On Jul 20, 2007, at 9:01 PM, Auguste Blanqui wrote:
> What do you think is holding them up? The head of Starbucks has
> also been
> making a lot of comments about how upset he is over his high employee
> premiums.
Doug wrote: I think it's a broader class interest in keeping American workers weak, scared, and dependent. Trying to find literal things like interlocking board memberships seems like vulgar Marxism (in the debased sense).
Doesn't even Doug's explanation presume a bit too much organised self-consciousness of the US ruling class? Isn't the point more that (in general) the reproduction of the US labour force doesn't currently demand the kind of significant state intervention people are talking about? Secondly, there's the lack of substantial mass pressure for any sort of universal state health scheme.
In my understanding the introduction of systems like the British NHS mostly had to do with the extremely poor shape of the post-war working class and the problems that posed for the rebuilding of European economies after 1945. Post-war social-democratic ideology and working class radicalism were very much secondary factors in the creation of schemes like the NHS which were from the start rather penny-pinching operations.