Public Health and Inequities Under Capitalism: Systemic Effects and Human Rights

The chapter aims to reflect on the global systemic effects of capitalism on health and health inequities posing two questions: Is it possible to understand capitalism’s systemic effects as a whole? Can we know the multiplicity of all these interrelated impacts on eco-humanity and on health? The text claims that capitalism, as an economic and power system, impregnates the social organization of all human domains, thus permeating humanity and the many facets of the health-disease production process. Then, it presents the example of the agrofood, showing how the capitalist agro-industry has set an extractive, predatory, commodity-driven and inequity-generating system of food production and distribution that gives autocratic power to agrofood oligopolies competing to lead a global capitalist market and ultimately produces both health-damaging hunger and obesity. It uses this example to further reflect on the extension of commodification of human life under neoliberal capitalism and the complex set of processes and mechanisms by which it directly or indirectly affects our minds and bodies. In this sense, the chapter highlights the great importance that social and environmental media play in the production of health, to the extent that even behavior and the micro psychobiological effects on specific organs, cells and neurons should be understood under the light of history, power relations, economic systems, culture and ideology. Finally, the chapter translates such reflections into a criticism of how current global political institutions frame the human right to health. It claims that in order to resist the systemic pressures of capitalism, to democratise states and international institutions and to control and regulate the large oligopolies, it is essential to rethink the hegemonic discourse of the right to health so that it becomes a first-class human right intrinsically coupled to the other social, political and economic rights.