Health Communism: A Surplus Manifesto

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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. 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.

the achievement of such a concise yet cogent framework (aided by the fact that the past years have only confirmed its conclusion) is a marvel. The authors see current medicine and medical practitioners as part of the problem faced by patients, placing them in a position whereby they perpetuate ableist norms that discriminate against those classed as disabled.These cookies help provide information on metrics the number of visitors, bounce rate, traffic source, etc. This has not only justified organized state abandonment and enforced the poverty of the poor, sick, elderly, working class, and disabled; it has tied the fundamental idea of the safety and survival of humanity to exploitation. As an intro to some of these concepts though 10/10, and Bolton's writing style is extremely clear and persuasive.

Everyone who wants to stop the destruction of their bodies by capitalism should join the Death Panel community. 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. 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. Ultimately, Adler-Bolton and Vierkant argue, we will not succeed in defeating capitalism until we sever health from capital.It is an immensely useful tool for wrestling with the most urgent questions facing our movements in these terrifying times. 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. 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.

The language used throughout is fairly dense and directed towards a particular audience, indeed some of the glowing reviews are provided by people quoted in the text. 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. Arbitrary divisions between ‘well’ and ‘unwell’ mirror earlier attitudes towards the ‘deserving’ and ‘undeserving’ poor to determine which sections of the population receive any form of relief from the conditions under which capitalism forces people to live.

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! 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. 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.