Hi, I have a few short reflections to share in written form after reading chapter 6 ("BORDER") from Health Communism by Beatrice Adler-Bolton and Artie Vierkant before our video chat later today at 12p ET.

You can join here in about an hour.

Another note of love for Alice Wong

Jane Shi and Leah Piepzna-Samarasinha wrote a eulogy for Alice Wong, which you can read here. Together, the three co-organized the Crips for eSIMs for Gaza effort. The two continue together, hopefully with whatever support we can offer.

BORDER

... the liberation of health from capital requires the rejection of all nationalisms: the expansion of health-capitalism is inextricably tied to the rise of contemporary state securitization and its constituent bordering regimes, an ever-looming blight on the international body politic.

Eliding questions of "social citizenship" and whether health has ever been an inalienable right under capital, this observation is important in understanding why the entire political economy of health should be stripped from capitalism. [...] Segmenting the provision of social and health services into two-tiered or mixed systems does not result in what its proponents suggest, a "universal coverage" where all needs are met. Instead, it produces countless new sites for abandonment.

Collectively, these constitute the incursion of capital on the health of the global population, and the institution of a contemporary regime of international extractive abandonment.

The right to maim is not an act of sparing life, it is instead a deliberate systematic campaign to debilitate the Palestinian population, an event of mass disablement which has displaced the sovereign right to kill, with "its covert attendant, the right to maim ... Both are mobilized to make power visible on the body."

Reflections

While reading this chapter, I caught myself thinking again about Refaat Alareer's essays and poetry, particularly an essay where he described how Israel would withhold access to care from young Palestinians and use it as leverage to coerce collaboration from them, or from family members.

I also thought about Steven Thrasher's piece for The Intercept, and Israel's gruesome practice blocking antiretrovirals and forcing Palestinians to halve or quarter their medicine to try to make it last as long as possible.

It's hard not to think about how we're watching the Israeli occupation use borders to draw arbitrary kill zones; use patrol borders to institute regimes of care that western society would call a travesty if they cared about the lives of Palestinians, or if they were imposed on Israelis; use borders to gate and restrict access to pharmaceuticals, gauze, bandages, diapers, baby formula, and other basic needs. All this gets rendered as the civilized, dignified way to erase a population.

The purpose of the genocidal settler state is to annihilate the indigenous population, and the Israeli occupation uses borders as a key part of that project. But that is just as true in Israel as it is in Canada or the United States or any settler colonial state. Those differential, preferential regimes that privilege settlers and occupiers are not incidentally resulting in genocide, but deliberately so. The use of violence across and around borders is part of that regime; the countless deaths in ICE facilities - people abducted and starved or deprived medical care - the proximity of a border as a pretext to instigate violence can't be ignored, and what we do about it is going to be central to our collective future.

Later today I think we'll talk about the privatization of healthcare in Latin America, so I won't say more on that, but I'm looking forward to learning more about the history of that process.

Buy the book

I'm still figuring out what book to read next; if you have any extra money at this time of year, you could do a lot of help by buying eSIMs for Palestinians. The Crips for eSIMs for Gaza project has raised more than a million dollars to keep Palestinians connected to the internet during this ongoing genocide. If you wanted to donate to them in the memory of Alice Wong, that would mean a lot to me.

If you'd rather continue to donate to The Sameer Project, that would also help Palestinians in Gaza a lot.

However you do help (however you can help), thank you.

That's all for now; talk soon.