Health Communism: A Surplus Manifesto

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Here is deep wisdom to arm a struggle towards forms of human embodiment as yet undreamed-of; inspiration for a million insurgencies of communist health. Our selves, our worthiness, our entire being and right to live revolve around making our labor power available to the ruling class. Beginning with a detailed description of the ways that some of the population is classed as surplus and how this is used to ‘other’ them, Adler-Bolton and Vierkant establish their case for the need to separate what they describe as the parasite of capitalism from the host of health.

This is a book you should read before you die, because the ideas synthesized by Adler-Bolton and Vierkant could save our collective lives. The things that were most interesting about this book were unfortunately the things that were not even in this book - the bibliography and notes, the topics raised, and all-too-quickly dealt with. Most importantly, 'Health Communism' analyzes the unique relationship that health has with capital, and capital has with health. Despite how long this review is, I'm still only touching on a modicum of all 'Health Communism''s greatness. Some of the data that are collected include the number of visitors, their source, and the pages they visit anonymously.

Rooted in the contemporary reality of mass death and disability, it reworks our familiar, commonsense concepts of sickness and health, care and cure, labor and waste to show how capitalist biomedicine wrings every last drop of productive labor from us before discarding us into the trash heap of ‘surplus population’ to carelessly be picked over and plundered until our death…Indeed, we are all ill under capitalism. This book shares the impressive truth that we are all surplus in the political economy of health, whether we are presently ‘healthy’ or ‘sick. Importantly, the reliance on a worker/surplus binary as a means of sorting the deserving from the undeserving establishes a concrete historical record offering de jury justification for organized state abandonment.

Nor can I imagine a more needful book for the pandemic we are still in, let alone the pandemics yet to come. In Health Communism, [Adler-Bolton and Vierkant] show how members of the ‘unproductive’ surplus class are cast as burdens even as health capitalism sets up entire cottage industries (e.Payments made using National Book Tokens are processed by National Book Tokens Ltd, and you can read their Terms and Conditions here. Important: Your credit card will NOT be charged when you start your free trial or if you cancel during the trial period. 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.

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. The state thereby underpins the creation of “capacities for profit,” to the detriment of individual health, which is quantified for these purposes.Since capitalism inherently produces mass death as part of its endless drive for maximum profit generation and concentration in private hands, nothing short of the end of capitalism and its replacement by a socialist society built by and for the most oppressed can be truly based around affirming life for all. It is an extermination norm, directed against everyone who is sick, that is: against all (who wouldn't be sick these days? In particular the claims around the political economy of health were generally not elaborated with a more in-depth analysis of the economy, which I think would have been really valuable-- I was sympathetic to these claims! That these divisions exacerbate exploitation, particularly in the global South, needs to be stressed. Everyone who wants to stop the destruction of their bodies by capitalism should join the Death Panel community.

They see the export of American-style private health provision and insurance through forced trade deals as a form of imperialism that undermines social-welfare systems globally. Parallels to what RWG describes in terms of prisons being a solution to both “surplus populations” and unmonetized land in the California of the 1990s. i will say i think the analyses lacked some nuance at times even if broadly-speaking the book is correct about the systems’ functioning. It makes a direct assault on the idea that health can survive under capitalism, where the sick are simply disposable, while the system making a killing along the way. These dynamics mark a finite barrier between wealthy “developed” nations and those consistently held underneath as vessels of extraction.Aquest llibre reprèn el fonaments d'una crítica marxista a la salut/malaltia iniciada pel Col·lectiu Socialista de Pacients els anys 70s. Personally, I enjoyed this overview of various health systems and how they can and cannot work without our current (American) structures. I’m disappointed accessibility wasn’t more of a priority for the authors—both because I wanted to understand the authors’ views better and because this undermines what I assume is its goal of raising public consciousness. This book doesn't oversimplify and avoid theory, but it does soften the edges enough for the casual reader to grasp the finer points of the arguments presented. Even if this is your first exposure to this line of thinking and it feels a little dry, I’d suggest you give it a shot.