Universal healthcare is a means to an end, the end being health justice. Health justice means autonomy of bodies and selves, the well-being of communities and families, the prosperity and flourishing of our persons in bodily and psychological form.
But such a thing flies in the face of and is legitimately contrasted to capitalism and its wings. Consumer capitalism needs to exploit the earth, and the result of this is catastrophic damage to the planet (and more on this in another blog). It needs to disrupt working communities through brutal policing, incarcerations, deportations, and gentrification. And it needs standing armies, both state and private, to occupy lands so that it can continue to extrapolate human and environmental resources.
This is where empire comes in. Empire is the full-force violence of the capitalist state in colonial mode. Occupations, deposing rulers and supporting coups, enforcing no-fly zones (in which a country’s airfield is occupied by another), military and paramilitary actions: all of these exist to perpetuate colonialism in all of its forms and trappings. Which is to say, they exist to perpetuate racist capitalism (which is to say capitalism, because all capitalism is racially unjust, including in its so-called diverse and multicultural manifestations, which are just Racist Capitalism with a black or brown face).
As such, the military needs to die so that we may live.
But the liberal Democratic Party Senators who are supposed to be on the side of people of color has overwhelmingly voted to approve an $80 billion increase in military spending. This increase, it’s been pointed out, is larger than the one President Horny4Troops asked for. It would also, if redirected, cover the cost of free public college with enough left over to help eliminate college debt. Among the Sea of Yays were are a few exceptions including a handful of Democrats and independent caucuse-r Bernie Sanders. However, several of those who signed on to Sanders’ Medicare for All bill also unwaveringly signed on for this bill. Those who opted for both include would-be presidential contenders Kamala Harris and Corey Booker, of the Multicultural Neoliberal wing of the Democratic Party.
The shilling for both a heightened imperialist army and universalized medical coverage by so many high-profile Democrats indicates that both options are relatively popular and that, as mainstream liberal Americans understand the terms, they don’t apparently contradict each other. Indeed, history demonstrates it is easier to hold up liberties of a limited group by oppressing outsiders. It is a way of having cake and eating it too.
Of course, a powerful argument against military spending is lack of resources for other public needs, including those of healthcare and public education. Another is how military service is seen as a vanguard to rights — such as housing, healthcare, citizenship, and higher education — that are often inaccessible to the Working Class and especially people of color. Thus, military service positions itself as the primary means to obtaining the very rights that should be universalized. The fact that these rights aren’t universal rests in the fact that the army needs to monopolize them in order for itself to be a preferable option of the poor. The main argument should probably be, however, that militaries exist to kill and their targets disproportionately lay in the intersection of people of color and poor people. Few people in the world deserve to be murdered, much less the women and children most often taken out by us.
But we must dig even deeper than even these criticisms to get at the heart of these contradictions. For how can one want to heal with one hand and harm with the other?
As Lenin said in Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism:
We stand for a revolutionary struggle against imperialism, i.e., capitalism. Imperialism consists in a striving of nations to extend and increase that oppression and to repartition the colonies…
That is why the question of self-determination of nations today hinges on the conduct of socialists of the oppressor nations (Britain, France… Russia, the United States of America, etc.). The socialist who does not recognize and does not struggle for the right of oppressed nations to self-determination… is in reality a chauvinist, not a socialist.
I’m not going to argue that Kamala Harris and anyone fighting for healthcare-for-us-but-war-for-them is a chauvinist. Because repetitive arguments are boring. But we got a lot of people who don’t believe in internationalism. Hoping for relevant socialism without a concrete analysis of how US nationalism is strictly imperialist and thus murderous dooms us. Because capitalists and other exploiters will always square insiders against outsiders where there is no solidarity. How can there be commonality if we do not allow for self-determination? How can we demonstrate team-work if we are complicit in bombing their mothers and children and overthrowing their elected governments?
Many liberals have moralized (and rightly so) against the xenophobic and Islamophobic Right for its refusal to take in refugees. Erase the fact that the US under Obama also had an extreme bottleneck approach for the few refugees it takes in and that he was called the Deporter-in-Chief for his then-record deportations (it’s clear the distinction between the parties is one of degree variance). Leaving that aside, the worst crime is not that we refuse to take in refugees but that the US government bipartisanly creates the conditions that push people out of their homelands. That we can temporarily ignore the cost of building an empire is secondary to the fact that we outsource the cost in the first place — that others pay for our desires.
However, in the long haul, the costs are produced in us, in the workers of the US along with the workers of the world. And the only solution is to unite and lock arms against Imperialist Arms that we fund and implicitly support. Let’s rid them of their supply chains in our communities, for we are not their pawns.
