Always three months to the gutter
Never three months to ascent
This is not a house of amateurs
This is done with full intent

Ashenspire, The Law of Asbestos

Our Long Weimar is coming to an end. We are in a period of transition in which the world spirit does not arrive on horseback, but rather sits within an unmarked van, or hunches over at the controls of a drone, from which the payload of all previous history is let loose upon its prey. This Spirit, this enemy, has not stopped, for they will not stop until they are stopped. Transitions are times of break and rupture, and yet also continuity. This is why fascism does not ‘refute’ capitalism simply by gaining the upper hand over liberalism in the institutions of government 

Fascism is a contradiction, a violent, disastrous form of libidinalised, socialised, institutionalised, self-destructive cruelty. It is made manifest in the programming of society, in which all production and reproduction are tied to the death of the present in favour of a new future, one for a fantasy of days past. As this contradiction, fascism presents itself as the inheritor, liberator, and conqueror of liberal capitalism. Fascism aims to liberate capitalist society from its constraints as supposedly imposed by the spectral forces of communism, the victories gained through class struggle, and issues from those groups it accuses of poisoning the well, the ground, the very metaphysic of humanity’s social nature as embodied in the myth of the nation.

Interwar socialist and communist attempts to theorise fascism were notoriously split on questions of rupture versus continuity. Namely, whether fascism was simply a continuation of liberal democracy’s capitalist and imperialist governance imposed from above by the bourgeoisie, or the result of a mass movement of the middle classes and associated conservative elements from the working class, the army, and the police (with whom elements of the bourgeoisie would eventually compromise or enthusiastically support in the transition to a fascist state).¹

To accept that fascism is a contradiction is to embrace what David Renton calls the ‘dialectical theory of fascism’, in which fascism is understood simultaneously as mass movement and as reactionary ideology which is allied with the ruling class, the bourgeoisie, but is not simply wielded by it as a means of the continuity of capitalist government:

“One advantage of this theory was that it seemed to fit the facts. Clearly, fascism was linked to capitalism; it emerged only in capitalist societies, and inside these societies it sided with the capitalist class against the working class. However fascism was also independent of both capitalist and pre-capitalist elites, thus even while allying itself with capitalism, it attacked the bourgeoisie as parasitical and put itself forward as a force that would protect the little man against big business.”²

Drawing on the work of Clara Zetkin, Renton highlights that fascism is an attempt to articulate a mass politics in which the class antagonism of a society is dissolved in the ideological constellation of the nation, yet its contradictory character means that it cannot erase the ground of those same antagonisms, it cannot abolish capitalism itself. To invoke the distinction between the world itself and its ordering, or between world and cosmos, fascism aims to offer a new world within the same cosmos, which it cannot ultimately do. If it cannot abolish capitalism, then its ‘ruptures’ with capitalism instead rely on the desires, both massified and elite, which fascism composes into the living force of its own brand of racial-capitalist cruelty. 

As states in the 21^st century make their transition to fascism, or allow themselves to become increasingly fascistic, I believe that one point of inevitable continuity is the practice of social murder. This is an intuition of despair, the intellectual transfiguration of a bruise left by an unnamed policeman in the midst of slow political defeat. Thankfully, the ‘path of despair’ may be the road to some kind of truth. To uncover this truth, we need to investigate the concept of social murder.

Towards a Philosophy of Social Murder

The term ‘social murder’ was first coined by Engels in his study The Condition of the Working Class in England, written during his stay in Manchester from 1842-44. The rhetorical force of his argument has rendered the section on social murder as one of the most recognisable passages in all of Engels’ works:

“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 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 life—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.”³

In a footnote added to a later edition of the work, and dated 1886, Engels provides the following elucidation as to what he means by ‘society’, as regards the agent of this murder:

“When as here and elsewhere I speak of society as a responsible whole, having rights and duties, I mean, of course, the ruling power of society, the class which at present holds social and political control, and bears, therefore, the responsibility for the condition of those to whom it grants no share in such control. This ruling class in England, as in all other civilized countries, is the bourgeoisie.”⁴

Engels’ framing of social murder is in the form of a juridical charge, an accusation made to a rhetorical tribunal. I cannot help but wonder to whom he believes he is speaking. Given the book was written in German, for German readers, and was not translated into English until 1887, the book was not aimed at the British themselves nor their government. Despite the initial dedication of the book to the working men of England, Engels is addressing his fellow German revolutionaries. He was writing during the ‘Vormärz’ period, the years preceding the revolutionary upheavals of 1848 across central and western Europe. Engels did not see himself as making a paternalistic appeal to the British government on behalf of their labouring masses. He is not appealing to the conscience of the ruling class. Rather, he disregards the British state as something completely immune to such appeals, recognising that it has been completely captured by the perpetrators of the very crime he accuses them of committing. In a dispatch to the Rheinische Zeitung from 1842, he describes the House of Commons as “a corporation alien to the people, elected by means of wholesale bribery”, which continuously tramples the will of the people, and is completely uninfluenced by popular opinion on pressing issues.⁵

Engels is not appealing to the conscience of the bourgeoisie, he is not even appealing to the proletarians living in England, for what he has learned he has in part learned from them. He believes that their victory is assured, because the situation is so dire that “the fear of death from starvation will be stronger than fear of the law” and hence the British proletariat will inevitably revolt.⁶ Rather, his appeal is to the people of Germany as capitalism starts to take hold in Europe. Engels returns from Manchester with a warning, it could, and will, happen here. The British bourgeoisie are convicted in absentia, and Engels’ case for the prosecution is built not only on his own testimony as a witness to the lives of those proletarians in Manchester, but on British governmental statistics on mortality—both infant and adult—on those living and labouring in industrial urban centres.

In order to make the charge stick, we must look at the accused. Engels does not accuse a government of murder in the sense of individuals within a cabinet of legislators. Engels makes this clearer in a note added to the German edition of 1982, when he notes that “I have spoken of the bourgeoisie as a class… all such facts as refer to individuals serve merely as evidence of the way of thinking and acting of a class.”⁷ One might here object that the ‘capitalist class’ is a mere abstraction, that each bourgeois acts as his own individual, and each often has contrary interests to the other. However, their competition with each other means that they are competing as individuals within the same social position. They only come into conflict with each other as opposed owners of capital, as individual capitalists, and they only compete in this way because they belong to this class of proprietors. Each defends their share of capital and its profit. They do not simply defend it from the appropriations of labourers outside of their class, but also from each other. Yet their conflict requires mediation in each case, such that their property becomes recognised as theirs and that their ownership becomes enforceable against its violation in the form of theft. The alienation and exchange of property, of monies, of goods, requires institutions such as contracts, and something to enforce them. It is in all of their interests that the owners of capital sacrifice their immediate interests in the expropriation of each other, such that they can maintain their status as owners in the first place. This status does not simply require the existence of mediations and adjudications in contractual disputes, but also requires the very institution of private property itself to be defended.. For this, their saviour is the state, whose role Nate Holdren aptly summarises in his own study on social murder:

“Competition among capitalists plays out across sectors of the economy as well as among capitalists in the same sector. Capitalists thus do not share a common interest that disciplines their behaviour. No capitalist takes the role of capital-in-general. That role must be played by the state.”⁸

The ruling class, after all, is not simply the capital-owning class in an analytic or definitional sense. It has not always been the case that the bourgeoisie have been the ruling class, otherwise we would never have had a bourgeois revolution like that in France and all across Europe. The capitalist state is the mediator and guarantor of bourgeois social relations and their continued existence within its own zone of operation, which includes the jurisdiction of its own polity as well as its sphere of influence and position in relation to other states. The state is the relative nationalisation of the bourgeoisie at the same time as provides a means of its internationalisation backed by the force of law and a promise of relative stability given its institutional perseverance through successive generations of individual administrators. Its methods are policing, war, counter-insurgency, economic regulation (or the withholding thereof), the provision of contracts and the opening up of new markets (this includes the liquidation of institutions of the state itself through privatisation), propagandising, the adjudication of disputes, and the prosecution and punishment of theft.

The state can itself be the means of social murder on behalf of the capitalist class, or it can simply be the mediator of those practices which engender its continuation in favour of the interests of capital. The state that generates reports into its own mortality rates in order to understand the effects of its own economic policies, is a state that is institutionally self-conscious as to what it is doing. This information is supposed to be informative, that is, the reports note differences in mortality rates that should make a difference to policy. ‘Should’ here is of course a mere plea, but that is far from Engels’ mode of argument. The state, in its role as the servant of the ruling class, and through which this class serves and reproduces itself as the ruling class—is the self-consciousness of the bourgeoisie. Each state presents itself as one formed by the history of nationalism and the strands of continuity from its preceding feudal ruling dynasties. States, as nation states, formally rely on international recognition from one or more parties, namely other nation states. The interaction of each nation state with other such states simultaneously sets and supersedes the limits of the nation in the international relations of trade and the management of flows of capital, commodities, and labour power. The institutions of international trade, be it those of competing hegemonies such as the US or China, alongside transnational institutions such as the IMF and the World Bank, are the mediator of the entire global bourgeoisie, the international system of capitalism.

Individual capitalists may be too callous or distracted to know (or care) that what they are doing is killing people, with ecological destruction, poverty wages, medical exhaustion, exposure to racialised, sexualised violence, and the proliferation of dangerous and discriminatory ideologies all being rampant. However, in the state, they nonetheless achieve a collective cognition, not simply as a class, but as a ruling class immersed in the institutions of government. The state confirms that the capitalists, as a class, know that they know, and that despite the best efforts of “honourable exceptions”, the wheels of death keep turning in those dark satanic mills. The state, as the self-consciousness of the ruling class, records itself in such obvious bloodlust for all to see in the universal and published medium of written script, and the bastards keep going. The charge of social murder is a charge of totality, that both in and for itself, the capitalist state knows that its production and reproduction guarantees such murder by its very actuality.

This is why social murder is a revolutionary concept, because it is fundamentally anti-reformist. There is no liberalism compatible with an analysis of social murder that does not find itself implicated, and we should note that the ease with which liberalism denies genocide is a trained habit from the ease with which it shrugs off the slaughter of its own history, even within its own territory. Liberal reformism, including the national welfarism of social democracy, is the demand for less (noticeable) murder. It charges governments as murderers, rather than the classes and class structures which manifest in said governments. We can see this as clear as day in the liberal Zionist hatred of Netanyahu and his cabinet, as if he was miraculously in office during the Nakba of 1948. Nonetheless, given that liberal reformism, welfarism, and so forth enjoyed a certain degree of victory following the British Factory Acts of the 1840s, the revolutions of 1848, and the post-war compromise in Europe, there is a historical truth to the notion that the state can intervene in the process of social murder.

As Holdren notes, the state can intervene to mitigate and redistribute the murder, but it cannot abolish it entirely. When the state “mitigates one specific manner of killing, it does not do so in order to end social murder per se but rather to keep society capitalist and thus murderous.”⁹ The bourgeois state cannot abolish this slaughter because the existence of the bourgeois class is itself a kind of social murder. If everyone had the means of their own reproduction such that they did not need to rely on money to survive, then capital would have no workers, there would be no valorisation, and no circulation, there would be no necessity for the worker to sell their labour power.

It may be objected that in certain states it seems at least formally possible to erect a welfare state strong enough to provide a safety net—this is the often idealised image of the ‘Nordic social democracy’—but this, at best, would be little more than the minimisation of social murder internal to a nation or region and its externalisation through the circuits of international trade and imperialist competition. A lower rate of social murder (an abhorrent phrase) would arguably boost the population base of a nation’s economy and a social safety net would allow for them to be reproduced both as workers and as individual consumers for a broader domestic goods market in so-called luxury items, but this consumption is itself a labour of circulation and the production of metrics, at the same time as high demand leads to a further squeezing and social murder of the underpaid labourers across the global supply chain. In the globalisation of social murder as the globalisation of capitalist social relations, each state becomes a partner in the social murder that its production and consumption necessitates. The accusation of social murder hence generates itself throughout the history of capitalism as a critique of the order of the world. The inter- and trans-national management of capital flows is the hence management of social murder rates.However, the management of capital is at first only implicitly this management insofar as the management of the capitalist process finds its expression in such a process of social murder. When the state or an international mediator explicitly intervenes to prevent certain forms of social murder, it often does so in response to societal pressure from social movements. However, as the state is the societal mediator on behalf of the capitalist class, it mediates its own interaction with these movements in a form that is fundamentally reformist and symptomatic in seeking to partially remedy the effects of class domination rather than to eliminate the root cause. At the same time, the centrality of the state to dominant theories of political change leads to a relative depoliticisation of these causes as they are presented to the state in a manner receivable to its own norms of operation and change, which pre-empt the possibility of their total abolition (in order to abolish social murder, the capitalist state would have to abolish itself and the class it serves).¹⁰¹ Overall, what we can say about the role of the capitalist state in social murder is that it serves as the manager of its distribution and intensity, and as such capitalist state societies mandate social murder as a practice in the institutionalisation of capitalism. Fascist states, insofar as they are capitalist, therefore engender a new distribution of socialised homicide.

The Accursed Share: From Murder to Militarisation and Back Again

This distribution is determined, as it always is, in tandem with the libidinal and ideological attractors at work in the movement of fascism, as it is determined by a relationship between their ideas in media and their mediation within the mass base of the movement itself, which has its elite input in the form of platform owners, newspaper editors, and ideological entrepreneurs who push further radicalisations across both poles the of mass base and elite cadres. For example, we can see this in the push for the relaxation or withdrawal of preventative forms of care such as vaccinations, increasing the exposure of those deemed abnormal or ‘impure’ to death in a way socially enforced by the state and the ideological apparatuses.¹¹ Fascist forces treat the distribution of social murder as a therapeutic form of economic, libidinal, and material redistribution, a bloodletting for the health of the social body of the Volk. One of the most explicit images comes from those media which promoted the Nazi eugenic policy, where a cover of the Neues Volk magazine once read “Volksgenosse, das is auch dein Geld” [comrades of the race, that is also your money], referencing the price of 60,000 Reichmarks that it supposedly cost to provide what was then meagre and often inadequate care to disabled people.¹²

Eugenics does not begin with fascism however. To distinguish the two requires an additional element that is more openly political, less clinical and more spectacular, in which the peculiar institutions of liberal capitalism become not simply sites of population management but of political enjoyment. What I mean by this is that the fascist distribution of social murder is simultaneously its affirmation as a (re)distribution of cruelty in line with the imagination of the race and/or nation. The fascist of the dominant class offers a share in the feeling of power to their mass base, with the promise that they have been wronged, that the contradiction is not one of class but of the nation versus hostile or ‘degenerate’ elements within the nation, and that they are all therefore victims of the same injustice. We can see this in the manner that fascism embraces the idea that the nation has gone ‘soft’, that it has been too generous to those it deems weak, and that as a result the nation has itself become—as in the term embraced by Mussolini—’proletarian’, as if it were the nationalists who were the ‘true’ working class, serving the tyrannous demands of the lower beings of other nations and sacrificing their national vitality. In doing so, fascism elevates those it considers lower whilst simultaneously placing on them a debt to the nation, constituted by their very existence and continued social reproduction within it. In doing so, this reversal allows for an entry into a logic of cruelty, in which the oppressed pay for the sins of their real oppressors. Instead of the abolition of the wage system, the wages of the cruelty of the nation, of whiteness, of cisheteropatriarchy, of Christian supremacy, are distributed:

“Instead of a direct compensation for the damage done (i.e. instead of money, land, possessions of whatever sort), a sort of pleasure is conceded to the creditor as a form of repayment and recompense—the pleasure of being able to vent his power without a second thought on someone who is powerless… This enjoyment will be prized all the more highly, the lower the creditor stands in the social order, and can easily appear to him as the choicest morsel, even as a foretaste of a higher rank. By means of the ‘punishment’ inflicted on the debtor, the creditor partakes of a privilege of the masters: at last, he too has the opportunity to experience the uplifting feeling of being entitled to despise and mistreat someone as ‘beneath him’—or at least, in cases where the actual power and execution of punishment has already passed to the ‘authorities’, to see this person despised and mistreated.”¹³

As Alberto Toscano has argued, contemporary fascisms engage in a fantasy of loss, by which the hostile other has not only stolen the enjoyments of the existing order (apparently, we cannot make jokes, eat breakfast, be a man, drink, smoke, etc., because of ‘woke’) they have also stolen the enjoyment of its inherent cruelty.¹⁴ Economic and political supremacy cannot even be enjoyed because of the paltry elements of representation which maintain the fragile ‘peace’ of racial capitalism, leading to the absurdity which declares that to point out the racism, transphobia, fascism of their operatives is itself a form of oppression (because why be on top if you cannot enjoy the transgressions victory supposedly affords you?). 

Via the construction of a national in-group, fascism encourages an investment of its base’s enjoyment such that the two become identical, that Trump’s enjoyment becomes theirs through the cruelty it inflicts on others, and as state capacity deploys itself to intensify this cruelty, its lower-tier agents themselves are marshalled to participate within it, through rallies, through street violence, through state and media participation, and through joining militia such ICE. Ultimately, this investment in violence creates a surplus of means for the production of violence, which must intensify its deployment inwards until it reaches its own inner limit and the borders of its enterprise of social murder. This limit is that of the social within the nation, and hence beyond this limit fascist violence can only extend outwards, to the international relation of those it brands as competing national or anti-national forces.

Fascism’s relation to social murder, itself something that characterises the social as the life of one body of the race-nation, the elect, the ‘true’ political body, wields this murder as a purgative form of redistribution. It wields the violence of capital and makes it explicit, nationalises it, and does so in a manner that portrays itself as the preparation for a war that is itself the opening salvo of its conflict. Because fascism cannot erase the fundamental violence of the capitalist order of which it is a symptom, fascism must and can only build itself to internally police and enforce this distribution as a form of redistribution. This can only take the movement so far however, as the mass base cannot be satisfied at the same time as the liquidation of internal capitals cannot satisfy the fascist wing of capital. Social murder is hence the first preparation and promise of fascism’s conclusion if it fails to be defeated. Its nihilistic redistribution and expansion of social murder is one that ultimately that sets its socius, its body, against other bodies of people inhabiting land it sees as ripe for living space, as its ‘health’ expands into a mockery of martial strength—this is the exportation of the surplus of internal militarisation in the form of external war. 

This dialectic of internalisation and externalisation is not itself limited to social murder, nor to war between nations. It is libidinal, and it manifests within the psyche of living individuals. The externalisation of this promise of cruelty occurs amongst individuals recruited to the cause of the nation from within the nation itself. This is the externalisation of fascism’s libidinal economy not merely as social murder but as the murderous waging of an attempted civil war. This cruelty is redistributive in the social sense, but is also taken by individuals as a form of retribution. ICE agents are promised revenge against the nebulous Other which they blame for their own material and emotional destitution: migrants, women, queer people, and anyone who stands against them. Joining ICE is a promise of cruelty, that you will feel the other suffer, that their murder will not simply be social, but yours to enact. The ICE agent becomes the national project in and for themselves. 

The agency of social murder becomes that of the agent, and they achieve the same consciousness as the state they serve. Namely, that they know their order is murderous, they take pleasure in knowing that they know, and they delight in the execution of this order. This has become most explicit in the form of the executions of those opposing ICE raids such as Keith Porter Jr, Alex Pretti, and Renee Good. Further, they delight not only in being recognised as cruel and malicious (the coveted ‘liberal tears’), but also in the abduction of human beings and their transportation to conditions which weaponise social privation and destitution as actively violent and murderous forces. This is the violence of the concentration camp, of deportation, and of depriving people of friends and family members who help them to survive in capitalist society. In the latter case I am speaking of the social murder of Wael Tarabishi, who died after his father Maher, his sole caregiver, was stolen from him by the fascists.¹⁵ We are dealing with an enemy who affirms the implicit evils of capitalism, social murder, as an explicit weapon of violent purification. The enemy enjoys this wickedness, its targets are the poor and the vulnerable, its enemies are solidarity, and empathy, those bonds which can form the subjectivity proper both to the abolition of ICE, and to the abolition of the economic and psychic complex which birthed it–the social murder of capital.

What the analysis of social murder brings to the study of fascism, I argue, is the inextricable relation of fascist cruelty to capitalist violence. It does so by treating fascism as a political force which modifies and intensifies the deathliness of capitalist social relations, both internal and external to the nation state. Fascism transforms social murder into a new subjectivity, it makes the evils of capitalism into its weapon, its own ecstasy. The task of fighting fascism is to deny them this fulfilment, to reveal the promises of fascism as impossible to fulfil, and to root out the cruelty at its heart, the cruelty of capital. Fascism will not be stopped until it is stopped. As social murder is transformed into a carnival of ecstatic malice, only the collective action of a superior force can overwhelm it, a force which fights for the dead as much as they fight for the living. If what horrifies us about fascism is its murderous political program, then this terror must also be extended back towards the conditions which spawned it. To understand fascism’s political relation to distributions of social murder is to understand capitalism as a system which always bears within itself the capacity for fascism, and that this latent quality is not something that can be reformed out of it. A liberal antifascism may indeed win the battle against Nazism, but only a consummate anticapitalism can truly bring our current war to a lasting end. Only communism can win the peace.

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1. These constitute what David Renton calls the ‘Left’ and the ‘Right’ theories of fascism articulated by Amadeo Bordiga and Giovanni Zibordi respectively. See David Renton, Fascism, (Pluto Press, 2020).  ↩︎
2. David Renton, Fascism, (Pluto Press, 2020), 77. ↩︎
3. Engels, The Condition of the Working Class in England, (Oxford, 2009), 106-7. ↩︎
4. Ibid, note 1 to page 106.  ↩︎
5. Engels, Karl Marx & Friedrich Engels Collected Works, Volume 2, (Lawrence and Wishart, 1975), 371. ↩︎
6. Ibid, 374. ↩︎
7. Engels, The Condition of the Working Class in England, (Oxford, 2009), note 1 to page 297. ↩︎
8. Nate Holdren, “Social Murder: Capitalism’s Systematic and State-Organized Killing”, in R. Hunter et al. (eds.), Marxism and the Capitalist State, (Palgrave Macmillan, 2023) pp.185-207, 190. ↩︎
9. Ibid, 204. ↩︎
10. Ibid, 203-4. ↩︎
11. See Branko Marcetic, “You Know Who Else Opposed Vaccine Mandates? Hitler.”, Jacobin, (2021), https://jacobin.com/2021/09/vaccine-mandates-covid-pandemic-german-nazi-inoculation-policy ↩︎
12. https://research.calvin.edu/german-propaganda-archive/posters/neuesvolk.jpg ↩︎
13. Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, (Oxford, 1998), Essay 2, Section 5. ↩︎
14. Alberto Toscano, Late Fascism, (Verso, 2023), 151. ↩︎
15. Charlie Herbert, “Disabled man died after ICE detains his dad who was his sole caregiver”, The London Economic, (2026), https://www.thelondoneconomic.com/news/disabled-man-dies-after-ice-detains-his-dad-who-was-his-sole-caregiver-402876/ ↩︎

Adam C. Jones