• amemorablename
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    6 days ago

    Well the thing is, wanting the US project to continue and wanting people to not die from lack of healthcare aren’t the same thing, even if they can and do intersect at times in people who cling to the US concept as some kind of bastion of “freedom”, whether because they’re chauvinists or naive. Getting universal healthcare to happen at all in the US, within the US system, seems it will require a significant amount of strength in, and pressure from, the working class. I’m not sure it would happen at all at this stage, without some kind of major electoral win in a genuinely working class party; and if that was achieved, it would mean there is at the very least some kind of strengthened reform movement that likely has some communist cadres supporting it, if not directly involved. Right now, it’s sort of just the red and blue corporations swapping turns on who screws people over.

    I guess what I’m getting at is, at least in the context of the US, I’m not sure significant reform is even possible without having a much better organized working class. And if the working class is much better organized, that means it’s much more feasible to galvanize them in general. This would not necessarily be the same situation as if the US were to have had universal healthcare for decades and had made the working class mostly toothless at some point after amid the full bore Red Scare, while slowly eating away at the healthcare system (my rough understanding is that’s more how it is in some of the european capitalist countries).