[“In 1951, Talcott Parsons published The Social System, a text which can best be described as a para-philosophical work attempting to ascribe logic, reason, and moral justification to existing patriarchal and white supremacist social norms within the US. The Social System was unfortunately an immensely influential text, enduringly cited for decades in social science research. One of Parsons’ most famous contributions in The Social System comes in his definition of “the sick role,” an analysis of the burdensome nature of the ill. Parsons classified illness—any state of illness, from permanent disability to a light cold—as, socially, sanctioning “deviant” behavior. The ill or disabled, according to Parsons, practiced “deviancy” in that illness allowed for the reprieve of social responsibilities including labor, work, duties owed to the traditional family structure, and other normative behaviors.
It was for this reason, Parsons concluded, that “society” had established the “physician role” to manage the sick. While the modestly ill could be attended to by family—but must be goaded into returning to wellness as quickly as possible, to minimize their period of deviant behavior—the gravely ill, the disabled, and indeed the “incurable” would be managed by those in the “physician role.” Only in doing so could the sick be kept siloed from society, their burdens managed, encouraged toward rehabilitation from their deviancy, pressured to return to their status as productive members of society as quickly as possible: to be, therefore, worthy of life.
The sick role was, for Parsons, “a mechanism which in the first instance channels deviance so that the two most dangerous potentialities, namely, group formation and successful establishment of the claim to legitimacy,” by which Parsons means confirmation of diagnoses, confirmation of illness, “are avoided.” According to him, “The sick are tied up, not with other deviants to form a ‘sub-culture’ of the sick, but each with a group of non-sick, his personal circle and, above all, physicians. The sick thus become a statistical class and are deprived of the possibility of forming a solidary collectivity.”
Parsons was, in his way, correct. Much as we do with the century-long litany of revanchists who have decried “socialized medicine” as the onroads to communism, we embrace Parsons’ paranoiac insistence that deviants, the surplus, and the sick form the central class that can bring about the fall of capital. As we have seen throughout Health Communism, Parsons’ observation that the sick are retained as “a statistical class” and are therefore “deprived of the possibility of forming a solidary collectivity” is an accurate description of why and how capital manages its relationships to its surplus classes and wields with impunity the divisions between them.
We do not believe in the simplicity of dialectics. But it is easy to understand projects like SPK’s, and ours, as in part a reaction to the outright declaration and confirmation of norms on display in works like that of Parsons, as well as a manifestation of his worst nightmare. SPK’s assertion that we are all ill—the psychiatrist, who is wage dependent, is a sick person like each of us—is echoed not only in SPK’s constitution of a radical anti-capitalist collective of the surplus, but in the very idea of universal illness being constituent to Parsons’ worries over “the sick role.” According to Parsons, “To be sick is by definition an undesirable state, so that it simply does not ‘make sense’ to assert a claim that the way to deal with the frustrating aspects of the social system is ‘for everybody to get sick.’”
It is not necessarily the case that we are all sick. But none of us is well. The truth of the distinction that capitalist states draw in their demarcations of worker/surplus is that in the eyes of capital, we are all surplus.That we must center the surplus in our political projects and demands is therefore not simply to say, “celebrate the surplus.” It is to show that the capacities of immiseration, the processes of extractive abandonment, that play out insistently and invariably on the surplus populations is not merely the fuel for capital, but is the fate of us all. We are each of us ripped and maimed, strangled and buried by capital, in one way or another. That entire industries exist in plain sight to see us along this vast process of endlessly iterative life chances, to then subject us to extraction when we are surplus and no longer of use, and to eke out slivers of profit from our eventual deaths, is capital’s greatest sleight of hand. We are all surplus.”]
health communism, by beatrice adler-bolton and artie vierkant, 2022
pixelskylines
kaledo-art
discoholicmusic
annaxmalina
vaporwave
