murder o'clock?
I wrote a while back about how there’s an issue of scale when it comes social murder. (https://buttondown.email/nateholdren/archive/theres-social-murder-but-then-theres-social/) As I remember anyway the issue I was thinking about was that for Engels social murder is a holistic category that shows how things like a worker pulled into a machine on the job, a worker exposed to pollution at another job, people dying of overdoses, kids getting sick from substandard food and housing, and so on are all the result - are all the concrete, particular expression - of more general processes baked in to capitalism. The covid pandemic is absolutely another concrete particular expressing those processes, but it’s a different kind of concrete particular in that the ones I mentioned a moment ago are all bounded in time and place - they’re all localized, so to speak - while the covid pandemic is far less localized, making it a different sort of example at least to some extent.
This is above my paygrade but examples themselves as concepts are kind of weird: an example exemplifies something, which means it is of a piece with and expresses - it is - what it exemplifies and yet, insofar as it’s an example of what it exemplifies rather being the sum total what’s exemplified, it also differs from and so in an important respect it is not what it exemplifies. And for anything that can be exemplified in an example, there are other examples possible. And like I tried to say, the covid pandemic is one kind of example of social murder different from other examples. What I’m fumbling for here is that social murder doesn’t occur in just one way, but occurs in many ways, some of which interact in important ways. (A lot of throat clearing just for that point, ah well!)
This was on my mind as I continue to read Doris Lessing, which I was talking with Cartus about recently and as I wrote a bit about the other day. I’m newly interested in Lessing in relation to my ongoing and growing interest in the first New Left in the UK in the late 50s/early 60s, and Lessing as someone who seems to have written a lot about race, in a milieu not known for writing about race. More on that another time, maybe, but talking to Abby it clicked in my head that Lessing’s first novel, The Grass Is Singing, depicts social murder of racist white supremacist settlers in Southern Rhodesia, among other things. That is of course not an especially sympathetic population, to put it mildly, and Lessing wrote critically about them as part of criticizing the society they were creatures of, but it also just seems to be part of the analysis the novel puts forward. That is, the novel shows a lot of people - some of whom are exploiting, subordinating, violating others people - who are drowning. To put it abstractly, white supremacist settler colonialism in Southern Rhodesia as she depicts was a social structure reproduced over time and that reproduction involved the non-reproduction, the discarding, the destroying, of a lot of individuals who were the bearers and agents of that system. That’s a kind of social murder. What struck me today was the timing.
This is weird and embarrassing (Weird And Embarrassing: The Nate Holdren Story) but it clicked in part because I started thinking about, or maybe just vibrating in time to, the KFL songs 3 AM Eternal (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A57P8hjdYcY) and What Time Is Love (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=28w2LVzxVkU). I don’t want to pretend it’s deeper than it is but they were a vehicle for this clicking in my head. The second song asks what time is love, and the first one says time is eternal. If time is eternal than in one sense the idea of a specific time looks funny - this time, that time, they’re just points in the continuity of time over eternity. (Christ this is embarrassing...!) What I mean is: when is social murder? It’s all the time, it’s at different times in different ways. A coal mine exploding is social murder, and black lung disease is also social murder. Social murder doesn’t have just one single temporality, but rather is a term for how capitalism generates multiple forms of inflicting suffering and death. I often say capitalism is a death machine, and it is, but in important respects it’s a laboratory and factory for designing and mass producing new and unexpected kinds of death machines: the system doesn’t kill in just one way. It’s a way of life that is also a way of killing, many ways of killing, ways of inventing new ways of killing, and that never ends as long as the system exists.
That’s all weird and wonky but one important point in this is that no specific instance of social murder sums up the system’s ongoing lethality, all the examples matter but the death machine is bigger, uglier, and more dangerous than all those examples added together. Furthermore, struggles over social murder emerge as struggles over concrete examples of social murder and rarely ascend to the general (socialist revolutionary) level of opposing all forms of social murder and so opposing the system per se - not ideologically let alone in practice. Instead, for very understandable reasons (not least that this shit is literally life and death for people involved), struggles over social murder are particularized as struggles over this concrete expression of systemic lethality: this fire, that epidemic, this occupational illness, that set of injuries, etc. A huge part of the point of the category of social murder, as I sort of said already, is to show how all those concrete instance are specifically instances of the same social processes - the hope is to help distinct struggles knit together into larger wholes. At its outward or upward bound, it seems to me the concept of social murder becomes an objection or part of an objection to class and commodification as such: those social relations are intrinsically murderous (in multiple ways operating at different speeds and in different times and places in different ways), and we oppose murder as such, therefore we oppose these social relations, period. To maybe too fine a point on it, part of the point is that every facet of this world is significantly blood-soaked in general (capitalism is never not killing someone somewhere at some speed, so to speak), so we need to oppose this world in general - which is to say, in all of its possible variants - while also attending well to the realities that the bloodletting occurs in infinitely varying localized ways, and those local variations are, again, literally life and death. That means, I think, moving across different degrees of abstraction, not getting lost/dispersed among the concrete specifics of all the particular acts of violence without a unifying theoretical framework, nor getting lost/abstracted away by the generalities of the theoretical framework without reference to the concrete specifics. I’m massively biased here but I’m inclined to say that Engels’s Condition of the Working Class in England and volume 1 of Marx’s Capital are excellent examples of works that move across these different levels of abstraction to investigate their objects of criticism.