendous wealth to buy off the State.

Another problem with the conservative libertarian strategy is their view that we can slowly but surely draw people away from the existing, monopoly controlled System, via the persuasive power of our ideas. Ironically, this is the same strategy championed by the illiberal cancel culture snowflakes most of us oppose. As Jessica Cassell argues in her Marxism vs. Intersectionality, in a paragraph based on Marx and Engels’ The German Ideology,

This is a profoundly idealistic approach which is based on the idea that in order to change society, you need to change people’s views first—or even worse, that by changing “discourse” you can transform reality. The truth is that the dominant ideology in a class society is that of the ruling class. The ideology of the people who carry out revolutions, the exploited and oppressed masses, is imbued with all the reactionary ideas and prejudices imposed by the ruling class. It is in the course of the struggle to transform society that people (in large numbers) become transformed and change (to a large extent) their points of view[ii]

Instead of real solutions, these libertarian conservatives offer panaceas, like Henry George’s “Single Land tax,” “parallel structures,” Ellen Brown’s “people’s state banks,” and Proudhon’s “fair labor exchanges”. Their chief advantage, in the mind of these conservatives, is that these quick fix-it schemes do not require abolishing the profit system, private property, or competition. One of the motives for this resistance is disillusionment with the “formerly existing” socialisms. Because socialism in Russia turned into the Stalinist nightmare, it must always do so. But they ignore the real causes for this denouement—the tremendous pressure placed upon the Soviet experiment by the imperialists, to, in Winston Churchill’s words, “strangle this baby in its cradle!”

Another motive is these “libertarians’” middle class orientation, by which they have become enamored of the privileges they enjoy, unlike the workers, under capitalism. Like their forebears in the U.S. Populist and Progressive Parties, and much of the Green Party today, they uneasily recognize the fact that the working class is constituted by the vast majority of society. It is the only class that can wage a successful struggle, through the power of economic, political, and general strikes, to confront and overthrow the rule of the “plutocrats”. But they fear like the plague the revolutionary outcome of such a struggle, since it would mean not only the death of the capitalist system, but also, their own privileges within it—including the “right” someday to exploit their own workers![iii] So they hope, through such schemes, to hitch the wagon of the working class to their own starry eyed panaceas, in order to head off this dreaded outcome—all the while making life more comfortable for themselves, if not for the working class majority![iv] Such movements are as contradictory as the mythical “Behemoth”, and it is on the basis of such contradictions that the Populist, Progressive, and Green Parties have all up to this point failed miserably.[v]

Image of Behemoth, from William Blake’s Behemoth and Leviathan

These conservatives investment in the “old liberal utopia,” as Wilson Carey McWilliams asserted in The Idea of Fraternity in America (1973), “a world of total private liberty and the ability to gratify desires…” is based on a blindness “to the nature of communion,” and “is rooted in hatred of the self and fear of the other.”[vi]. To work toward freedom means not to embrace old illusory panaceas or nostalgia for a Republic that never was, but to push forward to a new, social Republic. Within the new workers council state, we will be able to abolish exploitation, economic (but certainly not political: yes, let’s all compete to see who can best represent the interests of working people!) competition, private property, poverty, racism, and build a society where our bodily autonomy—and our possessions![vii]–is respected, and our basic needs, fulfilled In this socialist movement, middle class intellectuals, provided they offer selfless rather than self-serving leadership, will certainly be greatly valued.

Notes:

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[i] Karl Marx, Capital, v. I, Chapter 25. Economic Manuscripts: Capital Vol. I – Chapter Twenty-Five (marxists.org)

[ii]      Jessica Cassell Marxism vs. Intersectionality | Other | History & Theory (marxist.com)

[iii]     See Herbert J. Gans. The Uses of Poverty: The Poor Pay All. Social Policy July/August 1971: pp. 20-24

[iv] As Marx and Engels write in their Address of the Central Committee to the Communist League,

“The democratic petty bourgeois, far from wanting to transform the whole society in the interests of the revolutionary proletarians, only aspire to a change in social conditions which will make the existing society as tolerable and comfortable for themselves as possible…. As far as the workers are concerned one thing, above all, is definite: they are to remain wage labourers as before. However, the democratic petty bourgeois want better wages and security for the workers, and hope to achieve this by an extension of state employment and by welfare measures; in short, they hope to bribe the workers with a more or less disguised form of alms and to break their revolutionary strength by temporarily rendering their situation tolerable.“

[v] See The Rise and Fall of Progressivism by George Novack, at The Rise and Fall of Progressivism (marxists.org)

[vi]     Wilson Carey McWilliams, The Idea of Fraternity in America. University of California Press, 1973. In the Epilogue: A Note on Generation and Degeneration,”

[vii]    We are NOT for the Great Reset, and Klaus Schwab is no socialist!

1. Image from Typefoundry: The image of the Proclamation of the Irish Republic 1916

Source: Red Fire