Nor can I imagine a more needful book for the pandemic we are still in, let alone the pandemics yet to come. The state thereby underpins the creation of “capacities for profit,” to the detriment of individual health, which is quantified for these purposes. It’s an interesting history, but after the broad, internationalist lens of the first two-thirds, it feels out of place.

I read a lot of theory and thinking books, which I know are a huge turn-off for many people, even as they insist on involving themselves in serious discussions of politics and social change without truly understanding the foundations of the institutions they rail against. Abandonment" is an unsurprising throughline of health capitalism though — the book also discusses "extractive abandonment," which I won't go into here. 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. 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.This book is brilliant and awful, for it clearly shows the true roots of Capitalism's need for workers/labor to exist and thrive. 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. They stake out the far edge of what is possible and remind us that only the journey towards that horizon will make us free. To associate the medical extermination ideology "health" with the SPK is an attempt of total forgery of the SPK ( http://spkpfh. assertions like “health is a fantasy” and “the sick are the central class that can bring about the fall of capitalism” (both stated in the conclusion) are divorced from both reality and basic marxist thought.

We don’t share your credit card details with third-party sellers, and we don’t sell your information to others.This dedication to a very controversial group, whose ultra-leftism led some of its members to the Baader-Meinhof group, does limit the audience for the book, and thereby the reach of the arguments contained within. 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. Health Communism illustrates how people are viewed as fuel from which to extract profits through the medicalization and financialization of health outputs. it isn’t enough to separate out the deserving from the undeserving, those who can rehabilitate vs those who will “never contribute”, we of course have to make mONEY off the abandoned. 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.