A companion to capitalismkills.info

Social Murder

The deaths capitalism causes are not accidents. They are built into the structure.

— and counting — capitalism's toll, counted next door. This is why it's killing.

The argument

When a person knowingly puts another in conditions that kill them, we call it murder. When a society knowingly puts millions in such conditions — and, having the food, the medicine, and the means to do otherwise, keeps doing it — we call it an accident, a tragedy, the way of the world. It is none of those things.

  1. The deaths are predictable. We know, in advance and in detail, who dies and from what — hunger where there is food, untreated disease where there is medicine, exposure where there is housing.
  2. The deaths are preventable. The resources to stop them exist and are not scarce. What is allocated elsewhere is a choice.
  3. The deaths persist because the structure ranks profit and property above need. Care, food, and shelter are distributed by ability to pay, not by who will die without them.
  4. Therefore they are not accidents. A system that reliably produces the same deaths, year after year, while holding the means to prevent them, is not failing. It is functioning as designed.

"The resources exist" is not a figure of speech

The claim that these deaths are preventable rests on a fact: the food, the housing, and the money are already here — wasted, hoarded, or spent elsewhere.

Scarcity is the alibi, not the cause. The dying happens amid plenty.

"But no one intends these deaths." Correct — and it doesn't matter. Structural violence needs no villain. A casino is built to take your money without rigging a single hand; the house edge does the work. Capitalism is built to allocate life and death by wealth without anyone signing an order. The absence of a trigger-puller is not the absence of a cause — it is the definition of structural violence.

The idea has a name — and a lineage

This is not a slogan. It is a 180-year analytical tradition.

Friedrich Engels — "social murder" (1845)

"When one individual inflicts bodily injury upon another such 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 … when it deprives thousands of the necessaries of life, places them under conditions in which they cannot live … 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."

— Friedrich Engels, The Condition of the Working Class in England, 1845

Engels named it: death produced by social arrangement, with the killing diffused across a whole class so that no single hand is guilty. The term has been revived, seriously, in our own moment — by physicians and scholars after Grenfell, during austerity, and through the pandemic.

Johan Galtung — "structural violence" (1969)

The peace researcher Johan Galtung gave the concept its modern analytical form: structural violence is harm built into social structures — present whenever people are denied what they need to live and there is no identifiable actor to blame. It is the gap between the life people could have and the life the structure permits them. Unlike a punch or a bullet, it has no perpetrator — which is precisely why it kills at scale and goes unpunished.

Paul Farmer — structural violence as who lives and who dies

The physician-anthropologist Paul Farmer took the concept out of the seminar and into the clinic. Across his work (Pathologies of Power, 2003) he showed that structural violence is the social machinery that decides who gets sick and who gets treated — that poverty and inequality are not the backdrop to disease but its cause. Farmer is the bridge from theory to the body count: he made structural violence measurable in deaths.

Marta Russell — the money model of disability

The disability theorist Marta Russell (Beyond Ramps, 1998) argued that capitalism does not merely neglect disabled and sick people — it produces disability and then makes it profitable. Under her "money model," people who cannot be exploited as workers are still exploited as objects of the institutions built around them. Worth is measured against labour; those who cannot work become a cost to be managed.

Adler-Bolton & Vierkant — Health Communism (2022)

Building on Russell, Health Communism (Beatrice Adler-Bolton & Artie Vierkant, Verso 2022) supplies the contemporary engine for this site. Its argument, in brief: capitalism sorts people into the worker and the surplus — and health itself becomes a relation to capital, not a state of being. You are worth keeping alive in proportion to your usefulness as labour. The surplus is not simply abandoned; it is abandoned and extracted from — a profit centre for the medical, carceral, and debt industries even as it is left to die. We treat this as a framework, openly argued, not as settled fact — see "What this claim is and isn't."

Ruth Wilson Gilmore — organized abandonment

The geographer Ruth Wilson Gilmore (Golden Gulag, 2007, and her later work) names the process by which the state and capital write off whole populations and places — organized abandonment — and the prisons, borders, and walls built to manage the people that abandonment produces.

How the structure kills

Six pathways. Each maps to a category counted on capitalismkills.info — this is the mechanism behind those numbers.

1. Rationing by ability to pay

Care, medicine, and food are abundant; they are withheld from those who cannot pay. Health becomes a relation to capital: treatment flows to worth, not to need. This is the largest share of the toll. → Structural violence on the counter

2. The surplus — extractive abandonment

Those who cannot work — sick, disabled, old, incarcerated, poor — are classed as surplus. The system does not only neglect them; it profits from them: nursing homes, the medical-industrial complex, the carceral system, and medical debt extract value from people it has already decided are expendable. Death and profit at the same address. (Adler-Bolton & Vierkant; Russell)

3. Commodifying necessities

When water, housing, and insulin become commodities, the price of staying alive is set by a market — and those who can't meet it are priced out of living.

4. Extraction & dispossession

Famine amid export, forced labour, land seizure: the colonial and settler machinery that turns other people's lives into raw material. → Colonialism & settler categories

5. Externalized death

Profit is kept; death is offloaded onto others — pollution into the air, danger onto the worker, risk onto the consumer. The ledger only balances because the bodies aren't on it. → Corporate & industrial violence

6. Disposable populations

Where a group is worth more contained than cared for, the structure builds the prison, the border, the camp. Organized abandonment, managed by force. (Gilmore)

It has names: case studies

The abstract becomes undeniable in the particular — moments where the words "social murder" were used in earnest.

Grenfell Tower (London, 2017)

Seventy-two people died when fire raced up the combustible aluminium-composite cladding of a London tower block on 14 June 2017. Records showed the cladding had been downgraded from fire-resistant zinc to flammable panels to save £293,368, and the resident-led Grenfell Action Group had warned for years — most starkly in November 2016 — that "only a catastrophic event" would expose the danger. The 2024 public inquiry concluded every death was avoidable, blaming "decades of failure" by government and the "systematic dishonesty" of manufacturers who concealed how flammable their products were. Senior politicians and scholars invoked Engels' term "social murder": a death toll that was costed, foreseen, and ignored.

Austerity (UK, 2010s)

After 2010, the long rise in UK life expectancy stalled — the first such stall since at least 1900 (Marmot Review, 2020) — and England's health-improvement slowdown was among the worst in Europe, with life expectancy actually falling for women in the most deprived areas. Multiple peer-reviewed and institutional analyses associate this with austerity-era cuts to health, social care and local government, in modelled excess-death estimates ranging from ~45,000 observed deaths (Watkins et al., BMJ Open 2017) and ~9,600 tied to local-government cuts (Alexiou et al., Lancet Public Health 2021) up to ~335,000 across Britain for 2012–2019 (Walsh et al., JECH 2022). We flag plainly that these specific tolls are modelled and contested: they rest on ecological designs, the slowdown was partly an international phenomenon, and critics argue no precise figure can be cleanly pinned on austerity. What is robust is the association — austerity coincided with a severe, internationally unusual mortality stall. The number is disputed; the policy choosing whose survival was affordable is not.

Insulin rationing (United States)

Insulin was isolated at the University of Toronto in 1921; its inventors sold the patent for $1 each — "insulin belongs to the world." A century later it had become so expensive in the United States that an estimated 1.3 million adults with diabetes — 16.5% of insulin users — rationed it in the past year (Gaffney, Himmelstein & Woolhandler, Annals of Internal Medicine, 2022). Documented cases show rationing can be lethal: Alec Raeshawn Smith died of diabetic ketoacidosis at 26 in 2017, weeks after aging off his insurance and rationing what he could afford — though no aggregate death toll has been quantified. US list prices ran roughly ten times those of other wealthy nations (RAND); $35-a-month caps from Medicare and the major manufacturers arrived only in 2023–24, after decades of escalating prices. Commodification, lethal at retail.

AIDS and the price of treatment (1996–2003)

By 1996, combination antiretroviral therapy had turned HIV from a death sentence into a manageable condition — but only for those who could pay roughly $10,000–15,000 a year, which put it out of reach across sub-Saharan Africa, where the epidemic was concentrated. Through the late 1990s and early 2000s, global AIDS deaths climbed to around 3 million a year — the great majority in sub-Saharan Africa — even as mortality collapsed in wealthy countries. When India's Cipla offered the same triple therapy for $350 a year, less than a dollar a day, in 2001 — and when 39 pharmaceutical companies dropped their lawsuit against South Africa's generic-access law that April under global pressure — it confirmed the barrier had been price, not science. The treatment existed; it was rationed by cost. Paul Farmer and others named exactly this — life-saving care that exists but is priced out of reach — as structural violence.

COVID-19 (2020 onward)

In February 2021 The BMJ — one of the world's oldest medical journals — ran an editorial by its executive editor titled "Covid-19: Social murder, they wrote," explicitly reviving Engels' charge that the powerful commit social murder when their choices send the poor to early graves. The data bore out the distribution that animated it: in England, COVID-19 mortality ran about 2.2 times higher in the most deprived areas than the least, Black African men faced roughly 3.7 times the death risk of White British men, and frontline workers — security guards, care workers — died far more often than professionals who could work from home. In the United States, age-adjusted death rates ran 2.1 to 2.6 times higher for Black, Hispanic, and Native American people than for white Americans. The virus was universal; the dying was not — it followed class, race, and occupation, driven by exposure and crowded housing, not biology.

What this claim is and isn't

Sources

Case studies