I am a doctor in New York City. Like everyone else in this capitalist healthcare system, my colleagues and I work in an environment that reduces people to numbers, costs, and potential profit, not health. We perform unnecessary procedures, fight with insurers, and watch patients’ conditions deteriorate due to poverty, stress, and environmental degradation.

We call this the “social determinants of health.” There is another way to say this: the violence of capitalism.

That violence has been entering a new, terrifying phase across the country as we have seen Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) murdering people with impunity, terrorizing communities, and kidnapping families. This recently escalated further. Just over two weeks after ICE agent Jonathan Ross executed legal observer Renee Nicole Good, federal agents executed another person in broad daylight. This time it was one of our own, an ICU nurse named Alex Pretti who was attempting to help another individual being brutalized by Customs and Border Protection (CBP). As the video shows, CBP agents pinned Pretti down to the sidewalk, punching him in the face, and then firing at least ten shots at point-blank range into his motionless body. This was not an arrest gone wrong. It was a public execution.

It’s no coincidence that it happened only one day after a historic, worker-led mobilization. On January 23, over 50,000 people in Minneapolis brought the city to a standstill for a “Day of Truth and Freedom.” Healthcare workers, teachers, and service workers walked out, transforming schools into sanctuaries and showing the power of collective refusal. Over 700 small businesses closed throughout the state as part of the action. Nationwide, tens of thousands joined in solidarity. The message was clear: No business as usual while ICE terrorizes our communities.

And the state’s response? Not to retreat, but to escalate.

In Minneapolis, the epicenter of this crisis, my healthcare colleagues have been rightfully sounding the alarm. Last week, leaders of Minnesota’s medical societies held an emergency press conference. They detailed how ICE agents are showing up at hospitals and clinics, accessing exam rooms without warrants, and refusing to leave even during medical visits. The result is further damaging public health. Many undocumented adults and significant numbers of legal immigrants, and even citizens, now avoid medical care due to immigration fears. This leads to conditions going untreated, preventable illnesses become emergencies, and children missing critical care.

The 19th-century physician and pathologist Rudolf Virchow, who famously identified the social roots of disease, stated that “medicine is a social science, and politics is nothing else but medicine on a large scale.” He understood that epidemics are just simply biological, they are political. The new epidemic we face today is one of state terror committed by ICE and all of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). It’s an epidemic perpetrated by the capitalist system. It is an epidemic of capitalist state violence. And those same bodies who are victims of this epidemic will be sent to the hospitals, ERs, and ICUs to be treated by healthcare workers.

The causes of the epidemic are capitalism’s violence, plain and simple. We treat the symptoms — the asthma exacerbated by pollution, the hypertension fueled by poverty — while politely ignoring the cause: a capitalist system that requires exploitation, borders, and police violence to function. This is the ultimate “upstream” factor we so often fail to take into account.

In light of this growing epidemic of state violence, it is time for healthcare workers — doctors included, who are so often apolitical — to mobilize. We must act as one class fighting across staff lines and across work sectors.

In New York City, nurses are already on strike for a fair contract and better patient care. They see how the healthcare system focuses on profit above all else. Their fight is our fight. Their union, and every healthcare union, must now join the call and help build towards a nationwide general strike. No work gets done while ICE murders people with impunity. No procedures, no clinic visits, no billing — except for emergency, lifesaving care.

The recent Minnesota mobilization showed the power of rank-and-file organization with teachers forming sanctuary committees and workers deciding collectively to withhold their labor. We need to build these democratic assemblies in every hospital, clinic, and union hall. In these spaces, we can plan how to safely provide emergency and lifesaving care while shutting down everything else, as part of a coordinated withholding of labor that can paralyze the economy. After all, the same capitalist class that benefits from repression at home is the same that runs our hospitals sacrificing patient health for profit.

Unions must use all their power and resources to join the fight to get killer federal immigration agents off our streets and out of our communities, not just in Minneapolis but across the country. Working people are angry and ready to fight. We need meetings and assemblies in workplaces across the country to discuss and decide on how to spread energy and the combativeness from Minneapolis to spread at a national scale building toward a national strike.

There can be no business as usual when we are being murdered in the streets. It’s time to block everything and shut it all down to demand for ICE and DHS to get out of our communities and for them to be abolished altogether.

The post Healthcare Worker Alex Pretti Is the Latest Victim of Capitalist State Violence. We Need to Join the Call for a Nationwide General Strike appeared first on Left Voice.

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