ABSTRACT This article considers the relationship between cancer and capitalism from the perspective of political economy. It argues that this perspective is crucial for producing a critical agenda in the sociological study of cancer, which has otherwise and traditionally neglected the question of capital as social totality. To underline the significance of capital's relationship to cancer as well as sociology's neglect thereof, the article focuses on the world historical juncture of the 1970s, which both transformed the US regime of accumulation and intensified a class struggle over cancer knowledge. It examines the structural basis for the subsumption of cancer as a link in the chain of capital accumulation, as well as the institutional basis for medical sociology's absence from the “cancer wars”. The article concludes that the history of medical sociology reveals important elements which have been systemically excluded, and which must be recuperated as part of a critical agenda that addresses socio‐ecological carcinogenesis as well as cancer's subsumption by capital. Foremost are an intellectual commitment to Marxism and a political commitment to anti‐capitalism.
Faisal Al‐Asaad (Thu,) studied this question.