A-Infos (en) Bruxel, UCL - Take over the hospitals! ...but how? (ca, de, fr, it, pt, tr)[machine translation]

Here we translate an article, "Seize the Hospitals!" ...But How?", 
published on the website of Black Rose / Rosa Negra (BRRN), our sister 
organization in the United States. -In May 2023, several Black Rose/Rosa 
Negra (BRRN) activists working in the healthcare sector participated in 
the Health Autonomy Convergence (HAC) in Durham, North Carolina. Here is 
their collective reflection and analysis of the event and the prospects 
for radical union organizing in the health sector in general.
Last May, 200 health care workers gathered in Durham, North Carolina, 
for the first Health Autonomy Convergence. Many other healthcare workers 
wanted to participate but could not, as capacity was reached in less 
than a day after registration opened. This is not surprising, given what 
we have experienced since the start of the pandemic, and the failures of 
the racist capitalist system that we see every day as we try to provide 
care in this broken world.

It was important that this was a conference aimed specifically at 
healthcare workers, rather than a gathering to discuss healthcare in an 
abstract or theoretical way. We believe it is essential to encourage an 
organizing orientation among radicals, which means shifting the focus 
from the WHAT (such as the health care issue) to the WHO (such as health 
care workers). health). As healthcare workers, we need spaces to connect 
with others who share the same needs and struggles as us, and who face 
the same bosses in the healthcare industry against which we must build 
power.

Among anarchists in the United States, organizational orientation is 
rare. It is more common for anarchists and related anarchists to be 
oriented toward the activist world of issue-based projects and 
ideologically closed collectives. This is neither surprising nor limited 
to anarchists alone, given that most American communities today are cut 
off from any memory of lasting and transformative collective struggle. 
The norm on the American left is spectacle: protests or marches, often 
organized by professional activists, that appeal to the media or "the 
public" without critical engagement with those who have the power to 
respond to our demands. American anarchists can take these protests to 
the streets, but many of them still lack a coherent sense of how a 
protest can build power for the mass of people. More recently, 
anti-authoritarian political projects are largely internally focused, 
emphasizing how we speak and how to decolonize our individual thoughts 
and social relationships. There is an unmistakable sense of resignation 
that the thing we need - a genuine anarchist social revolution - is a 
hopelessly unrealistic vision to be invoked purely as rhetoric, rather 
than something we can make practical progress towards in the here and now.

Among anti-authoritarian health workers, political projects tend toward 
street doctor collectives, artisanal herbalism projects, efforts to 
change the way we talk to our patients, or perhaps a writing and 
propaganda project with other radical health workers. These types of 
activist projects also made up the majority of sessions at HAC. These 
projects can indeed make useful contributions, but without a conscious 
plan on how to connect them to a broader movement that builds and uses 
the power of health workers, and without an active process to reach out 
and bring about previously non-politicized health workers, these 
projects often end up creating an insular subculture: separated from 
society, rather than engaged in struggle within it. Without a mass 
movement capable of actively embracing the vast swaths of dissatisfied 
healthcare workers by proposing a real strategy to challenge the 
horrific conditions we face and, more broadly, to attack the healthcare 
system murderous capitalist who creates these conditions, we will remain 
isolated and largely powerless.

As BRRN members, we were motivated to participate in the HAC to share 
what an organizing perspective within healthcare can look like. We 
wanted to show that there is an alternative to the default activist 
model, and share how healthcare workers can take simple steps to 
organize - a necessary step in a systemic change strategy and ultimately 
of account, of social revolution.

At the HAC, the slogan chosen by the conference organizers was: "Take 
over the hospitals". We completely agree, both emotionally and 
practically. We agree because taking over hospitals is something we can 
actually do, if we are powerful and organized enough to do it. If we 
want to liberate our healthcare system and make it something that is 
controlled by workers, patients and neighborhoods, then as healthcare 
workers we must physically take over hospitals. But at the HAC, we 
unfortunately have not seen how this slogan could become reality, apart 
from some historical discussions on past movements. The idea of radical 
change, of mass collective action, of the seizure of hospitals, of a 
revolution, remains an abstract slogan if there is no explicit link to 
what we are doing here and NOW.

To build our vision of collective organization in healthcare, we set up 
a convergence panel during which healthcare workers shared their 
experiences of organizing in the workplace. Participants shared their 
diverse experiences - a union nurse at a large urban hospital went on 
strike and organized to transform the union, a non-union nurse at a home 
health facility spoke about her first steps in the organization, a 
social worker spoke of a successful organizing campaign in a state with 
guaranteed labor rights, and a nurse spoke of the challenges of a 
stalled campaign at a southern teaching hospital-our hope was to give 
practical examples of what organizing in healthcare can look like and to 
motivate to start something similar. Based on the conversations that 
took place during the workshop and the responses that followed, it seems 
that it worked: participants were able to make connections with their 
own experiences in the workplace and asked for advice to face their own 
challenges. After seeing how other healthcare workers were able to build 
power and make change in their hospitals, they said they felt more 
inspired and empowered to take action.

We paired this panel on organizing experiences with a workshop 
describing the stages of workplace organizing in the healthcare sector 
and showing how it is an essential part of revolutionary struggle. 
Organizing in the workplace is not part of the experience of most health 
care workers at a time when unionization rates are at an all-time low 
and online activism often takes the place of rooted social movements. We 
believe it is important to reintroduce workers to basic tools such as 
workplace mapping, one-on-ones, and creating an organizing committee, 
and to practice these tools together so that we can overcome the 
anxieties of doing this difficult work with our colleagues. This 
workshop went a little more unevenly. A few workshop participants 
expressed discomfort with the one-on-one organizing model, when we have 
intentional conversations with our colleagues to listen, stir them up, 
and invite them to take action. Their concern was that it seemed 
manipulative to start a conversation with a goal and the intention of 
asking someone to join an organizing campaign. Since we can't do much in 
life without asking other people to do things with us, this response 
seemed disappointing and disempowering to them. But other workshop 
participants said they found the organizing skills useful and practical.

Not only are these skills often not accessible to radicals, but when 
they are, they are generally disconnected from any revolutionary 
project. Unions use and teach organizing techniques, but most often to 
develop their own top-down bureaucracies, and they sharply separate 
class and class struggles to create movements that challenge the state 
and capitalism.

Participating in the HAC also allowed us to understand the conditions of 
healthcare workers across the country, as well as the organizing 
opportunities and challenges. We learned that there is a strong desire 
for radical and activist organizing within the health sector. We saw 
that a group of health care workers were willing to dedicate months of 
work to organizing this three-day conference, and that hundreds of 
people were enthusiastic to come from all over the world. country to 
participate. We met some comrades who are organizing movements with 
unions or campaigns like the Do No Harm Coalition and DPH Must Divest. 
However, the majority of conference participants sympathetic to 
anarchism were not oriented toward mass organizing or strategic power 
building, whether through lack of interest or lack of 'opportunity.

We see this orientation as reflecting a huge unmet need to build 
structures for mass organizing, for organizing outside of our narrow 
social circles, for organizing that aims to build power. We believe 
there is a need to continue to develop and promote concrete examples of 
radical organizing models in healthcare, to show how organizing can be 
both a more sustainable way to develop a supportive culture and a way to 
build and exercise our own power. Furthermore, the relatively low number 
of unionized participants reflects the low rate of unionization in the 
health sector (even if it is higher than in other sectors). We need to 
organize in spaces like this where we reach non-union healthcare 
workers, while also organizing in union-only spaces like Labor Notes.

As we approach the convergence with our orientation toward mass 
organizing for power, we have seen trends in left-wing and anarchist 
activism reflected at the HAC, which is disturbing and sobering. At the 
same time, we view the existence of such a conference, and the work that 
organizers and participants were willing to do to make it happen, as a 
sign of hope for the potential healthcare workers to fight together for 
a revolutionary future. We hope the HAC is part of a growing trend of 
activist organizing in the healthcare sector.

https://bxl.communisteslibertaires.org/2024/02/14/emparez-vous-des-hopitaux-mais-comment/
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