Early in this powerful book, Sara Ryan lays out her central theme, which is shocking in its stark simplicity.People with learning disabilities are subject to structural violence, a form of socially applied violence which is unregistered, invisible, unnoticed and natural.Its very naturalness enables it to be sustained in full social view, but somehow unremarked upon or even noticed, in all parts of a person's life.It occasionally gets acknowledged when episodes of institutional violence or hate crimes are exposed, but otherwise is remarkable only for the communal perception that it is unremarkable.

In contemporary UK debate, welfare and disability benefits are officially described as safety nets designed to protect vulnerable people while ensuring fiscal sustainability. This paper assembles evidence from legislation, tribunal data, official statistics, and independent research to demonstrate that current arrangements produce a different outcome: disabled and low-income people experience higher rates of premature death, chronic illness, and material insecurity that are not accidental side-effects but foreseeable consequences of institutional design. Four interlocking structures are examined: disability assessments that exercise clinical-level power without clinical accountability; digital-by-default benefit systems that manufacture precarity through sanctions and surveillance; housing and tax arrangements that protect asset-holders while framing modest welfare transfers as excessive; and automation policy that treats displaced workers as problems of control rather than as resources for collective problem-solving. The paper argues that these structures constitute what classical social-policy analysis termed “social murder”: the state knowingly maintains conditions in which identifiable groups live shorter, harder lives, while responsibility is diffused across procedures and actors. An alternative model, a publicly governed research-and-development commons, is proposed, demonstrating that different choices are available. Standard falsification criteria are applied throughout; claims are limited to what can be independently verified.

David Walsh and Gerry McCartney. Social Murder? Austerity and Life Expectancy in the UK

Book Review: Social Murder? The Effects of Austerity on Population Health in the UK

ABSTRACT Using archival data from Peru, Britain, and France, along with primary and secondary sources, this study expands the corporeal rift theory, concerned with the undermining of human bodies, by exploring the conditions faced by 19th-century Peruvian guano (bird dung) diggers. It identifies four interconnected moments of the corporeal rift: abduction, transportation, super-exploitation, and social murder, and argues that the corporeal rift also encompasses cultural dimensions. This analysis enhances our understanding of the systemic impacts of worker exploitation globally, showing its persistence and its ties to the ongoing ecological crisis.

Starting from the historical background of Jazz Age, this thesis analyzes the inevitability of the promising psychiatrist Dick in Fitzgerald's Tender is the Night towards self destruction from the perspective of society. Dick's failure was destined because he could not be recognized by the upper class and could not escape from the cage of his time. His fervent dreams were incompatible with his time, so he was unable to rewrite the tragic ending.

ABSTRACT The prevalence of cyberbullying and related suicide rate increases among youth demand a proactive and systematic response. This paper proposes a mobile-based Framework for Youth Suicide Screening and intervention (YSSI) to address the issue of youth suicide within the cyber environment. It draws on Vygotsky’s sociocultural theory to understand the developmental stages of youth and employs Durkheim’s concept of anomic suicide to frame suicide due to cyberbullying as a social fact that extends beyond individual problems. Additionally, the framework invokes Friedrich Engels’ concept of social murder to highlight the urgent social responsibility of preventing youth suicide. The YSSI framework is designed for early detection and intervention, with mobile technology as a primary tool. It encompasses four stages: Stage 1 (Warning Signs), Stage 2 (Assessment), Stage 3 (Intervention), and Stage 4 (Follow-up). This framework emphasizes the critical role of community and family engagement in addressing youth suicide in the digital era. This engagement aims to provide support and guidance to youth, thereby strengthening their resilience to adversity associated with cyberbullying. In alignment with the objectives of the Grand Challenge for Social Work Initiative (GCSWI), the YSSI framework is dedicated to mitigating the negative effects of cyberbullying through collaborative social engagement and fostering a critical discourse on youth mental health and cyber well-being.

This study aims to analyze the discourse produced during the colonial period, especially suicide in the 1920s and 30s. Suicide is a concept that reflects modern social signs and cultural changes and is the starting point for interpretations from various perspectives to compete. To this end, this paper examined the suicide discourse formed during the colonial period and focused on newspaper editorials dealing with the concept of suicide as a contemporary phenomenon. This is because it is possible to grasp the phenomenon of suicide and the emotions of the people of the time behind it through the production and distribution of official statements about suicide. As a result of the analysis, the meaning of suicide revealed in the suicide discourse of modern newspapers could be largely divided into three. First, suicide as a social murder, second, suicide as a transitional phenomenon of civilization, and third, suicide as a personal/ethnic failure. Suicide discourses classified into these three types were analyzed to induce specific discourse effects by combining expressive, narrative, and value layers, respectively. Through the above work, it was confirmed that the suicide discourses produced and distributed by newspapers during the colonial period rearranged the public's perception in a specific direction.

Abstract Despite legislation banning combustible cladding materials after the 2017 Grenfell fire, at least 10,000 buildings were still awaiting remediation in 2022. This is in large part because fragmented ownership and management structures alongside the specificities of British property law produced a situation in which individual apartment owners (leaseholders) were liable for the costs of remediation rather than those who own the buildings (freeholders) or the developers who built them. Faced with unaffordable remediation bills, leaseholders became stuck in uninsurable, unsellable, potentially fire‐prone units. Through the case of a London housing block, we trace the relationship between the structure of landed property, value extraction, and the distribution of risk to understand how a significant portion of the UK's housing stock have remained firetraps. We argue that institutionalised value grabbing not only created the conditions of social murder but also became an obstacle to remediation, resulting in a politically charged “asset class struggle” over the way in which the structure of housing property and its capitalisation mediates social harm.

Situating this collection of essays within the global pandemic associated with COVID-19, the author returns to Marx and Engels to account for how the unhealthy history of capitalism they document transforms their writings into what Mark Neocleous terms a "political economy of the dead." From this starting point, the author amplifies the importance of biopolitics, social reproduction, and rhetoric as important concepts for the future study of Marx and Marxism.

Unlike earlier pandemics, where a “politics of blame” was directed against those who spread infection, the COVID pandemic in the United States has created occasions for the deployment of a “politics of commendation” for performing acts of sacrifice. Frontline healthcare workers have been celebrated for sacrificing themselves in service to their patients, even as critics have charged their being hapless victims of “social murder” at the hands of irresponsible medical administrators. Governmental officials, notably in Texas, have also recommended the elderly to refuse COVID care, die and thus sacrifice themselves selflessly for the benefit of the younger generation. Lately, COVID vaccine-refusal has been seen as an act of noble political sacrifice—typically to further individual liberty against the coercive power of the Federal government’s promotion or mandating of vaccination. Anti-vaxxers embracing the role of such political sacrifices, however, generally fail to realize this aspiration, insofar they are often just culpable of their own demise by neglecting public health advisories. Furthermore, the partisan politicization of their deaths militates against the normal recognition of their being sacrifices. Party political calculations have frequently demanded denial of the COVID origins of the anti-vaxxer deaths, and also effectively eliminated any normal attendant rites of reciprocation, memorialization or sacralization of the victims, typical of sacrifices, proper.

On March 27, 2021, a Salvadoran refugee named Victoria Salazar was brutally killed by police in the Mexican resort town of Tulum, Quintana Roo. In this article, I introduce a "proletarian feminist analysis" to the study of Central American displacement and forced migration to argue that Victoria Salazar's death is a "social murder." Although Mexican police murdered Victoria Salazar, I contend that the social degradation and working-class precariousness in El Salvador and Mexico, all shaped by neoliberal capitalist relations of exploitation and afflicting cisgender and trans women in distinctive ways, set the conditions for Ms Salazar's social murder.

Literature now exists on how the media reports on health inequalities. One compelling concept as to the sources and impacts of health inequalities is “social murder” as articulated by Friedrich Engels in his 1845 volume, The Condition of the Working Class in England, whereby the capitalist economic system sent workers prematurely to the grave to serve the profit motives of the bourgeoisie. There is a reemergence of the concept in the academic literature in response to growing social and health inequalities, but is this material being reported to the public? We examine news content since the turn of the 21st century and find a significant increase since 2017 in reporting that evokes the social murder concept in relation to the Grenfell Tower Fire, the COVID-19 pandemic, and the imposition of austerity in Canada and the UK. We consider these developments in relation to journalists’ roles and their reporting on health inequalities.

Progress in reducing health inequalities through public policy action is difficult in nations identified as liberal welfare states. In Canada, as elsewhere, researchers and advocates provide governing authorities with empirical findings on the sources of health inequalities and document the lived experiences of those encountering these adverse health outcomes with the hope of provoking public policy action. However, critical analysis of the societal structures and processes that make improving the sources of health inequalities difficult-the quality and distribution of living and working conditions, that is the social determinants of health-identifies limitations in these approaches. Within this latter critical tradition, we consider-using household food insecurity in Canada as an illustration-how polemics and anger mobilization, usually absent in health inequalities research and advocacy-could force Canadian governing authorities to reduce health inequalities through public policy action. We explore the potential of using high valence terms such as structural violence, social death and social murder, which make explicit the adverse outcomes of health-threatening public policy to force government action. We conclude by outlining the potential benefits and threats posed by polemics and anger mobilization as means of promoting health equity.

ABSTRACT Building on the theory of ecological imperialism in the context of the Peruvian guano boom, this analysis explores the metabolic rift in the human relation to external nature and the corresponding corporeal rift in the destruction of human bodily existence. Guano capitalists robbed Peru of the manure deposited by seabirds, while British imperialism introduced a system of racialized expropriation (the ‘coolie trade'), referred to by Karl Marx as ‘worse than slavery.’ Previous failures to understand this historical tragedy were due to the legal forms adopted, which categorized as semi-free labor what was in fact the social murder of the workers.

The reemergence of Engels’ concept of social murder in response to growing social and health inequalities

The goal of this commentary is to explore and reflect upon some of the everyday normalized mechanisms of social murder operating in the Covid-19 pandemic. Although social murder is activated in a complex and hidden process, it is nonetheless put in place by actual policymakers in the course of their actual everyday lives. Drawing on Engels’ original writings about social murder, and the work of contemporary authors such as Chernomas and Hudson, Birn, Grover, and Hodkinson, I explore the relentlessness of social murder – a deeply entrenched historical repetition of lethal, public policy-induced disease and illness. Using the cycle of oppression (stereotype, prejudice, discrimination, oppression) I illustrate in more granular detail how some of these mechanisms play themselves out in the social murder of the COVID-19 pandemic. Although oppression and social murder are somewhat abstract concepts, they are (re)envisioned and (re)enacted in the material world we live in, by actual people, especially those who operate in the public policy realm. I conclude with Scambler’s greedy bastards hypothesis (GBH), underscoring that the perpetrators are known, as are the policy-based solutions.

ABSTRACT This article maps and analyses the trajectory of India’s Covid-19 pandemic from its onset in early 2020 until the outbreak of the country’s devastating second wave a little over a year later. I begin with a critique of the lockdown policy of the right-wing Hindu nationalist government of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and Prime Minister Narendra Modi, which served as a political spectacle rather than a public health intervention. I then proceed to detail how India as a lockdown nation witnessed forms of social suffering and political repression that can only be truly understood in light of how the trajectory and impact of the COVID-19 pandemic was shaped by two preexisting crises in India’s economy and polity. In conclusion, I reflect on the likely political outcomes of the pandemic, considering both the impact of its second wave, and the emergence of oppositional sociopolitical forces in the country.

Abstract The social stigmatization, persecution and murder of tuberculosis patients in Nazi Germany is a topic that has long been overshadowed by euthanasia crimes. Based on extensive archival research, this article shows that over 30,000 patients, labelled as deviant, became victims of forced detention. In so-called ‘special institutions’, which were part of the regime’s terror apparatus, these people suffered severe physical abuse. An estimated 4,000 were deliberately starved to death or murdered by overdoses of medication. As the article argues, a long road led to the Nazi murder of tuberculosis patients and began with medical experience gathered during the First World War and in the 1920s. When the regime’s handling of the disease and of tuberculosis patients is located within this much wider time frame, the notion that the exigencies of the Second World War caused the regime’s radicalization falters.

This paper takes Friedrich Engels 200th birthday on 28 November 2020 as occasion to ask: How relevant are Friedrich Engels’s works in the age of digital capitalism? It shows that Engels class-struggle oriented theory can and should inform 21st century social science and digital social research. Based on a reading of Engels’s works, the article discusses how to think of scientific socialism as critical social science today, presents a critique of computational social science as digital positivism, engages with foundations of digital labour analysis, the analysis of the international division of digital labour, updates Engels’s Condition of the Working Class in England in the age of digital capitalism, analyses the role of trade unions and digital class struggles in digital age, analyses the social murder of workers in the COVID-19 crisis, engages with platform co-operatives, digital commons projects and public service Internet platforms as concrete digital utopias that point beyond digital capital(ism). Engels’s analysis is updated for critically analysing the digital conditions of the working class today, including the digital labour of hardware assemblers at Foxconn and Pegatron, the digital labour aristocracy of software engineers at Google, online freelance workers, platform workers at capitalist platform corporations such as Uber, Deliveroo, Fiverr, Upwork, or Freelancer, and the digital labour of Facebook users. Engels’s 200th birthday reminds us of the class character of digital capitalism and that we need critical digital social science as a new form of scientific socialism.