Social murder facts for kids
Social murder (German: sozialer Mord) is the unnatural death that occurs due to social, political, or economic oppression. The phrase was coined by Friedrich Engels in his 1845 work The Condition of the Working-Class in England whereby "the class which at present holds social and political control" (i.e. the bourgeoisie) "places hundreds of proletarians in such a position that they inevitably meet a too early and an unnatural death". This was in a different category to murder and manslaughter committed by individuals against one another, as social murder explicitly was committed by the political and social elite against the poorest in society.
Although originally written with regard to the English city of Manchester in the Victorian era, the term has been used by left-wing politicians such as John McDonnell in the 21st century to describe Conservative economic policy as well as events such as the Grenfell Tower fire. York University professor Dennis Raphael used it to describe Conservative public policy in Ontario, Canada. In 2007, Canadian economists Robert Chernomas and Ian Hudson of the University of Manitoba used the term to refer to conservative economics in their book Social Murder: And Other Shortcomings of Conservative Economics. ..... In 2021, the BMJ executive editor Kamran Abbasi used the term to describe governmental policy which had failed to control the COVID-19 pandemic.
See also
- Diseases of despair
