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I thought maybe we could sort of start with talking through social murder.

And you bring this up, you know, obviously right in the beginning of the piece.

And it connects this idea that you just mentioned of the fact that, you know,

part of the problem with the pandemic response and with all sort of

health and extraction and structural violence in general, right, is that there is no way to engineer

capitalism to end social murder because it is part of the system itself. Absolutely.

So I always like to foreground kind of my own journey to things and my process,

partly my disposition as a Midwestern or I don't like to be fancy.

But also I think it's important because the world is hard and confusing.

And I think that when it feels like other people just magically get it, it's like, oh, I'm the only one or doesn't get it.

So I always like to kind of foreground my journey to things. And so I wrote this book and I have a footnote where like I wanted to understand this stuff and it felt really urgent.

And I didn't know how to understand it. So I threw everything I had into the book.

And so I have this footnote where I talk about this comedian who was talking about the Grenfell Tower Fire in the UK.

And if folks aren't familiar with that, basically it's a public housing development that had flammable insulation and residents activists who were residents on had lived there for decades saying, this is dangerous, you need to do something. And the local council just never did anything about it. And it finally burnt up and a bunch of people died. And this commentator said, you know, this is social murder. And he was quoting a UK politician. And I was like, that's a apt phrase. And so I threw that in. And then I finished the book and I was

like, you know, I'm going to finally get around looking that up. And it actually comes from this book

that Friedrich Engels wrote in 1845, you know, Marx's close collaborator. And I've been a Marxist

for like longer than I've been an adult. And but I've never really taken Engels, especially

seriously. Like Engels was the funder in the facilitator, right? Marx is the intellectual was how I thought about it. So I'd never read that book. I read that book, I don't know, sometime in 2020. And it's the condition of the working class in England. And it's a phenomenal book. I wish I'd read it years ago. I'd highly recommended everybody. And in that, yeah, right, and a classic that I had neglected because I was a bad, had a bad version of Marxism.

And basically, Engels writes his book in 1845, Engels also did some work on investigation of the economy that kicked off Marx's inquiry into the economy.

And Marx is very, very clear about this in Capitol where he's like, Engels wrote this thing in their 1840s and that's why I inquiry into the economy. Marx is very, very clear about this in Capital, where he's like,

Engels wrote this thing in their 1840s, and that's why I started studying the economy.

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