All tagged Health

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

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.”

Hijacking Pharma: Open Access Medicine For The Betterment Of All / Michael Laufer

Michael Laufer of the Four Thieves Vinegar Collective returns to the podcast to reiterate the aims of the group, and update us on the collective's recent and soon to be launched projects. 

As a founding member of this project, Dr. Laufer's objective has been to communicate the philosophical and material objectives of the organization, which has been described as "an anarchist biohacking group." Since its founding in 2015, the collective has worked to provide the information needed to produce DIY pharmaceutical drugs safely and equitably, particularly for a population, like those that live within the borders of the United States, that do not have easy and affordable access to them. This is especially relevant when we discuss, in this interview, the recent Supreme Court decision to overturn Roe and Casey, leaving a sizable portion of the US population without access to pregnancy terminating procedures and abortifacient drugs. Dr. Laufer and the collective's response to this has been to provide, in an open and accessible manner, information on how to potentially attain and prepare the materials needed to have a safe DIY abortion, regardless of what a wholly illegitimate political and legal system may prohibit or discourage. But, this is only one facet of the broader conversation Dr. Laufer and I have in this episode. The absolute inaccessibility of the healthcare system for most US Americans is a violation of one of the most fundamental indicators of a healthy, equal, and stable society, which is access to care. Four Thieves Vinegar Collective is a response to that, giving us an inspiring alternative to the for-profit healthcare system that is impoverishing us more and more every day.