Health Communism: A Surplus Manifesto

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We don’t share your credit card details with third-party sellers, and we don’t sell your information to others. The examination of the commodification of ill health is interesting as it shines a light on the need to divide the proletariat into ‘workers’ and ‘surplus population’. 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.

It loses one star because of the final third of the book, which focuses exclusively and in excruciating detail on one 1970s radical patient collective in West Germany. Only as recently as the mid-1990s, with the ratification of the TRIPS agreement, did a formal mechanism come into place whereby an international pharmaceutical company could protest drug production or development around the world and expect to see swift political, military, or economic action by the US and other imperial WTO members against the “offending” state … [and] … produced a “persistent threat of unilateral retaliation” for states that would ignore or reject international corporations’ patent rights.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 am a massive fan of the Verso Books imprint, and this is easily one of their most accessible and most aggressively anti-capitalist publications to date. 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. In a society where the rule of capital has ended, despite the real scarcity imposed on the country by the US blockade, the Cuban people have prioritized a system that provides care to all, in their homes, in dialogue rather than direction, and with a truly internationalist orientation. Everyone who wants to stop the destruction of their bodies by capitalism should join the Death Panel community.

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. 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. People must embrace revolution - what else do most people have besides a hopelessly precarious life anyway?Also includes a really interesting + usable history of SPK, a socialist patient’s collective in 1970s West Germany. 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. Very helpful for thinking about surplus populations’ centrality to capitalist political economy *and* (ideally) anti-capitalist resistance. i will say i think the analyses lacked some nuance at times even if broadly-speaking the book is correct about the systems’ functioning.