#Artie Vierkant

[withbriefthanksgiving]

To the SSA, illness is only relevant in relation to whether and to what degree it impacts a person’s capacity to work. As Rosemarie Garland Thompson argues, this presumes that ill health, disability, and impairment are located only in the body and not also in the broader social, political, and geographical context that comprises the individual’s social determinants of health. Impairments and disabilities are reduced to numbers on a page: “On one scale, for example, limb amputation translates as a 70% reduction in ability to work, while amputation of the little finger at the distal joint reduces the capacity for labor by a single percentage point.”

[…] The ideological framing of wage work as a mitigating factor in an individual’s eligibility for health and welfare benefits attempts to map economic valuations of life onto regimes of biocertification, as is readily evident in SSDI determinations. Social Security disability eligibility is a legal process of decertifying a body for work, not the certification of a body for any type of qualifying disability or impairment demonstrating need for care and additional social supports.

Health Communism, Chapter 1: SURPLUS

[misterbitches]

There are footnotes and links in this post that I think are valuable. All of these things are extremely worth reading. This is long.

Forgive me (sike idc) for injecting my ancommie art brain but: I don’t know who needs to hear it but castigating Jack as some monster instead of a kid from the fucking slums who is “stuck” in some sort of (supposed nebulous referent-less) cycle that cannot be solved as opposed to purposefully kept there by imperial colonial [racial] capitalist exploitation⁰ with some pretty difficult but clear¹ possibilities for struggle and understood solutions is a limit on our imagining of a future and want for change as well as just sullying this story (outside of critiquing the work itself) for you. I don't know why we are glossing over the fact that you have to pay to live and also global determinants of health.

Why do the poor the world over have such low quality of health and life and therefore die first? Why are they overwhelmingly black and the darker peoples of the world? The colonized or subjugated? When did we move from the right to life and health to the right to coverage or being able to afford it?²

Is it not interesting that Joke's father is a doctor and his livelihood is linked with this system? Do you think that, maybe, how the father is and his job show a congruency? Why do individuals have to go above a system and yet are still invested in this system? And since Joke was a part of this nuclear family then ousted when he dared to transgress its rule—the unit based off of generating labor and necessary for one's survival since it is the only safe financial place to land and rely on—is it not significant that he isn't acknowledged by that father over things that could save someone? I'm super tired so I'm not making as much sense as I'd like. To quote from this comprehensive piece³ on Health Communism: A Surplus Manifesto by Beatrice Adler-Bolton and Artie Vierkant:

“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.” (Turn Illness into a Weapon: A Polemic Call to Action by the SPK, 1972)³

Joke comes from a family with money. They aren't super rich but they have what Jack (and now Joke!) doesn't. His father is in a position where he could throw rules out the window to help his son's friend even if that has consequences. Ostensibly had Joke not done what he did, Joke would always have access to decent healthcare or money. Or he would have gotten a job that would allow him to have it or afford it. He also would lead a life where his health is most likely going to be optimal. (A bit of a stretch since we are still in a pandemic and the globe is dying and they live in a place where people are affected by MAN MADE CAPITALIST climate disaster and racist ecocide that is going to primarily affect those in rural areas and people are fucking sick but I digressss) What kind of air are these people breathing? What's in these pills? Why is there no sustained contact with health professionals (that don't suck—also a thing)? Why are we so okay with elderly alienation and their death? Poor death?

This captures several major themes of the book, namely, the impossibility of health under capitalism; the potential of solidarity between physicians and patients, despite the power dynamics that otherwise separate them; and the need to turn illness into a weapon to dismantle capitalism itself. Adler-Bolton and Vierkant write: “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. [SPK] called this cultural imaginary of health a “biological, fascist fantasy” because it obscures the true and violent architecture of economic systems of extraction underneath the shadow of a capitalist-realist depiction of the perfect worker.” (pp. 10-11) ³ (x)

So with all this known why the fuck are people so goddamn angry at Jack? And for Tattoo too. I didn't really touch on this in all this text but my main point is that it's interesting that we don't know what we're mad at beyond a betrayal when for the both of these men they "betrayed" the rich boy. In Save's case he betrayed the poor ones, his comrades, the ones who are suffering like him. My anger towards him is much greater but I still get it. (To be clear: I am angry at him and it is even worse because it isn't directed at anyone but the poor. His friend's grandmother. And it's a tale as old as time. If he wasn't such a little bitch he would be able to withstand it but he isn't. If I think even harder I wonder if this signal's the closer one is to these types of people, the more they suture themselves to capital out of survival, the more they believe they will be protected by heinous acts but I am tired lol.)

They're all poor boys from the fucking slums but our main concern is Joke, the rich-ish boy—who is right btw cos we love robbing the rich yet still his old class position and upbringing very clearly influences how we view him and his agency. It is done to him like with Arun and the necklace—a gay boy with an abusive father—and Rosé—a woman with an abusive father(?)—and her life. They are entitled to these sympathies first!

The formatting bugs me so I'm gonna reblog the rest.

Footnotes:

⁰This is "H.L.T. Quan on Cedric Robinson, Racial Capitalism, Black Internationalism, & Cultures of Resistance" on Millenials are Killing Capitalism. "Cedric’s point is that Marx and Engels missed the significance of revolt in the rest of the world, specifically by non-Western peoples who made up the vast majority of the world’s unfree and nonindustrial labor force." (Essay from Robin D.G. Kelley's foreword to the third updated edition of Cedric Robinson's Black Marxism.) I haven't read BM yet BTW but I know a lot about it and it has influenced black anarcho-communism (black anarchism), our traditions, what revolt should require, INTERNATIONAL RADICAL SOLIDARITY, and our development. Robinson was also, like many radical intellectuals, an artist and art critic! I think it's important to put here particularly because Thailand wasn't colonized so the conception of the nation is different though not out of step with colonized history at all. Obviously. Which is answered to here and elucidated here as it seems Bangkok acts as an imperial core. It’s too easy to take them out of that history is what I’m garnering from this. I don't know how much of this is enough and I can only go by the knowledge I have gained in reading and being in these spaces because to get information on radical left in Thailand (or many parts of asia) is fucking hard and even the man I'm referencing doesn't support armed struggle currently apparently! I'll continue to research. But we have been so cut off from each other and radical thought esp from an American standpoint it's fucking pathetic. This is why I say understanding art and being critical is important. In a better world this would be an OBVIOUS articulation and revealing where people wouldn't get upset over someone like Jack just because he isn't fucking a boy on our timeline. ¹ “1968 and the “Thai Seventies" – 14th October 1973 uprising, 6 October 1976 bloodbath and after” by Giles Ji Ungpakorn who also wrote "Down with Thai Capitalism! The People Against the Military Dictatorship!" in Spectre as a response to Thiti Jamkajornkeiat ²"SPHC matched the general shift in high level development planning to technical solutions and privatisation of public services, and from the comprehensive vision of Health for All to survival rates. The health care reform that was then promoted by the evolving global health governance structure, as a subset of conservative neoliberal economic policies, gave rise to the privatisation and commercialisation of health care—from Health for All to health care that people could aford. There was a concomitant reduction in government health spending in many low-and middle-income countries with increasing dependence on multiple international donors and the reduced ability of countries to determine their own health agendas." Conclusion from Health Policies and Health Care in the Context of Neoliberal Globalisation. ³Health Communism — All Care For All People (Part 1) also read alongside this "review by Evan Sedgwick-Jell for Asylum magazine and this Q&A of Beatrice Adler-Bolton and Artie Vierkant by the New Republic." You can find the HC book online (pirateflagemoji) and/or buy it.

[luulapants]

do you have nonfiction book recs? either all time/go-to recs or things that feel important/timely to you right now? i want to read more nonfiction & you seem like someone who would have good recommendations

Hey, so I have given non-fiction recommendations before, which will include most of the important or all-time faves, but I'm happy to talk about what I'm reading more recently!

Full disclosure, I tend to read 10-20 books all at once very slowly, and I also tend to read weird, obscure books that weren't in good enough condition to get sent into prisons. Non-fiction I'm working on now:

Men, Women, and Chainsaws: gender in the modern horror film by Carol J. Clover - not very timely but SO interesting oh my god

The Tao of Statistics: a path to understanding (with no math) by Dana K. Keller - for learning vibes-based statistics

What If? 2 by Randall Munroe - the most fun you'll ever have reading about science, also great for reading before bed

Union: the struggle to forge the story of United States nationhood by Colin Woodard - CWood is my BOY for historical analysis

Health Communism: a surplus manifesto by Beatrice Adler-Bolton and Artie Vierkant - this one is really timely and important and also SUPER dense and actually requires an attention span so actually I'm having my dad read it and then deliver long, rambling lectures to me about what he's read, which probably takes longer than it would to just read it myself, but it's good father-daughter bonding

In the Light of Justice: the rise of human rights in Native America and the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples by Walter R. Echo-Hawk - I just started this one, but I'm told it does a good job of focusing on modern realities of indigenous justice as impacted by historical evils

Resistance, Rebellion, and Death by Albert Camus - because the issues we're dealing with in society aren't new and letters written during WWII are still relevant to politics today

[librarycards]

Do you listen to audio books, and if so, what are your favorites? thank you for the recommendations Sarah!

yes, I do!

some of my favorites to listen to on audio are:

fiction:

Becky Chambers, EVERYTHING, but here's the first book in her sublimely fantastic Wayfarers series.

Anthony, Veasna So, Afterparties

Courtney Summers, Sadie

Nnedi Okorafor, Who Fears Death

Ryka Aoki, Light from Uncommon Stars

Oyinkan Braithwaite, My Sister, The Serial Killer

Seanan McGuire, Every Heart a Doorway

Yaa Gyasi, Transcendent Kingdom

nonfiction:

Jeanette McCurdy, I'm Glad My Mom Died

Ruha Benjamin, Viral Justice

Beatrice Adler-Bolton, Artie Vierkant, Health Communism

Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass

Harsha Walia, Border and Rule

there are many more where that came from, but that's a great list to get you started. listened to all of them on libby ofc!! <3

[myceliumbutch]

Accordingly, the idea that generosity and material comfort itself could act as a pathogen for "idleness" (and thus "fraud") is a way of framing those conditions, impairments, illness, or disabilities that could contribute to an individual's inability to work as a contagion in need of a "cure". - "Health Communism" by Artie Vierkant

[toastyslayingbutter]

My list of Marxist/communist writings I’m reading or rereading:

Class Struggle in Africa by. Kwame Nkrumah;

An Anthropology of Marxism by. Cedric Robinson;

Decolonial Marxism by. Walter Rodney;

Golden Gulag by. Ruth Wilson Gilmore, and;

Health Communism by. Beatrice Adler-Bolton & Artie Vierkant

[readingsquotes]

Currently, there are more than 30 bills pending in Congress and statehouses across the country that seek to limit the right to protest. It’s not a fully new strategy, Michael Loadenthal, founder and executive director of the Prosecution Project, which tracks federal-level prosecution of political violence, tells Teen Vogue. “The laws follow the movement tactics,” Loadenthal says. “When Black Lives Matter activists throughout the Midwest and the country are blocking highways, then you have all these laws introduced that say you can't block highways; when people are setting up Standing Rock, in the early days of the Dakota Access Pipeline, you get these laws about blocking critical infrastructure.”

...

We’re seeing similar categorizations of blocking traffic as “domestic terrorism,” or making “wilful disturbance” a misdemeanor, in response to pro-Palestine protests, in states including New York, Massachusetts, Arizona, and West Virginia. During yet another COVID spike, officials are attempting to restrict the ability to wear masks, targeting protesters in places like New York City, Los Angeles, and the state of North Carolina. As Artie Vierkant of the podcast Death Panel argued on a recent episode, “Masks are being attacked in part because they've successfully been made into symbols of solidarity... between COVID, disability justice and the fight for a free Palestine."

In a May 2024 feature for New York Magazine entitled “How to Criminalize a Protest,” focused on the charges against the Stop Cop City movement, writer Zak Cheney Rice described how, in the years following the Ferguson uprising and preceding the George Floyd uprising, Georgia included “damaging certain types of property” in their legal definition of domestic terrorism directed at the Black Lives Matter movement. This increasing criminalization of protest, one expert proposed, seemed to be a test: “How many people could [police] criminalize at once?” Meanwhile, cities across America are looking to build new “Cop City” police training facilities.

.... Dissent won’t stop. Resistance to bigotry, to racism, to climate destruction, to laws controlling people’s bodies — none of it is going away. Mass protests are in the works for the upcoming Republican and Democratic conventions and we’ll be watching to see what’s coming in the United States of Suppression.

[mirandamckenni1]

Liked on YouTube: Fear of Trans Bodies || https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yt2QPnhqIuI || Get a year of Nebula + Curiosity Stream for under $12 (42% off): https://ift.tt/yu7Dmns Watch this video ad-free on Nebula: https://ift.tt/aksDNAQ - What does it mean for a body to be damaged? - Support the channel on Patreon: https://ift.tt/8ubzfXm Twitter: https://twitter.com/lily_lxndr Letterboxd: https://ift.tt/mbqnyrZ Instagram: https://ift.tt/PQZOWV5 - References 1. “On the Outside Looking In” by Julia Serano: https://ift.tt/GR0D1IC 2. “Irreversible Damage” by Abigail Shrier: 3. “Tracing the Roots of Pop Culture Transphobia” by Lindsay Ellis: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cHTMidTLO60 4. Breast cancer risk in transgender people receiving hormone treatment: nationwide cohort study in the Netherlands https://ift.tt/YGoeaQZ 5. “What’s so Good about Being Natural?” by Nour Abi-Nakhoul: 6. Hormone Replacement Therapy Market Worth $35.79 Billion by 2030: https://ift.tt/ONbmX94 7. Global Anti Aging Market Size Worth $120 Billion by 2030 at a 7.5% CAGR: https://ift.tt/wmaVSlN 8. Female voice changes around and after the menopause--an initial investigation: https://ift.tt/TCZc4tv 9. “Ten Stages of Genocide” by Gregory H. Stanton: https://ift.tt/LFT7uC0 Media used “It Was Hot, We Stayed in the Water (STEMS Version)” by The Microphones “Transphobic Techno (B**** Got a P****)” by Your Favorite Martian “Back to the Future” by Robert Zemeckis Several videos by TT Exulansic “I Emailed my Doctor 133 Times - The Crisis in the British Healthcare System” by Philosophy Tube Twitter vent by KC Miller “Network” by Sidney Lumet “Synecdoche, New York” by Charlie Kaufman “RaeLynn - God Made Girls” by TK McKamy “The Final Exit of the Disciples of Ascensia” by Jonni Phillips Backxwash live set - M for Montreal 2021 “The Queen” by Frank Simon Inspirations “Health Communism” by Beatrice Adler-Bolton and Artie Vierkant “My Words to Victor Frankenstein Above the Village of Chamounix” by Susan Stryker “Should Have Known Better” by Sufjan Stevens Everything ever released by The Microphones & Mount Eerie “There is no other world, and there has never been.” Correction: 33:31 The sale actually ends January 2nd, 2023. After that, my link gives a smaller discount.

[t4t4t]

Beatrice Adler-Bolton and Artie Vierkant have been a lifeline for many during the COVID-19 pandemic through their Death Panel podcast, deconstructing the failed American response with a knife that cuts like truth. Here, they do something even more remarkable: imagine a better future. 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. No one talks like Adler-Bolton and Vierkant do - those in public health and medicine are too deeply embedded in the status quo to even acknowledge the searing logic of their words. They stake out the far edge of what is possible and remind us that only the journey towards that horizon will make us free.

Gregg Gonsalves, Yale School of Public Health and Yale Law School

This creative, wide-ranging book would be important under any circumstances since it helps readers understand widespread social processes that are genuinely violent in their operations yet often curiously bloodless in their ideological depictions. The book is especially urgent in light of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. Health Communism helps make clear both the fundamental social patterns that gave rise to the pandemic, and stresses that any real solutions to those patterns will require far-reaching social change.

Nate Holdren, Theory & Event

If you have ever gone to work sick because you need the job to treat the sickness, you know the basic argument of Health Communism to be true: health under capitalism is an impossibility.

Natalie Adler, LUX Magazine

Health against health! I can't remember the last time I learned so much in under 200 pages. Nor can I imagine a more needful book for the pandemic we are still in, let alone the pandemics yet to come. This exquisitely researched 'surplus manifesto' made me cry tears of rage, but demonstrated powerfully to me that our collective illness can be ‘turned into a weapon.’ In my view, everyone new to disability liberation should read this text. Everyone who wants to stop the destruction of their bodies by capitalism should join the Death Panel community. If we let them, Beatrice Adler-Bolton and Artie Vierkant will teach the left how to really understand capitalism, at the cellular and somatic levels. So, if you are holding this book, congratulations. 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

Beatrice Adler-Bolton and Artie Vierkant bring us a galvanizing proposition: Unlike the rest of us, capital is not alive; it merely animates itself through our host bodies. This book shares the impressive truth that we are all surplus in the political economy of health, whether we are presently 'healthy' or 'sick.' 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

nothing shows the need for communism more than sickness. individual responsibility will kill us all.

[withbriefthanksgiving]

In Fantasies of Identification, Ellen Samuels analyzes how certain forms of state assistance, resource allocation, or support are often understood within the popular imaginary as a “kind of currency.” These benefits are gatekept by abstract bureaucratic systems of eligibility predicated on the verifiability of someone’s biological state and identity.

As such, Samuels argues, the role of biocertification, namely the process of assuring that only “legitimate” claimants receive this “currency”-in-kind, is reinscribed with a simulated social “banking function,” reinforcing the idea that the process of biocertification itself is an efficient means of allocating economic resources.

Biocertification is assumed to be a necessary gatekeeping mechanism or checkpoint to prevent the “wasting” of resources on fakers, cheats, imposters, and malingerers: “invoking both a model of scarcity, in which resources must be reserved for those who truly deserve them, and a distrust of self-identification, in which statements of identity are automatically suspect unless and until validated by an outside authority.”

Health Communism, Chapter 1: SURPLUS

[webionaire]

Photographers Today

Ryan Foerster (b. Newmarket, Canada, 1983. Lives and works in New York.) Lucas Blalock (b. 1978, Asheville, NC. Lives and works in New York.)  Artie Vierkant (b. 1986, Breinerd, MN. Lives and works in New York.)  Martine Syms (b. 1988, Los Angeles. Lives and works in LA.)  Joshua Citarella (b. 1987 New York. Lives and works in New York.)  Sara Cwynar (b. 1985, Ottawa. Lives and works in New…

Foma200@200 with HC110 dilution H plus 2ml of Rodinal, 16’30” agitation every minute

I mix Ansco 130 with either potassium or sodium carbonate to obtain slightly cooler or warmer tones. I also use 1% benzotrizole solution to slightly modify tones.

[mentaltimetraveller]

Artie Vierkant - US 6318569 B1, US 8118919 B1; (Exploits) 

at New Galerie, Paris - 7 September to 19 October, 2013

[battymoonflower7]

Plain text: ¹ Beatrice Adler-Bolton and Artie Vierkant, Health Communism (Brooklyn: Verso, 2022), 128-129. / End PT

⚕️ Turn Illness into a Weapon ⚕️

"Among the surviving records of SPK’s (Sozialistisches Patientenkollektiv or Socialist Patients' Collective) actions and ideologies is a manifesto written by its members called Aus Der Krankheit Eine Waffe Machen (often translated as To Make an Army out of Illness, or Turn Illness into a Weapon). This 1972 text is part user manual, part oral history, part sardonic critique of Cold War capitalism. Unlike other self-organized patient groups and their counterparts in the anti-psychiatry movement, SPK uniquely combined Marxist political theory, social science analysis, and what they termed 'therapeutic praxis' to create an improvised, in-patient community with the express collectivist goal of researching the connections between capitalism, madness, eugenics, and the individuation of illness under political economies of work and care."¹

— from Health Communism, written by Beatrice Adler-Bolton and Artie Vierkant.

[ID: My design of a linocut print on brown paper. A snake is wrapped around a stick, with text below which reads, "Turn Illness into a Weapon". The snake is hissing and baring its fangs. Its tongue is curling out of its mouth. The second image is the same design but on white paper. End ID]

¹ Beatrice Adler-Bolton and Artie Vierkant, Health Communism (Brooklyn: Verso, 2022), 128-129.

[nuncaestarassolo]

[myceliumbutch]

The ever-growing industry of private care, nursing homes, assisted living centers, psychiatric hospitals, boarding and halfway houses, rehabilitation facilities, and long-term treatment centers reflects a complex web of profit extraction designed to prioritize economic interests and reclaim commodified bodies as avenues for profit. - "Health Communism" by Artie Vierkant

[marcalcockedit]

Artie Vierkant