On Health Communism
Created: 2024-01-21 (12:00:00) — Modified: 2025-06-27 (19:55:12)Status: completed
Explores how capital wields the concept of health, primarily as a means of demarcating the healthy (fit for work) population from the surplus, “those who fall outside of the normative principles for which state policies are designed, as well as those who are excluded from the attendant entitlements of capital.” Adler-Bolton and Vierkant highlight that it is not any characteristic of the population that makes them inherently vulnerable to becoming surplus (for example, being disabled, sick, or mentally ill). Instead, their vulnerability is constructed through the deliberate diversion of resources away from these communities.
The surplus population then exists for capital as both a threat to the healthy population (of being certified surplus), that is, a means of buttressing capitalist hegemony, and as a source of profit generation. Adler-Bolton and Vierkant call this second function “extractive abandonment” and spend a considerable portion of Health Communism working through its manifestations in, for example, for-profit prisons and nursing homes, and in the history of the asylum.
The book is remarkably clearsighted in how it unpicks these processes. It provides a vocabulary to account for the way capitalism constructs, extracts from, depends on its surplus populations. Beyond the healthy/unhealthy demarcation in this book, it reminded me of Gregory Sholette’s description of the art world’s vast accumulation of redundant works in Dark Matter, and of Sofi Thanhauser’s description of an export processing zone as an island of stability dependent on the instability of its host country in Worn.
In short, there is so much in this book, on the mechanics of extractive abandonment, its manifestations throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and the radical movements that opposed them, whose fates were more often than not recuperation and repression. The later chapters focus on the Sozialistisches Patientenkollektiv initated in West Germany in the early nineteen-seventies, but which was rapidly criminalised as a terrorist group and forcibly dissolved.
Health Communism argues that health is then a critically overlooked vulnerability for capitalism, as the two are coupled so tightly. To sever health and capital, it is necessary to “both center the surplus populations and also to categorically refute the political, biostatistical, and sociological stratifications that lie at the center of the very construction of the surplus.” The book emphasises this is not simply to “celebrate the surplus,” it is to recognise that all of us, healthy or ill, are subject to extraction under capitalism. We are all surplus.
See also
References
- Adler-Bolton, Beatrice, and Artie Vierkant, 2022, Health Communism, Verso Books
- Sholette, Gregory, 2010, Dark Matter: Art and Politics in the Age of Enterprise Culture, Pluto Books
- Thanhauser, Sofi, 2022, Worn: A People’s History of Clothing, Pantheon
Endmatter
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