Day by day the worker needs to rest, eat, and recover from labor to return to work the next day. Week by week we need social connections to nourish and grow us. Year by year the worker needs medical treatment to continue to be fit to work. Generation by generation we need to be raised and educated to both be fit to work and to continue the human race. This is what socialists call social reproduction. Socially reproductive labor is necessary for maintaining human life and for enabling workers to go into work each day, but capital is constantly trying to turn it into a super-exploited profit center.
Capitalism asks how little must we treat the sick for them to return to work. What is the least we can educate to ensure that the work gets done correctly. How little care does a child need while the parents work gueling hours just to get by. Under capitalism this will always be where we as workers are pushed. How little care and nurturing do we need, because our job asks for more and more for less and less.
This is no less obvious than in the “caring” industry in such jobs as healthcare, education, and childcare. Even as each worker is driven by their care for humanity, even as they care immensely for their students, for their patients, it is this very care that is used against them to ultimately undermine their own efforts to care for their charges. To get away with understaffing those that care for our most vulnerable, management places the workers in impossible situations. They swear that the understaffing is temporary, but that if you cared enough you would take on an extra patient or student, because you care so much both those you care for and those you work with who already have too much on their plate. Even though this is underhanded and slimy, any employer that does less risks bankruptcy. Capitalism’s volatility cuts away any security that would allow safe staffing.
So on one side the workers love their work, those they care for, and their coworkers and this all gives incredible meaning to them. On the other hand there is an employer that knows that anything less than ruthless exploitation endangers the entire organization and their “good work” including that which the worker treasures. Thus the employer justifies the manipulation and exploitation as being for the “benefit” of the worker in the name of job stability and continuing the “good work”.
So what is the way out of this conundrum? The only permanent solution is the working class taking power. The working class taking power is one and the same with implementing and defending socialism. Anything less will forever be besieged by the capitalist class. The initial success of the NHS in the UK has been hollowed out. Medicaid in the US has been sold piecemeal to the point that it is a shell of what it used to be.
But what can be done in the meantime? Right now friends and comrades are suffering from illnesses that need treatment. Right now many workers are looking for new and less abusive jobs, but for all that searching, the decision of what capitalist to work for is seriously limited by the type of health insurance offered. We cannot throw up our hands and say that this will all wait until we have a revolution. No, there must be things that can be done more immediately.
As Rosa Luxemburg said, “The daily struggle for reforms, for the amelioration of the condition of the workers within the framework of the existing social order, and for democratic institutions, offers to the Social-Democracy the only means of engaging in the proletarian class war and working in the direction of the final goal – the conquest of political power and the suppression of wage labour. Between social reforms and revolution there exists for the Social Democracy an indissoluble tie. The struggle for reforms is its means; the social revolution, its aim.” It is by fighting for reforms that address the immediate needs of our fellow workers that revolutionaries can win the confidence of our class and build our organizations.
Healthcare needs to be taken out of the hands of the market. Healthcare needs to be nationalized and run for the health of the people. The advancement of charter schools must be stopped and reversed. Secondary education, college, vocational school must all be run not for profit but for growth of society and the benefit of the students learning there. Medical debts and student debts must be canceled. Childcare must be run to support struggling parents and to nurture and educate young children. Each one of these is an immediate massive victory for the working class under capitalism. Simultaneously they speak to the inability of capitalism to fulfill the most basic needs that we have. They are transitional demands toward socialist revolution. We need to be cared for, we need to raise our children, we need to educate, learn, and grow.
Taken in the context of a general socialist program, these demands speak to the need for a revolutionary overturn of capitalist society and the inability of capitalism to provide for the basic needs of the working class. Nationalizing healthcare would not only prioritize the role that it plays in caring and healing the working class, it also would be a major stake to the heart of US capitalism. 20% of the economy would be wrenched from the hands of the bourgeoisie. Canceling student debt will free millions from some of the most insidious shackles that capitalism has created and requires a fundamental break with the normal functioning of finance capital. Nationalizing childcare further expands the horizon of what is on the table, it expands the revolutionary possibilities as it ensures that our children are raised in conditions that allow them to flourish while not forcing women to bear the sexist burden of being primarily child bearers, hidden away from public life.
The very nature of life, society, of any sort of human organization is to continue our species. To attempt to ensure a better standard of living for those that we raise and leave the earth to. Capitalism is fundamentally opposed to the highest realization of this. The working class needs to wrestle these concessions both to immediately improve our lives and to erect them as monuments for what humanity can do once the working class is in power. As we organize for revolution, CSWO commits to fighting for universal healthcare, childcare, and education. We will fight for and defend any reform that improves the living conditions of exploited and oppressed people under capitalism and, come the socialist revolution, we will end all oppression and exploitation forever.
Cincinnati Socialist Workers Organization 
2 thoughts on “Fighting For Our Future”