Good evening friends and colleagues at Vital Signs,

I am writing from Spain. I am a Resident Physician in Internal Medicine at a tertiary hospital in Spain. The reason for my email to you is to present, through some points, my position regarding the medical strikes that have been happening for the past few months.

I want to emphasize that my position is based on class consciousness (not caste) with internationalist principles; in short, a (materialist) class analysis of the medical strike in Spain. I would appreciate your comments and contributions regarding my point of view. A big hug, always fraternal, supportive, and internationalist.

MY POSITION ON THE NEW STRIKE

 This week another strike begins. It’s called by the same old players: unions that have long proven their function is not the victory of the working class, but the management of discontent so that nothing structural changes. I won’t attend. And it’s not due to lack of awareness of the problem — quite the opposite, that’s precisely why I’m not going — but due to an excess of class consciousness.

1. I won’t walk hand-in-hand with reformist unionism

CCOO, UGT, SMA, CESM, and the corporate medical unions have spent decades showing that their role is to mediate between capital and labor in order to stabilize exploitation. They call 24 or 48-hour strikes, knowing full well that:

• Minimum services guarantee the system doesn’t stop. “Negotiating pressure” is an empty ritual.
• The result will be, as always, some crumbs they’ll present as a “historic victory” while the pillars of the system (disguised 24-hour shifts, MIR precarity, division between categories) remain intact.

I won’t participate in that theater. A strike that is born conditioned by its own conveners isn’t a strike: it’s a mechanism for deactivating collective anger.

2. I won’t play into the hands of the right and far-right

Vox and the PP have openly positioned themselves in favor of this strike. Not because they care about public healthcare — which they’ve systematically cut and privatized — but because they’ve seen an opportunity to:

• Fish for votes among a discontented group with high symbolic mobilization capacity.
• Pit the medical collective against the Government, even though that same Government is just one face of the same capitalist system they defend.
• Use legitimate discontent to fuel their narrative of confrontation and their reactionary project.
• Any strike that has Vox and the PP as natural allies is a contaminated strike. Not because the conveners are fascists, but because their struggle, being exclusively corporate and isolated, can be easily co-opted by the right for their own ends. And that, for a conscious worker, is unacceptable.

3. Cheap political opportunism stinks from a mile away

When you see Vox and PP leaders posing with medical unionists, when you hear their speeches about “defending professionals against the ideological government,” it stinks. It stinks of partisan use of workers’ pain. Their goal isn’t to improve public healthcare, but to weaken the government to advance their agenda of cuts, centralization, and exclusion. And there are unions willing to play that game just to maintain their share of power.

4. So what to do?

Not joining this strike doesn’t mean folding your arms. It means:

• Explaining to colleagues why this strike won’t change anything.
• Building organization from below: assemblies in healthcare centers, real debates about our conditions, alliances with other healthcare workers (nurses, nursing assistants, orderlies) and with social movements defending public healthcare.
• Preparing the ground for when discontent erupts again — and it will — but this time without intermediaries, with an organization that can’t be co-opted by union bureaucracy or the right.

5. The context they hide: capitalist crisis and counter-revolution

To understand why these reformist struggles are a dead end, we have to look beyond the healthcare sector. Global capitalism is going through a structural crisis (overproduction, tendency of the rate of profit to fall, exhaustion of the long expansionary cycle). This isn’t just another recession: it’s the manifestation of the historical limits of the capitalist mode of production. The ruling class’s response across Europe is preventive counter-revolution: cutting rights, generalized precarity, strengthening the police state, and pushing the far right as a battering ram to break the last dikes of working-class resistance.

In this context, reformist and corporate “strikes” play a tragic role:

• There is and will be no revolutionary rupture from this perspective, because their leaders don’t even contemplate it.
• But there’s no revolutionary defeatism either: they don’t assume the only way out is direct confrontation with the system, and so their “defeats” (the crumbs they achieve) become lessons in powerlessness for the class: “strikes don’t work,” “better to negotiate,” “every man for himself.”

This combination is lethal. On one hand, they deactivate any possibility of working-class offensive at a time of crisis when capital is weakened but united. On the other, by not proposing a revolutionary alternative, they leave the class ideologically disarmed, paving the way for frustration to lead to individualism or, worse, to reactionary solutions (like supporting the far right that promises “order” and “privileges” for some). 

That’s why this strike is a double trap:

• For those who believe in it: it teaches them you can’t win, when in reality what can’t win is this way of fighting.
• For those who ignore it: if we don’t build an alternative, its failure becomes ours.

The only consistent response in this period of crisis and counter-revolution is twofold: 

a). Relentlessly point out the limits of these reformist struggles, showing they’re functional to the system they claim to fight.

b). Build revolutionary organization that, starting from concrete struggles, elevates them toward a horizon of rupture: the abolition of wage labor, workers’ control of production, healthcare as an unconditional right and not a commodity. 

6. Conclusion

I won’t join this strike because it’s not my strike. It’s the strike of reformist unionism that has brought us to where we are. It’s the strike applauded by the right that wants us precarious. It’s the strike that doesn’t unite all healthcare workers, but divides them. And it’s, above all, a strike that ignores the historical moment we live in: a moment where patches are no longer enough, where capitalism shows its cruelest face, and where the only way out is the revolutionary organization of the working class. 

I’ll keep fighting, but outside their theater. Building something that can truly be called workers’ power.