Health Communism: A Surplus Manifesto

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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. Even so, they do not view social welfare as necessarily good when it must operate under a capitalist framework that seeks to provide the greatest ‘value for money’ by dehumanising the poor. The biggest industry of nowadays is that which fakes to produce health, that is to say a thing which never has existed and which never will really exist, except as a product of illusion nourishing Nazism in all its past and coming variations [HEILwesen] ". Health communism" (the title of a planned Verso book) cannot mean anything else but the dictatorship of the medical doctors' class. The 103 third parties who use cookies on this service do so for their purposes of displaying and measuring personalized ads, generating audience insights, and developing and improving products.

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. 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. 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. 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. 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.This exploitation does not stop in those countries, and the immorality of its existence should be at the forefront of discussion. Where it really shines is when it is dismantling the various accepted “truths” of health and, later, going through the history of SPK. The worker/surplus binary solidifies the idea that our lives under capitalism revolve around our work. The political economy demands that we maintain our health to make our labor power fully available, lest we be marked and doomed as surplus. 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.

You can change your choices at any time by visiting Cookie preferences, as described in the Cookie notice. The surplus is then turned into raw fuel to extract profits, through rehabilitation, medicalization, and the financialization of health. Adler-Bolton and Vierkant teach that our shared condition of vulnerability is ever ready to transform into our collective strength. The agenda spreads quietly to allow for not only the prevention of social health systems developing in some countries, but also to dismantle those already in existence. This book shares the impressive truth that we are all surplus in the political economy of health, whether we are presently ‘healthy’ or ‘sick.The part that hit the least for me was the history of SPK - because while the theory is solid and so recognizably true, everyone quoted from and involved with SPK just seemed annoying and/or unhinged, but that's how I tend to feel about most super lefty ~praxis groups~ lol. Beatrice Adler-Bolton and Artie Vierkant have been a lifeline for many during the COVID-19 pandemic through their Death Panel podcast, deconstructing the failed American response with a knife that cuts like truth. In lieu of direct prescriptions of how a communism centered around health could look like in practice, the authors urge us to reframe current conceptions of universal liberation and class struggle, using the SPK as a potential model and framework for centering the surplus in already existing movements. I am a massive fan of the Verso Books imprint, and this is easily one of their most accessible and most aggressively anti-capitalist publications to date. Hotjar sets this cookie to know whether a user is included in the data sampling defined by the site's pageview limit.