Health Communism: A Surplus Manifesto

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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. 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.

Payments made using National Book Tokens are processed by National Book Tokens Ltd, and you can read their Terms and Conditions here. The things that were most interesting about this book were unfortunately the things that were not even in this book - the bibliography and notes, the topics raised, and all-too-quickly dealt with. 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. S. (and other Global North) imperialism chokes the economic prospects of Global South nations through what I'd consider policing — thus forcing immiseration unto whole nations (there's a whole chapter on how health capitalism has shaped pharmacology).I definitely found some of the ideas in this book valuable and interesting, and the SPK history was particularly of interest, albeit a bit lacking in analysis, but I think the book was ultimately muddled by its scope, and its liberal use of jargon. The language can obscure the argument at times, making it difficult to concentrate on the links between capital and illness, and the need to create a revolution in society that would also make for a revolutionary change in how illness is identified and treated. assertions like “health is a fantasy” and “the sick are the central class that can bring about the fall of capitalism” (both stated in the conclusion) are divorced from both reality and basic marxist thought.

Adler-Bolton and Vierkant teach that our shared condition of vulnerability is ever ready to transform into our collective strength.

The political economy demands that we maintain our health to make our labor power fully available, lest we be marked and doomed as surplus. This book is brilliant and awful, for it clearly shows the true roots of Capitalism's need for workers/labor to exist and thrive. i will say i think the analyses lacked some nuance at times even if broadly-speaking the book is correct about the systems’ functioning. These barriers can hinder care if they cause doctors to ignore patient concerns due to what the authors feel is classism. Despite how long this review is, I'm still only touching on a modicum of all 'Health Communism''s greatness.

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 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. There is clearly a need under capitalism to keep those designated as useful healthy enough to be exploited, but not well enough to build a meaningful rebellion. 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. 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. 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.

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. Here is deep wisdom to arm a struggle towards forms of human embodiment as yet undreamed-of; inspiration for a million insurgencies of communist health. 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. We don’t share your credit card details with third-party sellers, and we don’t sell your information to others. 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.

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. 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. It is succinct and to the point--making it an excellent resource for activists, theorists, and academics--but its threshold of foreknowledge keep it from being what I would classify as "pop politics" and widely accessible to the general public. 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. 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.