Jeff Shantz Avoidable deaths of capitalism. Lives ended prematurely through policy or the pursuit of profit. In his wide-ranging analysis of working class life in Victorian England,
The Condition of the Working Class in England, Friedrich Engels makes use of a term from labour circles of the day – social murder – to name the processes by which the day-to-day dynamics of capitalism kill working class people. In his words, “the class
which at present holds social and political control [capital, the bourgeoisie] places hundreds of proletarians in such a position that they inevitably meet a too early and an unnatural death.” Unlike the street crimes of the poor, which are severely punished
by criminal justice systems, social murder is carried out by economic and political powerholders against the exploited. And these social murders are not punished; they are licensed and legitimized operations of capitalism. Engels explains social murder as follows:
Community organizers have revived the notion of social murder with regard to the actions or inactions of governments in creating or maintaining the conditions that end in what are otherwise
avoidable deaths of working-class people. Examples include both actively harmful social policies – like drug prohibition and criminalization of sex work – and policy failures such as lack of essential services like proper long-term care resources, for example. Over a few weeks in June and July 2021, capitalist climate crisis and government failures came together to leave hundreds of people dead in British Columbia. A climate emergency heat dome
over much of southern and central British Columbia showed at high cost the intersection of capital-created crises (a climate change extreme heat event) and the cruelty of government practice, resulting in potentially hundreds of avoidable deaths and the annihilation
of an entire village along with ecological catastrophe. These might be called acts of social murder.
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