Just a quick introductory note -- this is an essay that is no longer going to appear in the publication it was scheduled to. Everything is fine, but since it's now sort of Vogelfrei (winking emoji) I'm just posting it here for all of your enjoyment. The idea is for this to be one essay of a series of length n summarizing a Marxist theoretical intervention that isn't explicitly related to the pandemic, and trying to use it to "think with" the concept of social murder we are developing. I hope you like it.
Thanks to the catastrophic experience of the COVID pandemic, Friedrich Engels’s obscure concept of “social murder” has enjoyed a small renaissance in some corners of the academic literature and discourse since 2020. Ironically, as COVID has made the concept of social murder – which my colleague Nate Holdren describes as the “depoliticized mass killing of working people” and which Engels described as the death produced by placing working people in the position where they can neither survive the conditions of work, nor survive on the wages paid, nor survive without wages altogether – more popular, its inner mechanisms have become more and more depoliticized, mystified, and naturalized. Currently, provisional weekly death counts associated with COVID-19 – if you know where to find them – suggest lower levels of death relative to previous years. We are still, however, almost totally in the dark about transmission of the virus, and therefore of the general level of risk, following dismantling of testing infrastructure and associated reporting systems.
The highly unequal distribution of COVID mortality drew a bright, highlighter-yellow line under other health inequalities in the United States, and further suggests some kind of structural explanation rather than the individualist-lifestyle attitudes many of us hold about health. But leftists and leftist formations in the US have largely not investigated this from a structural perspective, nor made any concerted attempt to develop a coherent analysis of the biggest mass death event in living memory. A recent book by Søren Mau, Mute Compulsion: A Marxist Theory of the Economic Power of Capital while not intended to address or make sense of either social murder generally or COVID specifically, is promising in terms of developing an actionable critical analysis of public health, the pandemic, and the catastrophically failed pandemic response. Specifically, Mau’s concept of economic power can help us make sense of several episodes in the pandemic in ways that mainstream explanations, focused on the cultural and ideological correlates of individuals, simply can’t.
Economic power is distinct from other forms of power typically treated in Marxist analysis: coercion through violence or conviction through ideology. Economic power is subtler and quieter; it derives from the “abstract social logic of capitalism,” which is to say, the features that make capitalism, capitalism – features of capitalism consistent across its specific historical and geographic configurations. In a careful analysis, Mau shows why and how this abstract social logic of capitalism has come to penetrate ever-deeper into the fabric of life itself. To use Mau’s phrase, social reproduction (survival – “reproducing” oneself or others to sell labor power another day) is organized on the basis of this abstract social logic in capitalist societies. We all live this: we buy food, produced by private firms, for money at the supermarket; we pay money for shelter and for medical care. Since the means of survival can only be accessed by having money, and because most of us must sell our labor power in order to get money, we are, in Marx’s paradoxical phrase, “compelled to sell [our] labor power voluntarily.”
This economic power, the “mute compulsion” (Marx’s phrase) of capitalist economic relations, is the mechanism of social murder (in fact, Engels himself identified the wage relation as its driving force). That social murder emanates from the logic of capitalism itself is why it is an ineliminable element of capitalism and why it appears both natural and agentless – as Engels said, “no man sees the murderer,” such that “the death of the victim seems a natural one.” This understanding helps make sense of what very few predicted at the outset of the pandemic: that efforts to contain the virus would fail because of inadequate provisions for social support to allow people to stay home from work. Income support was made available only in a severely limited fashion, and only early on in the pandemic. The operation of economic power here is, again, more subtle than the other forms of power. Direct coercion of workers through intimidation or violence did take place, but was uncommon outside of specific settings, like prisons. The ideological and discursive project of normalizing and rationalizing the pandemic, as documented by my Death Panel cohosts Beatrice Adler-Bolton and Artie Vierkant, has been underway since the first virus cases were reported. Economic power, however, is different and more insidious.
With stagnating wages and a spiraling cost of living crisis, people were squeezed even before the pandemic. Temporary payments eased the pressure of economic power on some workers, promoting social distancing and reduced transmission. Ideological pressures to get people back to work as soon as possible were certainly intense from the very beginning of the pandemic. But the material pressures on people were just as great, if not greater. Though he does not address theories of the state in depth on purpose, Mau is careful to demonstrate that the abstract logic of capitalism operates on – subjects and dominates – everyone: workers, unemployed people, bosses, businesses and firms, and finally the state itself. A theory of the state – a part of capitalism – is an important element of understanding the pandemic response, but one which we will not address here except to say that these material pressures also operated on and constrained authorities and the state. Simple aggregate indicators speak to this pressure and how it flowed downstream to everyday people: food insecurity and poverty increased over the course of 2020, notwithstanding the modest economic relief built into the CARES Act.
A brief review of some high-profile episodes in the pandemic show how this concept of economic power can help illuminate underappreciated aspects of the failed pandemic response. First, the rush to reopen in the spring of 2020 was described and interpellated in the public imagination as a result of irrational and anti-scientific Republican zealotry combined with Trump’s incomprehensible evil. In actuality, this was probably more the result of pressures on the state, and the federalized nature of power in the United States. Mere months after this reopening push, Democrats under Biden adopted the exact same positions as the Republican Trump administration, albeit with a slightly different rhetorical sheen. Similarly, Biden’s “vaccine-only” strategy and his administration’s rigid adherence to it in the face of changing epidemiological reality (e.g., the emergence of the delta variant) can be read as a technological fix for the pandemic that doesn’t require costly, lower-tech public health measures that are economically disruptive like business closures or hybrid schooling.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s (CDC) abrupt decision to shorten the required number of days for quarantine or isolation following COVID exposure or infection from ten days to five in the middle of the omicron wave, the most explosive of the pandemic, is perhaps the most illuminating example. As contemporaneous remarks by Anthony Fauci and Rochelle Walensky indicated, this change was explicitly intended to get people, in particular health care workers, back to work sooner to avoid economic collapse under the sheer volume of infection. From the perspective of economic power, this likely also reflects pressures on the state to manage the protracted crisis of unmitigated COVID spread in ways consistent with continued capital accumulation and economic growth. Importantly, these decisions are interrelated in complex ways, feeding back on each other to shape and constrain the decision landscape for the state – would it have been necessary to use an administrative change to force people to work sick if, instead of relying only on slack uptake of the vaccines, nonpharmaceutical interventions had been used more extensively and effectively to reduce transmission?
Subtly reframing the analysis using the concept of economic power can also help us evaluate (and refine) various global explanations for the failure of the pandemic response. The narratives being pushed out by the Biden administration all share the clear goal of reconciling the outrages of COVID with a shared system of global meaning predominant in the US – one where nothing is fundamentally amiss with our political economic structure and social hierarchies, where illness and health are matters of individual choices, behavior, and responsibility; where the government is responsive to the needs and desires of the public and is both competent and efficient at prioritizing the public good. From a leftist perspective, these narratives obviously belie reality. It is tempting to, instead, analyze the pandemic according to a narrative similar to that presented in the 2010 book Merchants of Doubt by Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway. Oreskes and Conway showed how well-organized, well-funded, and well-connected corporate interests intervened in the very process of knowledge production to generate misleading claims and ultimately false controversy and confusion over health hazards like tobacco and later, the existential threat of climate change. This has definitely been happening during the pandemic, as many things attest: the Great Barrington Declaration, the involvement of billionaire-funded right-wing philanthropies in education politics around COVID, intense lobbying on issues of COVID policy by corporate interest groups across the board.
The concept of economic power helps illuminate the limitations of this story, which implies that better firewalls between the state and self-interested non-state actors, more and better organizing among scientists, and a less venal and pathetic media class would have led to a better pandemic response. It is probably true that all of these things would have lessened the impact of COVID, but they would not have eliminated it. Through the lens of economic power, it is immediately clear that the COVID response wasn’t per se a failure because it was “undermined” by corporate interests. It was rather rotted from the inside out by the very logic of capital that, by subjecting everyone to it, draws everyone tighter and tighter into a sphere of power and compulsion we can’t see.
Economic power is part of the genius of capitalism. It turns our very interest in survival against us, uses it to dominate us and compel us into dangerous workplaces. Thinking with economic power gives us a sorely-needed basis for a theoretical approach to public health – to understand social murder is to understand the structure and terrain of actually-existing population health in a capitalist society. It means that we can understand social murder as an irreducible feature of capitalism itself, and that we can make more sense of the empirical fact of COVID deaths, which were not equally distributed through the population but instead clustered among the most marginalized. There are, hopefully and likely, other uses for the concept of economic power as applied to the pandemic beyond the scope of this essay. The point is that good pandemic analysis serves good pandemic politics, and making a good pandemic analysis demands careful attention to the meanings we assign and accept. We can try to reconcile the cataclysm of the COVID pandemic with an understanding of the social form of capitalism as basically fine, fixable with some anti-corruption measures and vague gestures at “organizing.” Or, we can try to make meaning of the pandemic and its ghastly toll by politicizing it and, through politicizing it, allowing it to transform our system of meaning and our understanding of what it means to be healthy or sick.