The price of a kidney

The ability of the medical industry to replace the diseased or injured vital organs of individuals with those from another person is undoubtedly seen as a near miracle by those who receive the donated organ. From another point of view, donating an organ is also a sign of the greatest human solidarity. Even donating the organ of someone accidentally dying is an act of human consciousness. That of someone close, probably a relative to allow a better genetic match, is a great sacrifice for another human being.

In a society built on solidarity it could be expected that organs would become available because enough people would voluntarily offer theirs—at least upon their death—to aid other human beings.

In the U.S. today, there are over 95,000 people waiting for organs. About 6,700 of these people die for the lack of them each year. Under these conditions, and in a world ruled by capital, the worst can be expected—organs at market prices. There is a national law that no benefits can be given to organ donors. But of course there is an underground market that makes everything available for a price.

On the global market, what is the price of a kidney? This question might raise a feeling of nausea and disgust among people who have a sense of humanity, who are appalled by the command of the capitalist market in every sphere of life. You would think that no one could go lower than taking an act of immense human solidarity—donating a vital organ—and having it ruled by the market.

You would think so, until you learned what was being considered in South Carolina in the United States in 2007. What could be worse than putting human organs on the cash market? Worse than raw, ruthless capitalism? Well, a throwback to slavery would be worse. And that’s precisely what some South Carolina legislators are considering. Not only that, they think that what they are doing is a contribution.

A state Senate panel in South Carolina is proposing to offer to the mostly African-American prison population of that state a deal that many of them can’t refuse: one hundred eighty days cut off their jail time for the donation of a kidney. It is a slave owner’s solution to a human problem. It is a reminder of the medical experiments done on African Americans who contracted syphilis in the 1930s—known as the Tuskeegee project—which used Black men as laboratory specimens and abandoned them as human beings, using them as guinea pigs and then cutting off their medical care once the experiment was finished.

So there are two grotesque possibilities under the globalized capitalist market: a poor worker or farmer in a developing country giving up a kidney to support his or her family or a nationally oppressed person in the United States, imprisoned most likely as part of that oppression, giving up a kidney to gain a half-year of relative freedom.

It is the unique contribution of U.S. capitalism, born in part from the slave system, to take what should be an exercise in human solidarity and turn it into a sordid addendum to oppression. It is one more reason to fight that much harder to replace the capitalist system with socialism.