A searing analysis of health and illness under capitalism from hosts of the hit podcast “Death Panel”
Beatrice Adler-Bolton is an artist and writer, currently
completing an MA in CUNY’s Disability Studies program. She is
disabled and chronically ill, a subject position which made clear
to her how untenable the American left’s approach to health care
legislation was. Artie Vierkant is an artist and writer.
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.” Death Panel has a listener-initiated reading group on
disability justice and has become a “cult hit” in the art
world.
This book changed the way I think about health, power, state
capacity, extraction, social welfare, and resistance. It is an
immensely useful tool for wrestling with the most urgent questions
facing our movements in these terrifying times. Readable and filled
with concise histories and clear examples to illustrate nuanced
analysis, it will no doubt become required reading among those
struggling against the death cult that is racial capitalism.
*Dean Spade, author of Mutual Aid*
Beatrice Adler-Bolton and Artie Vierkant bring us a galvanizing
proposition: Unlike the rest of us, capital is not alive; it merely
animates itself through our host bodies. This book shares the
impressive truth that we are all surplus in the political economy
of health, whether we are presently 'healthy' or 'sick.'
Adler-Bolton and Vierkant teach that our shared condition of
vulnerability is ever ready to transform into our collective
strength.
*Jules Gill-Peterson, author of Histories of the Transgender
Child*
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. Here, they do something even more remarkable:
imagine a better future. Health Communism doesn't tinker around the
edges. 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. 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. They stake out the far edge of what
is possible and remind us that only the journey towards that
horizon will make us free.
*Gregg Gonsalves, Yale School of Public Health and Yale Law
School*
Health against health! I can't remember the last time I learned so
much in under 200 pages. Nor can I imagine a more needful book for
the pandemic we are still in, let alone the pandemics yet to come.
This exquisitely researched 'surplus manifesto' made me cry tears
of rage, but demonstrated powerfully to me that our collective
illness can be 'turned into a weapon.' In my view, everyone new to
disability liberation should read this text. Everyone who wants to
stop the destruction of their bodies by capitalism should join the
Death Panel community. If we let them, Beatrice Adler-Bolton and
Artie Vierkant will teach the left how to really understand
capitalism, at the cellular and somatic levels. So, if you are
holding this book, congratulations. 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.
*Sophie Lewis, author of Abolish the Family*
I could not help but cheer as I read Health Communism. The most
analytically sharp analysis of the relations between capitalism and
disability since the pioneering work of Marta Russell, this
powerfully explicative work is a rousing manifesto for the sick and
becoming-surplus to unite.
*Jasbir Puar, author of The Right to Maim*
Health Communism illustrates how people are viewed as fuel from
which to extract profits through the medicalization and
financialization of health outputs...[it] serves as a wake-up call
for the dehumanization of healthcare delivery.
*The New York Journal of Books*
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.g.
for-profit nursing homes, prisons) to extract value from this very
population.
*Bookforum*
This seamless book fills an urgent void in leftist theories of
illness...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.
*PopMatters*
Surveying a century of sickness under an increasingly privatized
system, in Health Communism Adler-Bolton and Vierkant argue that we
have to demand much more than Medicare for All in order to fix
health care.
*The New Republic*
This is a book you should read before you die, because the ideas
synthesized by Adler-Bolton and Vierkant could save our collective
lives. Health Communism diagnoses our shared social sickness
correctly. 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. Read this book.
Care for your neighbors. Smash capitalism. Malingerers of the world
unite.
*Peste Magazine*
Health Communism is itself a blueprint, in the (roughly translated)
words of SPK, for turning illness into a weapon.
*The Baffler*
[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. Turning those ideas into practice is a
greater challenge. Where to start? 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.
*New York Magazine*
Heath Communism is not "well-behaved": It is not interested in
sober consideration, dry pontifications. It thrives through a sense
of optimism. There is a joy to a manifesto that sits alongside its
anger. If it is birthed from complaint and fury, these emotions are
funneled through a hope that things could be otherwise-most of all,
an optimism for a new collective.
*Full Stop*
Best Books of 2022
*Counterpunch*
If you have ever gone to work sick because you need the job to
treat the sickness, you know the basic argument of Health Communism
to be true: health under capitalism is an impossibility.
*LUX Magazine*
Health Communism is, most fundamentally, a call for a new and
expansive concept of health as a commons, a collective experience,
and a collective commitment to human flourishing, freed from the
ideological and financial strictures of market discipline.
*The New Republic*
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. The book is
especially urgent in light of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. 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.
*Theory & Event*
An exciting contribution to materialist disability studies
*Critical Inquiry*
In explicitly naming the alternative to health capitalism, Health
Communism offers a clear path forward for the left and confers on
us the power to demand health liberation.
*Electric Literature*
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