Beatrice Adler-Bolton
LightNews LightNews
banner
reallandsend.bsky.social
Beatrice Adler-Bolton
@reallandsend.bsky.social
7.9K followers 460 following 730 posts
co-host @deathpanel.bsky.social | co-author of Health Communism w/ Artie Vierkant (Verso Books) https://bit.ly/healthcommunism | health, debility, class struggle & the state

www.deathpanel.net
www.patreon.com/deathpanelpod
www.beatriceadlerbolton.com
Posts Replies Media Videos
reallandsend.bsky.social
September 9, 2025 at 8:05 PM
reallandsend.bsky.social
happy birthday to @avierkant.bsky.social my partner and collaborator in basically everything—cohost, coauthor, and now coparent. grateful every day to be in this messy, beautiful struggle of life together 🖤
Artie holding baby Death Panel on his lap and feeding them milks in a bottle. The baby is wearing a spotted hat with dog ears and blue overalls.
September 9, 2025 at 5:23 PM
reallandsend.bsky.social
Disability isn’t just a body or health status—it’s a political relation produced by capitalism. Under capitalism, disability is a mechanism for managing surplus labor. It’s not marginal to class struggle. It is class struggle.
Image with info about an essay. Essay title is an iron sky pressing down: the phenomenology and political economy of expected impairments. The essay is available at blindarchive.substack.com. Behind the text is an image. It is a color lithograph of two people sitting in a stone archway. It is also an image of a skull.
August 21, 2025 at 9:23 PM
reallandsend.bsky.social
The article’s obsession with “accuracy” around medical conditions is a smokescreen. Sure, you could say that context matters—but the framing here weaponizes context to deny accountability for a genocidal blockade actively causing suffering and death, including intentional famine.
August 14, 2014 article in IMEU called "Putting Palestinians “On a Diet”: Israel’s Siege & Blockade of Gaza" which discusses intentional famine used by the genocidal settler state as a tactic of siege going back to the mid-2000's
August 21, 2025 at 12:21 AM
reallandsend.bsky.social
Mosab al-Debs, paralyzed after a traumatic head injury caused by a zionist shell, is similarly exploited. The Free Press is even doing this when pre-exisiting injuries are a direct result of genocidal Zionist violence. Instead, readers are trained to see death as inevitable.
more from this awful and eugenic article, where the authors admit that Mosab's injuries are caused by overt zionist geoncidal violence and yet dismiss their suffering from famine because of pre-existing condition just the same, the article reads: Mosab al-Debs The 14-year-old boy was featured in the same CNN story as another child “suffering from malnourishment.” The original caption didn’t mention that last May, he sustained a traumatic head injury amid what SHMS News Agency, a Gaza-based outlet, called “an Israeli shell” explosion.
August 21, 2025 at 12:21 AM
reallandsend.bsky.social
Najwa Hussein Hajjaj has a congenital esophageal condition. Free Press emphasizes this to once again suggest that reports of malnutrition are overblown. The piece teaches readers to view preexisting illness as a form of “justification” for death under genocidal zionist occupation
image of Najwa from New York Times reporting on famine in Gaza
August 21, 2025 at 12:21 AM
reallandsend.bsky.social
Hamza Mishmish, a 25-year-old with cerebral palsy, is presented as an example of how “malnutrition” is exaggerated. This weaponizes fact that disability + genocidal blockade = compounded risk. Ableist logic treats his death as less significant & uses it to discredit all suffering
npr headline with image of Hamza
August 21, 2025 at 12:21 AM
reallandsend.bsky.social
Maryam Dawas is cited as “not typical” because of a suspected undiagnosed illness. Free Press frames this as a reason to discredit malnutrition claims. The implication: children who are sick for any reason cannot be victims of systemic starvation. Absolutely eugenic nazi logic
headline from the guardian featuring photo of Maryam
August 21, 2025 at 12:21 AM
reallandsend.bsky.social
Youssef Matar, a toddler with cerebral palsy, is used to argue starvation is overblown. The article ignores that preexisting conditions do not negate the harm caused by a genocidal blockade—if anything, they intensify it. These are not deaths pulled from the future.
guardian reporting with image of Youssef
August 21, 2025 at 12:21 AM
reallandsend.bsky.social
Language is weaponized: phrases like “already facing grave situations” or “irrespective of third-party action” subtly blame the children’s bodies for their own suffering, rather than Israel’s blockade and military policies.
another quote from this terrible lazy hasbara: The children in all of the images reviewed by The Free Press were either sick or facing death at the time their images circulated online, according to local reports in Arabic. Their situations were dire. But in every instance, they were already facing grave situations because of their health, irrespective of any third-party action.
August 21, 2025 at 12:21 AM
reallandsend.bsky.social
The subtext is eugenic thinking: some bodies are “naturally weak” or “defective,” their suffering is somehow inevitable or less morally relevant. An obvious point but must be said: this is not neutral journalism—it is ideologically aligned with genocidal settler colonial regime.
quote from this despicable piece of drivel reading: symbol for a story about widespread hunger in Gaza, (blue highlight begins) wasn’t simply suffering from malnutrition. He had preexisting health issues “affecting his brain and his muscle development,” (blue highlight ends) according to an updated version of the story. But that detail didn’t find its way into print. When the so-called paper of record updated its story with an editors note four days later, it also quietly deleted the mother’s claim that her son was “born a healthy child.” There was still no mention of the boy’s brother, who appears healthy in the background of another photo that appeared online.
August 21, 2025 at 12:21 AM
reallandsend.bsky.social
This is classic ableist logic. By emphasizing “preexisting conditions,” article tells readers to discount the deaths of children who are already vulnerable. It erases their humanity & weaponizes their bodies to deny accountability for the settler occupation's genocidal policies.
subheading of the article with blue highlight. text reads: A Free Press investigation found that the viral photos (blue highlight begins) lacked important context: The subjects have cystic fibrosis, rickets, or other serious ailments. (blue highlight ends)
August 21, 2025 at 12:21 AM
reallandsend.bsky.social
The framing is immediately suspect. The piece argues that these children’s suffering is less consequential because they had preexisting conditions. Translation: only healthy children’s suffering is politically legible. Disabled or medically vulnerable children? Less important.
screenshot of article title with part of it highlighted in blue. headline reads: They Became Symbols for Gazan Starvation. But all 12 (blue highlight begins) Suffer from Other Health Problems (blue highlight ends)
August 21, 2025 at 12:21 AM
reallandsend.bsky.social
This month’s @inthesetimes.com features Health Communism in @leftiecowboy.bsky.social’s Big Ideas column—we appreciate the care taken in engaging our work & translating it into such a great distillation (no easy feat lol)—health communism is the antidote to MAHA & is needed now more than ever 🖤
An illustration by Kazimir Lee Iskander in warm tones of orange, purple, and pink depicts two masked healthcare workers in heroic, statue-like poses against a glowing sunset sky. One worker, wearing a hijab and scrubs, strides forward while holding up a sickle. The other worker, in a white coat with a stethoscope, stands beside them, holding up a hammer. The style echoes Soviet monument art and appropriates Vera Mukhina's masterpiece public sculpture called the Worker and Kolkoz Woman Monument, reimagined with contemporary healthcare workers as revolutionary figures.
August 18, 2025 at 8:17 PM
reallandsend.bsky.social
Let’s be real: Medicare for All isn’t some wild left fantasy. It’s the bare minimum we need to survive the US. So why are we still acting like it’s too much to ask? Or expect? Stop letting Dems shrink the horizon. M4A is the floor.

What would you want M4A to make possible—beyond just surviving?
Now is the time to revive the call for Medicare for All—not as a nostalgic slogan, but as a reasonable demand grounded in urgency, clarity, and collective power. The pandemic tore off whatever was left of the myth that our health system works. Millions have been abandoned. Labor conditions for the healthcare workforce have deteriorated. Disabled people, elders, young people, migrant and low wage workers, teachers were sacrificed for the economy. All the while the for-profit insurance companies raked in record profits, while the healthcare system—caught in the chokehold of private equity—continues to consolidate and cannibalize itself in the name of efficiency. Medicare for All offers us not a final solution but a foundation. One that if done with precision and resolve could immediately end the tyranny of employer-based insurance, eliminate medical debt, and deliver universal coverage while creating new possibilities for organizing beyond the limits of the current system. It is often talked about like it is just too much to ask. But Medicare for All is the most winnable, most transformative, most basic policy demand on the table.
August 3, 2025 at 12:45 PM
reallandsend.bsky.social
The idea that poor or disabled people “use too much healthcare” shows up everywhere—from 1990s World Bank reports to current day Medicaid & private insurance debates—as an excuse to ration care, privatize services, and criminalize need. We break this down in the BORDER chapter of Health Communism.
Page 111 of Health Communism, BORDER chapter. Since it’s a lot of text (and I co-wrote this), here’s a summary: International financial institutions like the World Bank and US National Institutes of Health have pushed a global agenda to reshape health systems by promoting market-oriented “reforms.” These reforms prioritize privatization of healthcare, reduce public responsibility for population health, and shift the burden onto individuals to manage their own health through behavioral changes. The 1993 World Bank report “Investing in Health” explicitly framed health as a private responsibility and healthcare as a private commodity, criticizing public health systems as inefficient and costly—especially in “developing” countries to help fuel expansion of the US insurance model outside of the US. This agenda served to expand capitalist control over global health under the guise of economic necessity, reinforcing neoliberal austerity and market logic at the expense of collective welfare. Page 112 of Health Communism, BORDER chapter. Since it’s a lot of text (and I co-wrote this), here’s a summary: The 1993 World Bank report Investing in Health advocates for governments to shrink their role in healthcare by promoting private finance & delivery of services, reserving public health provision only for unprofitable populations (e.g., poverty or disability, measured through tools like DALYs). This creates a two-tiered system where the state funds only “last resort” care, while private health industries dominate the rest. Contrary to claims that privatization reduces public spending, evidence shows state health expenditures often stay the same or increase, as governments end up subsidizing private healthcare markets. This business model offloads healthcare costs onto the state for only the most marginalized while privatizing profitable services, forcing public subsidies to prop up private healthcare markets under guise of price control via efficiency & competition. Page 113 of Health Communism, BORDER chapter. Since it’s a lot of text (and I co-wrote this), here’s a summary: Countries shifting from mostly public to mixed public-private health systems often see worsened care for poor, disabled, elderly, and marginalized groups. Private insurers prioritize “low risk” clients to maximize profits, pushing high-cost, “high risk” patients onto public safety nets—programs they often help administer with state funding. This dynamic exposes the eugenic and debt-driven logic underpinning privatization, where healthcare is treated as a scarce commodity tied to capital, not a public good. This scarcity logic frames healthcare as a limited commodity, justifying privatization by falsely claiming that public provision is inherently unaffordable and must be rationed like a market resource. It also dictates that private insurance should only be for the healthy, and that private plans should get to pick and choose their preferred risk pools. Page 114 of Health Communism, BORDER chapter. Since it’s a lot of text (and I co-wrote this), here’s a summary: The World Bank’s Investing in Health report stigmatizes “overutilizers” of healthcare by framing excessive consumption as a moral hazard akin to insurance fraud—the report laments that, while fraud like arson or theft is criminalized, using too much healthcare is merely labeled problematic and should also be treated as a crime of fraud and theft. This marks a shift from overt colonial control to a neoliberal, “humanitarian-extractive” logic that cloaks capitalist exploitation in rights language. The report normalizes informal payments and unequal access, essentially prescribing a system where public healthcare is eroded under the guise of development, deepening inequality and commodifying care. The overutilization argument recurs across health insurance debates as a tool to police and blame patients, by framing care-seeking as irresponsible or abusive consumption.
August 2, 2025 at 3:23 PM
reallandsend.bsky.social
this reply guy thinks he’s had an original smart thought & doesn’t realize he’s just regurgitating the World Bank’s 1993 report Investing in Health: “health as a private responsibility & health care as a private good”—they fear universal care because they know deep down it threatens capitalism🧵
confidently ignorant reply to a good tweet. The good tweet from @mcsquared34 says: "Pre-existing medical condition?" I'm sorry, i don't speak capitalist. You mean like a medical record?” The smart-ass reply reads: “Insurance is supposed to cover unlikely unexpected large medical expenses. If when you apply for insurance you already have a medical condition that guarantees medical expenses that is no longer insurance, it's a handout.”
August 2, 2025 at 3:23 PM
reallandsend.bsky.social
New post on Blind Archive: “To Starve a People: Gaza & the Settler Biopolitics of Health”

TLDR is let your grief & horror become action. Give all the material support you can directly to Gazans.

The genocide depends on despair. Let it find you ungovernable. Loud. Unrelenting.
To Starve a People: Gaza and the setter Biopolitics of Heath Gaza is starving by design. This is your invitation to do more than witness- this is your call to act. Over an image of graffiti that reads: Israel is killing children every day and using your taxes to do it. BLINDARCHIVE.SUBSTACK.COM BLIND ARCHINE Dashboard If you feel rage and despair, good. That means you are human. That you know the difference between right and wrong. That means your conscience is intact. That means you yearn for Palestinian life to thrive. Let that rage move you. Let that grief become action. Because Palestinians don't need our thoughts and prayers. They need us to break the siege. To support the infrastructures of survival that they have built. To move money from the imperial core towards life-making in Gaza. To raise hell. To organize. To act. Your grief is valid. But grief alone won't save a life. Solidarity might. # BLIND ARCHIVE Dashboard Hold that fire close. Let it burn away the numbness, the helplessness, the lie that there is nothing more you can do. There is so much you can do. Every dollar sent, every fundraiser link shared, every protest joined, every conversation interrupted to make sure that someone has said "Palestine", every war , every war machine sabotaged, every system disrupted — these are just a small handful of the cracks in the walls of empire. # BIND ARCHIVE Dashboard = These are lifelines to the living. Refuse the story that tells you your power is limited to bearing witness. You are not a spectator to this. You are a participant. Your choices matter. Your solidarity matters. The genocide depends on silence, despair, and resignation. So let it find you ungovernable. Let it find you loud. Unrelenting. Impossible to ignore. Gaza is not gone. The people are still there. And they are still fighting. Meet them in that fight.
July 29, 2025 at 10:56 PM
reallandsend.bsky.social
Health Communism is finally out in paperback on 7/29! If you’re planning to order a copy online, please get it from the @workshops4gaza.bsky.social bookstore & add an additional donation to Sameer Project if you can! 👇
Front cover of new paperback edition of Health Communism by Beatrice Adler-Bolton and Artie Vierkant published by Verso books. Back cover of new paperback edition of Health Communism by Beatrice Adler-Bolton and Artie Vierkant, published by Verso. Text reads: A fiery tour de force by the hosts of the hit podcast Death Panel, a chronicle of life and death under capitalism and an argument for a new politics of solidarity aimed at severing the ties between capital and health "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." LUX MAGAZINE "Health Communism is itself a blueprint... for turning illness into a weapon." BAFFLER "A new way to find the universal in the particular, which is the kind of thinking tool we are in desperate need of at the moment." NEW YORK MAGAZINE "Surveying a century of sickness under an increasingly privatized system ... Adler-Bolton and Vierkant argue that we have to demand much more than Medicare for All in order to fix health care." NEW REPUBLIC Front cover of new paperback edition of Health Communism by Beatrice Adler-Bolton and Artie Vierkant published by Verso books. Photograph by Sam Kelly (who makes the fantastic podcast Red Medicine)! A post by my friend Joshua which offers an excellent and concise description of Health Communism. Bluesky post from living well @thebestrevenge.info: For anyone who didn't pick up a copy when it first published in hardcover, the publication of a paperback edition is a great opportunity to correct that. The book very methodically lays out a language to understand a particular case study and then hope for a better future for care. Quote reposting a post from me 3 days ago, reading: The paperback of Health Communism is out July 29. It's for anyone who's tired of being told suffering is a personal failure. A weapon against abandonment & a blueprint for solidarity. Grateful to @versobooks.bsky.social for bringing it to paperback 🖤
July 23, 2025 at 11:56 AM
reallandsend.bsky.social
Why is it so hard to imagine a world where care is free, universal & unconditional? Because the current system teaches us that care must be earned, health is a private matter, and dependence is failure. Health Communism traces the roots of that lie and how people have fought it.
Front cover of new paperback edition of Health Communism by Beatrice Adler-Bolton and Artie Vierkant published by Verso books. Back cover of new paperback edition of Health Communism by Beatrice Adler-Bolton and Artie Vierkant, published by Verso. Text reads: A fiery tour de force by the hosts of the hit podcast Death Panel, a chronicle of life and death under capitalism and an argument for a new politics of solidarity aimed at severing the ties between capital and health "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." LUX MAGAZINE "Health Communism is itself a blueprint... for turning illness into a weapon." BAFFLER "A new way to find the universal in the particular, which is the kind of thinking tool we are in desperate need of at the moment." NEW YORK MAGAZINE "Surveying a century of sickness under an increasingly privatized system ... Adler-Bolton and Vierkant argue that we have to demand much more than Medicare for All in order to fix health care." NEW REPUBLIC First page of new paperback edition of Health Communism by Beatrice Adler-Bolton and Artie Vierkant. Praise for Health Communism “Health Communism is a remarkable book that connects the best abolitionist analysis with the strongest social reproduction diagnosis. The authors are at once ahead of their time and right on time. The profound practicality of their vision shows that where life is precious, life is precious." Ruth Wilson Gilmore, author of Abolition Geography “In Health Communism, [Adler-Bolton and Vierkant] show how members of the 'unproductive surplus class are cast as burdens even as health capitalism sets up entire cottage industries (e.g, for-profit nursing homes, prisons) to extract value from this very population." Charlie Markbreiter, Bookforum "This book changed the way I think about health, power, state capacity, extraction, social welfare, and resistance. It is an immensely useful tool for wrestling with the most urgent questions facing our movements in these terrifying times. Readable and flled with concise histories and clear examples to illustrate nuanced analysis, it will no doubt become required reading among those struggling against the death cult that is racial capitalism.” Dean Spade, author of Mutual Aid "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
July 19, 2025 at 7:19 PM
reallandsend.bsky.social
open.substack.com/pub/blindarc...
They want us to think care is something we have to qualify for. That it belongs to the insured. The compliant. The deserving. But we win everyday when we reject all of that. When we remember care is a promise. Older than any institution. More powerful than any system. We win when we remember care is a practice, passed hand to hand. When we claim it as ours together, without apology.
July 4, 2025 at 7:06 PM
reallandsend.bsky.social
MAHA is a cynical political performance, a grift that exploits systemic failure by further stripping protections, making workers pay with their lives for capital’s endless accumulation. This is social murder—“murder against which none can defend…which does not seem what it is”
“When one individual inflicts bodily injury upon another such that death results, we call the deed manslaughter; when the assailant knew in advance that the injury would be fatal, we call his deed murder. But when society places hundreds of proletarians in such a position that they inevitably meet a too early and an unnatural death, one which is quite as much a death by violence as that by the sword or bullet; when it deprives thousands of the necessaries of life, places them under conditions in which they cannot live – forces them, through the strong arm of the law, to remain in such conditions until that death ensues which is the inevitable consequence – knows that these thousands of victims must perish, and yet permits these conditions to remain, its deed is murder just as surely as the deed of the single individual; disguised, malicious murder, murder against which none can defend himself, which does not seem what it is, because no man sees the murderer, because the death of the victim seems a natural one, since the offence is more one of omission than of commission. But murder it remains.” Friedrich Engels The Conditions of the Working Class in England
May 28, 2025 at 7:00 PM
reallandsend.bsky.social
Teachers, fought for safer conditions—not because they were elites, but because they were workers. As Justin always astutely points out only time “union” shows up in this discourse is to blame teachers for wanting basic protections while capitalists demanded mass infection
Screenshot of tweet from Justin Feldman (@jfeldman_epi) which reads: “I can confirm that "laptop class" appears 6 times in the book, while "OSHA" appears zero times, and "unions" only appears when criticizing teachers for wanting higher levels of protection for their in-person work.”
March 13, 2025 at 4:10 PM
reallandsend.bsky.social
This classic shallow argument runs cover for real ways that the response to the Covid pandemic has been all out class warfare, and is the perfect example of lazy, superficial “class analysis” that ignores the basic material conditions which actually define class under capitalism.
Screenshot of tweet by Tyler Austin Harper (@Tyler_A_Harper) Tweet reads: “Must read. Among other things, a frank discussion of how the Laptop Class championed policies—lockdowns and school closures-that primarily impacted the Have Nots, while the Haves enjoyed remote work, online shopping, booming stock portfolios, and groceries delivered by the poor.” Below text is an image of a book titled: “IN COVID'S WAKE: HOW OUR POLITICS FAILED US” by STEPHEN MACEDO & FRANCES LEE
March 13, 2025 at 4:10 PM
reallandsend.bsky.social
Enemy Feminisms lays out how bourgeois feminism has been an active force for domination—fueling imperialism, policing, eugenics, white supremacy, and class rule. From 19th-century imperial feminists to today’s TERFs, “pro-life feminists,” and carceral “progressives.”
Red book on blue background. Book title is centered and the only graphic on the cover, it is presented in gray sans serif text and reads Enemy Feminisms: TERFs, Policewomen & Girlbosses Against Liberation — Sophie Lewis, author of Abolish the Family
February 20, 2025 at 1:41 PM