RevolutionZ
RevolutionZ
EP 365 Duvernay and WCF: Health and Class
Episode 365 of RevolutionZ presents an essay by film director Ava Duvernay about the difficulty of writing in unimaginably chaotic times. Her's is a sentiment I share but that she expresses more eloquently. Simply put, it’s hard to write to a conclusion when the world won’t stop shouting new horrors. Then Miguel Guevara interviews Barbara Bethune and Emiliano Farmer, taken from chapter twelve of The Wind Cries Freedom. A doctor and nurse, Barbara and Emiliano describe their experiences in health work revealing aims, motives, biases, and beliefs. They report and analyze the class forces that shape who gets heard, who gets paid, who gets healed and who doesn't as well as the emergence of struggle about the issues including explaining the contrasting the circumstances and mindsets of doctors and nurses as a particular instance of the contrasting circumstances and mindsets of coordinators and workers more generally.
Barbara Bethune is a doctor who loved the promise of medicine but who began early on to question the rituals that came with it. She describes how she came to realize the differences between training for obedience and training for excellence. She tested her impressions by comparing her experience of medical internship to her observation of military boot camp as surprisingly similar methods of imposing systemic deference. Beyond profit-seeking, Barbara reveals how doctors' and administrators' coordinator class culture manages care but resists democratizing its means and methods. She finds the roots in the hospital's division of labor and her takeaway is clear. Class divided health care burns out workers, inflates costs, and leaves prevention on the cutting-room floor. It heals as a means, yes, but the ends are profits and power.
Emiliano Farmer, a militant activist nurse who helped build Healthcare Workers United, speaks from the front lines of the pandemic and beyond, where applause never becomes protection or real power for workers. Emiliano challenges face to face the reflexive elitism that keeps nurses and techs out of key decisions, and he lays out reforms that move from grievance to governance, balanced pay scales, and participatory decision-making. He and Barbara explore their own negative and positive experiences, and actions, their politicization, their actions and commitments, and the conflicts that occurred within RPS over practical steps like single-payer momentum, Big Pharma accountability, antibiotic stewardship, food and housing as health policy, and especially job redefinition—all of which campaigns help make care safer, affordable, and patient-first. Guevara elicits from them personal experiences, views, and feelings to convey lessons about class division, rule, defense and resistance in health care and in broader social struggles.
Hello, my name is Michael Albert, and I am the host of the podcast that's titled Revolution Z. You may have noticed a certain ambivalence in my recent episodes, even going back a couple of months or more, I think. Indeed, recently I've been delivering mostly episodes derived from a book I'm working on titled The Wind Cries Freedom. Actually, that's a tentative title. I think I'll probably change it. An oral history of the next American Revolution, which is now scheduled for publication in late spring, probably April. This particular podcast episode is titled WCF Colon, that's Wind Cries Freedom. Health and Class. It's from chapter twelve in this still evolving book. So what is my ambivalence? Well, it's a difficulty I'm having with writing or even outlining enough about current events and immediate prospects to compose a full episode. I can muster enough in any given week to precede the oral history main focus substance with a kind of summary or sidebar focus on something currently happening, and have been doing that pretty regularly. For instance, last week I had a sidebar on Epstein before the main body oral history material. And I will again have a sidebar today. But today's opening comment on our current situation in our world and in our time is actually borrowed from a column by the fabulous film director Ava DeVernay. I read her essay a couple of days ago, and it describes an ambivalence quite like my own, but more eloquently expressed. You may have even read it, but even if so, I would say listen again. It is worth it. It is worth it on the road to this week's full episode. I offer her article here as a better statement of my own current difficulties than I could render. She titled her article I tried to write this but couldn't. So Duvernay's essay goes like this. The Substack Project of mine was supposed to push me to do more long form writing, as in more than Instagram captions. In May, it seemed like a good idea, but I've struggled. I actually started to write my next onward essay a couple of months ago, and I started to write about Jerry Seinfeld. It was reported that he stood on a stage at Duke University and compared the movement for Palestinian freedom to the Ku Klux Klan. He reportedly suggested that quote, free Palestine is a coded way of saying, quote, I don't like Jews, and claimed that the Klan was, quote, a little better because their hatred was, quote, honest. I began writing an open letter to educate folks who may believe him on what the Ku Klux Klan actually was and still is. The KKK is a terrorist organization born in the ashes of the Civil War. The evil men of the Ku Klux Klan dragged black families from their beds at night, shot black fathers in front of their children, raped black mothers while crosses burned outside. Hooded Klan members lynched black men and women and children, mutilated their bodies and burned them alive before white cheering crowds. The Klan bombed black churches, assassinated black leaders, and spread terror so deep that entire towns lived in silence, afraid to speak, let alone dream. To invoke the Klan as some kind of yardstick for quote honesty is to desecrate the memory of those murdered in its blood soaked rain. Equally vile is the attempt to smear free Palestine as nothing more than an anti Semitic camouflage. It is the cry of a people suffocating under blockade, occupation, and apartheid conditions, with entire neighborhoods of civilians reduced to rubble by bombs as they are being starved. To recast this cry for help as hatred is a deliberate distortion that puts people in harm's way. Here's the paradox. I was writing this with the belief that Jerry Seinfeld has the right to say all that he said. Free speech protects his misuse of history. As I was working on the draft, a man I'd barely heard of named Charlie Kirk was shot and killed by another white man who was raised in a MAGA household in a conservative state using his grandfather's rifle. I couldn't finish the Seinfeld piece. I started to write about Charlie Kirk, the the rush by the right to blame the left, their dangerous hysteria to venerate a man who preached racist, misogynist, and violent views. Tanisi Coates in Vanity Fair laid it bare. Kirk wasn't an aberration. He was the product of a system that teaches cruelty as strength. Mourning him has seemed to become a requirement by some, but outrage for him never carried the same weight as for other victims of political violence or gun violence. They don't matter at all, it appears. I wanted to share all my thoughts on this, but the news stories were coming so fast that I couldn't focus. I started to write about Sudan. The RSF broke through the last defense of Sudan's armed forces after an eighteen month siege. The videos are unbearable. RSF soldiers storming the main hospital and shooting patients in their beds. It's reported that fifteen hundred people were murdered in three days. Fifteen hundred people in three days, not by a bomb or a catastrophic device, but hand to hand, at close range. Black people are the targets, specifically the Mosalit and other non Arab people. They are being slaughtered while the world scrolls on. one hundred fifty thousand humans gone since april twenty third. Mothers, fathers, aunts, cousins, shopkeepers, nurses, barbers, cooks, students, and currently a half a million children are there starving to death right now. All of this is motivated by even darker forces, to do with fortunes and minerals and gold and manipulation to profit and plunder by other countries, including the United States. What can I do with writing? I try to track the stats and learn about it and post about it, and will continue, but it feels like a raindrop on the ocean. Not enough. I don't know. I tried to write about the forty two million Americans who woke up one morning to find their EBT cards from Snap empty on purpose. What cruelty from a regime that treats a suffering like a sport. Congress had already set aside six billion dollars for emergencies like this, but the Trump machine shrugged and withheld it anyway. And then a handful of Democrats caved, a gut punch felt across the country. After the longest government shutdown in our history, the people received no real relief on the vital issue of health care, only another lesson on how pain has become a political tactic. The message was clear. If you're willing to hurt enough people, you can win any fight. Heartbreaking. Every time I sat down to write, the chaos and the cruelty of this time crowded the page. I kept stopping, I kept starting. Nothing felt finished until the people finished it for me. When New York City handed the mayor's seat to Zoran Mamdani and a landslide no one thought possible. A wind shaped by organizers, teenagers, night shift nurses, mosque elders, subway poets, delivery bikers, the people who refused to spare and decided to bend history with their own hands, the story written by those who refused to be ignored. When the people put black women in mayor's shares in Detroit, Albany, Charlotte, Syracuse, and Conyers, Georgia, and in California, my home state, when the people passed Proposition fifty as a middle finger to the GOP gerrymandering hustle, California said, You want to play games with congressional seats? Let's play. These aren't flukes. This is people choosing solidarity over cruelty. It is a reminder that organized people can outrun the arrogance of the powerful. I wanted to write this as a celebration of every single win on the road to a more just world. Thankfully, I was able to finish this time, just as Trump grinned and shook hands with Mamdani in the Oval Office mere hours after calling for the hanging of democratic political opponents. Folks, you can't make this stuff up. Overall, I've learned a lot in the last couple of months, especially about finishing. In a world this chaotic and wounded, an attempt itself carries its own integrity. Beginning becomes its own vow and its own defiance. Sometimes the incomplete essay is the truest one, because it reflects the world as it actually is, in progress. There will always be another spectacle waiting to break the day open. There will always be another crisis screaming for ink. So what do we do? I've resolved to just keep starting again and again, even when I can't finish, especially then. That was how DuVournay expressed her mood and desire. It is very like my own. More eloquent. So all right, returning to this episode's Wind Cries Freedom Excerpt, the health and class chapter of the Oral History, we here meet Barbara Bethune and Emiliano Farmer, each at their workplace, San Francisco General Hospital for Barbara, and Northwestern Memorial Hospital in Chicago for Emiliano. And they reveal intricacies and possibilities of RPS early healthcare organizing. So to start, Miguel asks, Barbara Bethune, you were born in nineteen ninety two and went on to become both a doctor and a researcher. But from the beginning you questioned the purpose and practice of your own profession. Once you joined RPS, your focus became clear, transforming health care at its roots. You later served as RPS's shadow secretary of health. Can you tell us how you came to medicine? How you then turned to radicalism, and what your early medical activism looked like in the wake of the convention. I became a doctor believing I could offer something good to the world, something solid and sustaining. I wanted to use my hands, my heart, and my mind in a way that felt right, that could serve, heal, and uplift. That dream planted itself early, nurtured by the presence of doctors in my family, and it became deeply rooted after I was treated with compassion and care by a doctor when I was still a child. It looked like a gentle road laid out before me, but college began to wear away the polish. As I worked further into the field, the shine dimmed. Medical school dulled the spirit. It sliced context from diagnosis, ignored prevention, erased the social causes of disease like a chalkboard wiped clean. Then came the internship. At a towering Chicago hospital, I saw the machine's gears grind, and that is when my path took a turn. I became political. Miguel S, being an intern, did it? Yes, my internship delivered the final blow. The training wasn't built to heal. It was built to shape us, to mold us into obedient cogs. We were told, without word of explanation, to conform or be cast out. That pressure was like water to a fish, constant, unspoken, inescapable. So we endured. We didn't speak out. We swallowed our questions like bitter pills. We learned to suffer in silence, and our silence helped us survive. But it also set us on a path to pass on that same suffering. We convinced ourselves the hardship had meaning, when really it was just tradition, choking purpose. Of course there were exceptions, differences, but I am telling you what I saw and felt. This was the song we'd heard all our lives. Do your job, follow the rules, don't question. At home, at school, now at work, and every time we bowed our heads, we trained ourselves to impose it on the next soul in line. We didn't just live through it, we defended it. We endured brutal shifts. We earned the right to high income and public admiration. But what we didn't do, what we were afraid to do, was to whisper to ourselves this is not right. That truth would have shattered the whole illusion. It was easier to just slip into our role, to let the system use us, and one day to use others. Don't misunderstand me. I had compassion, we all did. Our hearts beat for the patients, but the system we were in, it pushed us to set that compassion aside, and step by step we did. I too once believed the lie that this was the only way to be a doctor. Do it for pay for prestige. Miguel asked, but then you resisted? I did. Whether out of stubbornness, fire in my gut, or simply having danced with dissent before, I began to rebel. I asked myself the questions that burned. What is this really about? Why do we work interns until their bones ache, until their minds fog? That is not healing. That is harm. The prevalent logic failed the test of reason. The established doctors didn't work those hours, and those rare emergencies that did call for really long days, they didn't justify such widespread exhaustion. No, something else was at work, and that's when the clearest truth revealed itself. Miguel asked, so what was internship about? The more I considered that question, the more I felt the answer rising up like a tide. It wasn't just about learning how to heal. No child, it was about teaching submission. It was about keeping the club exclusive, so the ones inside could stay rich. What we were taught, yes, there was knowledge in it, but it drifted in behind something much larger, something more dangerous. We were being initiated, not into a ministry of mercy, but into a kingdom of entitlement. We were to learn to bow before hierarchy. We were to learn to obey without complaint. We were to fit the molds, or find another place to stand. Doctors were given power, yes, but the price of that power was silenced before higher power. Influence was permitted so long as it echoed the chamber's walls. I began to see interning not as training, but as hazing dressed in a white coat. And I couldn't just stew in my frustration. I had to understand it. I had to name the beast. So I went to where discipline was honed sharpest, a military boot camp. I watched the young recruits march and shout and strip themselves of self. Miguel asked, What is boot camp about for them? It wasn't only about learning to shoot straight or to stand firm beside your ally in arms. Those things were in it, sure, but underneath, deeper, it was about emptying them of hesitation. It was about burying compassion. It was about building people who could end the life on command without pausing to feel the sorrow. It broke down the soul and rebelted to follow orders, even orders to destroy. Soldiers are trained to report deviance, to smile with obedience, to never ask why, to leave empathy behind. And when they left boot camp, they were not merely soldiers. They were believers in the military order of things, in the righteousness of military command, and in the silence of dissent. They became protectors of a world where obedience is virtue and questioning is treason. Miguel asks, and you felt that something similar was true of being an intern on the road to becoming a doctor? Yes, I know it sounds heavy, even outrageous, but I felt it down to my bones. I looked again at the rituals I had endured, and I saw the same design. We were being shaped not to heal most effectively, but to serve profit most obediently. We were taught medicine, yes, but only inside the box that kept the many that kept the money flowing and the power concentrated. We were made to honor pharmaceutical giants, even when their profits depended on preserving sickness. We were taught to push nurses down, to keep them quiet and deferrent, even when they knew just as much and sometimes more than we did. We were trained to defend our golden wages, to believe we were entitled to them, and to keep that gold mine protected, we were taught to accept the bottleneck. Fewer doctors meant more demand, meant more money. So we marched through medical school, heads held high, eyes closed tight. We saved lives, yes, but not all the lives we might have saved if we challenged the whole design. And when we looked in the mirror, we didn't see the ones left behind. We saw only the patients we helped, and rarely the ones who suffered from a system we upheld. We were not born cruel, but we were pressed and bent, shaped and hammered until we became tools. Medical interning was what I later understood to be a coordinator class recruitment regimen. It wasn't built firstly for health. It wasn't even firstly about wisdom. It was firstly about grooming loyal gatekeepers for an unjust order, and the ones who could not conform, they didn't often last long. We learned to justify it all, because in this world, this weary, broken world, it all seemed to make sense. It all seemed to be the best that can be. But just because a song is old and has lots of singers doesn't mean it's true. Miguel replies Becoming a journalist was like basic training too. By the time you rise in the profession, if ever, to a position on some highly respected outlet, you can no longer even think, no longer even hear seriously dissident thoughts. It's the same song different verse. As doctors we thought, we heal, so we can't be responsible for the harm. The journalist thinks I report, so I can't be responsible for the silence. But the silence speaks and the harm accumulates. And once I saw it, I couldn't stop looking. I turned my gaze to lawyers, to architects, to scientists, to professors, and Lord, it was everywhere. These professionals hand out skills and confidence, yes. But they also teach you how to serve the top while you screw the bottom. That's how you rise. That's how you get invited in. That's how you avoid the whip. Deviation is dangerous. Conscience is costly, caring becomes an act of rebellion. They want us polished and polite, but not free. They want us proud, but only of the parts they've chosen for us. They want us alive, but only to obey. Miguel asks, but Barbara, surely doctors, journalists, lawyers, and all the rest try to be ethical. Yes, of course. But when the floor beneath your feet is tilted, even the kindest steps can go astray. People go through this pattern of pressure, frustration, and anger, and have varied reactions. Mostly, at least before RPS took off, doctors would try to navigate and do good and be ethical, but without challenging their role assignments. They believed with good reason that to challenge their roles would fail and would also lead to personal loss. This wasn't true just for doctors, of course, but also for nurses, for all medical workplace employees and in other workplaces as well. The role structures in hospitals, like those in law firms, political parties, churches, government agencies, industries, and other mainstream institutions create an attitude. Go along to get along. Here is your slot, fill it. To resist felt like a naive pipe dream, and more, we know what this is all about even as we succumb to it. The worst part was that complying with your prescribed role over and over, day in and day out, eventually switched from something you did with a frown under duress to being who you were. You know all the lawyer jokes? Well the same could be said for doctors, managers, engineers, and so on. Complying with one's role morphs from something we do under duress to who we are. To resist becomes virtually unthinkable. We don't keep ruling it out. In time, it just stops arising in our minds. We don't see ourselves as monopolizing our skills. Who wants to see themselves as a thief systematically keeping others down? We instead see ourselves as innately better. They are down there because that's where they belong. I am up here because I belong above. Those folks get the best medicine. Those others, they just die. Doctors have been able to cure TB for almost a hundred years. Millions die of it yearly. The killer is social relations, not just the germs. The lie feeds on itself. It reaches a point where someone who retains sufficient humanity to resist the inequities and want to treat the poor, to eradicate the poverty, seems either saint like or crazy. Those who comply seem mature. They rise. For whatever reason, I reacted a bit differently than the norm for those times, as did many others, though we were initially a minority, and most important, we rarely knew each other. I wanted to keep doing medicine, but I wanted to improve health for everyone and not just for a tiny few with means. I felt no explicit allegiance to a domineering class above workers, though I certainly understood the pressures and the allures of their situation. So I went to the first RPS convention as a kind of Hail Mary gesture. I didn't know if what was being attempted would provide me a good path forward or even make sense at all. But I would try, and I was glad I did. Miguel asks, why was that? At the convention I met other doctors, nurses, and medical workers from my own city and from around the country. To hide dissent and more so to hide positive aspirations from view in medical institutions was critical for those institutions' maintenance. So I had never seen very much of that. But once the dissent and especially aspirations were made public at the convention, they turned out to be much more plentiful than anyone realized. To be at the convention where the revelations were visible helped me see what was out there. At the convention we arranged and held some sessions of our own. We met each other, we empowered each other by sharing similar stories and desires and also original approaches. We talked about the kinds of chains we could fight for in the short term to win good gains for patients and ourselves, and to awaken desires for more changes, much more among fellow medical workers. The ideas that gained greatest traction, as best I can remember, were to seek comprehensive single payer health care, fight pharmaceutical companies to eliminate misuse of medicines, and reduce associated financial and health expenses for society, bring doctors to poor locales in appropriate numbers to support people in those locales, empower nurses, change the income structure of the profession toward more just allocation, and agitate for national campaign for more responsible food production and delivery. While I sincerely supported all of it, I became especially active in two parts, trying to battle the pharmaceutical companies and challenging the harsh hierarchies of income and influence inside hospitals. For combating misuse of prescriptions, we used direct actions aimed at producers. We held rallies and sit-ins to make clear the magnitude of the problem, including the extent to which pharmaceutical companies with complicity from doctors and pharmacists were not only vastly overcharging, but aggressively overprescribing and massively over advertising. How different is that than the behavior of illegal drug cartels? But then came another revelation. The practices we unearthed were nauseating, but we were even more shocked to discover that most people found grotesque medical malfeases unsurprising. They knew from experience what we had to fight to recognize. It turned out that spreading the awareness of medical injustice and criminality wasn't our key step. Our key step was convincing folks that the grotesque situation wasn't inevitable, and that we could win much better. Miguel asks, everybody knew the ills? People didn't know every twist of the story, but yes, they knew the rhythm of the tale, the ache of it. They'd come to accept the poison like it was medicine, and pointing to the facts cold, hard, grotesque, didn't shake them from that slumber. The truth was not enough. We had to lift the veil that told them this is the way it must be. We had to help them see this is not the way it has to stay. Don't get me wrong, modern medicine has saved countless lives, eased so many burdens, but it is also ignored, denied, and exploited so many who could have had better. We carried class action suits like banners of hope. Young voices rose up against the numbing tide of mood altering drugs. The old stood up, tired but firm, refusing to be dreamed of their savings in the name of one more procedure, one more cruel illusion of life. The addicted, too often blamed, too rarely heard, rose up and pointed to the architects of their suffering, the gleaming towers of Big Pharma. And across those lines all of us cried out against the reckless use of antibiotics, a slow poison threatening us all. We demanded free health care, not for the lucky few, but for the nation's soul. These campaigns didn't just put medicine on trial, they summoned the legal system too. The law had long declared it a sin to act before suffering arrived, even if suffering's shadow already stretched across the floor. We were told to wait until the harm was done, but we would not wait for more wounds to be carved. To deepen our strength, to ground it in the beating heart of our community, we called for a national boycott, a great refusal, a turning away from the worst of the pharmaceutical giants, by those of us in white coats and those without who could do so without undue risk. I stood firm and said, Quote it is time, it is time to name the sickness. It is time to cut it out, root and all. We had to show that winning one battle was not the end, that we could win again and again, and make the winning a way of life. Medicine had become a gluttonous merchant, it was ill with greed, and we, healers, had to become surgeons for the system. Miguel asks, you said you had a second focus. My other devotion was to confront the steep stairs of elitism built into hospitals and clinics. Racism and sexism had been fought with courage. There were victories, there were scars, there was still much more to do. But the silent stranger in the room, the ghost who had not yet been named, was class. The hierarchy of who speaks and who listens, who leads and who labors. We began with conversation, quiet at first. We let our truths gather breath. Nurses shared their hunger for respect, for fair wages, for the tools and trust to heal with fuller hands. Doctors, my people, had a harder truth to tell, that we needed to question our own privilege, our own hunger for status. We had to lay it down, not the skill, not the care, but the superiority. Miguel asks, Emiliano Farmer, you became a nurse by trade, and from the beginning you were a fierce advocate of working class politics, always pushing to expose and transform the tensions between nurses and doctors, and more broadly, between workers and the coordinator class. You've been part of RPS since the very start, a key figure in shaping its class commitments and its deep ties to workplace and worker organizing. Can you start by sharing how you first got involved and what some of your early activities following the convention were? During the twenty twenty pandemic, I was run ragged, which was okay, but I also saw how little regard there was for people like me. Yes, the public applauded us, but the profession couldn't even manage to provide us good conditions and protection. So I later went to the first RPS convention as a working class nurse hostile to doctor's elitism. I was already radical, even revolutionary, but I doubted the convention would ever be. Elevate my concerns. I was excited by some earlier demonstrations, but it was hard to be optimistic. And actually, I didn't want to curb my anger, but I went and I was pleasantly surprised. Nurses were there and forced to say we hate bad health care. We want better. We should be part of providing better. We should be respected. The ridiculous allotment of most power and income to owners, but also to doctors at the expense of nurses, technicians, and people doing other work in hospitals had to stop. At the convention, we nurses met, talked, and became more confident and empowered by sharing our views. We were excited about the program that emerged, and we quickly decided to form as a part of RPS Healthcare Workers United, a movement for better health for all, including ourselves. I think the organizing beyond oneself mindset owed a lot to what had earlier emerged to fight Trump II and RFK Jr. But whatever its origins, after the convention, HCWU became a militant, multifocused movement to organize workplaces and also win broader health policy reforms. We investigated and learned about our jobs and their financial logic and illogic, and especially about health workers' attitudes toward their conditions. We attracted support and soon initiated positive campaigns, as well as supporting other unions' campaigns. But before all that, at the convention, we nurses held some sessions and then invited doctors to one and at it I welcomed them with a speech. I remember it well. I began. We respect your work, but feel you are overpaid, overprotective of yourselves, and overly hostile to us. Do you really think you deserve more income, status, and power than us? And predictably, some young puffed up doctor screams out, damn right I do. Can you repair a heart? Can you breathe life into a dying child? I can, and you can't. I should earn more, and you shouldn't. I should have more say and more status, and you shouldn't. I mean really, isn't that obvious? How can you possibly think otherwise? I stared at him, trembling and replied, You ignore that our different tasks and different life circumstances give us different means to attain knowledge, which in turn enforces our different income and power. I think I was plaintive but militant about it, and I continued. I know many of you doctors like lawyers and managers and others with empowering work situations sincerely believe you are properly elevated and rewarded. I know many of you really believe we workers are dumb, parochial, and should be grateful. Most of you don't say it much, but deep down, and sometimes not so deep down, like just now, you've got it in mind. Many of you really feel workers should join a movement for a new society, but leave its decision making to people like you. We should help you dump your old boss so you can become our new boss. You should lay lead, we should follow. You should order, we should obey. And you know what? Sometimes we nurses are beaten down enough that we even doubt that we can handle empowered work. Sometimes we accept that we do deserve less income and say. Or if we are not submissive, sometimes we bend too far the other way, and furiously want you doctors kicked out of activism. Even worse we get so angry that you bait us into denying and denigrating knowledge and skill per se. But other times, like now, we see that we must eliminate class division not only in hospitals but throughout society. We must welcome doctors, lawyers, and other coordinator class members into activism, into RPS, but not let you dominate. We see that all workers must be empowered. And then this fancily dressed guy called out If you're right, why don't more nurses say so? I replied, Because we have families to feed, because you work us ragged, because we fear losing our jobs. A better question is why any of us do publicly address these class issues. It's probably because our jobs are less successful than most working class jobs at disempowering us. We are subordinated like other workers, but we are less socialized into accepting our plight. Still, even once we become aware and active, we don't want to antagonize doctors into rejecting change, so we often put a lid on our feelings. What is your excuse for keeping us down? Another doctor calls out. We don't keep you down, you are free to rise, but you just don't get very high. I have read progressive media, I don't see this concern. Is it just you? I know lots of nurses. We get along fine, they do good work, they are happy with their situation. I replied, You don't expect mainstream media to question private ownership because it would violate the owner's interests. Similarly, in much of alternative media, coordinator class rule by those who are empowered gets ignored because our need our media is most often run by coordinator class members like you, and due to their background, experience, and material interests, they, like you, reflexively ignore these issues. It is less malevolence than it is self serving ignorance. And just to be clear, you have no idea what the nurses around you think of you, what they aspire to, what they are capable of. Until we express ourselves, despite the risks, how could you? But then even when we do speak out, like I am right now, you are quick to contradict. Why not listen instead? So ended chapter twelve of the Wind Cries Freedom. I wonder what you think of that title. Titles either grow on you or don't. They either attract and motivate reading or they don't. Of course the subtitle matters an oral history of the next American Revolution, but I do have doubts about the title. And that said asked, this is Michael Albert, signing off until next time for Revolution Z.