Democratise or Perish: The Health Sciences as a Path for Social Change

Abstract

In this essay, focusing on the production of health care, I hope to show that new kinds of production can't operate efficiently without creating new social relationships - and therefore new kinds of people - ultimately inimical to capitalist society, yet essential to its continued expansion. These new people will be a new and much more powerful army of gravediggers for the old society, but more importantly, they will be more imaginative and better informed builders of a new society. They will show that there is a feasible alternative, working better in every way than the old. They will bring huge reinforcements to an old labour movement which has not in fact disappeared, adding immense new power - the advent of truly scientific socialists, able to deal confidently with the world as it actually is, without recourse to romance.