A Canadian colleague and kindred spirit, Dennis Raphael, recently sent me a copy of a pamphlet prepared by the Medical Research Group of the Labour Research Department entitled ‘Social Murder’ and published – ‘price twopence’ – in 1934. It has extraordinary resonance today and warrants a summary.
It starts, appropriately enough, with a seminal quotation from Engels’ Condition of the Working Class in England in 1844:
‘When one individual inflicts bodily injury upon another, such injury that death results, we call the deed manslaughter; when the assailant knew in advancer 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, one which is quite as much a death by violence as that by the sword or bullet; when it deprives thousands of the necessaries of life, places them under conditions in which they cannot live – forces them, through the strong arm of the law, to remain in such conditions until that death ensues which is the inevitable consequence – 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; 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. But murder it remains.’
It is self-evidently a quote that retains its salience and punch today!
The pamphlet is focused on contemporary statements on the ‘minimal food requirements of the workers’, with special reference to the advisory committee of the Ministry of Health and a commission appointed by the BMA. The message from the pamphlet: ‘workers must reject absolutely the principle of minimum diets and the idea that it is possible, in the present state of knowledge, to determine a minimum diet compatible with health.’
The details of the case need not detain us here, except to mention three points. First, it was apparent that the ‘minimum diet’ proposed by the various experts was simply unaffordable in light of rising food prices and low workers’ incomes. Second, it was noted that the ‘experts’ recognised – without irony – that middle-class workers required more and better food since they were of larger build! And third, it was recorded that food production was often cut back, and foodstuffs destroyed, to keep prices up.
What I want to draw particular attention to in this blog is the line taken in the pamphlet. Its writers note that the thrust of the expert’s analyses was to settle on discovering the minimum diet ‘compatible with health and working capacity’. There was no ambition to ‘raise the health of the workers to the highest level’, or any recognition ‘that the workers have any but bodily needs’. They continue:
‘Thus the bankruptcy of capitalism is reflected in the scientific world; science, instead of serving mankind by increasing the powers of production and so raising the universal standard of life, is in fact employed in degrading that standard … The spokesmen of capitalism admit that, even if their best hopes of prosperity are realised, there will still be no hope of employment for a large body of workers. All that this two million or so of ‘scrap’ will have to hope for will be these minimum allowances in the midst of plenty. Nor are the unemployed alone concerned. The amount paid to this large body of unemployed is intended to be the standard to which wages can be reduced. The Save the Children Fund recommends that assistance should be given to the unemployed in the form of meals for children, since, if assistance is given directly to the father, he may well be as well off when out of work as when employed. In effect this bourgeois organisation admits that if unemployment benefit is raised to a decent subsistence level wages will be forced up … This then is the best that capitalism has to offer the workers: the vision of food production being limited and stocks of food destroyed, and for themselves an animal existence, with just enough to keep up their efficiency for work and support their children … In order to rise above the degraded standards of capitalism, to put an end to the social murder so vividly described by Engels, the workers must use their combined strength not only to resist all attacks on their standards of living but to overthrow the system under which these are inevitable.’
Why this blog? Well, I trust my motives are largely transparent. First, we need to recover and re-use Engels concept of ‘social murder’ because this exactly captures the contemporary reality of rentier capitalism as it did that of liberal capitalism. Second, it is no less urgent that we socialists regain the accuracy, integrity and ambition represented in this pamphlet from 1934. Post-Corbyn, it is more than doubtful whether this will again be possible from within the Labour Party; as I’ve often noted, Ralph Miliband has been proven right. The bland leadership of Starmer has taken Labour back into the establishment and rendered it supine. Labour is firmly pro-capitalist, and therefore pro-social murder.