Just before TPM went blooy, TheraP, who knows Spain, asked
me what possible relation there could be between the American situation
and the Spanish one, where, as she pointed out, public health care
predates Democracy. I thought it such an interesting question that I
decided to answer her here.
Many
years ago I worked on a project for a large American, family owned
corporation with manufacturing facilities in Spain. They wanted to
close a factory and they were amazed at the penalties they would have
to pay to shut the thing down. They demanded a detailed history of
Spanish social legislation, which I helped to research.
I speak
from memory, but I seem to recall that we discovered that almost all
the Spanish welfare state dated from when it became obvious that Hitler
was going to lose the war. The idea of the victorious allies charging
over the Pyrenees and Nuremberging him concentrated Franco’s mind wonderfully.
Franco,
brutal victor in the recent civil war was always a practical and
expedient fellow, so he threw the defeated working class a fish.
Providing health care, protecting jobs and paying the summer and
Christmas bonuses helped the police state keep control of the defeated
working class during those black years before prosperity arrived, with
the tourists, in the 1960s.
Basically
then, Spain had some sort of health system under Franco because he was
afraid of hanging by his feet in a gas station like Mussolini.
Until
the Socialists reformed it in the 80s it was a very, very half hearted,
half assed system indeed. And it was the fear of Spain going Communist
after the death of Franco that allowed the reformist Socialist
government of Felipe González which had been previously "restructured"
under the guidance of Willy Brandt's SPD to finally take power and,
once they agreed to stay in NATO, receive the blessings of the US as
the lesser of many possible evils.
In
a sense the entire European welfare system was put in place because the
elites were afraid of the working class going with the Communists in
the late 40s and early 50s. In the democracies the pressure was
expressed in the ballot box, in Spain by police informers relaying the
mood of the population. What is necessary today in America is to
produce that same unease at the top of the American system. The civil
rights struggle shows that this is as possible in the USA as in Europe.
If
the Republican Party and the American conservatives in general were
still more or less normal, like they were under Eisenhower or even
Nixon, they would probably do like Franco and throw the fish. They
showed that sort of pragmatism when confronted with the reality of
"burn baby burn". But I think the Ayn Randies, the Norquististas, the
Cato Instituters and assorted Reaganites, are a bunch of real Talibans
and will fight this thing to the death and that will be the transformational struggle.
Just like during the civil rights movement, there have to be people in
the streets and a change or heightening of consciousness to bring about
this transformation.
There
would be two good things in this: one, the people would finally get
health care and two, the struggle itself would change their
consciousness. Thus, the
unyielding resistance of the American Reaganite conservatives to any
state health care system is fundamental to the final transformational
effect. If any of them were half as intelligent as Franco was there
would be no transformation.
As
Democrats are not really people of the left they don’t seem to
understand that politics like the rest of life is a constant, shifting,
conflict of contradictory entities with contradicting interests and
that these different interests struggle continuously among themselves
and that this struggle produces what the Hindus call "Maya” or what the
rest of us call “reality”: something of only apparent solidity,
something which is constantly in flux.
To
transform reality it is important first to understand the dynamics of
these contradictions and to know when it best to push one place or to
not push on another. This dialectical approach is very foreign to
American politics. It would be easier for an American therapist
to understand the dynamics of transforming political reality and the
value of the process of transformation than for the average American
political commentator. A therapist easily understands that the process
of becoming is as important as, or more important than the becoming
itself, since in fact, everything only exists in the act of becoming
and never really finally becomes, except, perhaps, when it dies.
Health
care obviously wouldn’t be “transformational“ for Spanish politics
because health care already exists in Spain. It was precisely Franco's
readiness to concede it that kept it from becoming transformational. To
create such a system in the USA would transform America because health
care doesn’t exist and, given the rigid ideological stance of American
conservatives, it probably would take a huge struggle to get it to
exist. Since there are 40,000,000 people without coverage, this would
constitute a formidable army in this battle. The struggle is just as
important as the final result or to put it another way, the struggle is the result.
