Health Communism: A Surplus Manifesto

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From a fantastic tour of marxist disability studies, to an enlightening exploration of Madness and institutionalization, to a really fascinating history of SPK, Health Communism is a book I will be referring everyone I know to, and a book I can imagine teaching from in the future.

Payments made using National Book Tokens are processed by National Book Tokens Ltd, and you can read their Terms and Conditions here. 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.

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. Nor can I imagine a more needful book for the pandemic we are still in, let alone the pandemics yet to come. The authors are deliberately and against their better judgement constructing an SPK that suits their ideological purposes, distorting and twisting it until they can force it into their false framework of ideas.

These dynamics mark a finite barrier between wealthy “developed” nations and those consistently held underneath as vessels of extraction. Health Communism illustrates how people are viewed as fuel from which to extract profits through the medicalization and financialization of health outputs. Beatrice Adler-Bolton and Artie Vierkant bring us a galvanizing proposition: Unlike the rest of us, capital is not alive; it merely animates itself through our host bodies.Heath Communism is not “well-behaved”: It is not interested in sober consideration, dry pontifications. I'm def not done with it and will probably go back and try to dive deeper into what resonated with me, so glad to have the resource. This book shares the impressive truth that we are all surplus in the political economy of health, whether we are presently 'healthy' or 'sick. 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. 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).

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. 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. If you’re wondering whether the text of a book with a title like “Health Communism” lives up to it, the answer is “yes. Health communism" (the title of a planned Verso book) cannot mean anything else but the dictatorship of the medical doctors' class. It loses one star because of the final third of the book, which focuses exclusively and in excruciating detail on one 1970s radical patient collective in West Germany.I’m also an avid Death Panel listener so I was familiar with some of their arguments and had a lot of context, but parts of it were still hard to understand. 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.

The biggest industry is no longer that which produces weapons, computers, cars or interspace crafts.That these divisions exacerbate exploitation, particularly in the global South, needs to be stressed. In a society where the rule of capital has ended, despite the real scarcity imposed on the country by the US blockade, the Cuban people have prioritized a system that provides care to all, in their homes, in dialogue rather than direction, and with a truly internationalist orientation. But your brain gets used to it, and the lengthy, fascinating historical anecdotes provide some relief amidst all the scholarly theory. Hotjar sets this cookie to know whether a user is included in the data sampling defined by the site's daily session limit.