Inflamed: Inspiring but insufficient
The popular book Inflamed (2021), by Rupa Marya and Raj Patel, is both enlightening and enraging. While they expose the environment as a culprit for most diseases, their solution is backwards—as in go back to a pre-capitalist society. Marya and Patel suffer from anti-communism.
Inflamed has several themes. One is that inflammation is behind most disease processes in all parts of our bodies, an idea more accepted by conventional medicine. The authors carry the idea farther, showing how the environment, both physical and social, is deeply entwined with inflammation. The second main theme is that modern medicine has detached bodily systems from each other and the body from the world it inhabits just as modern humans have fallen out of harmony with themselves and the world around them. They argue many indigenous cultures are better synchronized with their environment.
However, a solution is sorely lacking. They describe our environment as colonialism and as capitalist colonialism. The supposed remedy is to emulate non-industrial cultures by “walking backward into the future” (p. 351). But the authors do not address how, not to return to pre-capitalism but to consider what comes after capitalism and how to get there.
The main problem with the book is anti-communism. If you don’t believe it is possible to construct a society run by and for the working class through organizing a Party, then your only option is to persuade capitalists to be nicer exploiters. These authors proclaim communism will always fail because of individualist human nature. Progressive Labor Party believes workers can run a society based on the common good.
The Role of Inflammation
Acute inflammation may result from an infection, injury or psychological stress and initiate healing mechanisms like fever, bacteria hunting macrophages, wound healing, and the fight or flight reflex. Stress is the body’s response to any threat, and it activates the nervous, endocrine and immune systems to produce inflammatory signaling proteins (cytokines) and hormones to respond in the short term.
Chronic stress, however, may generate a chronic reaction from which the body never heals, be it from ongoing pollution or the stress of racist and sexist inequality under capitalism. Chronic stress leads to chronic diseases: diabetes, heart disease, kidney disease, osteoarthritis, chronic obstructive lung disease, and Alzheimer’s.Even aging is accelerated by chronic stress (p. 68).
The authors detail the ways our systems are affected by inflammation. Stress activates an axis from the brain that releases hormones like cortisol and adrenaline that in turn activate immune cells to release C-reactive protein and others. In the face of chronic stress this mechanism is disrupted, resulting in constant low-grade inflammation.
The response to new threats is lessened and the body is less able to defend against infections, such as Covid-19 (p. 92).We know that chronic diseases like diabetes and chronic obstructive lung disease result both from inflammation and toxins like air pollution and are more prevalent among the urban working-class and non-white residents.
Inflammatory racism
The Covid-19 pandemic explains how modern medicine both ignores the higher toll of disease on Black, Latin, indigenous, and Asian working-class people in particular and our class in general. Racism means that members of the super-exploited group have higher C-reactive protein, a marker of chronic inflammation. This is true of Black workers in the U.S., Muslim workers in Burma, Dalit workers in India and many more (p. 232).Compared to white workers, Black workers in the U.S. have higher rates of chronic diseases and have a shorter life expectancy—all conditions related to inflammation.
The authors give examples of how indigenous cultures have avoided high stress levels. However, when any of these societies were disrupted by colonization and the imposition of modern industrial agriculture and production for profit, disease and social disruption followed. The drive for profit hurts workers’ health.
What is to be done
So how can we change that world? Although we can learn from indigenous societies, today’s conditions are different. We can’t recreate life from the past for the mass of the world’s population in a sustainable way. Communism, a society run by the world’s workers for the world’s workers, is the future we need.
The authors support the movement to abolish the police that target and kill mainly Black and Latin members of our class. The demand is to redirect police funds to housing, schools, job creation and other community resources (p. 258). The authors write, “Abolishing the modern private corporation doesn’t mean ending coordinated enterprise but rather holding it accountable to the people it serves''(p. 334). However, the authors’ own evaluation of the hunger for profits, the cruelty of capitalist exploitation, and the violence perpetrated in world conquest illustrates the illogic of this demand. Their anti-communism leads them to reject the logical conclusions of their own research.
A system based on the repression of the few by the many needs a repressive force to quell dissent. A system based on profits, capitalism, cannot sacrifice profits to benefit workers.
We need a movement to destroy capitalism. This will require a violent, massive, international struggle that will be built on the basis of reform struggles focusing on multiracial worker-led movements and not building illusions about reforming capitalism.
This movement may also be inspired by the worsening cataclysms that capitalism will bring—climate disasters and world war. As a new worker-led society is constructed, many of the insights about medicine and the connection of the physical and social environments to our health will become clearer. But only then.
