What follows is a lightly edited (for clarity, readability, etc.) version of notes I prepared in advance of the session that Nate and I both participated in at this year’s Socialism Conference called How Capitalism Kills: Social Murder and COVID-19. This was the second in a five-session track on health, disability, and capital organized by the Death Panel podcast, of which I am a cohost and which you should subscribe to.

I have broken the original notes document up into three shorter posts for ease of reading. Posts two and three will be linked here as soon as I post them!

Propositions on social murder broadly – what is it and how do we understand it?

• Engels's definition, from The Condition of the Working Class in England (1845):

"When one individual inflicts bodily injury upon another such that death results, we call the deed manslaughter; when the assailant knew in advance that the injury would be fatal, we call his deed murder. But when society places hundreds of proletarians in such a position that they inevitably meet a too early and an unnatural death, one which is quite as much a death by violence as that by the sword or bullet; when it deprives thousands of the necessaries of life, places them under conditions in which they cannot live – forces them, through the strong arm of the law, to remain in such conditions until that death ensues which is the inevitable consequence – knows that these thousands of victims must perish, and yet permits these conditions to remain, its deed is murder just as surely as the deed of the single individual; disguised, malicious murder, murder against which none can defend himself, which does not seem what it is, because no man sees the murderer, because the death of the victim seems a natural one, since the offence is more one of omission than of commission. But murder it remains."

• Broader definition that we are actively theorizing: social murder explains why and how capitalism shapes population health. Consequently, I think social murder can (and should) assume a role as at least one theoretical/conceptual foundation for public health education and practice. Public health currently lacks such a foundation and lots of behavioral-individualist assumptions seep in to fill the void. But we can do better.

• The idea of social murder is obviously not new, but graduate school is ignorance-producing in general and public health is (in general, more often than not) an adjunct of state power. Knowing about previous work in social medicine is not useful to the hegemonic project of public health, and I would argue even less useful post-2020 (my own experience is one of active hostility to older strains of thought about social causation of disease and death).

• The mechanisms of social murder are very occult – before 2020, you’d need to go to grad school in public health or something similar to get anything approaching a total survey of all the diverse ways capitalism is killing people. Most people simply do not understand or think about “the market” as a force of domination. Engels even says that social murder appears to have no agent, directive force, or entelechy – I would actually agree beyond Engels’s original point, I think social murder is not a totally directed process (I think it is something more like an emergent property of capitalist social and productive relations). (Stay tuned on this point… )

• Human labor is absolutely necessary to the functioning of the capitalist economy and state (central to the core logic of capitalism, the valorization of value)... this means that the logic of capitalism is braided more and more deeply into our actual lives, not just socially but biologically.

• Through COVID, the expert class pundits have been working overtime to normalize, naturalize, and excuse social murder as it has become apparent through the experience of the pandemic, suddenly having to rationalize and justify mass death so urgently. The comparisons they favored were usually just to other outcomes of social murder that are more widely accepted as natural: influenza deaths, traffic accidents, overdose mortality. Which – it is not hard to explain these causes of sickness and death in terms of social murder. Did you know there is a steep occupational gradient in overdose mortality, with overdose death rates among construction and extraction workers around four times higher than for the paid civilian workforce overall?

• Thinking about COVID policies themselves as expressions of social murder, I think it’s illustrative to consider the biological and discursive function of age. Age is a biological fact, and increasing age is a risk factor for more severe outcomes of covid infection, but age/age structure alone do not explain the concentration of COVID mortality in nursing homes, for example. Despite making up a miniscule proportion of the total US population, nursing home residents accounted for nearly 1/3 of all coronavirus deaths in the summer of 2021. Nursing home residents are older and likely to be more medically vulnerable to severe outcomes from COVID – this is a natural fact, on top of which was layered the very unnatural results of federal pandemic policy as it played out through the complex matrix of payer schemes that shape incentives for nursing homes. The creation of so-called “hubs” for COVID-positive patients (much more on this at a later date) incentivized the transfer of many COVID-positive patients into nursing homes, most if not all of which are seriously deficient in basic care and infection prevention.

• Additionally (also stay tuned for much more to say about the formation of ideology around the pandemic), it is telling that both parties converged on basically the same set of COVID policies. The engine of social murder is the economy itself and the general ideology of the ruling classes around the economy (that markets are efficient, fair, and voluntary, for example) is one driver of this convergence, not necessarily any ideological position particular to COVID itself.

• To close, again, my take on social murder as stated above is that we are theorizing population health in an important way; social murder works as a foundational theory of public health in a really interesting and generative way. Consider the different implications of thinking about, say, patterns of stroke mortality in the dominant lazy lifestylist/health behavior paradigm (people choose unhealthy foods, behaviors, etc. that increase the risk of stroke, therefore, these people should be educated about the existence of healthier choices) vs. the social murder paradigm (racial and class stratification systematically restricts access to healthy food, healthful environments, preventive care, etc. in predictable patterns, therefore, we need to fundamentally restructure the political economy to make distribution of these health-promoting resources more equitable).