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<\/a><\/p>\nAmericans\u2019 anger with their healthcare system reached a fever pitch in December 2024, when the CEO of United Health Group was executed in the middle of a New York City street. Then a rare thing happened: the general American public came together to express effusive joy, informed by collective dissatisfaction, rage, and disillusionment. With an estimated 41% of Americans shouldering some form of medical debt, people are recognizing the connection between arbitrary healthcare costs, insurance denials, and the steeply rising salaries of healthcare executives. Something has to break.<\/p>\n
My debut poetry book, cells, fully differentiated<\/a>, out now from Noemi Press, is an account of an existence subjected to, shaped by, and never fully certified by the American healthcare system. Drawing on my experiences as a disabled person living in the liminality of non-diagnosis, cells explores the role of neoliberal capitalism in the formation of, the care for, and the quotidian experience of chronic illness. The book depicts phone arguments with insurance companies, illustrates the endless tug-of-war for credibility and legibility, struggles with the way pathologization is deployed as metaphor, and grapples with what it means to deal with failing health in a failing state.<\/p>\n In this reading list, I highlight books that depict the impacts of neoliberal capitalism and fascism on our collective health, reflect on encounters with Western healthcare systems, and call for a popular movement towards healthcare for all. The ten books that follow range from theory to poetry to memoir, yet find commonality in their emphasis on possibility and action. More than simply calling out the bureaucracies and processes designed to provide us with the minimum while extracting the maximum, these books illuminate paths forward and offer strategies for organizing against capitalist exploitation, harnessing the power of the people, and finding strength in solidarity.<\/p>\n Health Communism: A Surplus Manifesto<\/a> by Beatrice Adler-Bolton and Artie Vierkant<\/p>\n Written by the hosts of the podcast Death Panel (itself an excellent collection of \u201ctexts\u201d that serve as a balm in the current moment and provide instruction for action), Health Communism declares both that capitalism is inherently incompatible with health, and that health is fundamental to capitalism. As the book begins, \u201cHealth is capitalism\u2019s vulnerability.\u201d Adler-Bolton and Vierkant define the \u201csurplus class\u201d as those who are labeled as a burden, or a drain, on the economy, including but not limited to the chronically ill, the disabled, the unemployed, and the elderly. Building upon Ruth Wilson Gilmore\u2019s concept of organized abandonment, Adler-Bolton and Vierkant describe the \u201cextractive abandonment\u201d that operates to systematically render the surplus class disposable (that is, exposed to conditions that enable premature death) and, simultaneously, extract capital from us.<\/p>\n But Adler-Bolton and Vierkant have robust proposals for fighting back. Their history of the Socialist Patients\u2019 Collective (SPK) provides a model for organizing and ideology. They call for the centering of the surplus class in our movements. In explicitly naming the alternative to health capitalism, Health Communism offers a clear path forward for the left and confers on us the power to demand health liberation.<\/p>\n Capitalism and Disability<\/a> by Marta Russell, ed. by Keith Rosenthal<\/p>\n This collection of essays unpacks the political economy of disability, arguing that disability is a social category primarily constructed through its relation to labor. By dividing potential workers into \u201cthe able-bodied\u201d and \u201cthe disabled,\u201d capitalism coerces disabled people out of waged work and instead extracts value by treating the disabled body as a commodity, and its need for care as a source of profit. Russell points out that not only do meager benefits and the continued neoliberal destruction of the social safety net coerce workers into productivity for fear of becoming disabled, austerity and bureaucracy also operate to withhold welfare and keep disabled people in a state of precarity. Ranging from U.S. imperialism to eugenics to institutionalization, Russell employs Marxist analysis to explore what so many Americans know firsthand\u2014the intimate connections between health, disability, and one\u2019s ability to work.\u00a0<\/p>\n The Next Shift: The Fall of Industry and the Rise of Health Care in Rust Belt America<\/a> by Gabriel Winant<\/p>\n In The Next Shift, Winant describes the striking transformation of Pittsburgh\u2019s economy from steel to healthcare, arguing that this transformation is no accident and is a direct result of the increased care needs of blue-collar workers. In contrast to the strong unions of the steel industry and their labor wins, Winant emphasizes the \u201cmass low-wage private-sector employment\u201d imposed upon the majority of healthcare workers, workers who are as important as they are underpaid and exploited.<\/p>\n While Pittsburgh is a stark case study, the processes that Winant describes have been enacted all over the States, and thus The Next Shift offers a crucial assessment of what the rise of the healthcare industry means for healthcare workers, patients, and caregivers alike.<\/p>\n The Undying<\/a> by Anne Boyer<\/p>\n In conversation with an array of thinkers and patients, Anne Boyer\u2019s memoir, The Undying, depicts her experience with triple negative breast cancer and seethes against the vast societal and gendered connotations of the condition. With a studied cynicism towards the institutions she interfaces with, Boyer writes of \u201cdrive-by mastectomies,\u201d chemotherapy medications that cost more than yearly salaries, and the unremitting requirement of work during sickness. She reflects, \u201cWhen reading historical accounts of breast cancer, I am often struck by a world on which profit hadn\u2019t taken such a full and festering hold.\u201d<\/p>\n For Boyer, the origins of her cancer are haunting. Boyer leverages this into revolutionary anger: \u201cImmobilized in bed, I decide to devote my life to making the socially acceptable response to news of a diagnosis of breast cancer not the corrective \u2018stay positive,\u2019 but these lines from Diane Di Prima\u2019s poem \u2018Revolutionary Letter #9\u2019: \u20181. kill head of Dow Chemical \/ 2. destroy plant \/ 3. MAKE IT UNPROFITABLE FOR THEM to build again.\u2019\u201d More plainly, Boyer writes, \u201cI would rather write nothing at all than propagandize for the world as it is.\u201d<\/p>\n Disabled Ecologies: Lessons from a Wounded Desert<\/a> by Sunaura Taylor<\/p>\n In Disabled Ecologies, Sunaura Taylor revisits a land that has had embodied impacts on her \u2014its toxicity the likely cause of her genetic condition\u2014despite the fact that she has not lived on it for decades: a Superfund site on the south side of Tucson, Arizona. Considering her birthplace as exemplifying a \u201cdisabled ecology\u2014[a network] of disability [created] when ecosystems are corrupted and profoundly altered,\u201d Taylor investigates the history of the contaminated aquifer. A key component of that history was the formation by local residents, many of them Mexican American, of the group Tucsonans for a Clean Environment (TCE, named after a key toxin in the aquifer), which aimed to unearth the truth of the violence enacted upon them and to fight for justice, reparations, and the decontamination of their land.<\/p>\n Forming an instructive theoretical basis for an \u201cenvironmentalism of the injured,\u201d Disabled Ecologies is a beautifully written, captivating feat of archival work. Utilizing the networks of disability created by the U.S. military industrial complex, the book proposes ways we might leverage our interconnectedness on local and global levels to resist.<\/p>\n The Right to Maim: Debility, Capacity, Disability <\/a>by Jasbir Puar<\/p>\n In this crucial intervention into disability studies, Jasbir Puar emphasizes that the source of much global disability and illness can be tied to the concept of \u201cthe right to maim,\u201d or the asserted right of the state to enact mass debility on populations as a form of enforced precaritization. Defining \u201cdebility\u201d as a \u201cslow wearing down,\u201d Puar highlights how neoliberal capitalism and U.S. imperialism, work and war, use debilitation tactically to incapacitate and capacitate racialized populations and thereby control them. Through discussions of the impacts of the U.S. war machine and Israel\u2019s exercising of both \u201cthe right to maim\u201d and \u201cthe right to kill\u201d on Palestinians, Puar argues for a framework of disability that transcends pride and identity discourses. Instead, Puar names debility as a mechanism of state violence and takes that, rather than the push for acceptance of difference within neoliberal systems, as a launching point for disability scholarship, organizing, and activism.\u00a0<\/p>\n Mad World: The Politics of Mental Health <\/a>by Micha Frazer-Carroll<\/p>\n In Mad World, Micha Frazer-Carroll locates the Madness\/Mental Illness \u201cepidemic\u201d squarely within capitalism, highlighting \u201chow the world drives us Mad, how the world comes to categorize us as Mad, and then, how the world responds to our Madness.\u201d Drawing from principles of the disability justice movement, Frazer-Carroll deconstructs the asylum, diagnosis, carcerality, and the sickening impacts of labor exploitation, with thoughtful attention to the way linguistic formations operate within these systems of oppression. She foregrounds the lived experience of Mad people, calling for us to \u201cuproot our assumptions and centre knowledge \u2018from below\u2019\u2014which often contradicts that of charities, medical institutions, and other professional experts.\u201d Frazer-Carroll argues against disavowal, attesting to the necessity of solidarity in delivering us into a liberated future.<\/p>\n Decarcerating Disability: Deinstitutionalization and Prison Abolition<\/a> by Liat Ben-Moshe<\/p>\n In Decarcerating Disability, Liat Ben-Moshe thoroughly disproves the popular notion that the deinstitutionalization of asylums, beginning in the 50s, paved the way for increased incarceration of disabled and Mad people. Instead, Ben-Moshe identifies deinstitutionalization as the largest decarceration movement in US history and suggests that it can offer essential lessons for prison abolition movements. Decarcerating Disability provides a much-needed assessment of the intricate relationships between disability and carceral abolition, illuminating histories and knowledges in service of abolition movements.<\/p>\n