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Health Communism: A Surplus Manifesto

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To do this will require a radical new politics of solidarity that centers the surplus, built on an understanding that we must not base the value of human life on one’s willingness or ability to be productive within the current political economy. 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. 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. 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. 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.

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. Simply put, Capitalism is a scourge on the health of human beings, which would seem to preclude its renunciation by just about everyone, right? 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 history of ACT UP exposed me to a new critical perspective on the org and its methods (which I can attest from personal experience in disease advocacy are championed as wholly aspirational and uncomplicatedly good.

This may be in part due to the somewhat niche nature of the academic community to which it is aimed. While it is not discussed in the book, I think we can see this struggle playing out especially in Cuba, where the revolution has produced the world's most egalitarian and liberatory healthcare system. 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. 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.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. 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. This exploitation does not stop in those countries, and the immorality of its existence should be at the forefront of discussion.

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