Introduction

Engels provided one of the strongest and most famous indictments in the Marxist canon of capitalism and the suffering it causes with his accusation against the bourgeoise that they commit ‘social murder’:

Engels is drawing attention to how the avoidable deaths of tens of thousands of people are made invisible by what McGarvey (2023) would today call the social distance between the murdered and the murderer. The assailant in a social murder is always absent from the scene of the crime. The relations of capital, between worker and bourgeoisie, leave no fingerprints, nor samples of DNA that can identify a perpetrator. The insightfulness of Engels lies in his assertion that the harm capitalism creates is assumed to be, as he says, natural, with the implication that no individual nor social class of people bear any responsibility. Poor health and wellbeing are waived away as plain bad luck, or, within the responsibilization discourses of neoliberalism, poor wellbeing is the result of an individual making bad choices about their health and wellbeing – perhaps deciding to smoke too much or indulging in too many high-fat foods.