When people find out I’m an anarchist, a question I frequently get is “how would people with chronic illnesses like diabetes access treatment under anarchism?”
There are a lot of unspoken assumptions packed into that question that I thought I’d explore a bit.
The first is, of course, that people with chronic illnesses *can* access treatment in the context of capitalist modernity. Not everyone can! Many people in the world of states and capital suffer and die from lack of access to treatment.
Not because the treatment is unavailable, but because access is mediated through capitalist gatekeeping. People, today, right now, in allegedly rich countries, die because they cannot afford insulin. For them, the question of “but how would we access insulin under anarchism” is moot. Many others access it only at the cost of medical debt and other forms of indenture.
#capitalism #anarchism #diabetes #diabetic #disability #disabled #ableism #chronicillness
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People, of course, accessed health care before capitalism and even before the state, as hard as that is for people to imagine. Not everyone, and what they could access was often inadequate.
This is also true under capitalist modernity. The WHO estimates that there are 422 million people with diabetes in the world, most of whom live in low- to middle-income countries. A million and a half people die from diabetes each year, globally. They cannot access adequate care now, under the state and capitalism.
Scoffing at the idea that people could possibly access insulin under anarchism is premised on the idea that these people, who cannot access treatment now, don’t really count.
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We might assume that only the capitalist profit incentive is sufficient to drive the creation and provision of medical treatments like insulin.
Insulin was, of course, first synthesized for mass consumption by scientists working at a non-commercial lab, who sold the patent for a dollar a piece to a university, because they believed access to a life-saving treatment should not be restricted by profit-seeking.
That, sadly, didn’t work out for them. Insulin costs as little as $72 per person per year to manufacture and still collect profits. Some people in the US pay $1000 or more per month.
https://gh.bmj.com/content/3/5/e000850
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Capitalism, after all, doesn’t generate profits from providing things; it generates profits by controlling access.
Capitalists tell us this explicitly all the time! Goldman Sachs told the biotech industry that cures are not a sustainable business model, because people cured of an ailment stop being biotech customers.
(I am not suggesting there is a cure for diabetes that the biotech industry is withholding in order to profit from the sale of insulin, but rather making a point that capitalism does not incentivize industry to cure you. If Eli Lily could make us all diabetics, it would.)
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We might also assume that people will only manufacture, distribute, provide, and innovate on treatments like insulin if forced to, by the grinding drive of capitalist intensification or by state violence.
Archeologist Debby Sneed has done a lot of incredible research into the ways in which disabilities were treated in Ancient Greece, and published this incredible study in 2020:
“The concentration of ramps at sites frequented by individuals with mobility (and other) impairments appears to suggest that the ancient Greeks consciously provided for the needs of the users of these spaces. In much the same way that sites associated with athletics were provisioned with stadia and gymnasia, healing sanctuaries were provided with the buildings and features necessary for the successful inclusion of its intended visitors in ritual activities.”
This is from a decidedly non-capitalist society that, while still a state society, lacked anything like the modern state’s intrusive and omnipresent reach into the daily lives of its subjects. There was no Ancient Greek ADA, no OSHA. And yet the people in this society, with vastly fewer resources than our own, ensured access to people with mobility impairments.
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@HeavenlyPossum
Not sure the remark about how ancient Greece wasn't capitalist and had less resources than modern Greece plays as well when you remember that it was a slaver society...
@tobychev
I’m not sure what you mean by “plays well,” but, in any case, ours is also a slaver society.