By Richard Mellor in California
The assassination of a United Healthcare CEO, Brian Thompson, allegedly by Luigi Mangione, a 26-year Ivy League graduate from Maryland, has opened up a barrage of complaints about the state of US health care, without doubt the worst of the advanced capitalist countries. There are many articles about this on this blog. I often refer to the US health care system as the Sickness Industrial Complex.
Mangione was arrested in a McDonald’s after a customer recognized him from the photos and called police.
Most people, and most workers hate corporate bosses, but would not approve of dealing with the health care crisis or any other serious crisis of the so-called free market by assassinating parasites like Thomson. But there will be few tears shed for a health care corporation CEO or any other insurance company executive. In response to Mangione’s arrest, the restaurant received a barrage of negative reviews on Yelp, rats in the kitchen, and so forth.
The hatred for the rich in US society runs deep and the doctor in the video (below) gives some reasons why. But he never mentions the capitalist system. He points out that five Republicans on the Supreme Court passed a law allowing corporations to bribe politicians, but that’s nonsense.
They have a profession here in the US called a lobbyist. These lobbyists spend their lives bribing politicians; it’s in their job description. Many lobbyists are former members of Congress themselves, whose knowledge of how the corrupt system works is the perfect qualification for a bribery job after retirement.
Medical costs are the leading cause of bankruptcy in the USA
One of the reasons Americans kill each other at the rate we do is the stress, despair, insecurity and fear we have of homelessness, and particularly becoming sick as medical care or costs is the leading cause of bankruptcy. This compounded by the dominant ideology in capitalist society that you are in control of your own destiny and the self-blame that results from it when the system crushes you.
You can lose your home, your life’s savings, or your small business due to the poor health care system. People are overwhelmed with just surviving and it’s not just poor people but middle class people as well; they want to keep us in a permanent state of fear and apprehension here. And we are never free of them picking our pockets, “nickel and diming”, us as we say, day in and day out.
The ads on television for prescription drugs are relentless. There are pills and all sorts of medicine for diseases or more often than not what they call, ‘syndromes’ with multiple acronyms, most I’ve never heard of. The ads always end with, “Call you doctor and ask if….(the drug they’re selling…) is right for you”. This is illegal in other advanced capitalist countries. They create the need, they have the cure. This is capitalism at its best.
A doctor friend of mine told me a patient asked her about an ailment she’d never heard of. The patient told her she’d heard about it on TV. They dress someone up in a white coat with a stethoscope around their neck in order to influence the customer and a sick person in the US is a customer, not a patient. We are still living in a nation of snake-oil salesmen.
We have to change the system and dominant ideology
The doctor in the video shares valuable information about this barbaric health care system, but never raises the cause. The idea that we live in a system is rarely mentioned. All we need is to elect someone with integrity, a “good” person, a “Christian” or at very least a believer. As the election of Trump shows: a sexual deviant, racist and habitual felon is far more acceptable at the helm than an atheist.
The system is never mentioned because the conclusion of that line of thinking is that we have to change the system and the dominant ideology of any system is the ideology of the class that governs, for them, there is no other way; the system they govern is the best there is. The US mass media refers to the existence of a social system when they want to point to Soviet totalitarianism (Stalinism) and inform us that communism or socialism failed. Other than that, your poverty is your fault. Only “crony capitalism” fails, not real capitalism.
Eugene Debs the great US socialist and trade union leader said that, “I would not be a Moses to lead you in to the promised Land because if I could lead you in to it, someone else could lead you out of it.”
It is only the working class, the wage worker, who can change the system and who can build a society, a system based on the production of human needs in harmony with nature rather that at war with it. For this we have to rely on our own strength, our own organisations, our own political party. No other source can save us.
Because there is no such mass force at the present time, people turn to all sorts of charlatans and con men. Trump is an example of this. If the left and mass organisations of the working class won’t fill this vacuum, then the right will. The so-called strong man will save us. For millions of others they sink in to despair, are attracted to cults, religious salvation, drug addiction, alcoholism and so forth. Most of our problems, including racism, and other forms of oppression are systematic in nature, just like wars. Capitalism is a system based on war.
The method of struggle of the working class is mass action
The doctor above talks of government, or what we call the state and that the “Founding Fathers” believed the role of their state or government was to ensure “Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness”. They did indeed, but they were talking about their people, their class as capitalists, with their world view, their concept of society: a free market capitalist system where the central goal is profits. And the role of their government and the government we have today is to defend that profit system, a system where a few get rich at the expense of the many. It is an oppressive, violent system; the whole history of capitalism and the US shows this.
One can sympathize with the actions of an individual and what causes them, while opposing such methods. The method of struggle of the working class is clearly not individual assassination, or acts of individual terrorism. We have won what we have through mass direct action movements, international working class solidarity and the formation of political parties. Mass strikes, occupations, general strikes and popular insurrections are the methods of the working class.
If assassinating a political figure could lead to a transformation of society in the direction I suggest, it would be worth it, but it would not. The ruling class simply replaces one despot or representative of their rule with another. Individual acts of violence are substitutions for the conscious intervention and mass action of the working class in the struggle to change society.
Luigi Mangione is from an upper middle class or bourgeois family. He does not grasp the potential power of the working class or understand the working class as a worker does. We now know he had serious medical issues, horribly painful experiences and dealing with the Sickness Industrial Complex, and likely with arrogant doctors, must have driven him mad at times. We don’t know the all of it, but we know what he must have gone through over the years. His action may well have simply been revenge, we don’t know for sure. But it won’t change the root cause of a barbaric health care system like we have in the US.
And it’s highly unlikely Luigi Mangione will receive the same praise awarded Kyle Rittenhouse [see Wikimedia note here] as Mangione shot one of theirs.
This is republished from the US socialist website, Facts for Working People, and the original can be found here.
