JOHN LISTER reviews Feasible Socialism. The FEATURE National Health Service past, present & future, Hart, published by Socialist Health Association. THIS is a must for every socialist, health worker and campaigner sick to the teeth with the NHS internal market and its impact on the quality of health care.
And it is a powerful counter-blast to all those in the trade union and Labour movement who, after sixteen years of Thatcherism, have begun to capitulate to free market ideology.
Julian Tudor Hart is no disinterested academic willing to bow the knee to the orthodoxy of the day. For over 30 years he was a practising GP in a South Wales mining village, and he is still an ardent socialist.
Indeed the politics of the pamphlet will not easily be Ideologue: Thatcher taken on board by the pre- forthright terms, comes with sent leadership of the Labour a passionate commitment to Party. socialist values, including Tudor Hart's root and the now discarded Clause branch critique of the ideol- Four. ogy and practical contradicHe is clearty committed to tions of the NHS internal primary care, and keen to market, argued in lucid and see it improved and expanded: but his experience and his overview of the NHS as a whole mean that he does not subscribe to the trendy notion embraced by Virginia Bottomley, that primary care can effectively replace general hospitals.
The book contains an excellent historical account of the rise of the NHS, the causes of its crisis in the late 1980s and Thatcher's secretive 'review' which led to the current chaotic and expensive reforms.
It pours scorn on the commercial values of private medicine and rejects the privatisation of community care, pointing out that in 1984 30% of long-term nursing home care was provided by the NHS, and that this had fallen to 10% by 1994.
Tudor Hart knowledgeably dissects the free market ideology of Enthoven and Friedman which so captivated Margaret Thatcher, showing how it is not only inappropriate in the context of health care, but that it also failed abysmally to deliver its promised improvements elsewhere in industry.
New ideas But he goes on to offer some interesting new ideas on how health services could develop, arguing for recognition of the active role of the patient in the process of consultation and care, and pressing for a more rigorous and scientific assessment of the effectiveness of treatment.
The final chapter argues that "We have a huge base of popular support for any policy that moves the NHS back on course, away from competitive business and back to universal public service."
Tudor Hart recognises that it will be expensive and difficult to undo some of the damage that has been done, but argues that a democratised and restored NHS could serve as 'a model for a future economy. Now there's a revolutionary conception!
Get this book and enjoy! • Feasible Socialism is available (£6.50 inc p&p), from SHA, 16 Charles Square, London N1 6HP.
But the involvement of the Topf and Sons, won the conGerman bosses reached the tract to build the crematorium heights of horror with the col- ovens at Auschwitz. The laboration and sometimes di- Didier factories from Berlin rect participation of IG gave the SS advice on how to Farben (and other firms) in increase the efficiency of the mass extermination mass extermination.
Callos. The C.H. Kori firm It was Karl Krauch, chairDoase• or ne mens or mne man of IG Farben's board of ovens it had provided for the directors, who chose the site Dachau and Lublin camps, for Auschwitz (Its full name which had given "full and towas IG - "industrial com- tal satisfaction."
pany" - Auschwitz "We guarantee the effiMonowitz). ciency of our ovens, as well as IG Farben had always been their solidity, the quality of characterised by virulent hos- the materials used and the tility to trade unions; the slo- finish of the work".
gan Arbeit macht frei ("work As for Zyklon B, IG Farmakes free") written over the ben had sold its patent at a camp's gate was not dreamt high price to two firms, Tesch up by the SS, but had long and Stabenow, and Degesh.
been used in all IG Farben Every month the former defactories to celebrate the de- livered two tonnes of cyanide feat of trade unionism and crystals to Auschwitz and the worker militancy. latter three-quarters of a On 3 September 1941, 600 tonne.
Soviet prisoners of war and The last two years of the 282 sick prisoners were mur- conflict saw, thanks to forced dered at Burkenau using a gas, •labour, plundering of raw maZyklon B, produced in IG terials and the rationalisation Farben's laboratories. of the "total war" industry diIn 1942, IG Farben re- rected by Albert Speer and the ceived authorisation to ex- heads of industry, a unpreceploit the labour force in dented rise in productivity Auschwitz (the SS sold the and so of profits and divicamp inmates for three to four dends for shareholders in marks a day per person to the arms companies.
industrialists. The SS boss Between 1943 and 1944, Himmler thereby amassed a the production of weapons colossal fortune, apart from rose by 17%, iron production being a shareholder in IG Far- rose from 32 to 34.6 million ben) for its new synthetic rub- tonnes a year, Krupp tripled ber factory. its output of tanks from 9,400 in 1942 to 27,300 in 1944, and Children Messerschmidt and Heinkel IG Farben also used inma- also tripled their production tes from several other camps. of combat aircraft, from 13,000 to 36,000 in the same Rudolf Höss, the head of the SS at Auschwitz explained to period.
Without this rise in prothe Nuremberg Tribunal how the workers for IG Farben and ductivity. Due to a great-axthe Krupp missile factories tent to the industrialists themselves, the Nazis would were selected: "Those judged fit for the work were sent in- not have been able to continue side the camp. The others While after the war some were immediately directed toNazi political and military wards the extermination units. Young children were leaders were tried and senalways exterminated since tenced, the mild treatment they were not suitable for the handed out to the industrialLists is remarkable. work"
For example: Joseph Abs, The respite for those judged fit to work was short. manager of Deutsche Bank An order from the Depart- between 1938 and 1945 bement for camps of 30 April came a great friend of postwar 1942 indicated that "the use Chancellor Adenauer and Chairman of the bank beof the prisoners in work must be exhausting in the strict tween 1957 and 1967. Until This death he remained a finansense of the term, in order to obtain the highest production cial adviser to the Vatican. ... the length of the working Ill health period set by the camp commander is without limit." Baron Gustav Krupp von The deportees were thus to Bohlen und Holbach, the pabe worked to the point of ex- triarch of the Krupp firm and haustion, then eliminated and Charman of its Board of Diimmediately replaced. rectors was charged at The living body having Nuremberg, but not tried, owbeen drained of everything it ing to his "state of health". could give, the time had come His son, Alfred Krupp, to exploit the corpses. A Dan- who became owner of the faczig firm transformed human tories in 1943 was not even fat into soap, the hair was used among those charged. He in the war industries and gold was tried later by an Ameriteeth were carefully pulled can military tribunal along and, melted down into ingots, with nine others of the firm's filled the vaults of the directors and sentenced in Reichsbank. Even the ashes 1948 to 12 years in prison, but were used for fertiliser. was freed three years later on Capitalist competition also the orders of the US High operated in the death camps. Commissioner, John Mc Coy. Apart from using the human The property of his combeings there as a consumable pany was not confiscated, and and disposable commodity, his immense personal fortune the very tools of genocide was returned. were a subject of fierce com- The same for IG Farben petition, like any other com- and its Chairman Karl modity. Krauch, nicknamed 'the faA private company, I. A. ther of Auschwitz". He and 23 other major figures in the Why the lenient treatment firm were tried for a year. The of these men? To pass senresult: 12 of the 24 received a tence on them would have maximum of eighteen and a meant calling into question half years in prison. None of capitalism itself, since they them served their full sen- had all obeyed their immeditence. ate interests, both personal The living body having been drained of everything it could give, the time had come to exploit the corpses. A Danzig firm transformed human fat into soap, the hair was used in the war industries and gold teeth were carefully pulled and, melted down into ingots, filled the vaults of the Reichsbank. Even the ashes were used for fertiliser.
Practically none of them and collective, as members of ever snowed the least regret. the exploiting class. The almost all remained in leading. cynical statement of Baron positions in their firms. Hav- Krupp summed it up: ing grown fat in the Nazi "We in the Krupp firm are years, they could settle down not idealists, but realists. We to a comfortable time in a par- had the impression that Hitler liamentary democracy. would give us the possibility SOCIALIST OUTLOOK No. 86, June 24 1995, Page 13 of healthy development. Indeed. he did so ... after the years with him in charge, we felt much more comfortable. We wanted a system which worked well and gave us the means to work calmly.
"I have said that I didn't know anything about the extermination of the Jews and I have added: when you buy a good horse, you don't look too closely at the details!"
Any boss from any country could have spoken these words. That is why, Frédéric Clairmont put it, "passing judgement on the highest levels of German big capital would have presented a threat to the whole system."
Furthermore, it was necessary economically and socially to consolidate the west of Germany faced with the Soviet threat.
The cold war required a stable social order and so there could be no question of provoking working class protest by exposing the capitalist As the war effort hotted up, so the profits grew for Hitler's big business backers class' direct responsibility in the establishment and perpetuation of the Nazi regime.
The term "the collective responsibility of the German people" was and still is used to "drown the fish"; making the German people in its entirety guilty serves as an alibi to hide the responsibility of big business and capitalism as such for Nazism.
Finally, as this article has shown, the Nazis did not invent an economic model. Their methods of exploitation were no morenan ihe exacer. bation of capitalist oppression. of the human being as a comTURE modity, as labour power.
The holy trinity of competitiveness, flexibility and productivity so dear to our "post-industrialists" was fully achieved by the Nazis. Pushed to a frenzied limit, the Nazi regime showed exactly what such a logic can entail.
(from La Gauche, 17 May 1995)
SOCIALIST OUTLOOK No. 86, June 24 1995, Page 14 UP AGAINST mass unemployment, rampant employers with savage anti-union laws, and a war on hard-won public services, the working ber of issues. Free Ireland: Socialist Outlook welcomes readers' "the first duty' letters on any subject. Write to SIMON DEVILLE ISO 'Feedback', PO Box 85] correctly raises a num1109, London N4 The Labour Party has always been an overtly pro-imperialist party. It has always endorsed the Unionist veto, with the exception of 1921 2UU. Letters over 300 words will be cut.
and deserves a serous als wet.