“Social murder” is the term used by Engels and his contemporaries. “Its deed is murder just as surely as the deed of the single individual; disguised, malicious murder, murder against which none can defend himself, which does not seem what it is, because no man sees the murderer, because the death of the victim seems a natural one, since the offence is more one of omission than of commission.” Likewise “statistical genocide,” or “democide.” Lauren Berlant called this “slow death”—“mass physical attenuation under global/national regimes of capitalist structural subordination.”

The finality of death in the social imaginary as the ultimate conclusion of capital’s violence can produce fantasies of a moral or ethical capitalism. This is arguably the dream chased by capital’s true believers: with modifications to its systems, we can slow slow death to a crawl, render statistical genocide statistically insignificant. With “premature” death the imagined enemy of capital’s internal narrative of its own beneficence, minor reforms become enshrined as a legible mirage. But the primary sites of violence under capitalism are not those that lead directly to death. They are instead the quotidian forms that situate capitalist belonging; the reproduction of norms socially as well as legally and administratively, abetted by a “cynical din of knowledge production” that institutionalizes logics of eugenics and austerity.''

Beatrice Adler-Bolton and Artie Vierkant