In May of 2023 several BRRN militants organizing in the healthcare
sector attended the Health Autonomy Convergence (HAC) in Durham, NorthCarolina. This is their collective reflection on and analysis of theevent and of the prospects for radical labor organizing in healthcaremore generally:Last May, 200 anti-authoritarian healthcare workers gathered together inDurham, North Carolina for the first Health Autonomy Convergence. Withmany more healthcare workers wanting to attend but unable to, becausecapacity was reached within a day of registration opening, this eventspeaks to a huge desire for radical political approaches amonghealthcare workers. This is unsurprising, given what we have beenthrough since the beginning of the pandemic, and the failures of theracist capitalist system we see everyday as we try to provide care inthis broken world.The fact that this was a conference specifically for healthcare workers,rather than a gathering to discuss healthcare abstractly ortheoretically, was an important feature. We believe it is critical toencourage an organizing orientation among radicals, which means shiftingthe focus from the WHAT (like the issue of healthcare), to the WHO (likehealthcare workers). As healthcare workers, we need spaces to connectwith others who share the same needs and struggles as us, and who facethe same healthcare industry bosses that we need to build power against.Among anarchists in the US, an organizing orientation is rare. It ismore common for anarchists and the anarchist-adjacent to be orientedtoward the activist world of issue-based projects andideologically-closed collectives. This is neither surprising nor limitedjust to anarchists, given that most communities in the US today are cutoff from any memory of sustained and transformative collective struggle.The norm in the US left is spectacle: protests or marches, oftenorganized by professional activists, that appeal to the media or "thepublic" without a critical engagement with who has the power to meet ourdemands. US anarchists may take these protests up a notch on the street,but many still lack a coherent sense of how a demonstration might buildpower for the mass of people. More recently, anti-authoritarianpolitical projects are largely internally focused, with emphasis on howwe speak and how to decolonize our individual thoughts and socialrelations. There is an unquestioned sense of resignation that the thingwe need - an actual anarchist social revolution - is a hopelesslyunrealistic vision to be invoked only as rhetoric, rather than somethingtoward which we can make practical progress here and now.Among anti-authoritarian healthcare workers, political projects tendtoward street medic collectives, DIY herbalism projects, efforts tochange the way we speak with our patients, or maybe a writing andpropaganda project with other radical healthcare workers. These kinds ofactivist projects made up the majority of the sessions at HAC as well.These projects can indeed make useful contributions, but without aconscious plan for how to connect them with a broader movement thatbuilds and wields the power of healthcare workers, and without an activeprocess for reaching out to and bringing in previously unpoliticizedhealthcare workers, these projects often end up creating an insularsubculture: separated from society, rather than engaged in strugglewithin it. Without a mass movement that can actively embrace the vastswaths of dissatisfied health workers by offering a genuine strategy tochallenge the horrific conditions we face and, more broadly, to attackthe murderous capitalist healthcare system that creates theseconditions, we will remain isolated and largely powerless.As BRRN members, we were motivated to participate in HAC to share whatan organizing perspective within healthcare can look like. We wanted toshow that there is an alternative to the default activist model, andshare how healthcare workers can take simple steps toward organizing - anecessary step in a strategy for systemic change and ultimately socialrevolution.At HAC, the slogan chosen by the conference organizers was: "Seize theHospitals". We agree wholeheartedly, both in sentiment and realpractical terms. We agree because seizing hospitals is something that weactually can do, if we are powerful and organized enough to pull it off.If we are going to liberate our healthcare system and turn it intosomething that is controlled by the workers, patients, andneighborhoods, then as healthcare workers we do need to physically seizethe hospitals. But at HAC we unfortunately did not see how this slogancould become reality, outside of a couple historical discussions of pastmovements. The idea of radical change, of mass collective action, ofseizing the hospitals, of revolution, remains an abstract slogan ifthere isn't an explicit connection to what we are doing in the here and now.To build our vision of collective organization in healthcare, we puttogether a panel for the convergence during which healthcare workersshared their experiences with organizing at work. With panelistsspeaking to a range of experiences - a unionized nurse in a major urbanhospital striking and organizing to transform the union, a non-unionnurse in a home care setting talking about her first steps inorganizing, a social worker discussing a successful campaign to unionizein a right-to-work state, and a nurse talking through the challenges ofa stalled campaign at an academic hospital in the south - our hope wasto give practical examples of what organizing in healthcare can looklike and motivation to start something similar. From the conversationduring the workshop and responses after, it seems to have worked: peoplewere able to make connections to their own workplace experiences andasked for advice on dealing with their own challenges. After seeing howother healthcare workers managed to build power and make changes intheir hospitals, they said that they felt more inspired and capable totake action themselves.We paired this panel on organizing experiences with a workshop breakingdown the steps of workplace organizing in healthcare and showing how itis an essential part of revolutionary struggle. Workplace organizing isoutside of most healthcare workers' experiences in an era whenunionization is near rock-bottom lows and online activism often takesthe place of rooted social movements. We believe it is important tore-introduce workers to basic tools like workplace mapping, one-on-ones,and building an organizing committee, and to practice these together sowe can work through the anxieties of doing this challenging work withour co-workers. This workshop landed a little more unevenly. A couple ofpeople in the workshop expressed discomfort with the model of organizingone-on-ones, when we have intentional conversations with our co-workersto listen, agitate, and invite them to take action. Their concern wasthat it felt manipulative to go into a conversation with a goal and withthe intention of asking somebody to join an organizing campaign. Sincewe can't do much in life without asking other people to do things withus, this felt like a disempowering and disappointing response. But otherworkshop participants said they found the organizing skills to be usefuland practical.Not only are these skills often not available to radicals, but when theyare available, they are usually disconnected from any revolutionaryproject. Unions use and teach organizing skills, but most often to growtheir own top-down bureaucracies, and they pointedly separate thesepractical skills from any kind of political content. Our intervention atHAC aimed to demonstrate how organizing skills can be used to builddemocratic self-organization, and how they can be combined withpolitical education and class-wide fights to create movements thatchallenge the state and capitalism.Participating in HAC was also an opportunity for us to understand theconditions of healthcare workers across the country, as well asopportunities and challenges for organizing. We learned there is astrong desire for radical and militant organizing from withinhealthcare. We saw that a group of healthcare workers were willing toput in months of labor to create this three day conference, and thathundreds were excited to travel from across the country to participate.We met a few comrades who do movement organizing with unions orcampaigns like the Do No Harm Coalition and DPH Must Divest. However,the majority of anarchist-sympathizing conference attendees were notoriented toward mass organizing, or strategically building power,whether for lack of interest or lack of opportunity.We see this orientation as reflecting a huge unmet need to buildstructures for mass organizing, for organizing outside of our narrowsocial circles, for organizing that aims to build power. We believe weshould continue to develop and promote real-world examples of radicalorganizing models in healthcare, so that we can show how organizing canbe both a more sustainable way of developing supportive culture and away to build and wield our own power. Relatedly, the relatively smallnumber of attendees who were union members speaks to the low uniondensity in healthcare (even though it is higher than in manyindustries). We need to organize in spaces like this where we reachnon-union healthcare workers, along with organizing within union memberspaces like Labor Notes.Approaching the convergence with our orientation toward mass organizingfor power, we saw the trends in left and anarchist activism reflected atHAC concerning and sobering.At the same time we see the existence of such a conference, and the workthe organizers and participants were willing to put in to make ithappen, to be a hopeful sign of the potential for healthcare workers tofight together for a revolutionary future. We hope that HAC is part of agrowing and developing trend toward militant organizing in healthcare.By Healthcare Worker Members of BRRN Labor Committeehttps://blackrosefed.org/seize-the-hospitals-but-how_________________________________________A - I N F O S N E W S S E R V I C EBy, For, and About AnarchistsSend news reports to A-infos-en mailing listA-infos-en@ainfos.ca
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