Introduction

In 1845, Friedrich Engels first described the phenomenon of ‘social murder’ as:

“…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 a sword or a bullet; when it deprives thousands of the necessities 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 […] its deed is murder just as surely as the deed of the single individual; […but] 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.”¹

This form of violence has been redefined variously in the neoliberal era as institutional neglect, slow violence, violent bureaucracy, or slow death: “slow” describes “a violence that occurs gradually and out of sight, a violence of delayed destruction that is dispersed across time and space, an attritional violence that is typically not viewed as violence at all”²; “bureaucratic” refers to its seemingly quotidian nature, mundane even.

It is important to clarify that the function of social murder is not to wage unlimited war on the proletariat – the bourgeoisie obviously requires the social reproduction of the class it exploits in order to continue its exploitation. Nor is social murder visited equally or indiscriminately across the proletariat; rather, specific sub-populations are preferentially targeted – for discipline, impoverishment, segregation, or extermination. In this way a surplus class is constituted as both “socially dead”³ and “marked out for wearing out”⁴. We find useful the naming of this process by Chris Grover as “violent proletarianisation“⁵; i.e. the use (and threat) of structural violence is to force people into commodifying their labour power. He argues in fact this process is the primary force which simultaneously constitutes not just the surplus class but the working class as well; in other words, defining who is able to sell their labour vs who is not.

Disabled people are a central part of the surplus class, being failed subjects of violent proletarianisation and subsequently victims of social murder. In Health Communism, Beatrice Adler-Bolton & Artie Vierkant argue that the “production of death under capitalism” is the “ultimate conclusion of capital’s violence” and identify the surplus class as being particularly vulnerable to social murder.⁶ We reframe the intention here more explicitly: rather than the surplus class being happenstantially overrepresented victims of social murder due to their vulnerability, that vulnerability is itself socially produced and thus capitalist policies which kill vulnerabilised people function just as if they were expressly created to target them, regardless of the stated intention.

We view social murder as a highly dynamic process, deploying a range of strategies with varying intensities against shifting definitions of non-desirable groups at different times. Perhaps the most commonly witnessed face of social murder is austerity: a form of structural violence rooted within the capitalist mode of production and social reproduction, it by design produces living conditions in which life for all people cannot be sustained. A core function of neoliberalism is to expand social murder via austerity, dismantling the relatively generous state interventions of the post-war era. However, we argue that recent years have seen a sharper expansion of neoliberalism’s social murder, manifested both in the scope and severity of state violence.

We illustrate this with three concrete examples relevant to the UK today: i) Labour’s brutal welfare cuts planned via their Green Paper, ii) the latest attempt at legalising assisted suicide brought forward by Kim Leadbeater’s Voluntary Assisted Dying Bill, and iii) governmental mismanagement of the ongoing SARS-CoV-2 / COVID-19 pandemic. We frame all three policies as targeted acts of social murder, contextualising them within a Foucauldian biopolitical/necropolitical framework and describing their eugenic function. We also suggest some immediate methods for the proletariat to combat the rising tide of social murder, such as avoiding the bourgeois smokescreen of economic argumentation and reducing compliance with distributed policies of segregation, maiming, and death.

Welfare cuts

Adam Jones theorises the state as either “the means of social murder on behalf of the capitalist class” or “the mediator of those practices which engender its continuation in favour of the interests of capital”.⁷ This also applies to the so-called welfare state; indeed, even a welfare state “strong enough to provide a safety net” 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”. The latest round of welfare cuts, just like the procession of other cuts doled out over least the 50 years, confirm Jones’ suggestion that both the production and the reproduction of the capitalist state “guarantees [social] murder” as they demonstrate that welfare does not function as a safety net for vulnerable members of society but rather as an apparatus for managing surplus populations.

In last year’s Pathways To Work green paper⁸, Labour promised to cut £4.5bn per year from welfare spending by 2029 by replacing a monthly cash payment for disability benefits with vouchers or one-off grants. This has been called a “brutal, ideological attack” on disabled people’s support by Inclusion London,⁹ and not one of the 115 organisations asked to respond to the report supported it.¹⁰ Personal Independence Payment (PIP) was introduced in 2013 to replace Disability Living Allowance for people of working age to help with extra living costs caused by long-term disabilities or ill health. It is not an “out of work” benefit: 48% of Universal Credit (UC) claimants are in work whilst 29% of UC claimants are disabled. Of the 16.1 million disabled people in the UK, only 3.6 million people are claiming PIP meaning there are 12.5 million disabled people that are not receiving support. Disability causes poverty just as poverty causes disability: 69% of people using food banks in the UK are disabled;¹¹ 54% of people in severe hardship live in a family that includes a disabled person;¹² more than half of people receiving UC are living in poverty and 43% of households receiving UC are food insecure. While the DWP rejects half of all PIP applications¹³ and admits Access to Work support is failing,¹⁴ it is simultaneously pushing through legislation such as the Universal Credit Act 2025 which will push more disabled people into work. Crucially, the DWP attack on disability benefits is not just confined to working benefits, but targets the un/der-employed surplus class; for example, the health element of Universal Credit¹⁵ is being cut by 48% for claimants designated by the DWP as having “limited capacity for work”.

These plans come only months after the UN’s committee on the rights of disabled people concluded that the UK government had made “no significant progress” in the more than seven years since it was found guilty of “grave and systematic” violations of the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities.¹⁶ As bloodthirsty as these machinations are, they are merely an expansion of existing neoliberal welfare policy which is, by design, insufficient and cruel.

Assisted dying and healthcare cuts

Kim Leadbeater’s Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill proposed the rollout of what was euphemistically named Voluntary Assisted Dying (VAD) but is more medically accurately described as assisted suicide or euthanasia (both techniques are made possible in the bill; indeed, 99.9% of Medical Assistance in Dying (MAiD) deaths in Canada are actually euthanasia via medical practitioner injection¹⁷). The Bill passed all three readings in the House of Commons but failed to pass through the House of Lords this April, although this is likely only a temporary reprieve as several supporting MPs have already vowed to try again – possibly even with the exact same proposal as Lords cannot block an identical bill a second time.¹⁸ We estimate this will mark the 20th(!) attempt to legalise assisted suicide and/or euthanasia in the UK over the past 23 years (including four attempts in Scotland and three in the Isle of Man).

Deeper analysis of the many dangers concealed within Leadbeater’s Bill has already been made elsewhere¹⁹ but just a few points to summarise: the process was conducted at breakneck speed (there was only a five week period for evidence to be submitted before the committee phase compared with a minimum of 12 weeks required for government-led public consultations on disability issues); the committee was biased in favour of supporters (14 of its 23 MPs supported the Bill at its second reading and all eight international witnesses were known supporters of VAD); the Bill attempted to maximise the scope of eligibility (VAD would be considered ‘medical treatment’ and thereby in the remit of the NHS) whilst minimising the number of safeguards (327 amendments were rejected in total and only 30 of the accepted amendments were tabled by opponents of the Bill).

The Bill’s economic argumentation was one of its key points: that the “reduced cost from unutilised healthcare [of euthanised patients]” would save the NHS £59.6m per year within a decade. This is the exact same argument made before the introduction of Medical Assistance in Dying (MAiD) in Canada (where euthanasia now accounts for 5% of all deaths), Netherlands (where euthanasia now accounts for 6% of all deaths), and France, which is aiming to legalise euthanasia by 2027 to “save €1.4bn per year”. Part of this economic saving for the state comes from assisted suicide and/or euthanasia being used to replace adequate care – be it healthcare, mental health resources, social care, or palliative care. A 2024 Marie Cure report found that over 100,000 people each year die without receiving good palliative care and 215,000 people die without any palliative care.²⁰ People in pain are more likely to seek suicide; indeed, even supporters of Leadbeater’s Bill cite “very harrowing” and “horrific” deaths, patients in “unbearable” and “inhumane” states of suffering, pain, and agony.²¹ Yet the Bill simply plans to replace effective palliative care with medical suicide; indeed, part of the economic savings would be made by the UK government removing funding to hospices that refuse to participate in MAiD (e.g. $350m is recouped in Canada every year doing exactly this).

Non-medical suicides can also be expected to rise as options for actual treatment dry up; indeed, wherever assisted suicide has been legalised, total suicide rates have increased while non-assisted suicides have not decreased.²² A study in Sweden found that in 55% of suicides, “deficiencies in the healthcare […] were considered to have contributed to the suicide”.²³ Financial precarity is one of the strongest risk factors for suicide (alongside the interrelated factors of unemployment and homelessness), with twenty times more people who have experienced financial strain attempting suicide compared to those who have not.²⁴ Yet levels of poverty in the UK are still increasing year after year while the quality and availability of both financial aid and mental health resources is worsening; case in point, 26% of suicides in the UK between 2010 and 2021 were by persons already in contact with mental health services.²⁵

Tying back to the previous discussion of welfare cuts, suicide is a well-known outcome of austerity policies in general and specifically of UK welfare policy change in recent years. A 2017 report by the NHS showed 43% of Employment and Support Allowance (ESA) claimants had already attempted suicide at some point in their lives and 66% had had suicidal thoughts²⁶ (a fact known by the DWP but blocked in their report publication²⁷). Countless people have attested to the depressing and dehumanising process of trying to secure and maintain welfare through the DWP – with its mountains of paperwork, judgement from unsympathetic staff, constant threats of sanctions, high rate of rejections, and protracted appeals process.²⁸ “The cruelty is the point” as they say; or perhaps as China Mills frames it in more material terms, “dead people don’t claim”.²⁹

The forgotten pandemic

The final example of expanded social murder in the UK is the SARS-CoV-2 (i.e. the virus that causes the disease COVID-19) pandemic, still ongoing today despite its widely confabulated ending in 2021 or 2022. Although the World Health Organisation (WHO) continue to acknowledge the persistence of the pandemic,³⁰ their decision to end the Public Health Emergency of International Concern (PHEIC) phase of the pandemic on 5 May 2023 appears to have been reinterpreted in popular culture as the end of the pandemic itself. This date even appears to have been retconned in the UK to match the Conservative government’s proclamation of “Freedom Day” on 19 July 2021, something which was at the time widely acknowledged as a deceitful abdication of public health policy by the state in favour of economic profit. The misconception of the pandemic having ended is so widespread in fact that it bears stating the obvious here: pandemics do not just end overnight. We have been in a global cholera pandemic since 1961, a HIV/AIDS pandemic since 1981, and arguably still remain in a pandemic of the 1918 (“Spanish”) flu.³¹

The primary purpose of ending the PHEIC was to permit state abandonment of public health response; furlough pay, vaccination programmes, testing programmes, sick leave, remote work, and accompanying reductions in consumption, travel, and spending were all an unacceptable cost to the capitalist economy, with UK government spending alone on pandemic measures alleged to have cost up to £410bn. The premature termination of the PHEIC is perhaps unsurprising when considering the WHO is a specialised agency of the United Nations and as such exists first and foremost as a tool of capitalist and imperialist exploitation as much as any other institution.

A brief reminder of the brazen social murder conducted in the UK during the opening year of the pandemic: 31% of all patients admitted during the first wave of the pandemic had a Do Not Attempt Cardiopulmonary Resuscitation (DNAR) order placed on them³² – which cannot be overruled nor legally requires the consent of the patient or family; consequently, many thousands of disabled people died from being denied care.³³ Mortality rates of disabled patients were much higher than non-disabled patients – ten to twenty times higher for patients with Down’s Syndrome³⁴ – as were those for patients of all non-white ethnicities compared to white patients, with Black patients in particular experiencing a mortality rate three times higher.³⁵ Over 35,000 care home residents were confirmed as dying from COVID-19 by May 2020, allegedly due to care homes being under pressure to receive infectious patients being discharged from hospitals; outbreaks in care homes continued like wildfire since and still persist today.

Despite capital’s unqualified success of inculcating a widespread disavowal of the pandemic, in the real world the SARS-CoV-2 virus is more omnipresent than ever. The Economist estimated in September 2023 that the true death toll so far was around 30 million, four times higher than the official death toll at that time of 7 million.³⁶ Wastewater testing in the USA estimates there has not been a single day since 2021 with fewer than 100,000 cases³⁷ – despite former Chief Medical Advisor Anthony Fauci suggesting in 2021 that a reasonable level of infections required to abandon mitigations would be 10,000 cases per day.³⁸ Meanwhile in the UK, the NHS stopped routinely testing patients for COVID-19 in August 2022³⁹ and population statistics on infection were abandoned with the “pausing” of the ONS COVID-19 Infection Survey in April 2023.⁴⁰ When US President Trump infamously announced in June 2020: “If we stop testing right now, we’d have very few cases, if any”,⁴¹ it was rightly pointed out at the time as a preposterous tautology – yet that has been precisely the UK’s pandemic strategy for nearly four years already.

A key driver of persistent infection in our community – aside from under-ventilated schools, workplaces, and public buildings⁴² – is the spread of disease in medical facilities, due in large part to the lack of appropriate PPE worn by healthcare workers who therefore form major nodes in chains of transmission. On 13 March 2020, policymakers made the decision to downgrade Covid from being a High Consequence Infectious Disease (HCID) – something an anonymous member of ACDP later stated was “pragmatic” due to an insufficient number of FFP3 respirators in the NHS stockpile.⁴³ Around this time the WHO also started to push the fabrication that the virus was spread through contact (i.e. the fomite route) as opposed to being predominantly (>99%) airborne, despite scientific publications and public messaging from the original SARS outbreak in 2003 clearly demonstrating that the SARS virus was known to be airborne.⁴⁴ Every scientist who testified in the UK COVID-19 Inquiry has since confirmed SARS-2-CoV is airborne⁴⁵ – yet still no official policies of respiratory infection control exist in health or social care facilities, with far less effective surgical masks (essentially just a sneeze guard) being worn sometimes. This is an act of medical violence which is known to further maim and kill patients: NHS England no longer even collects statistics on COVID-19 infection but NHS Wales data shows that 74% of inpatient COVID-19 cases are acquired in the hospital⁴⁶ and the Australian Bureau of Statistics shows that 10–20% of patients subjected to nosocomial COVID-19 infection will die.⁴⁷

Just like any other disease, death is not the only outcome either. COVID-19 is a systemic vascular disease which can cause multi-organ dysfunction (lungs, heart, brain, kidneys, liver, pancreas, eyes, reproductive system, etc.⁴⁸) as well as immune dysregulation which increases susceptibility to other infections for at least 18 months.⁴⁹ The effects of widespread infection can manifest at the population level as other diseases become more prevalent and poor outcomes become more common; e.g. the number of deaths per year from respiratory disease has almost doubled in the last 5 years in the UK (“post-pandemic”) vs the period 2010–2019.⁵⁰ Latest estimates suggest 5-10% of SARS-CoV-2 infections cause Long Covid, a catch-all for a wide range of chronic conditions which can affect almost every organ in the body – but perhaps is most destructive when causing myalgic encephalomyelitis (ME), a complex and multisystemic chronic condition which can leave people entirely bedbound, yet is critically underdiagnosed, undertreated, and underfunded. Chloé, an epistemologist with severe ME, describes it as a “controversialised illness“, something “not so much ‘medically unexplained’ as it is rendered medically unintelligible”⁵¹; in other words it would threaten capital if medicine were to truly recognise the illness and its cause rather than simply decrying those affected by it as “lazy”, “malingerers”, etc. Long Covid intersects especially with our focuses on pandemic denial, healthcare cuts, medical violence, and attempted legalisation of assisted suicide because many ME patients are forced into “choosing” assisted suicide. It bears reminding that SARS-CoV-2 pandemic is still in its infancy and despite 487,000 scientific studies to date,⁵² we still only know anything about what happens during the first 6–7 years of infection. For context (and without seeking to draw any etiological comparisons), it takes 11 years on average for an untreated HIV infection to develop into AIDS – a fact only recognised in 1983, likely over half a century after the first humans were infected with the virus.

Economic arguments

The three examples of social murder we cover here are neither novel nor exceptional; austerity policy is being applied across the board in welfare and healthcare, partly to expedite the full privatisation of an increasingly non-functional NHS and remnants of the public social care system in future.⁵³ But these policies are also being weaponised in the immediate present to cause the death of disabled and/or elderly people – people who are being framed by the state as a drain on our fragile economy. This language mirrors Nazi propaganda for Aktion T4, the “euthanasia” (read: eugenics) program which murdered up to 300,000 disabled people and developed the mass killing technologies later used in Germany’s extermination camps. Leadbeater’s estimate that VAD will “save” the NHS £59.6m per year within a decade⁵⁴ is likely an enormous underestimate which discounts money additionally “saved” from pensions, welfare, healthcare, social care, and palliative care from the tens of thousands of people who would remain alive if they were not euthanised (this point was in fact made explicitly in the 2021 Budget which highlighted a “saving” of £1.5bn in pensions by 2022 due to over-65s dying from SARS-CoV-2 in 2020 and 2021⁵⁵).

However, we must resist temptations to challenge the cold murderous logic of eugenics on the same economic grounds that capitalists use. For example, it’s true that PIP generates £14bn net gain for the economy⁵⁶ and that the cost of “investigating fraud” far exceeds the actual 0.02% fraud rate reported by the DWP.⁵⁷ Likewise, poor workplace health costs employers a combined £85bn per year⁵⁸ and an additional 800,000 people in the UK are now “economically inactive” due to long-term sickness since the pandemic started.⁵⁹ Nevertheless, accepting the premise that bourgeois policies of social murder are an economic decision, however regrettable capitalists decry them to be, distracts from their true ideological objective: to mark surplus populations out for scapegoating, segregation, immiseration, violence, or death. Capital and its supporters (e.g. the state, industry, the media, liberals) often label such policies as some accident or incompetency, but we should be clear they are intentional and malicious acts of violence by capitalism – just another example of the foundational violence underpinning this socioeconomic mode of production, as it has for centuries already. There are times when social murder is produced with more intensity and enacted less covertly, but while the violence ebbs and flows it can never be eliminated from capitalism because it is capitalism: the beating heart whose pace quickens or slows to suit the sociopolitical climate.

Biopolitics, necropolitics and eugenics

The UK has been on this trajectory since Thatcher’s neoliberal reforms of 1979 and the logic of privatisation and austerity intersects with and intensifies the logic of social murder. Descriptions of it as “slow” or “structural” or “bureaucratic” violence belie how widespread and relentless and effective this form of mass extermination of surplus populations truly is. We suggest what these phrases capture most of all is how tolerated this form of violence is; the social murder of the surplus class is demonstrably not objectionable enough to have been opposed by the proletariat, perhaps because its victims are so Othered: abject non-Subjects composed by various minoritised identities (read: non-white, non-male, non-cishetero, disabled, non-citizens, etc.), not the proper working class.

Michel Foucault’s framework of biopolitics distinguishes between sovereign power as the power to “let live and make die” and biopower as the power to “make live and let die”; he claims racism functions as “a way of introducing a break into the domain of life that is under power’s control: the break between what must live and what must die”. Achille Mbembe’s necropolitics reposits this same dynamic as a politics of “let die, make die”, whereby a sociopolitical underclass is abandoned through the inaction, incapacity, or indifference of the state.⁶⁰ Biopolitics and necropolitics do not just operate discursively but are both clear material mechanisms of capital accumulation: welfare provision for the subjectivised working class optimises the outputs of the wage-labouring class and ensures their social reproduction; abandonment of the non-subjectivised surplus class create a hyper-exploitable reserve army of labour which doubles as a convenient scapegoat in times of economic crisis.

Two sociological processes emerge from the stratification of Subject vs non-Subject. Firstly, non-Subjects become dehumanised, rendered unintelligible as life; this bare or socially dead life is then primed for abandonment and social murder due to its status as abject. Bill Hughes describes how a “double branding of disability representation as abject and vulnerable is central to the ontological and moral invalidation of disabled people”, whereby capitalist society shuttles back and forth between a magnanimous paternalism of a vulnerable, needy Other which is “good to be good to” (e.g. those described as “the vulnerable”, “at-risk”, “shielders”), and an exclusion of an abject, monstrous Other which becomes “good to mistreat”.⁶¹ In both cases, the Other is denied its own agency and lives or dies at either the mercy or enmity of the sovereign and its interpellated Subjects – we could even say this is the primary force which constructs our dis/ableist society. Judith Butler describes this rendering of life vs non-life as a matter of grievability: “To be grievable is to be interpellated in such a way that you know your life matters; that the loss of your life would matter”.⁶² Inversely then, disabled, sick, vulnerable, or unhealthy bodies become “ungrievable” because it is more “natural” for them to die; deaths for non-“vulnerable” people are more grievable than the deaths of “vulnerable” people.⁶³

The differential apportionment of life by the sovereign serves a secondary role of ‘motivating’ the Subject class (“this could happen to you too if you don’t stay in line”). Johan Galtung described this as “carrot and stick strategies”,⁶⁴ the stick being disciplinary mechanisms (and the threat of discipline) such as keeping benefit levels low compared to wages and making sanctions commonplace and punitive, and the carrot including the so-called incentivising of people to take low paid wage-labour through the subsidisation of earnings via in-work benefits and holding out the hope that welfare-to-work interventions will support the reserve army in securing wage labour.

Eugenics received wide support across the political spectrum before WWII; although much of the terminology has changed in the modern era, some of the same policies – what disability scholars call “the new eugenics” – still receive public support: e.g. sterilisation, dispossession, institutionalisation, prenatal screening.⁶⁵ Discussing the intensification of violence against disabled people during the ongoing SARS-CoV-2 pandemic, Ryan Thorneycroft & Nicole Asquith argue: “The violence and oppression against disabled people in this moment is intensified and compounded because abjection is more pronounced, happening more, occurring repeatedly as the (abled/ableist) subject is threatened more than ever before. Abled/ableist people have never been more vulnerable or threatened, and, to protect their own borders and identities, they must abjectify the disabled subject.” This is perhaps exactly why the recent expansions of social murder described herein have been allowed to take place.

Extinction narratives

Nate Holdren brings out the connection between the ersatz ending of the pandemic and social murder, calling for the rejection of the fantasy of the former as a way of refusing the normalization of the latter; he warns that “Our goal should be to bring the pandemic to a substantive end — by promoting justice and actual human health — rather than by bringing it to a merely ideological end by normalizing social murder”.⁶⁶ The enormous push for the “return to normal”, the insistence that the virus has become endemic, and even the UK COVID-19 Inquiry itself⁶⁷ all function to historicise the pandemic: situating it as something that occurred in the past and thus not something which could even be resisted any more. This is the same technique used to historicise the ongoing violence of austerity.

The oft-quoted 330,000 excess deaths caused by the Conservative government of 2010–2019 not only freezes the death toll in time and prevents its growth, just like the reported 230,000 deaths from COVID-19, but its framing serves to bookend the crisis itself and mark its endpoint. Writing in 2017 about Israel’s settler-colonialism of Palestine, Jasbir Puar describes as “prehensive time” the common framing that Palestinian resistance is somehow already-doomed or already-defeated; that “the terms of futurity are already dictated in the present but also the terms of the present are dictated through the containment of the terms of the future, in an effort to keep the present in line with one version of the future that is desired”.⁶⁸ Tying this point more explicitly to our focus here, the recent emergence of the phrase “height of the genocide” to refer to the October 2023 – October 2025 period feels unmistakably borne out of the coining of the phrase “height of the pandemic” to refer to the period March 2020 – 2021 or 2022. A related concept from the critical climate change literature describes the framing of Pacific islands and their inhabitants as already-doomed by rising sea levels as “extinction narratives”, a colonial logic of disposability which acts to naturalise the imperialist vulnerabilisation and exploitation of its periphery, deterring resistance to the status quo.⁶⁹

It’s easy to see how these narratives and policies of imperialist exploitation abroad imbricate with the narratives and policies of capitalist eugenics within the imperial core. If we consider Dominic Cummings’ infamous planning board from March 2020, “who do we save?”,⁷⁰ to be an opportunistic plan for mass social murder of “the vulnerable” (i.e. predominantly the surplus class) by the state through a laissez faire public health response, it’s hard to imagine how much more flawlessly that plan could have gone especially considering the impunity of its executioners.

Suggested interventions

When it comes to the possibility to organise against social murder, Adler-Bolton and Vierkant warn in Health Communism that the encounter with social murder “can produce fantasies of a moral or ethical capitalism”, and that these fantasies should be disarmed as deflecting from the trajectory of resistance needed.⁷¹ Adam Jones agrees that “social murder is a revolutionary concept, because it is fundamentally anti-reformist […] Liberal reformism, including the national welfarism of social democracy, is the demand for less (noticeable) murder” and as such should not be pursued by social movements.⁷² With these warnings in mind, we propose three simple interventions, all immediately achievable.

Firstly, avoiding the bourgeois smokescreen of economic argumentation and widening the scope of proletariat beyond those currently in work. There are obvious economic and scientific arguments against the effectiveness and validity of policies of austerity, eugenics and social murder – but our only calculus need only remain unflinchingly moral. We know most scarcity under global capitalism is artificial and there should be more than enough resources to fulfil the basic needs of every person in the world – but regardless, policies of eugenics and social murder should never be supported even if they were more economical. Half of this struggle is learning how to recognise eugenics where it is staring us in the face; for example, the assuaging call for the majority of the population to drop disease mitigations against the pandemic in 2021 because only people with “underlying conditions” or “the (clinically) vulnerable” were now alleged to be at risk of dying was demonstrably not received with the gravitas one might expect for an overt policy of eugenic elimination.

Secondly, reducing compliance with distributed policies of segregation, maiming, and death and instead fostering the inclusion of disabled and medically at-risk people in public spaces through the mitigation of airborne disease transmission. The lack of public health mitigations has had the de facto function of socially segregating millions of people who cannot tolerate repeated COVID-19 infection from society, whereafter their social murder becomes even easier owing to their visible exclusion from the public sphere and resultant societal abjection.⁷³ We can advocate for the public domain to become more inclusive for disabled people (and everyone else who wants to become sick less often and reduce their risk of becoming disabled) by struggling for hospitals, schools, public transport, workplaces, and our own organisations to provide essentials like effective air filtration and ventilation, appropriate PPE, free testing, and sufficient paid sick leave.⁷⁴ As well as these more long term struggles against systemic sources of harms, anyone can also make one simple change by themselves to instantly improve accessibility: wearing an FFP2/3 respirator like an N95 in public spaces with shared air – most obviously hospitals and shops and public transport – but why not everywhere else disabled people should be able to access too. Mask Blocs are independent mutual aid organisations which provide masks (and other tools like antigen tests and air purifiers) to their community⁷⁵ – and always welcome support via donations of money, resources, or time.

Finally, supporting and engaging with disability justice to oppose the state’s actual proposed implementation of assisted suicide, regardless of opinions on how and why euthanasia could hypothetically be implemented more equitably somehow in future. A recent poll found 62% of people think legalising assisted dying is “too complex and polarised for MPs to decide at short notice”; meanwhile 350 Disabled People’s Organisations (DPOs) in the UK vociferously opposed the Leadbeater Bill.⁷⁶ Silence on this issue (or, worse yet, misplaced support for it) is a manifestation of non-disabled people’s general reluctance or refusal to engage with disability and or their internalised dis/ableism, similar to the denial of the pandemic. Interweaving the previous suggestion, there needs to be much more engagement with, support for, and solidarity offered to disabled people and DPOs in the organisations and personal lives of non-disabled people.

Conclusion

None of the three examples covered here are qualitatively novel forms of social murder: the provision (or not) of welfare has long been used to demarcate the surplus class, the availability (or not) of healthcare and social care has long been used to define quality of life and longevity, and outbreaks of infectious disease have long been allowed to spread through the proletariat. Social murder is a fundamental function and goal of capitalism, a dial which can be turned up or down as the state wishes to respond to material conditions. But we are seeing a quantitative expansion of these murderous logics in the last 15 years and particularly since the onset and subsequent abandonment of the current pandemic – and compliance with, support for, or wilful ignorance of distributed policies of social murder by the proletariat acts to provide a tacit approval of these policies. We expect the state to keep turning the social murder dial up until either a) its subjectivising process starts to falter (e.g. the Subject class begins to find the level of violence against the surplus class unpalatable and/or begins to see this violence as a threat to their own welfare), or b) the social reproduction of the Subject class is sufficiently threatened (e.g. enough of the surplus class have been killed that the reserve army of labour becomes too small, or enough of the presently proletarianised population have been disabled to affect capital accumulation). However, a portent that neither of these endpoints seem on the horizon any time soon comes from Epidemics and Ideas, a book on the cultural history of disease: “historical experience shows that, as long as mortality remained at levels below 40% of the population, epidemics did not bring revolutions, usually not even reforms”.⁷⁷

A necessary first step in struggling against social murder would be to acknowledge the gravity of the fact that we the proletariat have allowed everything to happen without reprisal, mostly without even legal challenge, too often without even acknowledgement. Not wanting to be discomforted or inconvenienced, even (especially) within our own allegedly inclusive organising spaces, is at best defeatist and at worst collaborationist; the section of society proclaimed to be most likely to bring about positive social revolution cannot turn a blind eye to social murder at home just like it cannot look the other way to imperialist genocide or war or famine inflicted abroad. These processes are not independent either but rather imbricated: for example, Palestine continues to experience regular outbreaks of respiratory diseases including COVID-19, the latter ever more immune evasive due to its evolution within the unfettered petri dish of “post-pandemic” western society, its damage worsened by a lack of medical resources and vaccine apartheid. This is therefore a call to recognise the lived reality of social murder despite its quotidian presentation; this is not a portent of some potential evil, it is an evil right here and right now, dripping from the fabric of our society. Many of us may only heed the warning when we see ourselves in the crosshairs but by then it will be too late for countless of other lives already claimed.

A final example to finish regarding the Pandora’s box which the UK government is letting sit wide open: NHS England stated in 2024 that “it will not be possible to halt the spread of a new pandemic virus, and it would be a waste of public health resources and capacity to attempt to do so”⁷⁸; in other words the planned mitigations against the next pandemic – possibly something “exotic” like ebola or hantavirus but most likely an avian influenza strain (which can have observed case fatality rate of up to 60% in humans) – will be even more murderous than the current pandemic. The question for the proletariat to address is whether we are just going to accept these future slaughters as quotidian and inevitable, or whether we are willing to recognise these as ongoing iterations of social murder and organise against them accordingly.

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2. Nixon, R. Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor. Harvard University Press, 2011. ↩︎
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6. Adler-Bolton, B, and Vierkant, A. Health communism. Verso Books, 2025. ↩︎
7. https://prometheus-mag.com/2026/03/26/the-promise-of-cruelty-fascism-and-social-murder/ ↩︎
8. https://www.gov.uk/government/consultations/modernising-support-for-independent-living-the-health-and-disability-green-paper ↩︎
9. https://www.inclusionlondon.org.uk/campaigns-and-policy/act-now/pip-consultation/ ↩︎
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30. https://www.who.int/europe/emergencies/situations/covid-19 ↩︎
31. The 1918 influenza A strain and its descendants continue to cause 290,000–650,000 deaths around the world each year (a bad winter in the UK alone can kill 30,000 people) ↩︎
32. https://www.sheffield.ac.uk/news/do-not-resuscitate-orders-were-common-patients-admitted-suspected-covid-19 ↩︎
33. https://inews.co.uk/news/politics/thousands-of-disabled-people-died-after-covid-treatment-withheld-inquiry-to-probe-2970333 ↩︎
34. https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/covid-19-deaths-of-people-with-learning-disabilities/covid-19-deaths-of-people-identified-as-having-learning-disabilities-summary ↩︎
35. https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/birthsdeathsandmarriages/deaths/articles/coronaviruscovid19relateddeathsbyethnicgroupenglandandwales/2march2020to15may2020 ↩︎
36. https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/coronavirus-excess-deaths-estimates ↩︎
37. https://whn.global/estimation-of-infections-based-on-wastewater-data-us/ ↩︎
38. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/sep/09/anthony-fauci-comments-covid-19-cases-high-control ↩︎
39. https://www.england.nhs.uk/long-read/covid-19-testing-policy-update-changes-to-nhs-use-cases/ ↩︎
40. https://www.ons.gov.uk/surveys/informationforhouseholdsandindividuals/householdandindividualsurveys/covid19infectionsurvey ↩︎
41. https://thehill.com/policy/healthcare/502819-trump-on-coronavirus-if-we-stop-testing-right-now-wed-have-very-few-cases/ ↩︎
42. e.g. UK legislation on indoor air quality in schools has yet to be updated since 2018; https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/building-bulletin-101-ventilation-for-school-buildings ↩︎
43. https://committees.parliament.uk/writtenevidence/36758/html/ ↩︎
44. e.g. https://content.time.com/time/magazine/asia/0,9263,501030505,00.html ↩︎
45. https://covid19.public-inquiry.uk/wp-content/uploads/2024/09/12175511/INQ000114429_0001.pdf ↩︎
46. https://bcuhb.nhs.wales/covid-19/incidents-of-nosocomial-covid-19/ ↩︎
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52. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/research/coronavirus/ ↩︎
53. A grim recent example: the Royal College of Nursing reported in June 2026 that 1,300 people per month are now dying in A&E, a rate 10x higher than 2015 (https://www.theguardian.com/society/2026/jun/08/more-than-1300-deaths-a-month-in-england-due-to-long-ae-waits-figures-suggest) ↩︎
54. https://publications.parliament.uk/pa/bills/cbill/59-01/0212/TIABImpactAssessment.pdf ↩︎
55. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-56272829 ↩︎
56. https://www.bigissue.com/news/social-justice/disability-benefits-bill-uk-economy/ ↩︎
57. https://www.benefitsandwork.co.uk/news/zero-percent-fraud-rate-for-pip,-dwp-figures-show ↩︎
58. https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/keep-britain-working-review-final-report/keep-britain-working-technical-note ↩︎
59. https://www.statista.com/statistics/1388245/uk-sick-leave-figures ↩︎
60. Mbembe, A. Necropolitics. Duke University Press, 2020. ↩︎
61. Hughes, B. “The abject and the vulnerable: The twain shall meet: Reflections on disability in the moral economy.” The Sociological Review 67.4 (2019): 829-846. ↩︎
62. Butler, Frames of war. ↩︎
63. Thorneycroft, R., and Asquith, N.L. Unexceptional violence in exceptional times: Disablist and ableist violence during the COVID-19 pandemic. International Journal for Crime, Justice and Social Democracy, 10(2) (2021): 140-155. ↩︎
64. Galtung, J. ‘Violence, peace and peace research.” Journal of Peace Research, 6(3) (1969): 167-191. ↩︎
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66. https://petrieflom.law.harvard.edu/2022/09/19/pandemic-nihilism-social-murder-and-the-banality-of-evil/ ↩︎
67. Public hearings from the UK Covid-19 Inquiry have referred to COVID-19 almost exclusively in the past tense and the stated purpose of the Inquiry is “to learn lessons for the future”, not to address any issues ongoing with the current pandemic. ↩︎
68. Puar, J.K. The right to maim: Debility, capacity, disability. Duke University Press, 2017. ↩︎
69. Weatherill, C.K. “Sinking paradise? Climate change vulnerability and Pacific Island extinction narratives.” Geoforum 145 (2023): 103566. ↩︎
70. https://www.rte.ie/news/analysis-and-comment/2021/0526/1223986-cummings-hearing-analysis/ ↩︎
71. Adler-Bolton, Vierkant, Health Communism. ↩︎
72. https://prometheus-mag.com/2026/03/26/the-promise-of-cruelty-fascism-and-social-murder/ ↩︎
73. e.g. Section 157 of the Police & Crime Act 2026 criminalises the wearing of respirators at demonstrations; any medical defence can only be raised after arrest and charges (https://www.thecanary.co/skwawkbox/2026/07/08/police-chronically-unwell-protesters/) ↩︎
74. For example, non-profits like Clean Air For Kids and the Benedict Blythe Foundation are helping to get air filters into classrooms and campaigning for improvements to legislation on air quality in schools. ↩︎
75. https://maskbloc.org/ ↩︎
76. https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p0k4d0tb ↩︎
77. Ranger, T, and Slack, P., eds. Epidemics and ideas: essays on the historical perception of pestilence. Cambridge University Press, 1992. ↩︎
78. https://archive.org/details/2025-11-29-open-letter-cata-to-baroness-hallett ↩︎