> Yoshie wrote:
>
> > Non-profit-making labor (unproductive labor in Marx's
> terminology) isn't
> > necessarily a drain on society. Some kinds of non-profit- making
> labor
> > (e.g, teaching in public schools) promote social welfare; other
> kinds
> > (e.g., soldiers making an unjust war) diminish it. Non-profit-
> making
> > labor can be a drain on profits, though: e.g., if US workers
> succeed in
> > transforming the US health care system into a single-payer
> universal
> > health care system, a lot of what has been done in the private
> sector for
> > profits either becomes unnecessary or gets transformed into
> > non-profit-making labor, depending on how the transformation is
> made.
> ------------------------------------------------
> But is it really the case, to take Yoshie's example, that single
> payer would be "unprofitable" - in systemic terms? For sure, it
> would reduce profits in the insurance industry and health
> administrators in these firms and their counterparts in the medical
> sector and large corporations would lose jobs, but wouldn't there
> be a net benefit to the private sector as a whole from the lower
> overhead costs of production if coverage for their workers was
> largely transferred to the public sphere?
I believe that the ruling class would rather not have a single-payer universal health care system and, if they have to have one at all, forced by the working class, they try to make it as meager as they can. Canada is a good example of countries that do have a single- payer universal health care system that the ruling class have underfunded and are threatening to privatize <http:// www.healthcoalition.ca/>. Attacks on the welfare state, from eduction to health care to old age pension, have been universal, only differing in degrees, depending on relative strengths of the ruling and working classes of countries.
The more populations age, the severer attacks on welfare states are likely to become. Having to pay for wages and benefits of current workers, and those of their children who are future workers, is bad enough in the capitalist eye. In the case of retirees, they are past any usefulness as workers to capitalists, but they need more health care and income support than younger generations. From the ruling class point of view, old people are better off dead.
Workers need to defend publicly funded pensions, health care, education, etc. because they need and want them and compel the ruling class to pay for them on workers' terms. The ruling class turn a deaf ear to workers who say to them that having such things is better for their bottom line than not having them at all.
Carrol wrote:
> And your reply also shows that Yoshie's attempt to finesse this
> problem of the "feeling" in words has failed. Profit-making vs Not
> Profit-making is subject to all the same verbal quibbles and
> misunderstandings as are Marx's terms
Workers need to see the world from two different perspectives: (know the enemy) to see the world from the capitalist point of view, for whom profit-making and not-profit-making kinds of labor are not at all the same thing, the former more necessary than the latter to them; and (know themselves) to see the world from their own utopian point of view, according to which the goodness, utility, beauty, etc. of what human beings do have nothing to do with profitability, and the less beings and things have to be measured by their utility, the more freedom they have, and the better off they are.
Yoshie Furuhashi <http://montages.blogspot.com> <http://monthlyreview.org> <http://mrzine.org>