Beatrice Adler-Bolton and her co-author Artie Vierkant claim in the last two chapters of "Health Communism" that they have dedicated thepr book to the Socialist Patients' Collective (SPK). Demarcating the healthy from the surplus, the worker from the “unfit” to work, the authors argue, serves not only to undermine solidarity but to mark whole populations for extraction by the industries that have emerged to manage and contain this “surplus” population.

I’m not exactly sure who the intended audience is—maybe someone with more academic background than me? 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. Heath Communism is not "well-behaved": It is not interested in sober consideration, dry pontifications.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. Also includes a really interesting + usable history of SPK, a socialist patient’s collective in 1970s West Germany. Nor can I imagine a more needful book for the pandemic we are still in, let alone the pandemics yet to come. It’s an interesting history, but after the broad, internationalist lens of the first two-thirds, it feels out of place.

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.

The history of ACT UP exposed me to a new critical perspective on the org and its methods (which I can attest from personal experience in disease advocacy are championed as wholly aspirational and uncomplicatedly good. assertions like “health is a fantasy” and “the sick are the central class that can bring about the fall of capitalism” (both stated in the conclusion) are divorced from both reality and basic marxist thought. 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. This creative, wide-ranging book would be important under any circumstances since it helps readers understand widespread social processes that are genuinely violent in their operations yet often curiously bloodless in their ideological depictions.

This may be in part due to the somewhat niche nature of the academic community to which it is aimed. 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. Hotjar sets this cookie to know whether a user is included in the data sampling defined by the site's pageview limit. The view of the authors is that capitalism is a ‘parasite’ on health, unable to function unless it can control, codify and exploit both diagnosis and treatment. Alongside social scientist Philip Rocco, they started the “Death Panel” podcast in 2018, a popular twice-weekly podcast on “struggles over healthcare, economic inequality, social justice, and the people, policies, and media narratives that stand in the way.If you are a person living in the world, and you have/are a bodymind, this book is relevant to you, and it will have something important to share that you can bring to your communities.