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.

The view of the authors is that capitalism is a ‘parasite’ on health, unable to function unless it can control, codify and exploit both diagnosis and treatment.

The function of this figment is to veil in the heads of the making-stupids and of the made-stupids that illness is conditioned by society, and also to veil the social function of illness". I've been listening to Bea and Artie on Death Panel for years now, and was cautiously optimistic about this book –– cautiously, because making a book and making a podcast are two different things, especially when you're speaking to a hugely varied audience (from PhD-getting types like me to the layperson).

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. 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 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.

Health Communism is itself a blueprint, in the (roughly translated) words of SPK, for turning illness into a weapon.I'll show some naivete and admit that I thought this book was going to be about socialized healthcare and health crises. The part that hit the least for me was the history of SPK - because while the theory is solid and so recognizably true, everyone quoted from and involved with SPK just seemed annoying and/or unhinged, but that's how I tend to feel about most super lefty ~praxis groups~ lol.

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. 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. It is an immensely useful tool for wrestling with the most urgent questions facing our movements in these terrifying times. Death Panel has a listener-initiated reading group on disability justice and has become a “cult hit” in the art world.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.