Earlier this month we collaborated with the organizers the Socialism Conference to put together five sessions at this year’s conference on the political economy of health and disability.

In this session, "How Capitalism Kills: Social Murder and Covid-19," Death Panel podcast co-hosts, Artie Vierkant and Abby Cartus, are joined by friend of the panel and historian, Nate Holdren, to discuss Friedrich Engels’ concept of “social murder,” the structural forces within capitalism that abandon populations to injury, debility, and premature death, and how social murder is a key component of capitalism, not merely a side effect.

Thanks to Han Olliver for our Death Panel x Socialism Conference 2023 poster image, which is being used as the cover image for this episode on platforms that support it. See the full poster below, and find and support Han's work at hanolliver.com

Transcript by Kendra Kline. (Kendra is currently accepting freelance transcript work — email her if you need transcripts!)

DP x S23: TRANSCRIPT
How Capitalism Kills: Social Murder and COVID-19

[Beginning of transcript]

Phil Rocco 0:01
Good morning, everyone. Welcome to the second of five panels sponsored by the Death Panel podcast. The title of this panel is How Capitalism Kills: Social Murder and COVID-19. My name is Phil Rocco, one of the co-hosts of Death Panel, and your chair and cruise director for this session.

Before we get going, just want to make two quick announcements. The first is about masks. All Socialism conference attendees are required to wear masks, fully covering the nose and mouth while indoors in conference spaces, including hallways and meeting rooms. Audience members are still required to mask when asking questions or making comments. This mask policy is in place to protect all of us, especially immunocompromised from the risk of contracting COVID-19.

Second, the conference community safety plan relies in part on badge checkers at the door of each room. You're expected to wear conference badges at all times to enter conference meeting rooms. You can see the badge checkers and know they're here to support a safe conference. And you can see registration if you have any problems with that policy.

So our session today is about how capitalism exploits not just the surplus labor of the working class, it also exploits our health. This panel is going to discuss Friedrich Engels' concept of social murder, the structural forces within capitalism that abandon populations to injury, debility, and premature death. Without further ado, I want to introduce three really excellent panelists who, in a way, need no introduction, in my mind. On the furthest left, Abby Cartus, is an epidemiologist, writer, and co-host of the Death Panel podcast. Joining us virtually from the great state of Iowa, Nate Holdren, is the author of the book, Injury Impoverished: Workplace Accidents, Capitalism and Law in the Progressive Era, published by Cambridge University Press, in 2020. Run, don't walk, to buy it. And he teaches at Drake University. And on my immediate left, Artie Vierkant, the co-author of Health Communism: A Surplus Manifesto, published by Verso Books in 2022, and a co-host, as well as the amazing editor and producer, of the Death Panel podcast. Without further ado, I think Artie will get us started.

Artie Vierkant 2:19
Hi, everybody, I'm gonna get us started. And then Nate's gonna talk, and then we'll hear from Abby, and then we'll get to get to the point where we're all kind of talking about this concept together. But I just have a few things to say to set us up.

So first of all, capitalism kills, right? We know this. We see it every day. And we know that it kills in many ways. Sometimes it's the quick death of the workplace accident. More often, it's slow. Sometimes it's the slow death of economic deprivation and austerity. Sometimes it's the smoke in your lungs, or the heat from a world on fire, or the particles that you can't see in the air or in the water from the heavy industry that you have no choice but to live next to. Sometimes it's the aggregate of the burden that comes from never, ever having your care needs met, or the debt that comes with having just some of those needs met, or the virus you caught because your employer refuses to wear a mask. Sometimes it's by the hands of the police forces that exist to protect private property, at the expense of your lives. Our lives. Most of the time, it's not any one thing. And there are many ways that we could choose to name this phenomenon and many ways that people have named this phenomenon.

Lauren Berlant called this process slow death, the "mass physical attenuation under global/national regimes of capitalist structural subordination." I also like to think of Ruth Wilson Gilmore's concept of organized abandonment as directly pointing to how capitalism kills. But I think another often quoted statement of hers is much more fitting in this context, "Racism specifically is the state sanctioned or extra legal production and exploitation of group differentiated vulnerability to premature death," which also brings to mind that we know who capitalism kills disproportionately. Similarly, Dean Spade situates this at the intersection of the state and the law, and how "the law structures and reproduces vulnerability."

But the term we're going to talk about today, as Phil mentioned, is a different one, which is social murder, which is the term coined in the 19th century by Friedrich Engels, and which I suspect both of our other panelists today, Abby and Nate, will have their own way of talking about and perhaps their own way of defining. But for me, I think Engels' own words from The Condition of the Working Class in England sum it up best:

"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 commission."

So, yes, capitalism kills. And over the last few years, one of the main ways capitalism has killed is COVID. At least 1.2 million people in the US have died this way, not to mention internationally, with countless more debilitated or disabled by Long COVID. As we've tried to catalog in our work as Death Panel, much of the suffering and death can be traced directly to capitalist economic imperatives, including what we could call the rush to reopen, where in almost no time at the beginning of the pandemic, as early as spring 2020, states pushed to resume normal economic activity at the expense of the health and lives of the people.

This included states controlled by elected members of the Democratic Party. Biden's new CDC director, Mandy Cohen, for example, was the head of North Carolina's pandemic response. And she and the Democratic Party governor at the time, in May 2020, pushed North Carolina to be one of the earliest states to reopen their economy. And you know, and of course, this is not merely a retrospective thing, or confined to 2020. There are countless examples we've talked about elsewhere over the years.

And even now, the Biden administration is pretending that COVID is no longer an issue as we march into fall with cases on the rise, which at this point, I would like to say, again, thank you all for masking. I know that it is a requirement, obviously, but I think it's important that we are supportive of each other in doing it, and that we take the moment to actually acknowledge that we're kind of doing it to be in solidarity with one another.

So with this, I'm going to turn it over now to Nate Holdren, who's going to speak first, followed by Abby -- not first, I guess second -- followed by Abby. Nate is going to talk about his view of the term, social murder, as a Marxist and the work he's been engaged in trying to show that social murder is not merely something capitalism sort of gets away with, but actually something that is structurally a part of capitalism, that we can't -- that it's inseparable from capitalism. It's part of the very structure of how capitalism operates. And then Abby is going to expand on some of those ideas. And after all of our remarks, I'd love for us to talk together, altogether kind of comrades in this room, about how it is that social murder is excused and has been sort of excused, how it can sort of hide in plain sight, as it were, and be so easily brushed off, as we've seen over the course of the ongoing pandemic as a sort of matter of individual vulnerability, or personal responsibility, as we have seen so blatantly. So with that, Nate, it's all you.

Nate Holdren 8:05
Right. So I can't see anybody. If I'm going too fast, too slow, too quiet, too loud, you're gonna have to yell to tell me because I don't have any visual cue. I'm gonna just jump right in. So I'm Nate Holdren. I want to say it's really great to be here as part of this event, with the comrades who are assembled today. And I'm honored to be part of an ongoing dialogue with the comrades who organized the event today.

As folks may know, there's a kind of distributed network of some of us who've been working on these themes that I'm going to talk about. I think it was on a lot of people's minds in various ways, in kind of silos or relative isolation before the pandemic. And the pandemic gave a lot of us a new sense of urgency, and trying to figure out how to understand the pandemic also provided the context through which we've kind of knitted together out of our silos into the network that we're in. And I'm sure there's other folks who are -- we haven't networked with yet, and I know there's a lot of folks who've plugged in since the pandemic. This is ugly, awful shit. At the same time, it is -- it's really an honor to be part of the group who's trying to make sense of this stuff and develop the analysis that we're presenting today.

So what I tried to do with my remarks here is give an overview of some of the analysis that has been developed by this distributed network, those of us on the panel today and other people who we're in dialogue with, and my hope is that providing this set of theoretical tools broadens the conversation, brings more people in who can then participate fully in the conversation. I'll also say a lot of what I'm talking about here, if you want the sort of Marx nerd footnotes, I developed this in a chapter that's coming out in a book soon. If you contact me by email or Twitter, I'd be happy to send you the document. But I'm going to just cover the gist today without the footnotes, etc.

So, as Artie said at the beginning, capitalism kills. Capitalism is a social system that is lethal. So social murder is Friedrich Engels' term in his 1845 book. And it's not rhetorical. It's a real process. Capitalism is a necessarily death dealing social system. Capitalism's violence can happen in a lot of different ways. It can happen at a lot of different speeds, and often in ways that are hard to detect until it's too late. I want to say here, my usage of the term social murder refers to forms of violence that often don't seem violent at all, and which appear natural or economic in a political sense of economic. The Engels quote that Artie read out gets at this. Capitalism also produces wars, forms of imperialism, other forms of political violence. All of that is tremendously important. Those are additional reasons why we should be revolutionaries and oppose capitalism and replace it with a communist society. That political violence, I think, tends to be organized and experienced differently. If people find it valuable to apply the analysis we're talking about here to that stuff, that's fantastic.

To my mind, the value of this stuff, of these concepts, is to focus our attention on things other than explicit forms of political violence, but it's not to the exclusion of them as a political priority. So to put it kind of conceptually, if we think of the public health phrase, social determinants of health, social determinants of health, the phrase means the health of any individuals or groups is not primarily or only the result of those individuals' and groups' actions. Rather, their health is the result of the social context they live in. Social determinants of health means society determines people's health. Capitalist societies determine people's health in capitalism specific ways. And for most people, that's a really bad thing.

In what follows, I'm going to talk about capitalism in general. Towards the end, I'll get a little bit into some more specifics of distinct national forms of organization of capitalism, because that stuff matters tremendously, and we've seen that tremendously within the pandemic. But for a little while, I'm gonna talk about all capitalist societies.

So there are a few patterns where social murder is underway in capitalist society over time. One is that there's a fundamental quality of capitalist societies, which is that people are market dependent, which is to say, you need money to get stuff, human beings need stuff to live. Access to money is not socially guaranteed. Certainly, there's no guarantee of enough money to have a good life. So this means on a regular basis in the ordinary, normal operation of a capitalist society, people will experience deprivation of things they need to live well. Suffering and death will result. That's already baked in to the condition of market dependency. So there's a baseline lethality of killing people at the bottom of the food chain already, by the sheer fact of money being compulsory, but not provided.

Second, another fundamental quality of capitalist societies, which arises from market dependency, is a pressure for competition among private productive units, that is, capitalists compete with each other. That pressure of competition pushes capitalists to cheapen the quality of products that are produced, which can include those products being unhealthy for consumers -- unhealthy food additives, chemicals in consumer goods, addictive products, and so on. Third, because production is for profit, goods that can't be profitably produced, or goods that are less profitable than other goods, will tend not to be made in sufficient quantities.

Capitalism is a system that steers, to the minimal degree it steers at all, steers by profits. This has two facets. One facet is that there just will be important things that it's currently technologically possible to make, where those important things get made in too small a quantity, because it's not profitable to make them in higher quantities. Another facet is that investment in research, which expands what's technologically possible to make, will tend to go towards things that it'll be especially profitable. So things that seem less profitable, won't be -- we won't develop the productive capacity to make them. The result of both of these facets, is again, some people have important needs that go unmet, which causes suffering and death, which we could as a society alleviate in the relative short term, if the system didn't stear by profit.

So we can see this in the relative lack of money spent eliminating diseases that afflict poor people more than anyone else. Doing what's good for poor people is just a lot less profitable than doing what's good for rich people. And since the system steers by profitability, poor people's needs are even less likely to be provided for on the supply side. The goods and services that poor people need will tend to be made only when they're profitable. And that compounds the deprivation built into being a poor person and not having very much money. Fourth, whoever controls our access to money has a ton of power over our lives. This means we can be forced to do unsafe things by the people who control our access to money.

Now, in my thinking about the world, I tend to primarily focus on employment. And I think about the coercion built into the employment relationship. But that's not the only form. We know from awful experience in history, and Marx is very eloquent on this as well, that the individual household family tends to build in forms of coercion. Parents who control their children's access to money, are able to coerce them. There's a long standing pattern of men having, controlling access to women -- of men controlling women's access to money. So it's not only in the employment relationship. The fact that you need money to live and your access to money is not guaranteed means whoever has control over your access to money can choke off your access to what you need to live. And that has massive ramifications in terms of creating situations where tremendous violence and coercion can exist. As I said, myself, I tend to focus on it primarily in the employment relationship, but that's not the only place where we see this kind of coercion.

So this shows up in employment in workers remaining in unsafe conditions. Pre-pandemic, about 5,000 workers a year were recorded as dying from fatal workplace accidents or occupational illnesses. The last estimate I know of, and this is from a few years ago, from the International Labor Organization, was that 5,000 workers every day were dying in the global economy. And people may know that they're in an unsafe situation, but the lack of safety at work is a gamble. I might get really physically hurt in this job. But if I lose my income, I will definitely get financially hurt and physical harms can follow from that. And so essentially, a lot of workers say, well, I'll take the chance that I'll get hurt over the guarantee that I'll get hurt, and so workers remain in unsafe conditions.

Fifth, competition among capitalists puts pressure on employers to lower safety standards in production, to speed up work and to introduce new technologies to work that increase the productivity of the individual worker, and that are often very dangerous. Think about the introduction of assembly lines. In an assembly line, the pace of work is mechanically controlled, and the worker has to keep up with it. There's also lots of gears that workers can get their hands pulled into. There's heat, there's exposure to electricity, chemicals, etc. So any given workplace may well get more dangerous over time in the form of longer hours, insufficient rest breaks, too rapid a pace of work, dangerous equipment, exposure to unhealthy conditions like pollution, heat, disease, and so on.

A small example in my own line of work, I'm 45 years old, I became -- I went to grad school, I think, in 2005, 2006. Started teaching then. And there were still desktop computers. I would still go to the library for computers, and laptops were just starting to become compulsory. I've lived through the becoming compulsory of the laptop in my industry. And now a smartphone is almost compulsory. I have known a lot of friends who have developed really severe tendinitis and carpal tunnel syndrome, because laptops are an ergonomic nightmare. And there's some issues with swiping on a tablet and a smartphone as well. That's not fatal, necessarily, but it does impact quality of life. And in the long run, that kind of thing may well reduce the number of years that you live. And being an academic is a relatively very safe job as well. So it's even worse in other industries. There's also issues of exposure to heat, disease, etc. We'll come back to disease, of course, for today.

Sixth, because the system steers by profits and because of competitive pressures on capitalists, capitalist production processes tend to have effects on their immediate surroundings. I live very close to a Goodyear plant and to a Firestone plant. They're putting all kinds of shit in the air that I don't like my children breathing. That's one type of example. There are incinerators all over the United States that incinerate medical waste. And there are often materials in medical waste which are good for preventing contamination and for containing biological agents, but they're made of various forms of plastic and so on, which when burnt up, releases toxins into the atmosphere. So there's a product -- a waste product of the medical industry that goes to a whole other industry of medical incinerators. Those are invariably located in low income communities, almost always communities full of people of color. And so the pollution from the medical industry becomes shit that people of color's children breathe into their lungs every day.

You can think about train derailments as well, that's been in the news. Marx has a whole long bit about train derailments being -- which is incredible, because it's exactly like what's happening today. There's pressures to reduce the number of workers on the trains, pressures to increase work hours, that leads to workers being tired and mistakes happening. There's pressures to not maintain track, not maintain the locomotives. There's pressures to cut corners on safety, and we have trains to railing. What Marx didn't anticipate is we'd have trains derailing carrying incredibly toxic shit, which then becomes an environmental pollutant. So anytime if you have a job, when you're at your workplace, your workplace is your living conditions, because you are alive at work.

Furthermore, people live physically proximate to the places where the direct production process happens. I'm just down the road from the Firestone and from the tire factory, right? So we tend to live right outside of capitalist production facilities, and who lives where is also -- there's tremendous income and class and race patterns in that. And if we're not a part of the immediate transaction, it doesn't matter that our -- that we and our kids breathe in that toxic shit. It's just simply not factored in. So climate change, that's an example as well of how capitalism is occurring in and ruining the living conditions of basically everyone on the planet.

COVID, that is another example. As far as we know, COVID originated from a virus jumping from non-human animals into humans. As folks probably know, it's called zoonosis. As far as I know, the initial zoonotic transmission with COVID likely occurred through the commodification of non-human nature, specifically animals, and the exchange of those commodified animals and the market compelled interactions of the people who were involved in that area of the market. Industrialized farming makes similar kinds of transmissions more likely as well. I live in Iowa, which is essentially a one party state that's been captured by agribusiness, industrial farming, and the forms of pollution, including disease, that it makes possible or likely, is a huge issue in our state. So after the initial transmission, human to human spread of COVID occurred to a significant degree because economic activity is compulsory in capitalism.

It's mandatory to get money and the system steers by profits, like I said. Stopping transmission early would have meant stopping economic activity, and there's tremendous pressure not to stop economic activity. That pressure is intensified by the fact that the harms of social murder concentrate downward on people in capitalist society, while the benefits of capitalism concentrate upward. As Marx puts it in chapter 25 of Volume One of Capital, in capitalism, "The accumulation of wealth at one pole is at the same time accumulation of misery at the opposite pole." A lot of us live much closer to the misery poll than to the wealth poll. Let's put it another way. We live on a hill, shit rolls downhill, money rolls upward.

Capitalism has a tendency for periodic crises as well. And in these crises, a great deal of wealth is destroyed. A lot of places go out of business, people lose their jobs. These include economic crises, as I just mentioned, as well as ecological, social and political crises. Generally speaking, a crisis of one kind just doesn't exist. Those names -- economic, ecological, social, political crises -- those are really names of where a crisis begins. An economic crisis rapidly becomes a political crisis, an ecological crisis rapidly becomes a social crisis and an economic crisis, and so on. When a crisis hits, people's access to money gets massively reduced, which intensifies all the harms that I talked about above.

So what I've done here, up until now, is give a quick overview, summarizing the arguments that Friedrich Engels' book, The Condition of the Working Class in England, and chapter 10 and chapter 15 of Volume One of Capital. I want to urge everybody in the room to read those texts. If you haven't read Volume One of Capital, 10 and 15, those chapters, they're basically standalone books inside the book. You don't need to read the rest of the book before you read those. I want to also make a plug for Artie and Bea's book, Health Communism. Absolutely. Among other things that their book does really well is to underline how the harms that I've been discussing here fall most on disabled people and are an important part of constructing what disability is. We can talk about race, gender, and similar categories along similar lines. On the one hand, these categories name patterns of rendering people vulnerable to social murder. And on the other hand, the violence of capitalism is partly how those categories get constructed in the first place. Part of being racialized is to have -- part of being racialized as a minority person is to be exposed to greater violence in various ways. That's part of what race is as a social reality. Likewise for gender, likewise for disability.

So another aspect of capitalist society is that there's a domain of society that's called the economy and it's treated as relatively non-political. And there's a domain of society called the state, which is treated as relatively political. There's a philosopher named Tony Smith, who wrote a fantastic book called Beyond Liberal Egalitarianism. He gives us a name for this distinction. It's called the bifurcation of the political. Basically, there's a division of society into a political and a supposedly non-political realm. Now economic activity is actually political, according to any reasonable standard of politics. It's all about power, it shapes who gets a good life and who doesn't, but it's treated as if it was not political.

A key thing that the capitalist state does is regulate the line between what's explicitly political and what's implicitly political. And it tries to prevent what's implicitly political from becoming explicitly political, and therefore subject to contestation and change. So to an important degree, we can think of the state as actually a body that works to prevent politics, fundamentally by keeping capitalists in the role of the controllers of the means of production. Whenever a crisis breaks out, and capitalism always is generating crises, there are always crises in the oven, so to speak. And whenever a crisis breaks out, tremendous suffering follows. And there are people like us in this room who are trying to make that suffering into a political problem for the people at the top of the system. There are people like us who demand that something has to be done about this. This is a political problem, something has to be done. And we have opponents who make the opposite claim, it's not political, do nothing. Unfortunately, our opponents are winning. So these demands raise problems for the personnel who staff the state, or they can if they get big enough and intense enough. And the state tends to side with the most powerful a lot of the time, but not all the time. Essentially what state personnel will do is side with where the wind is blowing. If mass struggle gets intense enough, that changes the direction of the wind, the state will start to change. So this is partly to say all the patterns I discussed of crisis and so on, that affects the state too. And the state, like everyone in capitalism, tries to get out of having to deal with the problems. Capitalist state personnel, everyone else, everyone's just trying to ride the tiger of capitalism, so to speak, which is not to say that the harms fall equally, because they absolutely don't.

So I want to make a really quick pedantic Marx theories aside here. There are people who talk about the state as serving capitalist profits, and I think that's true, but I think it's important to talk about how that happens. It's not a mechanical process, and it's not always an explicit conscious process. To my mind, what really happens is the state serves itself. The state wants to make capitalist profits continue to happen in a way that don't cause political problems for the state. And it wants to make disruptions to capitalist profits, whether through crises or through social unrest, also not be a problem for the state. Now, bear in mind, because of capitalism's crisis tendencies, there will always be problems for the state, which the state is always trying to put a lid on and prevent from boiling over.

So in effect, in my view, the state and state personnel act in a self serving way, and that's how they end up serving the needs of capitalism and maintaining profits. It's not about ideological commitment, which is why there's no value in arguing with them. And it's not a selflessness on their part, they're not committed to capitalist profits, they're committed to their own lives, careers and institutions. That's a matter of how the state is fundamentally designed, funded and organized. And it's, in my view, part of why the state in capitalism cannot be reformed and has basically no real contribution to our emancipation. At most, we have a strategic or tactical engagement with the state. So in any case, one major state response to crises is to try to prevent political action from breaking out, like I said, and essentially to keep things the same as it was before. And what I mean here by the same is in terms of the fundamental power relationships. So we've seen the pandemic massively disrupt a lot of people's lives, kill a lot of people. And for Biden, nothing has really changed, right. And that's what I mean by keep things the same -- preserve the fundamental configurations of power.

And one of the ways that this operates is that it -- we're offered channels with a relatively low ceiling, like voting lobbying, using state agencies, which I think we sort of have -- we may have to do in specific circumstances. But the ceiling on that is really low and it helps disorganize us, disorganize the development of a larger mass movement. I think we can see this in the response to the COVID pandemic. The state has made its own wellbeing the top priority in every country. Absolutely the case in the United States. And I think what the state has done effectively, I think the state is compelled to always do this, is to be an accomplice to social murder, and works to intensify social murder in order to prevent any effective dissent or opposition, which will cause a problem for the state. Now, how that plays out concretely varies quite a bit and I think is really important to investigate. I'm almost done here. A couple things I want to say. This is the analysis, I think, that I've developed prior to today. And as I said, my point, the goal for my remarks is to lay this out. And I think a lot of us who are working on this stuff share a lot of this analysis. I'm the only one responsible for this, for my remarks here, but I've tried to present what I think a lot of us have been thinking about.

So something else I want to think about, I want to say, this has been on my mind that I've tried to flesh out specifically for today, is I think there's a baseline trust in the state on the part of a lot of people in liberal democratic societies. And I think that's one of the things that has wrong footed us in the pandemic. This is certainly my view, walking into the pandemic, I didn't realize I thought this. I think there's an attitude like, if I was in huge danger, the government would be warning me. Since the government isn't warning me, I must not be in huge danger. And I think this is pretty important in how we understand the behaviors that we don't like by a lot of the rest of the population. I think there are people who are consciously explicitly living out hard commitments to odious politics. I think there's also a lot of people who just really don't get what's going on. And that's because they're good subjects of a capitalist liberal democracy.

And I think part of what's going on in that mistake people are making is that a lot of people think that their lives or our lives genuinely matter politically. And what I mean by this is people think if someone gets killed, or if a lot of people get killed, that'll matter to the powerful institutions in some way. And I think we're encouraged to believe that through the limited forms of democracy that were allowed, like voting and lobbying and welfare and public health, and so on. And I think the reality is much uglier and harder, which is that most of us are straight up nobodies. In their book, Artie and Bea use the phrase "surplus population," which is a really ugly phrase, and it's a phrase that names an ugly reality. A lot of us are just surplus to capitalism's requirements. And it seems to be the case that the system can kill a huge amount of us nobodies without it mattering at all politically.

That's an awful thought, for two reasons. One, it's really hard to look in the face of the death machine and know that it doesn't care about us. And especially because the death machine is instantiated in the faces of human beings, and to know that they just really don't give a shit if we live or die. That's a really -- it makes me feel like I'm losing my mind sometimes to think about. It's also a chilling thought, a frightening thought, because it means if I'm right, there are no built in guardrails whatsoever. The system will not stop killing, through any internal mechanism. There might be an accident, like say that we get lucky and the virus mutates and becomes less severe. But there's no built in logic. The system doesn't have an off switch for the social murder machinery that it pushes on its own. There's no built in political threshold where if we go above X number of deaths, the system will rein itself in. It only stops killing temporarily ever, and it only ever stops when it's forced to by political circumstances, above all, by confrontational mass movements.

Again, I want to strongly recommend people read chapters 10 and 15 of Volume One of Capital on this point. Marx talks about efforts to create laws to regulate work hours in England, and it gets at this point exactly. I'm almost done. I will say in the present with the COVID pandemic, the movement that we need has not found its footing. And I think the baseline social trust in the state that I mentioned, is a really big factor in where that has come from. I think in building the movement we need, we're going to need to make it very clear to ourselves and each other, that we are really on our own. And one way to do that is to point out where parts of the state have said this in kind of coded ways, and other times have said it in really explicit ways.

Some of us just talked about this on Death Panel about a court case in California, where the California Supreme Court pretty much said this really directly. So I'm going to stop in just a moment, but want to make two final quick points. All of this stuff is genuinely evil. It's really ghastly. And I think we need to bear in mind that a society that is an evil death machine produces powerful people who will be okay with the evil death machine and its effects. So we really need to recognize the ways in which people farther up the food chain, and I don't think it involves getting very far up the food chain before this kicks in, they really do not care about all of us social nobodies. I hate to bring this up, because it's an awful experience. But if you've ever seen a situation where there's an unhoused person begging for money, and you see other people walk by completely blanking them as if they don't exist, it's an awful thing to witness. The most powerful people in the system are like that, times 1000. Their capacity to blank all of us and our deaths and our suffering, and the deaths and suffering of our loved ones, is bottomless. And I think we need to really be aware of that.

And I think there's two elements of this. One, accurate perception of social reality. Two, seeing people as moral equals. The people who benefit from the system and the people who are paid to minimize COVID and other forms of social murder, they couldn't live with themselves if they understood capitalism's violence accurately, and if they saw the people who are capitalism's victims as their genuine moral equals. And there are a host of mechanisms. You can learn this at Brown under Ashish Jha. There are a host -- you can learn this at Harvard now under Rochelle Walensky. There are a host of mechanisms to train people to actively misunderstand social reality in convenient ways and to stop seeing social nobodies as their moral equals, akin to that awful blanking out of unhoused people. I think it's really important that we be aware of this ,so that we're aware of who we're dealing with as part of building the movement that we need.

That's my time. I'm a little over actually, I apologize. So I'm going to stop there. Thank you, everybody.

Phil Rocco 36:24
And now, Abby Cartus.

Abby Cartus 36:26
Hi, good morning, or I guess afternoon. And thanks everybody for being here. I'm going to keep my comments as brief as I can. I really just want to draw out a few things from Artie's and Nate's remarks to get into more deeply as we move into the discussion portion of this session. So the first thing that I want to talk about is this theoretical foundation that we're trying to build here. And this is not trivial, in my opinion. I think, as I will get into more very shortly, that solid analysis is the engine of good strategizing and effective tactics. And I don't think this is just limited to activism or organizing per se. I also think that social murder as a framework could be the theoretical basis for conducting better public health research in my field, which is epidemiology. My field sorely needs some kind of theoretical grounding, to understand what's going on with population health and how it relates, I think, to the larger social structure.

But something that I often hear being positioned kind of where I am, sort of straddling the world of public health and the world of the left, however we want to define that, is like, you know, why wasn't there more organizing around COVID? You know, why didn't XYZ people do XYZ thing when it seemed so obvious, you know, COVID really made all of these like mechanisms of social murder so visible. And I think that there's a sense of bafflement out there that I encounter quite often as to like why -- you know, it seems to make sense on paper that there would have been a massive social movement for health communism, but that hasn't really materialized.

I think that some of Nate's work and Artie's remarks pick up important threads that I want to kind of knit together about the reality of the situation and why what looks like it really makes sense on paper is maybe less so in real life.

So first, an understanding of the mechanisms of social murder. All the stuff that Nate was talking about, market dependence, pressure, competitive pressure among individual capitalist productive units, the valorization imperative, the organization of social reproduction of our ability to survive, on this basis, these, to me are the features of capitalism that generates social murder in the abstract, while the concrete forms look different, you know, at different places, and during different times. But I think it's really important for us to theorize this in the abstract, so that we have some kind of foundation for understanding events that get complicated quickly and are constantly changing. Second, I think that the social murder framework breaks us and by us, I mean, everyone, including scientists, out of this sort of static mode of thinking about complex social crises, like the pandemic. The thing about the pandemic, the thing about capitalism itself is that it's a process that is constantly in motion, and it's constantly changing. And third, sort of relatedly, understanding the role of the state in all of this. The state being subject to the same logic of capitalism as everything else, tends to resolve conflicting pressures on it in ways that are consistent with the logic of capital.

And I think, just as one example of this, I think a lot about the CDC's decision to shorten quarantine guidance in the middle of the Omicron wave as a classic example of this. You even had Fauci on TV saying, you know, we have to do this because the pressures on the state are so great, the state is the economy, and the economy is going to stop functioning if everyone who's sick is able to stay home for 10 days. I also think that it's really worthwhile to think critically about sort of popular media narratives about partisanship and about how COVID was only killing these Republicans who refused to get vaccination in these terms as well, right?

If we think -- Nate, in something that he wrote, quoted someone that I don't remember, as saying, you know, the state is kind of the political form of capitalist social relations, again, subject to the same logic and pressures as everything else. And I think that this really explains why we saw a nearly identical pandemic response between two presidential administrations under different parties. But the critical idea here is that the state will mediate the reorganization and the redistribution of the burden of social murder as long as the structural conditions that generate social murder, this abstract logic of capitalism, still obtain. So I know this is kind of abstract and like theoretical, I want to bring this all together and bring us to some questions for discussion by briefly touching on Nate's writing on E.P. Thompson. I'm name dropping E.P. Thompson, like punching above my weight at the Marxist conference. I've never read any of his books [laughter]. But Nate did a great analysis of E.P. Thompson's analysis of moral economy.

And I think this is a really fruitful way to, as Nate puts it, bridge structure and agency in thinking about the pandemic and thinking about social murder as an object of political analysis and action. What is structurally determined, and what is our range of options within the constraints that we're actually living in? So this idea of moral economy, this refers to the moral valence of economic activity. And what we call moral economy struggles break out when some aspect of that accepted moral economy, whether it's bread prices being sort of negotiable in the 1830s in England, or whether it's our understanding of what happens when you get sick and need to go to the doctor in 2021, when those sort of norms are upset or violated, you know, generating outrage that perhaps escalates to outright social conflict. These types of struggles, as Nate, I think so adeptly shows, tend to be forces for maintaining rather than disrupting social order, and what they basically express is a desire to return to some sort of pre-established normal that is basically compatible with the logic of capitalism.

And I think we saw this with the very, very justified outrage around this episode, early in the pandemic, where Tyson chicken plant managers, it was revealed that they were placing bets on how many of their employees would contract COVID, while they kept operations open in the very early days of the pandemic in 2020. Now, this was outrageous. It generated tremendous public outcry. And that public outcry, as far as I can tell, was channeled into individual lawsuits, by employees and their families that worked at the plant. Now, I hope they hose Tyson for all the money that they can. But in the meantime, workers have kept sustaining injuries and even being killed at work in Tyson plants, right up to this very day, you know, and perhaps operations have normalized from the disruption that COVID initially caused, but they've been normalized to a baseline that was unacceptable to begin with. And so, I think that kind of haggling over the particulars of class domination, the particulars of social murder, it might be absolutely necessary and justified, but I think we need to be really, really clear eyed about the totality, that pushing on one aspect of this complex system can cause another part of it to sort of bulge out.

And we need to be alert to how the state is kind of mediating this process of reorganizing social murder. I think we have nothing to lose and a lot to gain by thinking in these terms. I think we need to sort of properly think about and understand when we're waging a kind of moral economy struggle, you know, when we're seeking sort of more reformist reforms, and when and how we're mounting a challenge to the social form of capitalism itself. I share some of the bafflement that I touched on earlier because, you know, COVID, the pandemic, the general social crisis accompanying this moment in time, I think, profoundly exposed the mechanisms of social murder, which are very occluded under a lot of rhetoric and ideology in normal life. And I think, you know, this is part of why these expert COVID pundits are always trying to push us back to normal and wind the clock back to 2019, when, according to them, everything was good and fine and just with US health and healthcare and public health. So this is kind of bringing me to the end, and we're gonna transition into the discussion after this.

And I will close by -- I'm gonna just pose some important questions that I'm thinking about, in case it is generative for the discussion, you know, no pressure. And then I'll just close with a little bit of like a personal reflection, and then we can move on to the discussion. So the questions that I think are important to think about at this point in time are:

• What do sort of moral economy and social form struggles look like regarding COVID and health generally?

• Have there been moral economy struggles that have initiated the reorganization of social murder, mediated by the state or not, through the COVID pandemic?

• Did COVID strengthen or weaken labor in the aggregate and how did the state, the law, etc., mediate the reconfiguration occasioned by these struggles?

And then finally, this is just maybe interesting to me and no one else, but:

• How might this reorganisation of social murder look as it is displaced into the political economy practice and language of science?

Which I think is super important, like the knowledge production aspect of this, which I think COVID really kind of brought to the fore. So anyway, there was a lot here, I kind of just threw a lot at you. But hopefully, it'll be fodder for a great discussion. And I look forward really to developing some of these thoughts out further with the Death Panel, with Nate, and with all of you in discussion here.

And I just want to offer one final closing thought, sort of, I don't know, it's sort of personal maybe, which is that I am an epidemiologist, I am very trained to think in like abstract, large numbers. But this is not fucking abstract at all. Like every single data point in the aggregates that I study is a total human being and a totally infinite loss. So how do we talk about, you know, we talk about a million plus COVID deaths, like, what's a million times infinity, right? Like, there's no answer to that. So I believe, and I feel very strongly that this work is what we have to do. This is what we owe the dead and ourselves. I have felt the loneliness of this, and I know that you all have too, but there's so much depth and so much potential for solidarity in the burdens of suffering that capitalism tries to make us bear all alone. So I couldn't be more honored to be in struggle with all of you.

And I'll just close by saying that capitalism is killing us and it will continue to kill us until we kill it. Thank you.

[End of transcript, remainder of the session focused on discussion between panelists and participants which has not been shared to preserve privacy of participants]

Transcript by Kendra Kline. (Kendra is currently accepting freelance transcript work — email her if you need transcripts!)