Prospects for a Genuine Revival of Primary Health Care—Through the Visible Hand of Social Justice Rather than the Invisible Hand of the Market: Part I

Abstract

In a two-part article (the first part in this Journal issue), the author explores the prospects for a genuine revival of the social justice project of “Health for All by the Year 2000,” launched by the WHO and UNICEF in 1978 at Alma-Ata in the former Soviet Union, with reference (in Part I) to the World Health Report 2008, Primary Health Care: Now More than Ever, and the report of the WHO Commission on Social Determinants of Health, also published in 2008; and (in Part II) to Global Health Watch 2: An Alternative World Health Report and the perspectives of anti-capitalist, real socialist, environmental, and people's movements for economic and social justice. The reports are reviewed in terms of the original values and principles of Alma-Ata (social justice and human rights) and the structural foundations of the primary health care (PHC) project (a new international economic order and emancipatory development of decolonized countries). A genuine revival of the PHC project and of Health for All, which is its implicit objective, will not be possible unless the multiple crises that we are confronting today—in energy, water, food, finance, the environment, science, information, and democracy—are recognized as capitalist crises and addressed in these terms. In short, the invisible hand of the market must be replaced by the visible hand of social justice.