Memento Mori: On Social Murder

Priti Patel is the Home Secretary in the UK, and is thus responsible for much of the policy regarding immigration. As such, she is ultimately responsible for the death of Mercy Baguma.

Late last month, there was a case in the United Kingdom – specifically Scotland – where a refugee woman named Mercy Baguma was found starved to death in her flat, orphaning her small child. The British Government under Prime Minister Boris Johnson and Home Secretary Priti Patel, sharply curtails the ability of refugees to work, and allows them only ₤40 of assistance a week. As tragic as Mercy Baguma’s case is she was not the only person – nor the only asylum-seeker – to starve to death in one of the most affluent nations in the world.

The 2017 Grenfell Tower Fire.

Consider, also, the Grenfell Tower Fire of 2017, when 72 people burned to death, another 70 were wounded, and about 290 people were rendered homeless. The cause of this fire – as far as I understand it, I may be wrong – is due to a gap between the insulation and the cladding on the building, which allowed the fire to rapidly spread to every floor of the building from its point of origin on the fourth floor. Residents of the building were concerned about how it was a fire hazard, but were threatened with legal action when they attempted to campaign to improve fire safety. Grenfell Tower was managed by Kensington and Chelsea Tenant Management Organization (KCTMO) which is a government-owned corporate body. This, essentially, means that government-owned housing was not up to government-mandated building standards, and 72 people died as a result.

These are the same general type of phenomenon, but they are not limited to the United Kingdom.

Consider, in the United States, that for a person to receive Disability Benefits, they are required to live in poverty. A single person is only eligible for Disability Benefits if they earn less than $783 a month before taxes (though some types of income are not counted, but through creative finagling, a single person might manage a monthly income of roughly $1,500, but this is rare and the benefits vanish if they go above that limit), or $1,175 for couples that include a person with a disability. A single person with a disability is limited to $9,336, or 73% of the federal poverty line, in pre-tax income. The poverty line is the point below which it becomes difficult or impossible for a person to sustain themselves, and it is mandated that these people cannot receive benefits that allow them to reach that point. It is a system designed, seemingly, to produce misery and deprivation.

Of course, there are means by which this works that are not purely financialized. Let us consider the history of plague in the United States.

The famous picture of the San Fransisco Gay Men’s Chorus, from 1993. The men in white are the survivors of the AIDS outbreak. The men in black represent those who died.

Now, there has been a great deal of discussion of the 1918 Spanish Flu Outbreak (which actually, probably, originated in Kansas; it is simply that Spain noticed it before everyone else.) I would like to take a different approach and discuss the AIDS outbreak in the United States. While it may have arrived in the States as early as the 1960s, most people think of the AIDS crisis as being a feature of queer life in the 1980s, and mistakenly blame its spread on “Patient 0” (originally “Patient O” for “Out-of-California”), Gaëtan Dugas. Dugas, notably, cooperated with investigators and did his best to help track the spread of the disease: far from being a careless Typhoid Mary, he made every effort to help and does not deserve to be vilified.

According to the CDC, nearly 48,000 Americans died from AIDS in the first six years – disproportionately men, and disproportionately non-white men. The fact that many of these men were gay goes without saying. The fact that members of the Reagan administration joked about it, does not go without saying.

It wasn’t until 1987, a year before he was set to leave office, that Reagan did anything about it. It’s worth noting that his Surgeon General, C. Everett Koop, a conservative Christian, did try to do something productive about it, and did try to educate the public about it. Despite this, by the year 2000 , more than 448,000 Americans had died from AIDS.

Fast-forward to today. There are predictions that as many as 410,000 Americans may die of COVID-19 by January. Elsewhere in the world, the disease is largely contained, and the measures that effectively contain COVID are also being found to reduce mortality from Influenza. In the United States, there is widespread disagreement about whether the disease is a major concern, about the effectiveness of measures that have proven to be effective in other parts of the world. While it is almost inarguable that the disease was spread in its initial stages by any group other than the jet set, the majority of people who die are disproportionately racial minorities and the impoverished. The for-profit healthcare system of the United States is a major driver of this, as is the rise-and-grind culture that has been produced by the collision of the myth of the American Dream and the extreme – and ever-increasing – income inequality here.

Unlike Marx, Engels always looks like he’s wearing a fake beard.

All of these cases are an example of the phenomenon that Friedrich Engels referred to as “social murder.”

In The Condition of the Working Class In England, published in 1854, Engels introduced this term, defining it as:

When one individual inflicts bodily injury upon another such that death results, we call the deed manslaughter; when the assailant knew in advance that the injury would be fatal, we call his deed murder. But when society places hundreds of proletarians in such a position that they inevitably meet a too early and an unnatural death, one which is quite as much a death by violence as that by the sword or bullet; when it deprives thousands of the necessaries of life, places them under conditions in which they cannot live — forces them, through the strong arm of the law, to remain in such conditions until that death ensues which is the inevitable consequence — knows that these thousands of victims must perish, and yet permits these conditions to remain, its deed is murder just as surely as the deed of the single individual; disguised, malicious murder, murder against which none can defend himself, which does not seem what it is, because no man sees the murderer, because the death of the victim seems a natural one, since the offence is more one of omission than of commission. But murder it remains.

Social murder is, essentially, the creation of widespread death by making the conditions of continued survival inaccessible through social means. It is the use of laws, rules, and bureaucracy to – as Alice of the podcast Trashfuture eloquently puts it – “put your death in the passive voice.” Mercy Baguma was starved to death; the Grenfell Tower victims were burned to death; the victims of AIDS succumbed to the virus, just as the victims of the Novel Coronavirus do.

This is what I have called, in the past, Exterminism. In my analysis, this is what genocide looks like under the conditions of a Society of Control. It isn’t getting shoved into a cattle car by shouting men with harsh accents and haute couture uniforms, it is having the conditions for your continued life placed out of your reach by a faceless bureaucrat or a fleshless algorithm. It isn’t a bullet in the brain, it’s a form letter that purports to deeply regret what it’s about to do anyway. It isn’t a screaming man with a knife, it’s your doctor pushing high-powered opioids for the benefit of a family of billionaires.

This is not to say that the cattle car or the bullet in the brain are gone. The first has simply been requisitioned by ICE. The second and third are being distributed by police and manchildren radicalized by imageboards. We have active exterminism alongside passive exterminism.

Huey Newton — I still need to finish reading his work.

It is possible that the latter is a byproduct of the former: Dr. Huey Newton made the note that the black community is not a part of the United States, but is a geographically enclosed colonized nation, treated much the same way that the British treated the Irish and the Indians. They are the subject to colonial violence and exploitation. Through the principle commonly called Foucault’s Boomerang, the techniques of violence employed abroad tend to come back to their point of origin as policing: for America, the boomerang has a very short distance to travel. While we still engage in endless foreign wars (we have had only 17 years of peace in the 237 years our country has existed), we also engage in endless repression at home.

This repression takes the form of social murder, alongside explicit genocidal paroxysms. The former is the exterminist methods of Control; the latter, the exterminist methods of Discipline. These are the horns of our current dilemma, but they belong to the same beast. Regardless of which type of society we are currently trying to be, the exterminist end goal remains the same.

It’s a mistake to see them as purely different. While there may have been a purely Disciplinary society at one point, it’s my guess that the Nationalist Society of Discipline was chimerized with the Imperial Society of Sovereignty for most of its existence, and when Sovereignty failed, it turned quickly to Control, forming a new hybrid that was both immiserating and boring.

Not to reference a tired meme that has been emptied of all real meaning, but we live in a Society. Our traditions represent a Society of Sovereignty. Our Education shapes us for Societies of Discipline. The Marketplace sells us the tools to live in Societies of Control. We need another option, a Society of Consent or Solidarity, if we are to finally put an end to the phenomenon of Social Murder.

Of course, those in power in the United States are dead set on committing Social Murder at all turns. I hope that we can outlast them, and give these monsters the eulogy that they deserve.

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