• 1 Post
  • 60 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
Cake day: July 2nd, 2023
  • yumpsuit@lemmy.worldtoNews@lemmy.world•Now offline: Government resources about Long COVID as a disability
    2·
    2 months ago

    I doubt that the authors of Health Communism are Trump’s first choice of Death Panel, but I want to make their words from the intro part of this thread:

    “Health is capitalism’s vulnerability. There is no capital without health—it is capital’s host. And capitalism’s greatest trick is convincing us that it exists independent of this parasitic grasp. That it is indifferent.

    Health has no fixed meaning. It is fluid. Under capitalism health has been defined to embody many meanings at once: from the hyper-individualistic, biological “health” any one person possesses—always a possession, not an ontology—to global society-level constructs which attempt to give language to chances for survival at the population level. Health is a vulgar phenomenon. A race-and-class-stratified matrix of constantly intersecting regimes of artificial scarcity. A destination, something one must always orient one’s life toward. Healthy physically, socially, economically, and metaphysically. More than a thing, and so often difficult or impossible to describe, health becomes defined by the things it is not. Non-cancerous, dis-abled—as though the purest state of health is to simply not exist.

    Health under capitalism is an impossibility. Under capitalism, to attain health you must work, you must be productive and normative, and only then are you entitled to the health you can buy. This fantasy of individual health under the political-economic conditions of capitalism only ever exists as a state one cannot be, to which one must always strive.”