@seed-corn-thoughtsbsky.social writes:
"Denying someone insurance isn't violence. Giving someone diabetes through the omnipresence of corn syrup isn't violence. Paying people a shitty wage isn't violence. Here's a list of things that are violence: Violence, as in actually using force to injure, maim, or kill another. That's it."
@jbenmenachem.com responds:
"Ruth Wilson Gilmore's concept of "organized abandonment" is useful here: the intentional disinvestment and neglect which creates group-level vulnerability to premature death. Organized abandonment kills more people than interpersonal violence, and it's not even close. It's worse.(That being said, many deaths attributable to interpersonal violence can also be attributed to organized abandonment — gun violence is most prevalent in some of the poorest, most segregated neighborhoods in America)"
(original post since deleted)
Organized Abandonment Talk by Professor Ruth Wilson Gilmore (2:22:19)
On 8 December 2022 The Forge hosted a public talk and panel discussion on Organized Abandonment.
Presenter: Ruth Wilson Gilmore is Professor of Earth & Environmental Sciences and Director of the Center for Place, Culture, and Politics, at the City University of New York Graduate Center. She is the author of Abolition Geography: Essays Towards Liberation (Verso 2022); and Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California (UC Press 2007); and she has co-edited, with Paul Gilroy, Stuart Hall: Selected Writings on Race and Difference (Duke 2021).
Discussants/panellists:
"When one individual inflicts bodily injury upon another such that death results, we call the deed manslaughter; when the assailant knew in advance that the injury would be fatal, we call his deed murder. But when society [1] 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."
— Frederick Engels, Condition of the Working Class in England, 1845
[1] Note by Engels to the German edition of 1845: When as here and elsewhere I speak of society as a responsible whole, having rights and duties, I mean, of course, the ruling power of society, the class which at present holds social and political control, and bears, therefore, the responsibility for the condition of those to whom it grants no share in such control. This ruling class in England, as in all other civilised countries, is the bourgeoisie. But that this society, and especially the bourgeoisie, is charged with the duty of protecting every member of society, at least, in his life, to see to it, for example, that no one starves, I need not now prove to my German readers. If I were writing for the English bourgeoisie, the case would be different.
Added by Engels to the American edition of 1887: And so it is now in Germany. Our German capitalists are fully up to the English level, in this respect at least, in the year of grace, 1886.
Added by Engels to the German edition of 1892: How things have changed in the last fifty years! Today there are members of the English middle-classes who recognise that society has duties to the individual citizen – but as for the German middle-classes?!?