People's Free Health Clinic

We have initiated a Free Health Clinic to combat the health problems which exist among poor and oppressed people. We realize that a person’s health is his most valuable possession. We also realize that health care and inadequate facilities can be used as a tool to perpetrate genocide against a people. We know that as long as the oppressor controls the institutions within our oppressed communities, we will be subjected to institutionalized genocide whether it comes from inadequate housing, the barrel of a pig’s shotgun, or from inadequate medical attention. . . . [We] must create institutions within our communities that are controlled and maintained by the people"

Jo Spence,
from Cancer Shock

Spare Rib


The explosion of

militant feminist

publications in

the 1970s

transformed the

ways we

encounter health

questions and

health struggles.

Healthy or Unhealthy

unions?


The Confederation of

The Health Service

Employees (COHSE) 

The union was founded in

1946 with the merger of

the Mental Hospital and

Institutional Workers

Union and the Hospital

and Welfare Services

Union, with the aim of

having one union to

represent workers in

the National Health

Service on its

formation.


In 1993, COHSE

merged with two other

trade unions - NUPE

(the National Union o

f
Public Employees) and

NALGO (the National

and Local Government

Officers Association ) -

to form UNISON, the

largest public sector

trade union in the UK.

In the 1980s

questions

of health and the

environment often

went together... but

began to pose

themselves as a

parallel alternative,


critical of state

health

provision but also

perhaps more

strongly guided

by personal choice,

autonomy or in

other

ways indifference? 

Strikes,Occupations and Protests

One Woman's Fight to Die Her Own Way

"Andrea (N’Drea) was involved with Os Cangaceiros, a group of social rebels who refused the slavery of work and mercilessly attacked the prison system of France in the 1980’s and 90’s. In 1985, she learned that she had cancer. She underwent surgery, chemotherapy and radiation treatment. Then in 1990, she walked out of the medical world for good to grasp her life and her death as her own. This work explains that decision with intelligence, anger and joy. It is at the same time a powerful condemnation of the medical industry, a passionate theoretical analysis of the society of the commodity and its destruction of the human individual on all levels—emotional, intellectual, social and physical—and the personal expression of one woman’s decision to live her life fully and to die on her own terms among those she loved in defiance of a society that steals both our lives and deaths away."

—Wolfie Landstreicher

We Are All Sick!


a proposal for communist care

A health autonomy possible for mental health users?

'I see my illness as an economic illness'

RADICAL HEALTH

Fightback No.2 :Against Cuts in the Health Service,
May-June 1978

Workers Playtime No.1, February 1983

Counter Information No.18, Feb-March, 1988

Campaigns for Abortion

Health Autonomy

OCCUPY EVERYTHING!

Self-Organised
Clinics
in Greece