situating the actions of the ghouls in relation to the operation of the death machine
Ey up me duck, (sorry, been watching lots of dark and gritty cop shows set in the dark and gritty north of England - it’s basically the midwest with less apologizing, I think? - and I like some of the regional specific bits like ‘ey up’ and ‘me duck’.)
As ever I have a thought I’ve had before but don’t recall how much I’ve actually written down of that thought, and I figure better to restate it here - on the hope it iterates into a new thought or improved expression of the old one - than to bother checking the Open Mode archives. (Read my own blog? I can barely stand to write it! [this too is a stolen joke.)
So here’s the thought, or a corner of it. As I use the term, social murder is a term of system-generated killing, and that killing can take, I don’t know, acute forms - like mine fires, say - and chronic forms - death by cigarette smoking, say. I should say, I really don’t mean all forms of system-generated killing: if someone snaps from workplace pressures and shoots up their workplace, say, or wars, or police killings, those are all system generated in my view but it’s not clear what purchase the social murder analysis has on it. I’m not against calling that social murder, I just don’t see what the benefit is, whereas I do think the analysis has some benefits in taking apparently nonpolitical and often apparently agent-less processes and noting their lethality and that the lethality is product of capitalist social relations. Another way to put it, I think of ‘social murder’ as another way to say ‘social determinants of health’ where the ‘social determinants’ are specified as being specifically capitalist social relations - capitalist society shapes people’s health in capitalist fashion - with an insistence on how having health be capital-determined means lots of harm, suffering, death.
Related, and this is really what’s on my mind, I’d like a better term for subjective and policy participation in social murder. That is to say, austerity - like the fucking evil medicaid cuts that the House of Representatives just passed here in the US - is lethal, and it is so because it’s refusing to shelter people from systemic brutality (or is rolling back prior forms of sheltering people). It’s tempting to just call those policies ‘social murder’ but I don’t want to do that because, as I said, the term as I use it is a matter of systemic processes rather than being a term that applies to choices people make. That’s not quite right, really: the term does apply to choices people make, but those choices are elements of larger processes. Let me try it again, first by analogy.
In capitalism possession of money is in effect socially mandatory: no money, little chance of a decent life, all things being equal and generally speaking. That’s called market dependency. People make choices in response to that condition, and more often than not our choices will tend to reproduce (or at least, not meaningfully challenge) the basic social fact that is market dependency. So the working out of market dependent society over time involves choices, and shapes choices, but isn’t really something volitional. It may be reinforced or locally worsened by people’s choices, but ultimately it’s something that conditions people’s wills and choices (you can order whatever you want, as long as you order off the menu and you can afford it, and you don’t get consulted about what’s on the menu, so to speak -- this means you’re free in ordering in important respects, but your freedom alone is of limited explanatory value since you’re choosing off a menu in place when you walked in the door and you didn’t set the prices or get to decide how much money you’d have). Along similar lines, people may well make choices that intensify social murder or increase others exposure to system-generated harms - again, like the monstrous medicaid cuts. Those choices are themselves system generated to a significant degree (which doesn’t let the decision-makers off the hook morally, they’re morally abhorrent, full stop, the point of the analysis isn’t to replace moral judgments but rather to explain the origins of that heinous shit and the monsters who are able to do it), which means those choices in an important respect are social murder. At the same time, as I said, I balk at calling policy choices and so on social murder because it easily can result in treating social murder as something that results from choices, instead of being a social process baked into the system’s organization and which shapes choices (in part by shaping the menu of options and in part by shaping the character of the deciders).
I said I’d like a term for those choices which situates them in relation to social murder, which names participation in social murder as process. One term is ‘accomplice to social murder.’ There’s probably also a technical term that could be made up using the word mediation, that feels a bit above my paygrade. Both of those are also less than fully satisfactory as they don’t get at the full moral outrage: these fuckers are literally killing people! Just pointing and going ‘that choice is social murder!’ does important moral and political work in my view (I think moral judgments matter; some Marxists disagree, they’re wrong in ways that speak badly of them!) despite its analytical limits. Maybe this is just a tension (contradiction?) baked into the terms and/or the words we use, something like the following: we want analytical accuracy, specifically in naming the system which is the underlying architecture shaping in-system life, and we want, well, moral accuracy, meaning terms that get at the human stakes and genuine evilness of these processes and people’s participation in them as they exist concretely in the world. Brace yourself, this is going to get even wonkier. Ready? Three... two... one...
I have a vague recollection (you know shit’s gonna get good when you hear that phrase!) of some works I’m not totally sure I understood in the first place (feel that? that’s your pulse quickening as I make the case further, building your anticipation) by philosophers (holy shit, by philosophers?! now THAT is the good shit amiright?! especially when written about by a nonphilosopher, eh?)... specifically I’m thinking of something by Donald Davidson and something else by Nancy Fraser. [deep breath] Here goes.
As I recall it, Davidson basically goes as follows: look, no offense believers, but there’s only one world and it’s a physical one - no God, no souls, etc. - which means that in important respects our minds are physical phenomena. And yet we can’t talk about mental and emotional aspects of human life in physical terms. If I say to you ‘I feel angry’ or ‘I imagine a unicorn’ or whatever, that’s not at all the same as some sentence about the actions of neurons or brain chemicals or whatever. Now, I am nowhere near capable of formulating competent sentences about that particular kind of nerd shit - brain juice and sparks within the in-skull wiring or whatever - but that’s not the point. The point is that people who are fully competent, fully fluent in the speaking/writing and hearing/reading of such sentences can not use such sentences exclusively and successfully communicate the things that reports on mental phenomena ‘I feel sad’ and ‘I remember a song’ communicate: even nerds fluent in headmeat nerve-talk (I think it’s sometimes called neuroscience?) can’t use that vocabulary in lieu of mind- and emotion-talk, because the vocabulary itself isn’t there for any speakers.
Likewise, feeling- and thought-talk isn’t sufficient for the kinds of interventions into brains that, say, brain surgeons need to make in the aftermath of traumatic brain injuries. That is to say, one world as I said, but we need two vocabularies to talk about distinct facets of that world. As I recall it Davidson calls this anomalous monism - one world but we lack one set of terms to capture it all. Along similar lines, Nancy Fraser says we have one sensibility about what’s just, but we don’t have a single set of criteria to talk about. For her, we need terms to talk about economic deprivation, resource allocation, opportunities, etc - she calls that distributive justice - and we need terms to talk about status, respect, dignity - she calls that justice as recognition. For her a just condition would involve both distributive and recognitional justice and that’d be one condition, but it’s multifaceted such that we need two vocabularies.
This is all a tortured pair of extended metaphors, to say maybe we similarly need two sets of vocabularies, one for our moral expression and capacity to act, and one for social analysis, the systemic processes that generate our options and influence what and how we choose among those options. Social murder, as term, specifically the ‘murder’ part, is doing some real judging morally, and rightly so, yet the processes named by that term are, well, processes, not agents: agents are moments of (and conditioned by) those processes.
Having thought all that out I think I’ve arrived at wanting to just say those actions are murderous, without calling them social murder - social murder is why and how they’re murderous (because the actions are both exposing people to the gears of the death machine, and the influence of the death machine is part of why the murder-ghouls exist and act as they do). Specification of the rootedness in the processes that generate (that are!) social murder can be left to the context - lay out the analysis when necessary, and when not necessary don’t, I guess.
Is that anticlimactic? Sorry if so. I’m only here to disappoint! (Do you know that song? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=anzIMcsHyDw) Alright well [dusts hands] that’s this thought dug out the ground, time to get on with some chores and shit before the workweek reconvenes, blech! (Another song for you: “Day Job,” by Oblivion: ‘you’ve forgotten how to smile, since you got a day job.’ No truer words, fuuuck…https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u892PRzFxR4) Enough already!
Keep on trucking, young bold soldiers.