Letter: Comments on “Where Does Power Come From?”

Generally I really liked the article. It was a unique read and one which displayed views which the left today should pay attention to. The fact that the “capitalist state” primarily serves the interests of the rich and not workers is important to remember, with Pinochet being a dark warning of history on what can go wrong when asking the state to tolerate too much “courage”. Mutual aid associations are something that became very popular in Greece throughout its ongoing Eurocrisis.

I’m skeptical though about the extent to which mutual aid could effectively replace on a sufficient scale and actually disassociate workers from it. While, to my knowledge, the SPD was the most successful at building party institutions, it was actually not that big when compared to the German state. Workers simply can’t compete with the state when it comes to accruing resources; the more complex certain occupations are and the more resources they demand, the less sense it makes for workers to try to run them themselves.

Of course there are some things that a revolutionary movement must not neglect; the task of the movement is to prepare the workers for political rule, and the main focus ought to be education on a wide array of topics which will prove vital to a movement’s success once actually in power: political education, weapons training, and organized training in specialized tasks vital to being and staying in government. These points do not necessarily contradict having workers’ own medical services, but in the end these are political decisions which must collectively be made, ones that must assess the the risk of not investing in this for that program.

Health care in the US costs over four trillion dollars a year. By 2026 it is projected to be 20% of the economy. Thinking that workers, even if they reorganized in a powerful mass party on the scale of the SPD, will be able to seriously compete with the state in healthcare, or suggesting that this burden should be taken over even in part by revolutionary workers, is to be blind to the fact that we must make ado with limited resources. Winning concessions from the state like free Medicare For All could only serve to shift a crippling burden which threatens and actually bankrupts many working families, from the backs of workers to free up resources and their health for the class’s endeavors in more pressing matters, such as education and various training. The fact that many conservatives and christian zealots have legislative powers in American healthcare can only be countered by our entire class’s mobilization to action and political campaigns in parliament and public life.

We need the working class as a whole, even those still outside the movement, to be healthy and fit not just for the struggle of living under capitalism but precisely to effectively overthrow capitalism. The questionable idea of a UBI aside, winning an array of material concessions from the capitalists puts workers in a better position to develop the experiences, health and resources to not just build but take the brunt of society’s power from those who have it.

Sincerely,