Hospitals and Capitalism

There’s an amazing thing happening right now in New York City. Nurses are about to go on strike, because they have been overworked and underpaid for too long. This has long been the case, but it got really bad during the pandemic—and things have never really gotten better.

Instead of reaching an agreement with their nurses, Manhattan’s Mount Sinai Hospital is preparing to move newborn babies in their intensive care unit to a different hospital. I don’t think I’ve ever heard of anything this absurd before—or anything that better demonstrates the total disregard for human life that capitalism is based on.

Mount Sinai hospital is in conversation with the nurses as of today, hoping to avoid a strike tomorrow. Most likely they will reach some agreement, but maybe not. But the more interesting point is that hospitals, and nurses who are the backbone of them, have reached an impossible point. Hospitals are not just for taking care of sick people anymore, especially in a place like New York City. If you spend any time in a big city hospital, you notice that it is where people end up who have been beaten down by capitalism—as capitalism gets more brutal, people end up with nowhere to go but the hospital.

Nurses are the ones who deal with the victims of capitalism most directly. Homeless people, people living in poverty, the mentally ill who have nowhere to go—everyone who has become trapped in permanent hopelessness by the cruelty of capitalism, they become the responsibility of nurses. Capitalism is the only thing that exists in America, and it has one rule—you make money or you die. And even if you do make money, it’s never enough to survive. A lot of homeless people actually do have jobs—one study found that 40% of homeless people have jobs.

A hospital is the one place in our society that exists to help make sure you don’t die. This puts it in a strange place in a capitalist society, since everything in capitalism is designed to kill you unless you make money (and even making money is a way of killing you slowly, by exhausting, depleting, and using you up). So nurses deal with the human toll of capitalism in a way that nobody else does—except for police, that is. Police and nurses serve the same function, but in opposite ways. Police deal with desperate people who have been driven to the margins of society by a world that doesn’t care about them—but police use violence to deal with them. Nurses deal with people who have similarly been driven to the margins of society—who are so beaten down and desperate and hopeless that they can barely even live, but they don’t deal with them violently. They try to help them.

Being a cop is easier than being a nurse, because you confront the problems of social decay by just trying to crush them down. Nurses try to return you to society better than you were before. Cops just try to kill you or force you into a prison that will make you much worse than you were before. A hospital is supposed to make you either the same or better than when you went in—a prison in a capitalist society makes no effort to improve you, it just degrades you and turns you into an animal.

And now nurses in America’s biggest city are striking, because they cannot deal with their role anymore. Even if they get more pay, that won’t solve the problem. Their main issue is with staffing—there are never enough nurses to handle the inflow of patients. Capitalism is pumping too many of its victims into hospitals, and there aren’t enough nurses to handle it. And even if there were, the work is too grueling—you’re dealing with what a cop deals with, but you can’t use the blunt force brutality of a cop. You’re facing what a cop faces, but you have to respond with patience and gentleness. It’s like if cops were actually expected to serve, protect, and improve society, instead of just beating down the weakest members of society. It’s an absurd and impossible position, being a nurse. Better pay won’t solve it, and better hours won’t solve it—you can’t expect anyone to handle the role they are now in, of being the ones who deal with the victims of capitalism most directly.

Even if an agreement is reached between the hospitals and nurses in New York City, they will end up striking again soon, because they are being forced to shoulder the burden of a system that destroys people—they have to take care of the victims of the war of capitalism against the mass of people. But unlike cops, they have to fight in a war without any guns—and so they will always lose.

Update as of Monday afternoon: 7,000 nurses at two major NYC hospitals are on strike. Contract negotiations failed—they were offered a 20% pay increase, but the nurses want better patient care. This just confirms my point here—that it isn’t about the money, it’s about being unable to deal with how beaten down their patients are. They are being faced with the victims of the war of capitalism, and they can’t handle it. It has nothing to do with how much they’re paid, or them not being tough enough—they simply are not going to be on the frontlines of a socioeconomic war anymore. That’s not what they signed up for. Lots of patients in NYC hospitals receive their medical care in hallways, because of overcrowding—this is the kind of thing that nurses are striking against. Simply getting paid more, while still having to treat people in the hallways, isn’t enough—it’s about the dehumanization of patients they deal with every day. They want to be nurses that help sick people—they don’t want to be medics on the front lines of a war. But since capitalism is a permanent war, they will be caught in the crossfire.

And this is where the weird phenomenon of “clapping for nurses” during the pandemic comes in. If you remember those days, there was all of this talk about how the pandemic was a war, and nurses were heroically fighting on the frontlines. (This was also said about grocery store workers at the time, because they risked their lives to get people food). This kind of raised the consciousness of nurses so they became aware that they weren’t just healthcare workers—they were fighting in a war. That war did not end when the pandemic ended. It became worse, as the effects of capitalism—poverty, inequality, homelessness, mental illness, etc.—all became more severe. Nurses became accustomed to thinking of themselves as fighting in a war, but when the war was supposed to end, as the pandemic subsided, they realized that the war continued—because the war is called capitalism, and it is waged by the rich against the poor. It isn’t a war of the virus against everyone else.