Health is Social Justice
Vivian Camacho
Cochabamba – Bolivia
The COVID-19 pandemic clearly demonstrates the commodification of health and life on the planet today. Thanks to the widespread hegemony of modern medicine—marked by its academic, monocultural thinking—we suffer from wholesale dehumanization because it unabashedly values profit over human life when the latter conflicts with corporate interests.
Our health lies in the hands of corporate greed. The industrial-medical-pharmaceutical complex, the industrially processed food, and rampant profiteering of war machines are all guided by the same purpose: economic power. Having failed to resolve the hunger problem, they poisoned the soil, water and air with agribusiness, hazardous substances, and transgenic sterile seeds through the so-called “green revolution”. They do not care to heal the diseases of the world, on the contrary, they are a convenient method to generate limitless consumption through dependence on their pharmaceuticals (recall that Bayer purchased Monsanto). We therefore need to reflect on the how we can develop health from our territories using the collective experience of racism and structural social injustice suffered by the humble peoples of the world.
The neoliberal night, bearing the flag of fascism, threatens the life of all creatures. As living peoples we know from the ancestral spirituality rooted in our territories, the time has come for the sunrise of the peoples and, with it, dignity and social justice. It is time for the flowering of the peoples. The clarity of Dr. Ernesto Guevara accompanies us along this path: “The first disease that needs to be eradicated is social injustice”.
Health stems from Mother Earth. The Indigenous and original campesino idea of “Sumaq Kawsay” offers a new civilizational paradigm to overcome the totalitarian commercial system that transforms everything into a commodity. Crisis capitalism has caused immense destruction of ecosystems, hunger, pain, and death at the planetary level. Therefore the basis of this economic necropolity must be transformed from the nihilism of the egotistical individual to a life-caring, solidarity-based economy. Humanity is not to blame for this crisis—certainly not the environmental catastrophes—since it is the 1% that hold the biggest economic power over the 99% of us. The top tier of the neoliberal capitalist system and their absurd rampant greed, having accumulated riches we couldn’t even fathom, are the responsible parties behind this civilizational crisis poisoning entire regions, causing millions to be sick and dispossessed victims of capitalist looting.
This colonial, patriarchal and racist system continues to impose itself through mass media controlled by the masters of the world—an empty culture that fills itself through the act of purchasing any absurd thing on the market. This means millions of disposable products and wasted food to keep the prices high. Plastic life offers this market freedom to such an extreme that it has created plastic islands floating in the ocean—plastic particles in the water and air. Plastic people who consider purchasing their rights and sustaining white supremacist fascism through brazenly open violence simply because they have the money to do so. The rest of us are mere captives in this gruesome game.
Despite this perverse global imbalance, millions of humble peoples are getting stronger in community organizing. This is the strength of being together in a community, secure in the knowledge that protecting life and land together from corporate looting is possible. Many movements lift their voices from their cultural and ancestral identity, recalling the strength of indigenous, original campesino and Afro-descendant peoples who endured centuries of oppression.
We remain standing, steadfast, and continue to be born to safeguard community life, to sow and harvest with grateful love the fruits of our mother. People’s solidarity has been part of the sustenance and care during the quarantine: organizing communities for sharing casseroles to quench the hunger of the dispossessed, thanks to the tons of donated food produced by campesinos who know there is enough love of Mother Earth for all.
This loving and caring reciprocity is part of our ancestral knowledge that still guide us, because this profound memory reminds us that we are creatures born of the same Mother, Pachamama. With this living ancestral wisdom of our peoples and the ancestral traditional medicine that make up our cultural resistance and decolonizing anticapitalist struggle, we possess the strength of our ancestors—those who planted this long road in history with their lives so that we may recover our roots born of the heart of Mother Earth. Each person has sowed their tears and their lives in the just cause for human dignity, and it has multiplied into millions of new seeds that we came to flower on earth.
Today, each of us represents the most beautiful dream of past generations, making us the inheritors of the great strength required to spin the wheels of history in favor of the humble people of the world, respecting the cultural diversity and watching over biodiversity. Knowing that although we may be small, we number in the millions, a strength transforming the world as social struggles unite in the global weaving. This reveals to us the urgency of participating in life with respect and love–that being part of a community is not a name or a title but rather the collective force beating within all of us: “we are, together, together we are strong”.
The capacity of joy, beauty and justice are brought to our calling and commitment, with the birth of a more dignified, more free, and more caring world—a world dedicated to the dignified life of the peoples:
“Health is Social Justice”
Mother Earth our first strength
With your earthquake’s beating,
The seeds are born and the spring waters blossom.
With your spring smile,
The fields flower and the mountains rejuvenate.
With your sweet ripe fruit,
The human heart is forged.
With your tears in the rain,
The sadness of the world washes away.
With your wind’s embrace,
We hear your breath.
With your fire blanket in the volcanoes,
Anger becomes a cry for justice.
With your cover of high tides,
We can transform all the pain.
Mother Earth, Pachamama, we are your arms and your voice.
Women with wombs that give birth to humanity,
Dreams and a future.
As you yourself,
We have suffered violence for centuries.
The humiliation within a brutal capitalist system
Against life.
As you yourself, we are brave,
Despite all the pain.
We are reborn embracing community
From our ancestrality.
As you yourself, we will come back, buried in your womb
And your love will make seeds of us
For a humanity filled with love for life.
We are Feminine Force.
We are Pachamama.
We give birth to stars
And dignified life for the peoples.
