Health Communism: A Surplus Manifesto

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In this fiery, theoretical tour de force, Beatrice Adler-Bolton and Artie Vierkant offer an overview of life and death under capitalism and argue for a new global left politics aimed at severing the ties between capital and one of its primary tools: health. If we let them, Beatrice Adler-Bolton and Artie Vierkant will teach the left how to really understand capitalism, at the cellular and somatic levels. No one talks like Adler-Bolton and Vierkant do – those in public health and medicine are too deeply embedded in the status quo to even acknowledge the searing logic of their words. Arbitrary divisions between ‘well’ and ‘unwell’ mirror earlier attitudes towards the ‘deserving’ and ‘undeserving’ poor to determine which sections of the population receive any form of relief from the conditions under which capitalism forces people to live.

If you have ever gone to work sick because you need the job to treat the sickness, you know the basic argument of Health Communism to be true: health under capitalism is an impossibility. Overall, Health Communism is an interesting if at times flawed read that presents some fascinating insights into the links between capitalism, health and control. An idea of the authors and their forebearers I particularly felt moved by was that of organized state abandonment, which we are all experiencing in real-time as Covid disables and murders millions while the U. Written by co-hosts of the hit “Death Panel” podcast and longtime disability justice and healthcare activists Adler-Bolton and Vierkant, Health Communism first examines how capital has instrumentalized health, disability, madness, and illness to create a class seen as "surplus," regarded as a fiscal and social burden.Only as recently as the mid-1990s, with the ratification of the TRIPS agreement, did a formal mechanism come into place whereby an international pharmaceutical company could protest drug production or development around the world and expect to see swift political, military, or economic action by the US and other imperial WTO members against the “offending” state … [and] … produced a “persistent threat of unilateral retaliation” for states that would ignore or reject international corporations’ patent rights. We don’t share your credit card details with third-party sellers, and we don’t sell your information to others. Health communism" (the title of a planned Verso book) cannot mean anything else but the dictatorship of the medical doctors' class. Abandonment" is an unsurprising throughline of health capitalism though — the book also discusses "extractive abandonment," which I won't go into here.

The _ga cookie, installed by Google Analytics, calculates visitor, session and campaign data and also keeps track of site usage for the site's analytics report. While it is not discussed in the book, I think we can see this struggle playing out especially in Cuba, where the revolution has produced the world's most egalitarian and liberatory healthcare system.Almost every other sentence contained an argument or thing that I wanted to hear more about - I guess luckily about a fifth of the book is a bibliography. Health communists begin with a compelling vision of society not as divided between abled and disabled or sick and well but as a vast web of people, all of whom have both abilities to contribute and needs to meet. This book shares the impressive truth that we are all surplus in the political economy of health, whether we are presently 'healthy' or 'sick. worth the read if you’re interested in the premise especially considering it’s short and also available in audiobook form but the immense praise i see for this book is a testament to the veiled anarchistic tendencies of the american left.