“Capital has been allowed to define the meanings, terms, and consequences of “health” for long enough. In these pages we propose a radical reevaluation of our political economy that seeks to undo capitalism’s definitions of health by laying bare the violent and eugenic assumptions at its foundations. We articulate how health is wielded by capital to cleave apart populations, separating the deserving from the undeserving, the redeemable from the irredeemable, those who would consider themselves “workers” from the vast, spoiled “surplus” classes. We assert that only through shattering these deeply sociologically ingrained binaries is the abolition of capitalism possible.” (p11)

“The provisioning of medical care and the social determinants of health have been based on a system of triage that attempts to devote maximum care resources to those most able to contribute productively to the economy.” (p 63)

“Capitalism has defined “health” itself as a capacity to submit oneself to labor.” (p 65)

“We’ve been told that work will heal us. We’ve been tricked into trying the work cure. We are told that work is in our best interest, when the truth is that it only serves the needs of capital and the ruling class at the expense of our health. Breaking the mirage of worker versus surplus provides a revolutionary opportunity to unite the surplus and worker classes in recognition of a better truth: safety, survival, and care are best ensured outside of capitalism. This revolutionary potential has been divided, discouraged, and criminalized.” (p 78)

“Wilson Gilmore identifies these as the state’s process of “organized abandonment.” Organized abandonment describes how the state constructs itself through its capacity to sort and separate the surplus populations, marking some for reclamation and others for slow death.” (p. 37)

“Marta Russell’s money model of disability theorizes that while the disabled—the surplus population—are widely regarded as a “drain” on the economy, in truth over time capital and the state have constructed systems to reclaim this lost population as a source of financial production.” (p. 32)

“Resisting biocertification does not mean resisting “diagnosis” or identification. It means resisting the leveraging of these certifications by capital and the state.” (p. 28)

“Those who are deemed to be surplus are rendered excess by the systems of capitalist production and have been consequently framed as a drain or a burden on society. But the surplus population has become an essential component of capitalist society, with many industries built on the maintenance, supervision, surveillance, policing, data extraction, confinement, study, cure, measurement, treatment, extermination, housing, transportation, and care of the surplus. In this way, those discarded as non-valuable life are maintained as a source of extraction and profit for capital. This rather hypocritical stance—the surplus are at once nothing and everything to capitalism—is an essential contradiction.” (pp 23-24)

“… the worker is not a part of the surplus populations, yet faces constant threat of becoming certified as surplus, is one of the central social constructions wielded in support of capitalist hegemony.” (p22)

“A pivotal factor in the rendering of whole segments of society as “waste” was the construction of the worker/surplus binary. This binary is at the foundation of the eugenic and debt burden framework, a principle that rationalizes political notions that not all people are in fact equal in deserving assistance or support.” (p 62)

“While the surplus population does contain those who are disabled, impaired, sick, mad, or chronically ill, the characteristic vulnerability of the surplus is not inherent to their existence—that is, it is not any illness, disability, or pathologized characteristic that itself makes the surplus vulnerable. Their vulnerability is instead constructed by the operations of the capitalist state.” (p 23)

“Illness—you point out—is the only possible form of life in capitalism. In fact, the psychiatrist, who is wage dependent, is a sick person like each of us. The ruling classes merely give him the power to “cure” or to hospitalize. Cure—this is self-evident—can’t be understood in our system to mean the elimination of illness: it serves exclusively as the maintenance of the ability to go to work where one stays sick.”

“We call for a radical abundance of care that functionally casts off centuries of ideologies of austerity, subjection, and extraction.”

“Any left political projects that rely on the logic of waste—that are structured around scarcity, lack, capital accumulation, certification, citizenship, property, or carcerality—are doomed to fail.” (p 42)

Adler-Bolton and Vierkant