“Social murder” is a form of homicide that takes place through relatively invisible social processes involving collective rather than individual responsibility. The concept is controversial because it attributes murder to “society” while relying on an unconventional conception of murder: society intends murder, and society kills, where society is identified with a ruling class that controls the political system. What’s controversial here is that social murder kills mostly by omission rather than commission, and is perpetrated by a class rather than by individuals. Both assumptions flout the conventional understanding of the intentionality and causality of murder.

A recent survey of the literature on social murder suggests that the term has come (back) into currency–to whatever extent it has–within the last decade or so. Apparently much of this comeback can be attributed to its having been revived in British political discourse after the Grenfell Tower Fire of 2017. The fire took place under the Conservative government of Theresa May; the Labour Party in turn described the fire as a socially murderous result of Conservative austerity policies. The term is now being revived to describe and justify Luigi Mangione’s killing of UHC CEO Brian Thompson, the point being that health insurance denials are a kind of social murder, so that Mangione’s killing was a justified response to them. 

There’s much to be said about this concept and its various applications, but in this post I want to make a semi-pedantic side point about who coined the term. If semi-pedantic side points aren’t your thing, well, you’re socially dead to me.

It’s sometimes said that the phrase “social murder” was coined by Friedrich Engels in his early work, The Condition of the Working Class in England (1845). The claim is explicitly stated as fact in the Wikipedia entry on “social murder,” and is implicitly made in many other places in the literature on social murder. I can’t say that I’ve done a clean sweep of the social murder literature–not that it’s that big– but after some time with it, I’ve seen the pattern often enough to figure out that it is one.

The pattern is something like this. Commentators start by fast-forwarding to chapter 5 of Engels’s Condition, and focus on the second paragraph of that chapter. They then quote the first three sentences of that paragraph, omitting without comment a footnote that appears within the second sentence (added in a later edition of the book). The quoted excerpt ends with the dramatic third sentence, “But murder it remains.” Though the phrase “social murder” appears nowhere in the quoted passage, the natural referent of “it” would appear to be social murder. The reader is thus led to conclude that this is–or must be–the passage where Engels coined the phrase.* 

But the inference is mistaken. The fourth sentence right after the last one quoted begins as follows:

I have now to prove that society in England daily and hourly commits what the working-mens’ organs, with perfect correctness, characterize as social murder…(Condition of the Working Class, pp. 106-7)

So the phrase originated with the working-mens’ organizations, not Engels. 

Even more explicitly, a passage earlier in the book describes social murder at length and then puts things this way: 

But indirectly, far more than directly, many [working people] have died of starvation, where continued want of proper nourishment has called forth fatal illness, when it has produced such debility that causes which might otherwise have remained inoperative brought on severe illness and death. The English working men call this ‘social murder’, and accuse our whole society of perpetrating this crime perpetually. Are they wrong? (Condition of the Working Class, p. 38)

It’s clear, then, that Engels didn’t coin the phrase “social murder,” and didn’t claim to. He got it from the working people he was studying, who were using it well before he came into contact with them. It’s not clear whether or not they coined it (or who did), but it’s clear that Engels didn’t. What’s remarkable is not so much that commentators explicitly say that Engels coined it (some do, most don’t), but that they fail to make clear that he didn’t coin it, and said he didn’t. 

So far, what we have here is merely a pedantic point (or a merely pedantic point): commentators say or imply that Engels coined “social murder,” but he didn’t. What saves this point from pure pedantry is that the error involved isn’t a trivial one. 

The Grenfell Tower Fire. Photo credit: Natalie Oxford, originally posted on Twitter.

The impression commentators give is that Engels, reflecting on the condition of the working class in England, came of his own accord to the conclusion that members of the working class were victims of social murder. Having come to this conclusion, he then set out to conceptualize and prove the claim. 

By contrast, the impression Engels gives is that the working class, having been the actual victim of social murder, was compelled by that fact to coin a phrase to describe their own victimization. Meanwhile, Engels–himself neither a member of the working class nor a victim of social murder–might never have thought of conceptualizing the phenomenon, except for the fact that he spent twenty months in disciplined, self-imposed exile among working people who did.

On the commentators’ account, Engels is the hero of the piece: we owe him the concept. On Engels’s account, the working class is the hero of the piece: we owe them the concept. 

Though this is not a deal-breaking difference, it’s not a trivial one, either: it addresses an ambivalence at the heart of the book. The book begins with a dedicatory preface to the “To the Working Classes of Great Britain.” 

Working Men!
To you I dedicate a work, in which I have tried to lay before my German Countrymen a faithful picture of your condition, of your sufferings and struggles, of your hopes and prospects. I have lived long enough amidst you to know something about your circumstances; I have devoted to their knowledge my most serious attention. I have studied the various official and non-official documents as far as I was able to get hold of them–I have not been satisfied with this, I wanted more than a mere abstract knowledge of my subject, I wanted to see you in your own homes, to observe you in your everyday life, to chat with you on your condition and grievances, to witness your struggles against the social and political power of your oppressors. I have done so: I forsook the company and the dinner-parties, the port wine and champagne of the middle classes, and devoted my leisure almost exclusively to the intercourse with plain Working Men…(Condition of the Working Class, p. 9)

The implication here is that the English working class knows “the condition of the working class in England” better than Engels does. The book in some sense reports what they’ve taught him about social murder, not what he has to teach them. 

In what sense is tricky, however. The preface is dedicated to the working classes of Britain, who are addressed in the second person. This form of address gives the reader the impression that Engels is not just addressing them, but crediting them with teaching him whatever it is he learned during the time he spent among them. Yet in an obvious way, he is the author of the book, not them. And on reflection it becomes clear that he was the one capable of writing it, not them.

The book, then, can’t be a mere transcription of the thoughts of “working men.” It has to give order to those thoughts, specifically Engels’s order. So while they’re teaching him what they know, he’s offering up a polished version of their knowledge. It seems reasonable enough to say that the two parties are teaching one another, but also reasonable to say that there are some epistemic asymmetries involved. One asymmetry puts Engels in the lead: he has an expository and explanatory skill that the working men lack. Still, that’s compatible with acknowledging the steep learning curve Engels has had to climb to bring himself to epistemic par with the working class. So a second asymmetry runs the other way: the working class is the privileged source of the knowledge Engels is reporting at second hand. Their knowledge is first-hand knowledge in a way his is not, and for that reason both active and passive in a way that his is not. They suffer and struggle to get it; he doesn’t.  

One implication of Engels’s message is that if you want to understand social murder, then unless you’re a victim of it yourself, you have to do as Engels did. You have to travel to the scene of the crime and spend some time there. Having gotten there, you need what Bertrand Russell called “knowledge by acquaintance” of the crime, even if the best you can do is to infer the causality of the crime from the effects on its victims. A merely “abstract knowledge” won’t do. The bourgeois intellectual who theorizes about social murder from afar–whose relation to the facts is more imaginative than experiential–will end up missing the salient facts, and end up prematurely dismissing the existence of the phenomenon altogether. Whereas someone who’s really been there will grasp what eludes the armchair theorist. The sheer amassing of lived detail will convey to such a person what armchair theorizing can’t. 

Pierre Adolphe Valette, “Bailey Bridge, Manchester,” cover illustration of the Oxford edition of Engels’s Condition (photo credit: Manchester Art Gallery Shop)

The reverse side of the same coin is that when it comes to human affairs, we should beware of any academic discipline or form of inquiry that deprecates field work, the work of first-hand immersion in some lived experience that’s the object of inquiry. Field work comes naturally to anthropologists, sociologists, psychologists, journalists, and creative writers, but either reluctantly or not at all to philosophers, political scientists, economists, literary theorists, and historians. Members of the first group tend to see value in immersion-experiences of the sort Engels engaged in to write The Condition of the Working Class; members of the second tend not to.  The first group may, of course, have epistemic blind spots of other sorts, even blind spots that can’t be cured by immersion. But when it comes to the blind spots produced by over-abstraction, those can only be remedied by first-hand immersion in the target phenomenon. 

The upshot for health care should be fairly obvious. Suppose that you specifically want to understand social murder in health care. In that case, it helps to have spent time on an EMS crew, or in a hospital, a post-acute facility, a hospice, a clinic, a rehab facility, the denials division of an insurance company, a regulatory agency, or among the chronically or acutely ill generally (or as one of these people), or in a morgue.  If you don’t do that, you need at least to listen to those who do, and listen to them in the full variety in which they come. Eventually, Engels implies, a person willing to devote what would otherwise have been leisure hours to painful immersion in tedious detail will come to see patterns invisible to others. And then, both crime and consequence stand revealed–assuming there is one.

The advice, I take it, works either way–whether social murder is taking place or not. And that points to a potential problem within Engels’s mode of argument. There’s a danger to treating the sheer accumulation of horrifying experience as the equivalent of a sound argument for some contested conclusion. Horror is a necessary experience–it reveals something that ingenuous people systematically miss about the world–but it’s not by itself a cogent argument to the most horrible conclusion you can reach about something.  The nature and causes of horror don’t necessarily reveal themselves by sheer immersion in horror, any more than the nature and causes of disease reveal themselves by sheer immersion in illness. It’s a long way from horror to accusation, and from accusation to proof of guilt. 

It helps, I think, to leaven Engels’s communism with Mill’s liberalism, as expressed in the second chapter of Mill’s On Liberty. As Mill makes clear, sometimes the most gripping propositions are also the most contestable ones.

He who knows only his own side of the case knows little of that. His reasons may be good, and no one may have been able to refute them. But if he is equally unable to refute the reasons on the opposite side, if he does not so much as know what they are, he has no ground for preferring either option. (On Liberty, ch. 2)

Mill’s advice has come to seem like an eye-rolling, sentimental cliché, but is often easier talked about than accomplished. The difficult implication is this: Even in the grips of horror, we owe it to ourselves not to lose ourselves in horror even as we immerse ourselves in it. We owe it to ourselves, in other words, to seek out horror, to take a frontal look at it, even to expose ourselves to it in apparently masochistic ways, as Engels does, but also to examine it with as much detachment as is compatible with acknowledging its reality and understanding its nature, á la Mill. We are in some sense obliged to consider both sides–all sides–of what horrifies us, be it genocide, terrorism, or social murder. That’s never our first inclination, but truth-guided cognition demands that it make an appearance. 

Engels’s insight pays homage to the fact that the world contains its share of crime scenes, chambers of horror whose existence is systematically evaded by respectable practitioners of cloistered virtue. Mill’s proviso pays homage to the fact that while a crime scene may be the starting point of an inquiry, it’s not the ideal place to conduct one. We learn something by reflecting on each insight taken separately, but can only get anywhere worth going by putting the two together. 

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*As typically rendered, the three-sentence passage reads as follows:

When one individual inflicts bodily injury upon another, such injury 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 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 commission. But murder it remains (Condition, pp. 106-107). 

I’ve omitted Engels’s 1887 footnote to “society” in the second sentence, which clarifies that society is to be identified with the ruling class. 

Thanks to Nathan Byrd and Jenny Logan for pressing the points that led to this post. Thanks to Izzeldine Aboueilash, Alison Bowles, Susan Gordon, Asia Khawaja, Kate Herrick, Chris Sciabarra, Carol Welsh, and Ahsan Zafar for inspiring it in different ways.