This is the last part of my notes from Socialism Conference, based on my reading of a chapter in a volume that Nate contributed to (Nate! What's the citation? I will add it!) Apologies for the slow pace lately, just got a lot of plates in the air!
The polemic of "social murder" is important -- we are supposed to understand the fact of this ongoing death baked in to the function of capitalism as natural, certainly as apolitical. Theorizing social murder as a tendency inherent to capitalist economic and social relations -- as I've said many times before, this is a good theoretical foundation for public health, which really lacks one. (Public health explainer edition of this newsletter coming soon.)
This theory of social murder has two facets, per Nate: 1) "All versions of capitalism will tend to generate depoliticized killing of working class people" and 2) a theory of the capitalist state. This helps understand how capitalism generates both harm and social conflict (which may, as has been the case during COVID, take the form of a moral economy struggle). Thinking about moral economies around COVID and social murder; there was a lot of outrage over the conduct of Tyson plant managers during the early weeks of the pandemic. This outrage was channeled into some legal cases, not into general social unrest; for many and certainly for Tyson it's good enough to go back to the "normal" state of affairs for the company, which is absolutely brutal -- Tyson has been cited multiple times since 2020 for on-site employee deaths, hazardous chemical discharges, and more.
Directly from Nate, a typology of harms related to social murder (and social reproduction) occurring in the circuit from M to M' (if you don't know what this is, keep reading): 1) harms related to consumption of labor power; 2) harms due to needing money to access means of subsistence; 3) harms related to the means of subsistence being produced in a capitalist manner; 4) presence of byproducts of production in the living environment. I am trying to "think with" some concrete examples of these. On the industrial revolution tip, (1) is a fascinating way to think about the Chadwick-Farr controversy, which I highly recommend you check out if you've never heard of it.
It is important to distinguish between stuff that is general to capitalism in the abstract and stuff that is specific to actually-existing capitalism in particular times and places. "Engels and Marx emphasized that the particular way in which a capitalist society kills is historically specific, mediated by the concrete manner in which capitalist social relations are institutionalized in a given time and place." Market dependence, the valorization imperative, organization of social reproduction on the basis of market relations (or the penetration of market relations further and further into the processes of social reproduction), competitive pressures among capitalists/productive units are the mechanisms of capitalism's tendency to produce social murder in the abstract. "Workers are generally left to subsist at whatever level currently facilitates their employers' profits." You can spin out a lot of scenarios about how, for example, a given COVID policy will play out based on this simple truism about capitalism in general. It's also important, as Nate points out, to understand that the instability of specific institutionalized forms of class domination is not the same thing as the instability of class domination as such.
Marx charted the transformation in the organization and distribution of social murder with the transition from the accumulation of absolute to relative surplus value. What forms of social murder are specific to now, and what forms of redistribution of suffering and institutional adjustments in response to COVID and the social conflicts generated by COVID are underway now? Did COVID change or rearrange them? The second facet of the theory, the theory of the state, is important here. Capitalists compete, they do not share a common interest; the role of capital-in-general is assumed by the state. To secure conditions favorable to accumulation, the state might discipline individual capitalists (e.g. fining Tyson some nominal amount). What are the rippling effects of this mediation? There is also a connection to moral economies here -- new ways of organizing capitalist social relations, or changing configurations of those relations, or ways of managing conflicts that break out generate shifts in social murder without addressing the architecture that produces it.
The state itself is disciplined by capitalist social relations. Social crises create political consequences, which the state manages in ways that are consistent with the organization of capitalist social relations. The state as "the political form of capitalist social relations" -- it will tend to resolve contradictions and conflicts in ways that are consistent with the exigencies of capitalism (for example, abruptly shortening isolation/quarantine guidance in the middle of the omicron wave). This is important for how we evaluate the partisanship discourse around COVID deaths. Why was COVID a crisis and not, say, infant mortality, which is consistently much higher in the US than in peer countries? This isn't a flippant question; it is rhetorical, but not flippant. I think it's important and generative to ask ourselves things like this.
Thinking about state intervention to mitigate specific forms of social murder (perhaps in response to a moral economy struggle of some kind) -- such as limiting the length of the working day, which in Marx's analysis occasioned the shift from accumulation of absolute to relative surplus value. This is an example of how state intervention reorganized institutional forms of class domination and thereby social murder. What are some examples from the pandemic? (Not rhetorical... I am curious.)
"The reason why all capitalist societies would commit social murder... was that social murder was systematically generated by capitalist social relations." Nate draws out the uselessness of moral suasion here. There is no moral limit or moral threshold above which action has to be taken -- the caloric-deprivation theory of social change (what brilliant Bluesky mutual Alex Heffron described as "outsourcing the politics of the crisis to the crisis itself"). Social murder results from systemic pressures, not from bad attitudes, which exposes some of the nefariousness of the partisanship explanations for the toll of the pandemic.
Social murder as a process with distinct polarity. Marx: "Accumulation of wealth at one pole is at the same time accumulation of misery, agony of toil, slavery, ignorance, brutality, mental degradation, at the opposite pole." WHO GOT RICH DURING THE PANDEMIC? WHO PROFITED AND HOW MUCH? More than this, how did the state rearrange things institutionally and manage popular unrest and popular demands to facilitate this accumulation?
Social murder brings motion, process, to what is (in public health, for example) a very static analysis and theory of change (however underground or unarticulated that theory of change is, even the dullest epidemiologist has one). The general formula for the circuit of capital, the valorization of value, is M-C-M'; you need labor, and therefore human bodies that can become injured or sick or wear out or die, to get from M to M'. There is a contradiction here, the absolute necessity of human labor to create value and capitalism's tendency towards "wasting of human material" (I believe this is from Marx himself, via Nate). Capital itself as a process and not a thing! And we can, I think, conceptualize social murder as an emergent property of capitalist social relations.