Social Murder as a Necropolitical Governance Technology

The news media these days can often feel like an infomercial for “resilience.” Following the near-daily disasters, whole communities are blessed with the word and the media is onto the next one having declared that “normalcy” is being restored, albeit with heavy hearts.

Why the rush?

As Ajay Singh Chaudhary writes in his book The Exhausted of the Earth, “Resilience is a management strategy and apology for the status quo, for global capitalism with all its constitutive social and socioecological relations.”

Sarah Jaffe writes in The Baffler of this “organized abandonment” as representative of neoliberalism that isn’t simply about shrinking the state but growing power in some areas while others are completely hacked off. Disasters should speed up the timeline:

While of course there is urgency in rebuilding after a disaster, particularly when thousands are out of their homes, the rush to declare the tragedy over, to restore “normalcy,” has grown untenable. In a time of escalating climate catastrophe, we need something other than paeans to resilience.

Indeed. 

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“America runs on death.” So begins a forthcoming paper for the Washington and Lee Law Review, in which Marissa Jackson Sow makes the case for introducing the concept of social murder into the American legal lexicon. Let’s review. 

What Is Social Murder? 

Sow defines it as “the elimination of groups of people via atrocious events for which the State bears indirect or partial responsibility, through calculated abandonment instead of specific intent.” 

And she stresses that “social murder is a necessary outcome of market capitalism”:

Within the liberal democracy, social murder is a governance technology that allows the state to reallocate capital from the poor to the middle and upper-classes while coercing the poor, working, and middle classes to accept labor arrangements on terms less-than-favorable to them by holding up the victims of social murder as a cautionary tale concerning what happens if one becomes too poor and too dependent upon the state for basic survival.

A great example is the criminalization of homelessness (as if it wasn’t already punishment enough) taking place across the country in red and blue states. The ongoing destruction of welfare states in Western Europe and Canada provide other case studies. There are examples of social murder all around us—from abandonment in climate disasters to slave labor guest worker programs to the absence of a social safety net to the grandaddy of them all:

The COVID-19 pandemic pulled back the veil on governmental policymaking that expressly accepted the sacrifice of the lives of some for the benefit of the economy.

The Legal Nuts and Bolts

Here is Sow’s argument on why social murder must introduced to the American legal system:

Without the right to contract for the goods and services that support and sustain life, one does not enjoy the benefits of membership in the body social. Socially speaking, without the ability to exploit the rights to enjoy contract and property, one is not fully alive in the social sense, and without social protections, one is inevitably more exposed to the possibilities of physical death.

And here is the judicial precedent with regards to the 14th Amendment:

In deciding the Slaughterhouse Cases, the United States Supreme Court interpreted the Fourteenth Amendment for the first time since its 1868 ratification, and in so doing, made clear that the 14th Amendment to the Constitution was made for the specific and unique purpose of elevating formerly enslaved African Americans to the status of full citizen by preventing governmental discrimination against them. Stated otherwise, the Amendment, including its Due Process and Equal Protection Clauses, were meant to facilitate the inclusion of Black Americans into the body politic and the body social. But the Fourteenth Amendment does not protect against discrimination perpetuated by private persons and entities.

…The Court, of course, later placed key limits on that inclusion via the earlier Racial Retrenchment cases—notably via Washington v. Davis and Village of Arlington Heights.In both cases, the Court ruled that while intentional racial discrimination by government actors remained unlawful, discriminatory impacts without discriminatory intent were not unlawful—effectively sanctioning the legality—and banality—of structural and institutional racial violence.

The effect:

…harms, which, when accumulated, strip life chances away from the unwelcomed and increase their exposure to zones of death, are made banal. These violences are thus shielded from the reach of remedy and made imperceptible.

While the US courts have made it virtually impossible to prove legally because of the challenge to prove intent, the system remains highly effective for the elite perpetuating the violence:

It aids governments in the “economic and political management of human populations,” by “subjugate[ing] life to the power of death.” It accomplishes this by relegating its underclass population to a quotidian purgatory–terrorizing them into unfavorable labor conditions and coercing them into disadvantageous economic and sociopolitical bargains. As housing and food prices spike, there are some people who simply will not make ends meet even while working two or three different jobs—leaving them vulnerable to poor wellness, workplace injury, food insecurity, and compromised safety and physical integrity.

Social murder is effective governance technology because it is legally illegible and otherwise virtually imperceptible. When it results in injury and death, no one is to blame, because at no point did any policy maker declare specific intent to destroy individuals.157 Rather, interpersonal incidents of police brutality or violent vigilante harassment are attributed to bad individual behavior, or institutional bias, while disasters such as apartment complex fires are easily blamed on the negligence of the impoverished residents themselves. Social murder is treated as a bug in the technology of liberal governance and not as a feature thereof. However, it is a central, non-negotiable feature of American market democracy.

The Reality of US “Freedom”

According to Ronald Wright, “John Steinbeck once said that socialism never took root in America because the poor see themselves not as an exploited proletariat but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires.”

The reality is that a vast majority will always be temporarily embarrassed:

The United States, for example, only exists as dominant, both outside of and within its borders, and this requires that someone exist who will be dominated. Legally speaking, this requires that rights holders exist in contrast with those excluded from rights, that citizens exist in contrast with foreigners, patriots in contrast with subversives and enemy combatants, and the productive in contrast with leeches. American citizenship and the legal rights attaching thereto—life, liberty, and property—thus only exist insofar as a vulnerable underclass of Others—for which life, liberty, and property are never guaranteed—are also present.

Americans living in the top one percent of counties ranked by median household income now live an average of 84.3 years, while people living in the bottom 50 percent of counties ranked by median household income live an average of seven years less. Why is this unsurprising? 

In market democracies, withdrawals of state protection in favor of private contracting and only the rights to food, housing, and healthcare that one’s money can buy, have resulted not only in the expansion and enhancement of inequalities, but in the tragic, premature, and systemic deaths of America’s citizen underclass—those who bear the brunt of inequality until they can bear it no longer, or are culled. Their deaths are caused by state policy and practice, including the wanton disregard by governments for communities they find undesirable or bereft of social, economic, and political value; and the intentional destruction of Society through privatization of public goods. Because no precise language exists to describe these happenings in the United States, these deaths take place—often spectacularly—before our eyes, as if they are natural, if unfortunate occurrences, and for which no remedy is possible.

It goes beyond theory like “organized abandonment” defined by Ruth Wilson Gilmore as  the “explicit incorporation of interdependent policies and institutional practices over time that … lead to… entrenched inequities.” With social murder, Sow makes the case that “the State is not only intentionally subjugating disfavored classes of people to systemically poor living conditions to maximize Capital, but also intentionally sacrificing those among them to premature and unavoidable physical death—death that may be gradual, creeping, and slow, or which might occur in a fiery blaze.” 

And because of the state’s latest DOGE-turbo charged privatization efforts, she makes the case that it is only set to get worse:

As the American government accelerates its neoliberal project of replacing the protective state with private enterprise, and as it simultaneously cedes space to oligarchal authoritarian entrepreneurs who openly embrace necropolitics, citizens become commodities instead of rightsholders, and social murder becomes more perceptible and more prevalent. Social murder destroys American constitutionalism by depriving Americans of substantive and procedural due process, and thus breaching the American social contract. It also involves the systematic breach of Americans’ private contracts and pseudo-private contracts, such as those for housing and utilities.

…This abandonment is systemic, calculated, and much like depraved-indifference crimes, is perpetrated with wanton malice and foreknowledge that human deaths will result.

We see how these policies reverberate out into the open during times of crisis like natural disasters or manufactured crises like the endless war on crime or immigration that prioritzes terrorizing wide swathes of the population rather than go after white collar criminals or employers of immigrant labor.

And the ongoing genocide in Gaza is a natural, more in-your-face outgrowth of such policies:

…social murder and its creations of death zones is a governance technology that operates similarly to atrocities such as genocide, ethnic cleansing, and apartheid. …Yet, social murder is distinct from those forms of political violence because of the lack of specific intent on the part of specific people to harm other particular individuals. Social murder is distinct because while it certainly results in deaths and knowing wrongdoing, it functions as murder without murderers. Because social murder results from “[c]ollectively produced decisions”, social murders “typically involve a more remote proximity, in time and space, between the offender and the victim than…in cases of interpersonal violence.”

Social murder functions as a necropolitical governance technology, keeping citizens fearful enough of premature physical death or destitution that they can be coerced to become human sites of economic extraction and exploitation—based upon the faulty belief that work necessarily creates personal economic opportunities and “freedoms.”

…In illiberal states, ethno-states, and apartheid states (where liberal democracy may exist for favored ethnic groups at the expense of the disfavored), the political calculations made by government actors regarding who can live and who must die are often overt…

Contemporary Case Studies

There are plenty. Readers can probably add those that have hit closest to home for them. Here are some mentioned by Sow.

Covid-19. It hammers home on a daily basis the “existence through which one is critically and only useful—and thus alive—to create wealth” for our overlords “under permanent threat of death or destitution.”

The Grenfell Tower fire, as well as the fire at the Twin Parks North West apartment complex in the Bronx, where “due to faulty self-closing doors, the fire spread quickly, killing seventeen residents, and injuring forty-four others. At the time of the fire, the building management had received over thirty complaints regarding inadequate heating and other problems.” Sow’s useful summary of what connects them:

Both are “prototypical examples of how social murder manifests because of the tradition of neoliberal abandonment.” Where governments have outsourced their duties to protect and provide basic goods and utilities to their citizens to private entities, the positionality of the citizen—and particularly the value of the marginalized citizen—has drastically changed, from citizen-stakeholder to client-consumer. The devaluation of marginalized citizens—immigrants, people of color, residents in low-income housing, the elderly—takes place through public-private collaboration such as redlining (private), zoning (public), racialized arrest, prosecution and incarceration (public), and private development and management of prisons (prison), neighborhood revitalization/gentrification plans (public), and property development, sales, and leasing (private). 

The Detroit Water Shutoffs and Hurricane Katrina.

 The City of Detroit shut off water access to 40,000 households with the same type of intention to cause indiscriminate harm and suffering as did the City of Philadelphia when it flooded and bombed the M.O.V.E. residence; the outcomes in Detroit were less physically fatal and much less spectacular, but when identifying acts of social murder, is intention not what counts most?

But what was true in Detroit and in New Orleans is true of all cases of social murder: that the State has, at some point, made the knowing calculation that preserving and protecting the lives of some people is decidedly less important, and that in some cases, actively placing those lives in harm’s way advances certain necropolitical governance goals.

Illegitimate Justice

That’s a lot of dark reality. What’s the solution?

By making social murder identifiable and legally cognizable as a violation of both public and private rights, however, scholars, lawmakers, and policy advocates will be empowered to prevent social murder before it occurs and offer holistic remedies—including restorative and reparative justice—to survivors after social murder has taken place.

I have a hard time believing legal theory and the courts are going to lead us out of the dark ages. How well do our courts even function anymore? And is the “rule of law” not designed to protect them from consequences? Sow notes this:

Progressive social justice activists often remind themselves and others that law will not save us, but this Article has been written in the hopes that we might indeed be saved.

Hope is fine, but unfortunately, history shows us it’s going to take a lot more work, pain, and suffering to get there. In some ways we have been here before, as Adolph Reed Jr. mentions in his survey of the terrain:

Trumpism and the other fascist-authoritarian tendencies are from one perspective expressions of neoliberalism’s success. They are partly responses to the popular immiseration and insecurity that neoliberalization produces. For that reason, this reactionary turn, reprehensible and dangerous as it is, may be more like neoliberalism 2.0 than a wholly new political development.42Neoliberalism 1.0 (and I do not intend to argue for adoption of that terminology) would refer to the historically specific capitalist counterattack beginning in the 1970s and 1980s to undercut the gains workers had made via de facto class struggle during the postwar decades, gains that had been won within the already narrowed framework imposed by the capitalist counterattack that pushed back against the momentum toward socialization generated by the successes of the working class between the Depression and the end of World War II.

And what is the path out of this madness?

Countering the effects of a half-century of barely challenged neoliberal hegemony will require a great effort of political education and organizing to combat the weaponized lies and subterfuge that define American politics today. This will have to be conducted largely through slow, face-to-face processes that rely on establishing relations of trust and standing with others not already on our side. (On the electoral front, non-candidate, issue-based ballot campaigns can be a useful component of such organizing, as they can do political education and issue-shaping on a wider scale and facilitate making direct contacts with workers. And left-oriented initiatives have been instructively successful even in states that routinely spurn Democratic candidates.) As the late Jane McAlevey argued and demonstrated so forcefully, there can be no shortcuts in building the sort of movement necessary to challenge the dangerous forces arrayed against us.45The effort required is therefore not reducible to electoral dynamics; we cannot elect our way out of this horrible moment. We can hope only to keep the worst at bay while we organize the alternative political force. And I shall disclose here the not-so-secret punch line of my book, which the last eighty years of American political history demonstrate and with which I know Jane would also agree: there is no effective substitute for an anti-capitalist left. And the most serious political work ahead of us for the foreseeable future is to throw everything we can into generating one.

Maybe once that happens we can get to incorporating social murder. Until then, one can expect elites to continue to try to act with impunity and perhaps more vigilante justice. As Sow points out, what Luigi Mangione’s killing of CEO of the American health insurance company UnitedHealthcare Brian Thompson shows is that sentences for social murder are likely going to get handed down—one way or another.

The lack of sympathy for Brian Thompson reflects an open embrace of the bloodlust that animates contemporary American culture; ironically, however, it also reveals an enraged awareness amongst everyday Americans that they are subjected to violent indignities for the sake of profit maximization; that instead of the empowered citizenship Americans are promised, they are rendered powerless, and fungible; and that because of an erosion of social protections, they are, at all times, a stroke of bad luck away from death or destruction.

The openness with which some have celebrated Luigi Mangione’s assassination of Thompson has been premised upon a recognition, and rejection, of the widely accepted belief that while premeditated murder of one individual by another is both illegal and morally repugnant, the intentional denials of insurance coverage for life-saving healthcare are somehow lawful and banal. Implicit in this recognition are two others: 1) that the law, as written and enforced, does not capture many Americans’ expectations of what their citizenship should offer them; and 2) that there are more ways to murder a person than are reflected in relevant criminal codes.