[Marxism] Re: Andy Coates re recrudensce Schiavo etc.

[<hari.kumar@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi Andy:

You wrote:
"I pointed out that people have been rushing this week employ existing 
bourgeois law to protect themselves and their loved ones from state
intervention in their deaths by filling out health-care proxies and living 
wills.  Is this ultra-leftism?
"Any serious consideration of changing the reality of our present culture 
surrounding the end of life conjures up the crying need for social change of 
revolutionary proportions."  Is that silliness?
Thank you for taking the time to dismiss my essay."

REPLY:
Firstly - let me frankly apologise.
I did not even mean to hint at any dismissal of your essay, which I found 
interesting and useful.

Much less eloquently than yourself, I think I had said something fairly similar 
before at this list - on the same topic.
So - please accept my apology.

What I was moving onto - & I hope now, you can allow me to do that? -
Was an objection to the implication of the uselessness of any reforms in the 
system under Capital.
This was the simple point - perhaps naive point - that I tried to make.
Workers in the health care industry are often in a profound dilemma where the 
patient in front of them - is an individual - whose problems ultimately cannot 
be dealt with except by grappling with the NOW realities

I am sure you follow that - since this clear note was contained in your case 
histories. The fact that it was belied by the footnote tag - was unfortunate.

I linked my comment with Les's comment re IT - since that ALSO carried an 
implication that all was hopeless under capital.

Well - yes & no.
Yes - in the sense that as a M-ist I do believe that all will crumble in 
time... & will only be better under a socialist system...... if only we could 
build that movement to take advantage of the objective factors that are 
definitely on our side and accelerating at a rapid daily pace.
But, as your own case histories imply/show - you cannot say that looking a 
family in the eye as their black cerebral palsy child dies of peritonitis. Nor 
can I say it when looking at the eyes of parents whose baby with 
bronchopulmonary dysplasis cannot find a home help for airway care for delivery 
of oxygen due to poverty. Of what value are speeches at such junctures?

Both posts to which I replied - were linked with the implication in Guevera's 
tag-line - 'nothing possible under capital'.

This - my main objection is not in any way novel, & I suspect given the daily 
case histories that you battle with, result in views not dissimilar:
Namely that to say 'revolution will make the health care system meaningful' - 
is both everything and nothing.

Virchov - not only said: "Politics is Medicine writ large" - but practiced as a 
physician.
Guevera - did not practice much as I recall.
[I have not re-checked his bios].
W.Silverman, left neonatology because "it was useless saving a preterm baby, 
sending her home to Harlem, only to find her in the Emergency Room next week 
with her nose bitten off by a rat".
But Bill still ploughed on by creating the discipline of Evidence Based 
Neonatology.

Forgive me again for leaving you wiht the impression I did not appreciate your 
fine article - as well as the daily garppling with capitalist debris that it 
shows you engage in.

With Sincere Apology,
Hari K








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