People must embrace revolution - what else do most people have besides a hopelessly precarious life anyway? 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. 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.

This reads a bit like a primer on a ton of other things I now want to read about - I just think that the ideas and theory here were just too much to for such a short book. 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 think my main criticism though is that there were a lot of parts that could use more explanation and parts where they present a cool idea or part of an argument but don’t explain further.It offered so much more; Adler-Bolton and Vierkant discuss everything: from the "biocertification" framework that serves as the basis for how the privatized welfare state stratifies the body politic to the ways U.

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. 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. They stake out the far edge of what is possible and remind us that only the journey towards that horizon will make us free. Health Communism helps make clear both the fundamental social patterns that gave rise to the pandemic, and stresses that any real solutions to those patterns will require far-reaching social change.I was frustrated by the one chapter where they use Palestine as a case study but it’s tacked on at the end in a way that seemed rushed. These dynamics mark a finite barrier between wealthy “developed” nations and those consistently held underneath as vessels of extraction. 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. Some of the data that are collected include the number of visitors, their source, and the pages they visit anonymously.

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 book shares the impressive truth that we are all surplus in the political economy of health, whether we are presently 'healthy' or 'sick. i found the history described in this book very interesting and broadly, i think the book’s analyses of modern capitalistic systems of exploitation of the disabled/ill/elderly were correct and easy to understand, and likely accesible even for someone who isn’t familiar with a lot of political theory.

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). 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. Counterfire is a revolutionary socialist organisation working to build the movements of resistance and socialist ideas. 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. Health Communism] is a new way to find the universal in the particular, which is the kind of thinking tool we are in desperate need of at the moment.

And that have a more nuanced analysis of what has constituted this surplus in settler colonial capitalist nation states? Also includes a really interesting + usable history of SPK, a socialist patient’s collective in 1970s West Germany. 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. very radicalizing read - expanded the disability justice theory i’ve read in the past to take on an explicit marxist lens; incredibly poignant and depressing examples of how the social conception of health under capitalism intersects with boarders / global hegemonies / popularized understanding of mental health / physical disability, etc. Death Panel has a listener-initiated reading group on disability justice and has become a “cult hit” in the art world.