Friends from France have written a detailed paper on the question – read it <a href="https://mouvement-communiste.com/documents/MC/Booklets/BR6_Sant%C3%A9%20_EN_vF%20Site.pdf">here</a>.
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Debate on the current character of hospitals and their restructuring

This article will appear shortly in the print-version of Vital Signs Mag Issue no.2 &#8211; we distribute 1,000 copies to fellow workers at Southmead hospital and the Bristol Royal Infirmary. We pay for the print costs ourselves &#8211; if you want to support us you can donate <a href="https://www.angryworkers.org/contact/">here</a>.
The subtitle of this magazine is ‘The struggle for a new society’. What exactly do we mean by that? As someone once said when they had a bright moment: “It is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism”. We all can imagine that the war in Ukraine or Gaza spills over, that a climate-change induced flood or storm will erase our homes or that the next financial crash may wipe out our pensions. Or perhaps Elon Musk&#8217;s space-rocket won’t make it to Mars, but crashes on Southmead parking lot when you come off of a night-shift…
For as long as people have been exploited or oppressed, there have been visions of utopias of a better, just and equal society. Some of them have been wacky, for sure &#8211; paradise, the promised land, through to space colonies &#8211; but they were not entirely disconnected from reality.
Since society has become more connected through industry and global markets, these utopias have taken on more concrete shapes. Now, we don’t work alone in a field, but in a coordinated fashion together with other workers while the products of our labour are taken away from us by the rich. Now, we don’t go hungry because bad weather caused a bad harvest, but a series of man-made modern crises. We live in an absurd situation where crisis and social misery is caused by overproduction, not underproduction: companies cannot sell their stuff profitably, they close down, unemployment increases, wages drop, the poor fight over scraps and the rich start wars over remaining markets.
Under these conditions it didn’t take workers long to come up with ideas for social alternatives. Why make some people rich with our collective labour? Workers imagined running society in cooperatives or councils, where all relevant decisions on what and how to produce are made together and the product is shared equally without the arbitrary mediation of money and markets. They fought for a classless equal society that uses humanity’s social time and natural resources consciously and in the best interest of all. If we all work equally, if we abolish socially useless jobs and use technology in the interest of all, we would have to work much less and would have more time for learning, friendships and enjoyment. If there is no division into rich and poor &#8211; and into rich and poor nations &#8211; then the main reasons for violence and war are abolished. Hierarchies between men and women and between people with different skin colours that are used to divide our class can finally be overcome.
This utopia of the modern working class was not just ‘a nice idea’, it was a rational way out of the social nightmare of 20th century capitalism that produced deep and global economic slumps, resulting in world wars that killed millions of people.
These visions for a new society that used to be shared by millions and created a brother and sisterhood of workers around the globe have not disappeared, but they have become marginalised. Why? The reasons for wanting a new society have not disappeared; they have become more acute, what with the climate crisis, economic crunch and wars. We can describe two main reasons why the hope for a conscious classless society has been weakened.
First, so far the efforts to put these ideas into practice failed. Workers created councils that ran society in Paris, 1871, Russia and other countries 1917-21, Shanghai 1927, or Spain 1936. But as these efforts remained geographically isolated they could either be defeated militarily or &#8211; also in response to the external threat &#8211; created structures that reintroduced a new class of rulers, such as the so-called Communist Parties in the Soviet Union or China. The latter have given the idea of communism a bad name for generations, a tragedy we still live with. Another way to suppress the struggle for a new society is by trying to use the means of the current system to get there. Parties like Labour or the SPD in Germany tried to use parliament and the current state to bring about socialism, but ended up killing workers’ self-activity and spirit. In the end these parties joined the game of divide-and-rule of the current ruling class.
Secondly, social production has become much more complex and global. It is much more difficult to imagine that grassroots workers’ councils can take over the means of production and run them, when most of the stuff we need at work comes from far away &#8211; just look at PPE, disposables or medication in our hospitals. At the same time we now have the means that previous generations of workers have lacked in order to communicate, coordinate and share knowledge without relying on the ruling elite. While currently computers and the internet are used to speed-up financial speculation, to plan high-tech military operations and to stupify and isolate the poor, we could make much better use of them by consciously, collectively and effectively planning our social lives. Workers are currently trying to find ways to change their industries. For example, groups oil workers in Scotland discuss a ‘green transition’ under workers’ control. Or ex-GKN automobile workers in Italy occupy their factory and build links to engineering students and movements for free public transport &#8211; in order to produce green busses or cargo bikes rather than polluting passenger vehicles in future. New communites emerge within these struggles.
People are forced to think about a new and better form of society again. This happens in all sorts of forms. Just check out <a href="https://en.labournet.tv/alternative-capitalism-labour-time-calculation">this video</a> by friends who seriously think about how to re-organise production on a large scale!
But what are steps towards a new society? What role can we, as 1.4 million workers in the NHS, play when it comes to learning how to organise work and social life in an egalitarian and equal way? How can we prepare ourselves for the struggle that will be necessary to take the means of production (power plants, factories, railways etc.) away from those who profit from them now?
Send us your ideas and read more about it in Vital Signs issue no.3!

What do we mean by ‘a new society’?

By Dr Julia Grace Patterson
The book is easy to read, also thanks to personal anecdotes from the times when the author still worked for the NHS. It provides some interesting general information, which I will summarise in this review. I found the perspective of how to fight against the deteriorating conditions in the NHS slightly limited: the book primarily suggests that we should inform the public about how bad things are, make alliances with friendly MPs, start petitions and so on. Privatisation is singled out as the main problem, but the internal issues within the NHS remain largely unmentioned, e.g. the repressive hierarchy which forces most of the staff to just repeat the same tasks over and over again.
Perhaps the book is written mainly for ‘the public’, which explains why it sometimes uses pretty scandalising language, such as ‘the NHS is close to collapse’. As NHS workers we know that the NHS is not collapsing, but that both our and our patients’ conditions are deteriorating, and that it will largely depend on day-to-day struggles, instead of some holy reform from above to improve things for us. The day-to-day struggle at work is unfortunately missing from ‘Critical’ and the focus is on the campaigns of organisations such as ‘Every Doctor’, an organisation that the author co-founded. Still, the book is an important contribution to the general discussion.
In the near future ‘Vital Signs’ will interview <a href="https://www.vdaeae.de/">a doctors’ organisation from Germany</a> which has existed since the 1980s. This organisation attacks the austerity measures and health ‘reforms’ of the government, but also criticises certain aspects of the medical apparatus itself which are to the detriment of working class patients. We have just finished interviewing a junior doctor about recent strikes. Both will be featured on the Vital Signs website.
The scenario
As mentioned above, the author manages to draw an alarming picture of the situation of the NHS by using useful statistical data, e.g. that between 2008/9 and 2020 32,000 overnight hospital beds were cut; that according to the ‘Crowding and its consequences’-study by the Royal College of Emergency Medicine, 4,519 people died in England in 2020/21 due to ‘less than ideal care while delayed in A&amp;E’. Still, we also read that today there are ten times more doctors employed than in 1948, when the NHS was founded. We see an increase in spending for the NHS &#8211; or at least for certain sectors within the NHS! &#8211; while also witnessing pretty substantial austerity measures, such as the introduction of Universal Credit or the two-child benefit cap. What makes more of an impact on working class peoples’ health &#8211; the taking away of social safety nets or the spending on expert medicine? We raise this question not in order to tell what politicians should spend money on &#8211; we defend both the access to better medical provisions and welfare &#8211; but to understand the seemingly contradictory strategy of the state.
The origins of the NHS
The author portrays the origins of the NHS as both ‘patriotic’ in terms of being part of the national identity, and ‘socialist’ in principle. “It was the shared experience of the war itself &#8211; the cohesion, the mutual dependency, the horror and the national trauma &#8211; that eventually propelled the NHS into being”. We could question this and add that the experience of large-scale post-war discontent both after World War I and World War II forced the state to provide a basic health insurance in order to prevent a more general movement for socialism. At the same time the NHS also centralised a lot of the command over the health system in the hands of the state &#8211; taking it away from numerous smaller clinics which had been funded and run by mutual associations organised by workers in working class towns. While workers’ control diminished, the government made sure that doctors were allowed to keep their privileges, e.g. to have private clients on the side. You can read more on the origins of the NHS in <a href="https://pmpress.org.uk/product/sick-of-it-all-work-inquiry-struggle-in-the-nhs/">‘Sick Of It All’</a>.
The reasons for the crisis
The main reasons for the crisis of the NHS is seen in the decisions by politicians who fail to adhere to the original principles of the NHS. But why are they making these decisions? The author claims that “the most obvious place to start is the politicians’ personal political ideologies.” She focuses then on individual politicians who pushed for NHS reforms and who often had an economic self-interest in doing so, e.g. Matt Hancock’s family who owns 20% of a private health company that secured NHS contracts or the 28 Tory MPs who have links to private health groups. While these individual ideologies and interests play a role, they cannot explain the general trend of a system. With the whole system in crisis the state tries to reduce the costs to reproduce the working class &#8211; and each government, regardless of their ideological position, finds itself driven to do the same thing. This doesn’t mean that there is no use in struggling against austerity cuts, the opposite is true. But we have to do it as a wider effort that defends general human needs against not only those people who want to make profits, but also those who promote GDP growth, a reduction in state debt or the maintenance of bureaucratic state structures.
The restructuring
The book provides many examples about how the NHS has changed and what drove these changes. In the 1980s the marketisation started and with the private financing initiative (PFI) system under Blair &#8211; a system that pushed to build hospitals with private investors and developers &#8211; things accelerated. There have been investments of 12.8 billion under PFI schemes into the NHS. According to the Guardian, the NHS had to pay 2.3 billion on legacy charges for these PFI investments in 2022, out of which £1 billion was to pay for maintenance of buildings and £457 million in interest payments. This is interesting for us in Bristol, as Southmead hospital was one of the prime PFI schemes. We should look closer at the actual accounts in future. The Royal London Hospital, for example, has to pay £116 million every year to the private PFI developer, which is 7.66% of the trusts annual income.
The author states: “The NHS trusts affected have become the worst victims of the NHS reforms”. There is a problem with this view, as it puts the trusts’ management and upper hierarchy in the same boat together with the workers and patients. We can be sure that the PFI companies keep the upper-level of the hierarchy sweet. There is a close link between upper-NHS hierarchy and private management, greased through £400 million that the NHS paid on private consultancy companies in 2021. For example, Simon Stevens, the former NHS head, previously worked for the United Health Group, a major US multi-national health corporation. You will find similar overlaps with a lot of the people who form the upper-level of trust management.
Another interesting aspect the author looks at are the volunteers. During Covid, 750,000 volunteers signed up &#8211; Sajid Javid called them the ‘NHS reservists’. Volunteers take over more and more positions that used to be paid jobs. Similarly, a lot of health services are now run by so-called charities, with close links to the private sector. For example, ‘NHS Charities Together’ claims that it “wants to build meaningful relationships with corporate partners”. Another big open door for cooperation with the private sector is data, as around 13% of NHS data actually goes to private firms which use it commercially. Still, the growth of private sector health care is a hype. As the author exemplifies, the NHS employs 159,100 doctors, in contrast to the private health companies’ 860. Here it would be interesting to see how many NHS doctors work for the private sector on temporary or short-contract basis &#8211; that number will most likely be way higher than the actually ‘employed’ 860.
The forms of resistance
The author helped set up the organisation EveryDoctor. In particular during Covid the organisation managed to create a network of doctors who communicated with each other and discussed the development of the pandemic: “The EveryDoctor community, rapidly growing at this point, pulled together in the face of the crisis. The information sharing and collective support between doctors was fast-flowing.” It would be good to know how that happened and how communication and decision-making was organised. In the book we then mainly read about the demands for better PPE for health workers &#8211; which is of course of major significance. We get to know little about the fact whether the actual medical and quarantine decisions of the government were debated and alternative proposals developed. This would have been an important step; to develop an alternative medical proposition in the interest of the general working class, rather than the ‘national interest’. But even if we had such an alternative proposition there would still be the issue of enforcing it against the power and economic self-interest of the state. Here it seems EveryDoctor sought its allies amongst ‘progressive MPs’, rather than the wider NHS and health sector workforce.
The network’s tasks are described as “hold the government to account”, “demonstrate to the public”, “raise public awareness”. “With the help of a large number of MPs from various political parties we were pivotal in securing some policy changes…” The network organised weekly parliamentary briefings with up to 40 MPs present and helped to construct questions for Prime Minister’s Questions. During the EveryDoctor campaign against Health and Care Bill 2021, 12,000 people wrote to MPs within a couple of days. Here we can see that a grassroots initiative can have influence, in particular when those who are supposed to represent and lead us are utterly clueless and seek both expert knowledge and a legitimate and respectable partner, such as doctors. But the problem lies deeper, as the author herself says when concluding her experiences with politicians: “If we can’t trust what the politicians are saying (&#8230;) where does that leave us?” Therefore it is surprising that the current campaign of Every Doctor addresses the politicians again. From their website: “We are hoping to launch a huge new campaign, to write a &#8220;manifesto for the NHS&#8221; and push the new [Labour] government into action, but we need your help to get the project off the ground! We&#8217;re launching a crowdfund in a little while…”. At the same time <a href="https://morningstaronline.co.uk/article/campaigners-outraged-over-government-refusal-reveal-ppe-contracts">other campaigners</a> currently criticise that ‘the new government’ helps cover up the corruption of the old government!
Where next?
We need to turn our hope away from the political caste, towards ourselves as health workers and as the wider working class in need of health care. This would mean that we also address the divisions that exist within the NHS workforce. What is the actual relationship between doctors, nurses and health support workers? Why was it that first the nurses went on strike alone and then the doctors? How can health workers and patients defend free health care together?
‘Critical’ provides us with good material for discussion, which we can use to engage in a series of interviews with doctors and other health workers both within the NHS, but also within private companies. Nowadays the fight for free access to care and for an increase in workers’ control has to be conducted in particular at those points where ‘public’ and ‘private’ health workers meet and cooperate. And we need forms of struggle that create actual economic pressure on the state, such as the recent struggles of <a href="https://www.vitalsignsmag.org/posts/learning-from-health-workers-in-argentina-on-the-current-rebellion-in-neuquen">health workers in Argentina</a>. If you want to share your experience of working in health, please get in touch.

Book review: Critical – Why the NHS is being betrayed and how we can fight for it

There are good reasons why we need more workers’ and patients’ control over the health system. The pandemic was a prime example. We were able to see how disorganised the system is and how different players just followed their own interests. The national governments are pretty detached from the wider world of hospitals and labs. These same national governments are often in competition with each other, which is fatal if you have to react to global problems such as pandemics or climate change. The big private corporations that produce vaccines or PPE are also scattered, each just following their own goals. There were good people in medical science who had a critical view on the government plans, but they were powerless when it came to practical application and separate from the daily experiences on the wards. Hospitals didn’t coordinate effectively with the community and care homes, which was fatal in hundreds of cases. As part of the working class we, as health workers, were not united and conscious enough to provide society with an alternative pandemic plan. This will be our responsibility in the future.  
We need more effective control. But this is easier said than done, because we are boxed into our separate professional groups and departments. Medical knowledge is not just unevenly distributed – it is often monopolised by elitist science and corporate patents. The health sector mirrors the problems of society at large. Some workers are caged into complex and specialist knowledge and run the risk of becoming blind to the wider context of their work, let’s say brain surgeons. The large majority of workers are caged into repetitive jobs where you hardly learn anything new. The potential creativity and productivity of billions of people is completely wasted for society!
We are not brain surgeons; we are modestly skilled hospital workers, but with this series we’ll try to understand the development of two main sectors better. We work in local Bristol hospitals, but at the same time our work is closely intertwined with the global pharmaceutical industry and the device and implant industry. These industries connect the local, supposedly ‘public’ hospitals to the circuits of global development and money streams. For example, nearly one sixth of all annual hospital expenses, from wages to buildings, go straight to the pharmaceutical industry. In the case of one of the local hospitals that’s £150 million a year. Some of the private companies hire operation theatres and NHS staff for elective surgeries on weekends – at the Bristol Eye Hospital porters can make three times as much money on a ‘private’ shift compared to a regular shift. Some of the training for scrub nurses is provided by reps of global instrument manufacturers. Most NHS IT systems are run by global corporations, such as ATOS. The connections are endless.
There is a lot of journalistic material about these multi-billion industries, but journalism itself is a private industry and relies on ‘scandals’. And it is easy to find scandals in these industries, from hip implants that give people psychotic episodes due to cobalt poisoning, to the suffering of thousands of women who were given vaginal mesh implants or fallopian tube coils that had never been properly tested. It is important to hold the big corporations to account, but we also have to understand them from within, by reaching out to lab workers, surgeons, and science workers who have more insights than the journalist who looks for a good story. Yes, global medical corporations follow their own profit interest, but within these companies workers generate actual new knowledge. Most of them will get frustrated by the way that market goals limit the development of better medical technology. In academia as well, competition amongst medical researchers (which individual or which institution publishes more papers, gets more funding, etc.) prevents supportive cooperation and the development of a global human knowledge. We have to work together to break this human potential out of the tight shell of the corporate or academic boundaries. We need a counter-science where critical scientists, doctors, nurses, patients analyse new treatments together. We can see this slowly developing in other sectors, too, for example when tech workers at Google or Amazon start criticising the military or state surveillance use of their products or the impact on the climate. In some cases they link up with lesser skilled workers in the warehouses, which could give their critique a more powerful base.
Our class, the working class, has produced an enormous wealth of medical knowledge and resources within the boundaries of the market and particularly during times of social change the working class movement has also managed to popularise more of that knowledge. In India in the 1970s and 1980s doctors left the elite hospitals in the major cities and travelled amongst the rural villages, helping to build peoples’ hospitals. In Italy in the 1970s a movement and psychiatrists and mental health patients questioned the repressive asylums and developed alternative ways to deal with psychological problems. In the 1970s midwives and mothers started to develop a new knowledge on birthing that was focused on the mother and the baby, not the medical vanity of the doctor. In Germany a movement of<a href="http://vdää* - Verein demokratischer Arzt*innen (vdaeae.de)"> critical doctors</a> and health workers organised inquiries amongst chemical and other industrial workers, about hazardous substances and unhealthy working conditions &#8211; and they are still going strong.  We can stand on the shoulders of previous generations of our class. 
In the upcoming issues we will make first baby steps towards an understanding of these two main industries – the pharma industry and the medical devices and implants industry within surgery. Our focus will be on questions such as: How is knowledge and technology developed? What are factors that facilitate and what are factors that hinder this development? What role does the market, competition, tight budgets, corporate goals play in all this? How does the hierarchical division of labour impact on knowledge development? How can alternative forms of equal cooperation emerge? We would like to speak to surgeons, lab technicians, pharmacists about their views and experiences. Feel free to get in touch!

Debate on the current character of hospitals and their restructuring

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What do we mean by ‘a new society’?

Book review: Critical – Why the NHS is being betrayed and how we can fight for it

Issue no.1 – For workers’ and patients’ control of the health industry