So this week we learned the depressing news that the UK covid-19 death toll has passed now some 100,000. You may be asking yourself why. That we can’t answer but we are drawn to this extract from Freidrich Engels’ 1845 work “The Condition of the Working Class in England” to provide some context:
“When one individual inflicts bodily injury upon another, such injury that death results, we call that deed manslaughter; when the assailant knew in advance that the injury would be fatal, we call this deed murder. But when society places hundreds of proletarians in such a position that they inevitably meet too early and an unnatural death, one which is quite as much a death by violence as that by the sword or the bullet; when it deprives thousands of the necessaries of life, places them under conditions in which they cannot live – forces them…to remain in such conditions until that death ensues which is the inevitable consequence – knows that 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…”
