As Above, So Below...

It can't simply be coincidence that concurrent with the travails of the UK's National Health Service, so many otherwise great healthcare systems around the world are suffering similarly. Once held to be the very bedrock and a clear indicator of a civilised society, there seems to be a global decline in public health services. The cause is the elephant in the room that no-one seems ballsy enough to tackle head-on: capital. Capital: and its deification to the status of modern religious faith in recent decades, the allegedly inviolable markets and ultra-wealth-inequality characterised as somehow normal. Simple as. Think back to the 'bad old days' of decent labour representation, fairer wage structures, proper taxation, and yes, a health system that functioned beautifully and integrated well with social care.

What has caused this shift from the twentieth century into what now seems closer to the eighteenth for the vast majority of the population? Capital. But of course Marx and Engels pointed all of this out a very long time ago. OK, societies, politics and economics have changed radically since their original analyses were published, largely due to those analyses themselves; but we've seen in recent decades a retrenchment of gross inequality as the norm; less that of a medieval land-'owning' class structure than that of the simple accumulation of money itself by a global few. We are marching backwards rather than forwards and the future is looking increasingly like the past: and this now a global, rather than solely a first-world malaise. Proletarier aller Länder, vereinigt Euch! is as apt now as it was in 1848, and Marx wasn't a Communist, but an economic historian and philosopher who simply reflected the reality before him...