Larry Kramer is correct about at least one thing: IT IS EVIL that the poor and marginalized are mistreated by government and pharmeceutical companies, that profits are put before human beings, and that they are allowed to make excuses while the poor die.
The ACT UP phenomenon, born from Kramer's efforts at the beginning of what was known as HIV/AIDS, challenged this social evil. It was also to be the last breath of activism in the United States of America. Since then, we have slumbered - a drug-induced slumber perhaps since even our anxiety has been stigmatized into a condition to be treated - to do not a godd*mn thing. Kramer is also right to ask, not rhetorically, "where is the outrage," given the state of working class people. Working class toil on, and the wealthy grow richer with government diversion of more resources to them. Remember, the rich don't make money, they are simply as allowed their piracy as Drake was for Queen Elizabeth I.
But activism's last breath is a sour-smelling one. It fed right in to the march of obsene capitalism guided by figures like Ronald Reagan in the US and Margaret Thatcher in the UK. It is interesting to glance at their own empowerments, the Reagan victory and the Tory landslide which got Thatcher the requisite invitation to Buckingham Palace. A Reagan victory hung in the balance with Prsident Carter, the controversy being the hostages in Iran - it is speculated that those hostages were kept until after Reagan won, by design, to keep the Carter support low. Meanwhile, US espionage had been spying on the Labour government that preceeded Thatcher due to its leftist policies, union support, and its stance against the US war in Viet Nam. There are forces in the country about which you do not know, the current Queen warned.
The 1970's. The Trilaterals had already warned us, too, of the Crisis of Democacry, their own white paper speaking to the consequence to government of an empowered people. The rabble had to be tamed.
Economies were slowing, we were told. This meant nothing to the poor but spoke to the need of new frontiers for global capital.
Rightwing governments, which would bust unions and further empower a western capitalism with a new frontier that was direly needed. One of those frontiers would be the drug industry, which had helped win many battles in public health with public funding ... but how would profits continue to be made in a world without disease? Forces were at work to assure Reagan and Thatcher assumed the helms of power to deliver these frontiers.
HIV's link to AIDS was decided exactly 23 years ago by such a rightwing government in an April 1984 press conference with a political appointee who choked on her words as she spoke.
Public funding into medical research was starved by such a rightwing government.
Opportunities for drug companies to fund and control this research in universities was provided by such a rightwing government.
An old industry that was threatened with redunancy was reborn, and HIV-AIDS came along at a perfect time when government was getting out of the business of public health and capitalism let in to meet its bottom line, not needs of the people.
But the gay men of ACT UP did not demand the dismantle of capitalism. While theirs was a heritage that blended the elements of the 1960's civil rights era they also had direct ties to the modern world itself, and the modern world is structurally capitalist.
ACT UP was loud, angry, and theatrical, as they should have been; they used all sorts of strategies and antics to dramatize their purpose - this is a page lifted from the Black civil rights movement. But these were also the children of privilege. White men who had the same stake in being recognized as their merchant-class forbears who had to cut the head of a king off the begin the modern world. The modern world begins in France: more precisely, it begins somewhere when those slave-trading merchants grew richer and richer but were not acknowledged by an Old Regime of royalty and titled nobility. Those merchants - the bourgeoisie ... and I would add the American colonists - give us a better class picture of the ACT UP anger.
Their demand was not to dismantle or to question capitalism but rather to demand more drugs and drugs to be provided faster down the pipeline. AZT was dusted off the shelves and allowed to murder thousands of gay men. AZT had been shelved in the 1960's as being too toxic for the general population, but deemed fine to murder faggots.
So it was without surprise that the other day I heard veteran AIDS activist, Cleve Jones, founder of the AIDS Quilt, put his efforts behind the crystal meth "epidemic" and demand still more "treatment" - this means drugs and drug profits.
More drugs means more enrichment of pharmaceutical companies with funds that should be spent on the poor. In the ensuing years, where public health has become a shell of its former self and global capital is allowed to determine treatment, we already see the resurgence of diseases the world had once combated. We see them, and since the afflicted have no money and no power, they go neglected.
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