All tagged Beatrice Adler-Bolton

Surplus Manifesto: Health Communism; Life & Death Under Capitalism / Beatrice Adler-Bolton

Surplus Manifesto: Health Communism; Life & Death Under Capitalism / Beatrice Adler-Bolton

Patrick Farnsworth
Beatrice Adler-Bolton, 332

Death Panel co-host and disability justice advocate Beatrice Adler-Bolton returns to the podcast to discuss their new book Health Communism: A Surplus Manifesto, co-authored with Artie Vierkant and published through Verso Books. Health Communism “offers an overview of life and death under capitalism and argues for a new global left politics aimed at severing the ties between capital and one of its primary tools: health.”

Throughout this 90 minute interview, Beatrice and I build on our last discussion in March (during which we discussed the “sociological production of the end of the pandemic”), incorporating concepts outlined in Health Communism. Key among those are defining the “surplus” class or population(s), in which, under the economic valuation of life under capitalism, whole populations are relegated to a regime of “extractive abandonment” — “the process by which these populations are made profitable to capital”, and a “means by which the state constructs “health” culturally, politically, and institutionally.”

Let It Rip: The Sociological Production Of The "End Of The Pandemic" / Beatrice Adler-Bolton

Let It Rip: The Sociological Production Of The "End Of The Pandemic" / Beatrice Adler-Bolton

Patrick Farnsworth
Beatrice Adler-Bolton, 315

Beatrice Adler-Bolton, disability justice advocate and co-host of the Death Panel podcast, joins me to discuss the sociological production of the "end of the pandemic," and what that means for the "surplus" populations made most vulnerable by the economic demands of capital. She is the author of the upcoming book Health Communism: A Surplus Manifesto, co-authored with Artie Vierkant, which "argues for a new global left politics aimed at severing the ties between capital and health."

As the hosts of the Death Panel podcast have documented, discussed, and warned, the declarations made by the political and economic elites that we have entered into a "post-Covid" reality — where any and all public health measures meant to mitigate the spread of the virus are effectively lifted, and deemed unnecessary moving forward — is but a sociological construct, not based in epidemiological reality and sound public health policy. We have entered into the "let it rip" phase of the pandemic, it seems. What does this mean for the immunocompromised/disabled and other vulnerable populations, as practically all efforts and measures (however weak) to mitigate the spread of this virus come to an end?