Part 2 – Bourgeois Health & Education Factories
More recent examples can be seen of this. In the 1930's, in the USSR, the major hindrance to increased production arose, because new, more technological machines, that were capable of much greater levels of output, had to be slowed down, because the workers who had to use them, having been recruited recently from the peasantry, lacked the education and training to use them.
Frequently, that led to the machines actually being broken due to misuse. The USSR, poured resources into educating and training these workers with a massive corresponding rise in productivity. In a speech in the US a couple of years ago, Alan Greenspan told Congress that US education was failing.
He didn't think it was failing because it wasn't providing a decent education to all US citizens, but essentially because it wasn't producing enough of the right kinds of workers. Highly skilled, and educated workers had over the last thirty years, seen their incomes rise significantly, whilst the ordinary unskilled workers had seen their wages at best stagnate, or even fall. Of course, Greenspan wasn't particularly, concerned about the latter, other than the consequences it might have for social stability. On the contrary, his main concern was about the former. Given that the US will be only able to compete globally by developing its advantage in high value added production, the high wages of workers in that sector are a problem. The solution for Capital is to increase the number of more highly educated, and skilled workers, to increase the supply, and, therefore, reduce the wages of such workers. A similar drive is behind the need for UK Capital to encourage more working-class kids to go to university or higher education, and hence New Labour's policy of 50% entrance into Higher Education. Of course, just as it did with lower levels of education, it wants the workers to pay themselves for making them more productive instruments of capitalist production.
And, for the same reasons, especially as the use of contraception by the working-class has prevented the normal increase in the supply of workers that capital could previously count on as a natural stabilising mechanism over wages, capital needed to ensure that the workers on which it had spent time and money educating and training, were actually healthy enough, and lived long enough, to ensure that their was the maximum return on that investment. Given also, that the amount of constant capital that these workers now set in motion was massive, capital could not afford disruptions to its production process as a result of the human components of the process being faulty or absent. A few years ago, I heard that explained quite clearly. Someone I was talking to, told me he was a Transport Manager for TESCO. He had been provided with membership of BUPA. As a member of the Labour Party, and a Councillor, he told me he had asked if he could refuse to accept it. No he was told, and the reason he was given was exactly that stated above. You are in a high paid, job, we have invested in you, and we want to ensure you are not away from work due to ill-health for any time longer than necessary.
In fact, as I've described previously some socialists have explained why, in fact, the bourgeois healthcare provided by the NHS, which treats it as a commodity sold to workers, paid for via a compulsory deduction from their wages, might even be contrary to workers health needs. The oversubscribing of anti-depressants, and antibiotics, would seem to confirm that view, as does the emphasis placed on secondary healthcare – the building of expensive hospitals, the carrying out of expensive surgical procedures etc – rather than on primary care, or even on dealing with those factors within capitalism most responsible for causing workers ill-health, also seems to back that up. Time after time studies have shown that whether it is in education or in healthcare, the largest improvement has resulted from better living conditions, and conversely, where living conditions remain poor, workers continue to die young, to suffer ill-health, and any natural intellectual advantage they might have as infants, is lost by the time they are just seven years old, as against less intelligent kids from more affluent backgrounds. Yet, in the 60 years of its existence the Welfare State has done nothing to challenge, less still to fundamentally change, those basic underlying causes of ill-health, or poor educational attainment. It has merely performed the function that capital assigns to it, to provide the necessary supply of workers, suitably educated, trained, and socialised, and able to work for capital for a sufficient duration to maximise its investment in them.
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