On Sat, 10 May 2008, Doug Henwood wrote:
> Hey, things can't happen overnight! But if more people could be
> persuaded that this was a fruitful strategy, instead of obsessing over
> presidential campaigns, it might help. And single-payer is only one
> example; Working Families did a good job in New York on raising the
> state minimum wage and weakening the Rockefeller drug laws. The
> foreclosure crisis is another fruitful possibility.
Yes and no. All those things are good and props to everyone who does them. But multiplication of local activism does not lead by itself to a national movement. This is precisely this threshold we've been stuck on for thirty years. since the 1970s. How to build a national movement is a goal and a problem in itself. It wouldn't subsume all that local activity and it won't grow of itself out if it. It would be something people would do in addition to their local work, and the two would mix in them, each giving meaning to the other. And all we have now for that is political party politics.
And secondly there are the issues. There are millions of good reasons to organize locally, or on the state level, or nationally. But single-payer IMHO is uniquely suited to building a national movement on. It's what you might call a concrete vision: a simple answer to the question What is to be done that it includes why it would work and how it would make your life better. And which contains within its concrete the deeper principles we want to advance: that collective action, organized through government, is the way to solve our most important individual material problems. And that there's a different way to think about the world that makes this both obvious and possible.
It's the left version of tax cuts and smaller government: easy to put in a nutshell, infinitely possible to expand on.
Another thing that uniquely suits it to be the sand in the pearl is that it's an aim that can only be accomplished ationally. You can't have single payer in one state anymore than you can have socialism in one state.
And then thirdly, there's the fact that the only way to accomplish this is through a massive intervention in the economy by the state that takes on, and subdues, a massive wing of capital, namely the insurance companies. So people will learn the deep underpinnings of the system simply by following the evolutionary path of learning of trying to get this one thing they feel they need and deserve -- once they feel everyone else feels that way too.
Michael
Michael