Anthropologist and professor at UIC

Concerned with a political response to the way bio medicine is structured and the appropriation of health by capital. He approached this topic through distilling down the basic concepts of Karl Max’s labor theory of value - surplus labor. And approached big pharma applying the same idea and arriving at surplus health. You can still today read Marx and conclude that capitalism is not evil. But it is when capital starts consolidating that the system becomes broken as it leads to Corporatization, monopolization and financialization. The basic structure of big pharma.

The exploitative nature of capitalism looks like the bodily demand on the laborer to give more than capitalism gives back. Capitalism is not sustainable because it relies on the exploitation of bodily potential, and to another important extent environmental potential.

So then the idea of “Surplus health” - looks like those who have potential to require drugs in the future - this value of health is completely alienated from ideas of healthiness, and is about growing markets. Big pharma does not exist to create drugs that actually work and cause your patient or consumer to stop taking them. The whole system is predisposed to enable “surplus health”. For example there are no clinical trials to tell us when it’s ok to STOP taking drugs. All clinical trials are testing when it’s ok to START taking drugs, this is capital’s appropriation of health.

He speaks about the US society being therapeutically saturated, forcing drug testing to go offshore, notably to countries in the global south. These tests are conducted on what he referred to as “Marked bodies” namely coloured, post colonial, and or female bodies.

“We have a system where everyone is screwed” including the pharmaceutical industry as capital values growth, but there are varying levels of inequities amongst those involved at every level, including the state. If you look at Public health in the sense of a welfare state model exemplified in “democratic socialist countries” the courts play a more active role in regulating access. However even this model of stare regulation and access is insufficient as global capital overrides any state sanctioned ruling and benchmarking because of “free trade”. And then you have the gendered and radicalized inequities of the tested bodies.

And so how do we imagine a collective action that can engage with this system?