Doctors Saving Lives & Growing Potatoes in Russia

Yoshie Furuhashi furuhashi.1 at osu.edu
Mon Dec 18 20:02:18 PST 2000


Gar:


>Yoshie Furuhashi wrote:
>>
>> On this list, we've discussed the divisions of mental & manual labor,
>> intellectuals & manual laborers, "conception" & "execution,"
>> "pleasant work" & "shitwork," etc. Here's an article on post-Soviet
>> Russian doctors growing potatoes to survive while still trying to
>> practice medicine in the public sector. Russian doctors' salaries
>> are now so low that many of them also are compelled to extort
>> "bribes" from patients, making a mockery of still nominally "free"
>> health care. At the same time, some doctors have given up on public
>> medicine, opening private practices; a few of them have become rich
>> (relative to the rest of the population), but the populace are so
>> poor that probably most "private doctors" simply function as part of
>> the precarious "black market" in health care.
>
>
>> While some -- in an idealist & workerist fashion -- may argue for the
>> virtue of intellectuals like medical doctors becoming acquainted with
>> the "dignity of manual labor" via growing potatoes, etc., I think
>> that _a society that cannot support medicine as a profession_ under
>> the conditions of free health care, with medical supplies, equipment,
>> pharmaceuticals, etc. always ready at hand, is _a society in dire
>> straits_.
>
>True as far as it goes. Medical professionals should practice medicine.
>But there are quite a few other types work which save lives within the
>medical profession. Nurses, aides, medical technicians ("luxuries which
>capitalism is destroying in Russia) are every bit as essential as
>doctors. Our own U.S. health care system is destroying itself by a war
>on these profession.
>
>Now once these tasks are needed -- why confine training in surgery,
>advanace diagnostics etc. to an elite few? Why not allow any medical
>worker with the desire and capacity to be trained as doctors (and also
>train all doctors in one of the less pleasant jobs in medicine -- nurse,
>technician etc.?) I don't think this is idealism or workerism -- but
>simple fairness. Or perhaps it is horribly idealistic to consider that
>socialism would make an effort to be fairer than capitalism.

I think that medical doctors should be subjected to neither M-C-M' nor the workerist & idealist argument that they should grow potatoes, cut sugar canes, dig ditches, etc. so they learn the "dignity of manual labor." Medicine is in practice a good example of a combination of mental & manual labor.

Unfortunately, in actually existing for-profit medicine, the medical profession has been organized hierarchically: specialists; general practitioners; nurses; midwives; orderlies.

1. What might a socialist reorganization of health care labor look like? No division of labor at all? If there is any, of what kind?

2. Capitalism has, especially in recent years, increasingly proletarianized medical practitioners. While proletarianization has produced a promising trend of unionization of medical doctors, at the same time, proletarianized doctors & other medical workers have lost relative autonomy of "professionals," thus lowering the quality of medicine. One way of cutting costs & lowering the quality of care has been to employ under-trained workers to do the jobs of trained workers such as registered nurses. How do leftists respond to such capitalist reorganization of labor?

Yoshie



More information about the lbo-talk mailing list