A searing analysis of health and illness under capitalism from
hosts of the hit podcast “Death Panel”
In this fiery, theoretical
tour-de-force, Beatrice Adler-Bolton and Artie Vierkant offer an
overview of life and death under capitalism and argue for a new
global left politics aimed at severing the ties between capital and
one of its primary tools: health.
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. 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. Health
Communism then looks to
the grave threat capital poses to global public health, and at the
rare movements around the world that have successfully challenged the
extractive economy of health.
Ultimately, Adler-Bolton and
Vierkant argue, we will not succeed in defeating capitalism until we
sever health from capital. To do this will require a radical new
politics of solidarity that centers the surplus, built on an
understanding that we must not base the value of human life on one’s
willingness or ability to be productive within the current political
economy. Capital, it turns out, only fears health.