Welcome to the Death Panel
Every so often we feature great podcasts you’ve recommended. Here’s one:
“Welcome to the Death Panel, a twice-weekly podcast about the political economy of health. Hosted by Beatrice Adler-Bolton, Artie Vierkant, Phil Rocco, Abby Cartus, and Jules Gill-Peterson.”
Death Panel Podcast releases two episodes each week. It’s on Soundcloud, Apple, Spotify, Stitcher.
See also Health Communism podcast, includes the description of organised abandonment by the State. Few quotes for flavour “illness is the only possible form of life in capitalism” and “deviants, the surplus, and the sick form the central class that can bring about the fall of capitalism”! Well worth a listen …
Their side-hustle is a book called Health Communism (or the podcasts the side-hustle?)
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.
Written by co-hosts of the hit Death Panel podcast and longtime disability justice and healthcare activists Adler-Bolton and Vierkant, Health Communism first examines how capital has instrumentalized health, disability, madness, and illness to create a class seen as “surplus,” regarded as a fiscal and social burden. Demarcating the healthy from the surplus, the worker from the “unfit” to work, the authors argue, serves not only to undermine solidarity but to mark whole populations for extraction by the industries that have emerged to manage and contain this “surplus” population. Health Communism then looks to the grave threat capital poses to global public health, and at the rare movements around the world that have successfully challenged the extractive economy of health.
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