Cancer and Capitalism: Rise of the Cancer-industrial Complex and the Horizons of Care

A bold rethinking of cancer as a biological phenomenon, an indictment of science that serves capitalism, and a radical vision of liberated health and well-being.

More than fifty years after the declaration of the War on Cancer, we are nowhere closer to victory. The problem lies in the way cancer is understood and the “cancer-industrial complex” that has been established to address it. The cancer-industrial complex arises from the symbiosis of private corporations, nonprofit organizations such as universities and foundations, and public governmental regulatory bodies in the post-genomic era. This network profits off a vulnerable population who exist in a market that is structurally rigged against them given their physical and socioeconomic conditions. Under the auspices of scientific research and technological progress, much of which is well-meaning, a critical extortion takes place.

Metastasis brings the cancer-industrial complex to the fore of our understanding of what cancer is, the chronic nature of the disease, its unmistakable parallels to capitalism, its inextricable link to the neoliberal model of economic development, and its disproportionate burden on nonwhite and poor populations—and what it will really take to rid ourselves of the gravest dangers to our individual and collective well-being.

Trained as a cancer scientist, Nafis Hasan offers a critical and clinical reading of current narratives of cancer research and the conditions that put the onus on the individual rather than our collective efforts to prevent cancer incidence and deaths. He offers a visionary alternative theory about carcinogenesis—one countering the dominant neoliberal idea of mutations causing cancer—and centers a dialectical approach to understanding the biology and sociology of cancer. Hasan states, “If we must fight the longest war, then it should be the war against capitalism, whose growth has metastasized in every aspect of our society and ourselves.”

Nafis Hasan received his PhD in Cell, Molecular and Developmental Biology from Tufts University in 2019.  He is currently an Associate Faculty at the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research and a labor organizer based in Philadelphia. His writings have appeared in Jacobin, Science for the People, The Trouble, and more. He serves as an editor for the radical science magazine Science for the People and South Asian left media platform Jamhoor, and organizes with the Democratic Socialists of America.