My name is Beatrice Adler-Bolton, I am a writer, artist, and co-host/co-creator of the ‘cult-hit’ Death Panel podcast.
There is no regular posting schedule for Blind Archive: I am disabled and chronically ill so this newsletter runs on criptime. Essays and posts are periodic, you can also find my writing on my website, or on The New Inquiry’s Death Panel vertical.
To hear from me more regularly, become a listener or supporter of the podcast I co-host, Death Panel, about the political economy of health. We do two episodes a week, one in the main feed (Thursdays), and one just for patrons (Mondays).
Read my book, co-authored with Artie Vierkant, called Health Communism (Verso, October 18, 2022).
“Required reading among those struggling against the death cult that is racial capitalism.” – Dean Spade, author of Mutual Aid
“Adler-Bolton and Vierkant teach that our shared condition of vulnerability is ever ready to transform into our collective strength.” – Jules Gill-Peterson, author of Histories of the Transgender Child
“The most analytically sharp analysis of the relations between capitalism and disability since the pioneering work of Marta Russell.” – Jasbir Puar, author of The Right to Maim
“Health Communism doesn’t tinker around the edges. It makes a direct assault on the idea that health can survive under capitalism, where the sick are simply disposable, while the system making a killing along the way.” – Gregg Gonsalves, Yale School of Public Health and Law School
“Here is deep wisdom to arm a struggle towards forms of human embodiment as yet undreamed-of; inspiration for a million insurgencies of communist health.” – Sophie Lewis, author of Abolish the Family
“This is a book you should read before you die.” – Jon Shaffer, Peste Magazine
“In Health Communism, [Adler-Bolton and Vierkant] show how members of the 'unproductive' surplus class are cast as burdens even as health capitalism sets up entire cottage industries (e.g. for-profit nursing homes, prisons) to extract value from this very population.” – Charlie Markbreiter, Bookforum
“Health Communism illustrates how people are viewed as fuel from which to extract profits through the medicalization and financialization of health outputs...[it] serves as a wake-up call for the dehumanization of healthcare delivery.” – Roberta E. Winter, The New York Journal of Books
“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.” – Selen Ozturk, PopMatters
“Surveying a century of sickness under an increasingly privatized system, in Health Communism Adler-Bolton and Vierkant argue that we have to demand much more than Medicare for All in order to fix health care.” – Spencer Green, The New Republic
“[Health Communism] is a new way to find the universal in the particular, which is the kind of thinking tool we are in desperate need of at the moment. Turning those ideas into practice is a greater challenge. Where to start? Health communists begin with a compelling vision of society not as divided between abled and disabled or sick and well but as a vast web of people, all of whom have both abilities to contribute and needs to meet.” – Malcolm Harris, New York Magazine
“Heath Communism is not "well-behaved": It is not interested in sober consideration, dry pontifications. It thrives through a sense of optimism. There is a joy to a manifesto that sits alongside its anger. If it is birthed from complaint and fury, these emotions are funneled through a hope that things could be otherwise-most of all, an optimism for a new collective.” – Jon Venn, Full Stop
