WORLD WORLDWIDE FRANCE News Journal Update - (en) France, UCL AL #337 - Culture, Read: Da Silva, "The Battle of Social Security, a History of the Health System" (ca, de, fr, it, pt, tr) [machine translation]

 Political myths die hard. And among these there is one which, in a cyclical way,

returns and is brandished like a totem by politicians of the right but also of
the left: the famous national, cross-partisan and cross-class consensus, which is
embodied by the National Council of the Resistance (CNR). ---- This famous CNR is
the compass of politicians losing their bearings and popular support. It must be
said that in the collective imagination, it was within the CNR that Social
Security was born, the fruit of the agreement between communists and Gaullists.
Nothing is less true. In his book, The Battle of Social Security, the economist
Nicolas Da Silva deconstructs this myth firmly anchored in our unconscious.
The history of social security that he offers us is rooted in workers' struggles,
in this way of building solidarity that the author calls "la Sociale", heir to
the 1789 Revolution and the Paris Commune. The Social, thought and built from
below, is opposed to the " Social State ", vertical and subject to the interests
of the State and Capital, this social State which makes social protection an
instrument of population control. The Revolution of 1789 will put down the old
solidarities of feudal society and build a new way of organizing relief, in a
universal way and whose beneficiaries are, unlike charity, legally defined. But
these innovations are still limited and remain in the hands of the dominant
bourgeois class.

 From the first decades of the 19th century, the question of the health of the
working class was constructed as a political object. Nascent liberalism needs
workers in not too bad health, but the measures to be taken cannot conflict with
capitalist interests. The nascent hygienism seeks in the living conditions of
workers -which are really bad and harmful- the reasons for the degraded health of
the working class. Working conditions cannot be considered as an explanatory
cause of illnesses.

Two modes of financing will emerge: an insurance system (financed by capital) and
a self-organized system (financed by mutual aid). Thus, mutual aid societies
developed rapidly and on the eve of the Revolution of 1848 there were 2,500
covering a total of 270,000 members. Fighted during the Restoration, between 1825
and 1848, more than 4,000 of them will be condemned for offense of combination.
These mutuals are both organizations offering relief that the state does not
manage, but also political places of training that disseminate democratic ideas.

The bourgeoisie having once again appealed to the people in 1848, and fearing
that an opinion favorable to the establishment of a generalized system of
provident services for health, retirement and unemployment would emerge too
strongly, these societies of relief will finally be legalized in July 1850, but
with a strong framework. In 1852, the decree legalizing mutuality taken by
Napoleon III is a further step towards the integration into the social order of
these mutuals which remain " potentially subversive places of worker
socialization where social transformation through self-organization  is thought
out". . The State thus appropriates " social criticism to guard against change ".

The same will apply to the reappropriation of Social Security, which was also
born out of workers' self-organization and reintegrated into the doctrine of the
social State in a "conscious and relatively stable desire to target the
beneficiaries of benefits and let capital deploy itself to the detriment of
public production ".

Thus the social state, according to Nicolas Da Silva, is not a desirable horizon
but rather an impediment to the full realization of the emancipation of the
working classes. To submit to it would be to submit to interests that are not ours.

David (UCL Chambery)

Nicolas Da Silva, The battle of the Sécu, a history of the health system, La
Fabrique edition, October 2022, 328 pages, 15 euros.

https://www.unioncommunistelibertaire.org/?Lire-Nicolas-Da-Silva-La-bataille-de-la-Secu-Le-jour-ou-le-couple-Freinet-a
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