Health Communism

In this fiery, theoretical tour de force, Beatrice Adler-Bolton and 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. Ultimately, Adler-Bolton and Vierkant argue, we will not succeed in defeating capitalism until we sever health from capital. To do this will require a radical new politics of solidarity that centers the surplus, built on an understanding that we must not base the value of human life on one’s willingness or ability to be productive within the current political economy. Capital, it turns out, only fears health.

Red Medicine: Socialized Health in Soviet Russia reviews the medical organization and administration in Soviet Russia. This book is organized into 24 chapters that particularly tackle the city of Moscow and Leningrad. It addresses the travels of the authors from Moscow to Georgia and the Crimea, providing an overview of the background of Russian life. Some of the topics covered in the book are the progress of Russia towards Communism; developments in the introduction of Communism; type of government of USSR; description of industrial conditions and health; features of agricultural conditions; state of religion, civil liberty, and law; and characteristics of home life, recreation, clubs, and education. Other chapters deal with the condition of women in Soviet Russia, state of marriage, and divorce. These topics are followed by discussions of the care of maternity, children and youths, as well as the treatment in residential and non-residential institutions. The final chapters describe the characteristics of medical practice and the general considerations on the medical care in large communities. The book can provide useful information to the historians, doctors, students, and researchers.

This book analyzes the social impact of the transition from communism in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union.

Why did communism grow so quickly? Why did it spread to turn almost half of the world red by the mid-1970s? What impact did it have upon capitalism and capitalist society? Communism is a concise introduction to one of the most important and influential movements of the 20th century. It shows how the modern communist movement emerged out of radical millenarian movements of the Middle Ages and the English Civil War, becoming a mass movement of industrial society, seeking to overturn capitalism and replace it with a society of equality, justice, harmony and co-operation. It traces the growth of modern communism from its beginnings in the early nineteenth century to its position of global power at the end of the Second World War. Mark Sandle investigates the ultimate failure of communism as a political ideology, and concludes by asking how far the historical record of communism has been used to conceal the historical record of capitalism. Ideal for courses in both History and Politics.

In Soviet Nightingales, Susan Grant tracks nursing care in the Soviet Union from its nineteenth-century origins in Russia through the end of the Soviet state. With the advent of the USSR, nurses were instrumental in helping to build the New Soviet Person and in constructing a socialist society. Disease and illness were rampant in the early 1920s after years of war, revolution, and famine. The demand for nurses was great, but how might these workers best serve the country's needs? By examining living and working conditions, nurse-patient relations, education, and attempts at international nursing cooperation, Grant recounts the history of the Bolshevik effort to define the "Soviet" nurse and organize a new system of socialist care for the masses. Although the Bolsheviks aimed to transform healthcare along socialist lines, they ultimately failed as the struggle to train skilled medical workers became entangled in politics. Soviet Nightingales draws on rich archival research from Russia, the United States, and Britain to describe how ideology reinvented the role of the nurse and shaped the profession.