Health capitalism is a system where health is an impossibility: a state one cannot get to, but to which one must always strive. It refers to the way capitalism has intertwined itself so completely with health to make the two seemingly inseparable; its definition of health as ‘able to work’ seemingly unquestionable. 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. Selen Ozturk, PopMatters Health Communism and other recent abolitionist writings show the massively negative impact of capitalist and eugenic ideology and methodology on our ability to have nice things. The ubiquitous caving to the assumption that there is simply not enough for everyone still mars efforts to defend education, health care, etc. The idea that providing more to all will only hurt the deserving and worthy core of society is always just a defense of the capitalist class’ presumed right to maximum extraction of value and profits from every aspect of society.

Capital accumulation structures precarity and pathologizes unproductivity. While the surplus may be disabled, mad, or chronically ill, it is not their condition that renders them precarious but their dependence upon the medical-industrial complex. These “burdens” upon the state are essential to its profit. After all, disabled patients bear more GDP in a hospital bed than they do at home. The authors define this capital accumulation from surplus bodies as an “extractive abandonment” process.

Quick positive comments on Abolish the Family by Sophie Lewis

You argue that surplus populations are used to stave off broad reforms that would otherwise be destabilizing to capitalism. Usually, however, “common sense” argues that that the surplus population constitutes a twofold burden to society—that is, a eugenic burden and a debt burden. Historically, how has this rhetoric shaped arguments for and against socialized medicine in the US? Another example of resistance is the campaigning to close Manston detention camp where people seeking asylum were detained in the most horrendous conditions and subjected to violence. In response to pressure people were moved on, however there are reports of it still being used and the camp hasn’t yet been closed. In December 2022, an Iraqi man died of diphtheria whilst being detained. The struggle to close detention centres and stop deportations is paramount to health justice. Cited: Canadian Dimension: Making the invisible visible - an interview with Megan Linton about the harms of the institutional system, COVID-19, and disabilityjustice (08/26/22) Des Fitzgerald et al, ‘Brexit as heredity reduce: Imperialism, biomedicine and the NHS in Britain, Sociological Review, no. 68 (2020): 6, 1170. In short, this seamless book fills an urgent void in leftist theories of illness: a conception of health that is possible to work toward within the capitalist system but which is mutually exclusive with this system’s model of health (along a spectrum of capacity to work and, barring this, to be an institutional subject of extractive abandonment). Health Communism is a slim book, and its argument is tight. However, it is so tight between mutually informing threads of class analysis, early modern categorizations of disability, the decline and fall of asylum systems, and international pharmaceutical policy that 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.

The position of the AMA, of the organized labor movement, and increasingly in the post-war era, of the American public, carries a lot of the eugenicist and Malthusian assumptions that the authors establish as key to capitalist health care. This is not to say most people are against socialized medicine, only that the assumptions of what that could be have been constricted by now dominant views of what is possible.Interview: Charlie Markbreiter, Bookforum, Care for All: Beatrice Adler-Bolton and Artie Vierkant Discuss Their New Book Health Communism(10/20/2022) Review: John Shaffer, Peste Magazine, Better Red Than Dead: Should you read Health Communism before you die, or should you die first? (10/18/2022) This growth was mirrored and fed by pharmaceutical monopolies. State subsidization of pharmaceutical rights instituted the present role of capital “as defender of a global intellectual property regime”, enforcing the trade dependence of developing countries. The authors provide a densely-researched history of the pathologization of illicit drug use as a foreign social contagion and the privatization of licit drug production from the Cold War to the present day. They make a forceful case that resistance to this internationalist privatization requires an internationalist platform. “…[I]nternationalism must be an essential part of health communism if we are to achieve the end of capitalism,” the write. Hoffman was an early professional voice against socialized healthcare, but that resistance became entrenched in one of the most powerful medical institutions in the US, the American Medical Association (AMA). Wikipedia currently lists the AMA as having “one of the largest political lobbying budgets of any organization in the United States.” The AMA led the efforts to defend the capitalist mode of healthcare in class solidarity with other industry groups (33). They lobbied strongly against President Truman’s 1948 health insurance plans. Various physicians groups set about associating socialized medicine with communism, the Civil Rights Movement, and the Soviet Union as scare tactics to discredit any reforms that would threaten their professional hegemony in running a privatized, for profit healthcare system. That coalition of private organizations wanted to guide the state to carry out their own interests (34).

Written by cohosts of the hit Death Panel podcast and longtime disability justice and healthcare activists Beatrice Adler-Bolton and Artie, 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. Building on the concept of the surplus, Adler-Bolton and Vierkant introduce the ‘eugenic and debt burden’. [8] The eugenic burden might be framed as a genetic, demographic or social threat. People who exist outside of supposedly healthy, normative subjectivity. The debt burden is posed in terms of the ‘public purse’ where austerity is naturalised and justified through narratives of ‘personal responsibility’ and ‘affordability’. ‘Citizens’ are ideologically trained by the state to ‘surveil and judge others’ worthiness for aid’. [9] This might be translated into popular discourse as to who is really trans, really disabled or really a refugee. Who is deserving of care and who isn’t? Who is ‘faking’ it? Through the ‘debt/eugenic burden’ those who are deemed deviant are cast as irredeemable and considered a drag on humanity. This sometimes shows as arguments about ‘defrauding the ‘taxpaying citizen’ and the state’; [10] the ‘structural flaws of the political economy’ pushed onto the so-called ‘behavioural flaws of the individual’. In this, the deviant surplus is demonised as a malignant risk to the nation’s health. The current pandemic, during which Health Communism was written, is wholly and deliberately excluded. None of the Covid pandemic’s “lessons” were unknown, and none of its effects (save for the most menial) were unforeseen. They have only affirmed the authors’ socially determined view of health: housing is healthcare, working conditions are healthcare, food is healthcare, and clean air is healthcare. To attain it is to center on our demands of the current system and the surplus population that it creates and extracts. 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. The authors’ key claim is that regimes of biocertification are arbitrary and inconsistent, reducing individuals almost entirely to their capacity to work. Following Marta Russell, they view disabled workers as ‘canaries in the coalmine’, whose treatment is a sign of what threatens others after a workplace injury or a shift in what is deemed ‘healthy’ within society.The NHS is there for most of us, most of the time. Or at least it has been. And despite its many shortcomings most of us are happy that it exists. But after decades of austerity, privatisation and now the pressure of the neverending pandemic the NHS is fast breaking down. Staff are quitting in droves due to being overworked and underpaid. In retaliation, we are seeing the largest NHS workers’ strikes in its history. The outcome might well dictate to what extent the NHS, as we know it, survives. The wider left, for the most part, is disengaged. Review: Roberta A. Winter, New York Journal of Books, Health Communism: A Surplus Manifesto (10/20/2022)