Why a Different World is Possible: Review of The Dawn of Everything

Abstract

ing than those typically on offer in capitalism, which included politicizing the distinctions between patient and doctor and exploring nonhierarchical ways to address people’s real needs. The discussion of SPK is interesting in its own right and provides readers an extended example of what Adler-Bolton and Vierkant mean by health communism. The group also shows how socially unacceptable health communism is to capitalist society—German authorities quickly vilified and moved to shut down the organization. At some moments reading the book I had a sense of a pit yawning beneath my own and my loved one’s feet, in that the book shows that anyone categorized as vulnerable is likely to be written off, anyone who endures significantly impairing harm gets categorized as vulnerable, anyone can suffer such harm, and for many people the eventuality that they will do so is fairly curtain. As such, the certainty some of us assume about our current status is illusory, and perhaps dangerously so. 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.