The COVID-19 Pandemic: On the Everyday Mechanisms of Social Murder

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.