Health Communism: A Surplus Manifesto

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Personally, I enjoyed this overview of various health systems and how they can and cannot work without our current (American) structures.

Simply put, Capitalism is a scourge on the health of human beings, which would seem to preclude its renunciation by just about everyone, right? As an intro to some of these concepts though 10/10, and Bolton's writing style is extremely clear and persuasive. 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!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. 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. 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.

Nor can I imagine a more needful book for the pandemic we are still in, let alone the pandemics yet to come.

Health communism" (the title of a planned Verso book) cannot mean anything else but the dictatorship of the medical doctors' class. I haven't read anything this substantial in years — not since required reading in undergrad, to be honest. 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. To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average. Adler-Bolton and Vierkant teach that our shared condition of vulnerability is ever ready to transform into our collective strength.

This exploitation does not stop in those countries, and the immorality of its existence should be at the forefront of discussion. for the most part i agree with the authors, but i don’t think they flushed out a very coherent framework in this book. 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 dynamics mark a finite barrier between wealthy “developed” nations and those consistently held underneath as vessels of extraction. Some of the data that are collected include the number of visitors, their source, and the pages they visit anonymously. i would often find myself excited to learn more about an idea only to have it explained by a list of jargon (bio-this, bio-that, etc) that did not progress the argument any further. Important: Your credit card will NOT be charged when you start your free trial or if you cancel during the trial period.

This may be in part due to the somewhat niche nature of the academic community to which it is aimed. The surplus is then turned into raw fuel to extract profits, through rehabilitation, medicalization, and the financialization of health. I'm def not done with it and will probably go back and try to dive deeper into what resonated with me, so glad to have the resource.However, this book is very academic and requires a good working knowledge of political theory and how that is applied in policy. 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. 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.