There’s social murder, but then there’s SOCIAL MURDER (a note on scale)
I’ve thought for a while now that social murder is an apt concept for understanding the covid pandemic. (I’m far from the only one to think that; the intellectual community with comrades and close co-thinkers in fleshing out that concept and this understanding of the pandemic has been a real life line in many ways during these terrible fucking times.) I tend to think of this via Marx and Engels and in that thinking I tend to refer, I think as much or more implicitly as explicitly, to Marx’s and Engels’s examples as analogies. It occurred to me tonight that the analogies have limitations. I don’t know what, if anything, follows from this. (I’ve not even had the thought yet really so who knows what follows from it?)
Here’s what I mean: Marx and Engels look holistically across harms inflicted on workers in a wide range of social contexts - waged workplaces in various industries (which include a variety of kinds of harms including polluted air in crowded work spaces, injuries from industrial machinery which itself differs by industry, excessive speed of work, too long of work hours), deprivation of necessities, and low quality or actively harmful necessities such as adulterated bread. Part of the power of this analysis is that it’s holistic, showing how the general patterns of capitalist social relations shape particular contexts in ways that create likely harms. (Søren Mau’s book Mute Compulsion is good on that society-shaping power of capitalism. Abby wrote a good review of the book that draws out the connections to social murder well, I recommend the book and the review, which is here: https://buttondown.email/abbycartus/archive/social-murder-and-social-meaning/.) At the same time, though, what we’re living through right now is to an important extent not the working out of a general pattern across (or, the way that the general pattern is perceptible insofar as it’s expressed via) lots of ostensibly different particular contexts. Instead, to an important extent we’re living through one massive particular context.
That’s awkward (as per!), let me try again. Marx and Engels’s analysis helps identify the underlying and unifying processes within what seems like lots of discrete instances. What’s social murder? I’ve already answered to some extent, but it is (or, we need the concept in order to identify) what silicosis and childhood poverty and so-called deaths of despair and auto accidents and the opiod epidemic (and... and... and...) have in common - not only rhetorically but in the determining social patterns that create all those phenomena. The covid pandemic is certainly a phenomenon to add to that list, but what I’m trying to say is, first, that the covid pandemic is one of the instances the theory unifies, and second that the pandemic is in important respects significantly unlike a nontrivial number of those instance. Of course, all those instances are different from each other, which is why we need concepts to theoretically unify them, but I think the covid pandemic is different in a different way by virtue of its scale - the whole fucking planet, millions and millions of people in a very short span of time. I feel like this should have been obvious, but it never occurred to me before.
It’s tempting to say that the apparent obviousness of this means that nothing follows from it, but having written this far it occurs to me now that this is relevant to explaining the actions of the capitalist state. I do think that in general the state is likely to be predisposed to operate in ways that do more impede struggles by social murder’s victims than to mitigate social murder, though it simply is true that sometimes the state has been forced to step in to do that mitigation - and early in the pandemic there was more mitigating state action than there is now, to be sure. (Abby’s recent reflections drawing on Tony Smith’s fine book are on point here by the way, if you’ve not read them: https://buttondown.email/abbycartus/archive/left-liberal-self-criticism/) I think with regard to covid - and it occurs to me the planet-wide presence of harms from climate change are playing out this way too - the sheer scale of this instance of social murder means the state is significantly more constrained by capitalist social relations to come down against the side of the angels than in the smaller scale instances. In those smaller scale instances it’s sometimes possible to win smaller scale victories - I don’t mean smaller in terms of moral urgency, I just mean that some harms are localized to some places and so the fights over those harms are localized and win local victories - whereas to some degree covid is everywhere and needs action everywhere, not just localized. So the scale of the fight and the victory is higher.
I’ve said that I think we represent a future consensus in various ways and I do really believe that. I also think that the road to that future consensus being widespread is going to be rough and bloody, and with regard to covid in particular I suspect that as more conflicts over it heat up there will be a tendency toward fracturing, away from a universal-in-values global-in-scope issue/fight and toward localized ones instead, which will be heavily stratified by the complex of oppressions (race, gender, disability, the list goes on) that afflict us. This is already happening in the way the pandemic as a worldwide ‘instance’ (several years and millions of dead strains that word, I know) has been heavily stratified. I don’t have much of a clear sense of what this really would look like but I suspect that there will have to be a kind of rising upward from particular local versions of covid harms into a universal values and common struggle (to be fair this is generally my presumption across the board), with those worst afflicted, with the longest histories of affliction and histories of struggle and critical analysis, often running way out ahead of everyone else, which in turn will mean more in-house conflicts among ‘us’ alongside ‘our’ fights against state and capital. I alluded to, or maybe once again glimpsed through a glass darkly, those dynamics in this post: https://buttondown.email/nateholdren/archive/connecting-a-few-more-dots-more-notes-on-social/