Social Murder and the Antisocial Contract

Marissa Jackson Sow

Social murder is widely understood as the reckless and calculated killing by the State of people who are considered surplus and thus made redundant by the State. It is not merely an outcome, however; social murder, is an antidemocratic process, and—certainly as it is manifesting in the United States under the second Trump Administration—is also an anticonstitutionalist project aimed at destroying society, eliminating social goods, and renegotiating an American social contract that is, definitionally, antisocial. Social murder is as much about the elimination of social life as it is about the interruption of physical life. And it is fueled by the antisocial contract. The antisocial contract exists in the spaces below and outside of the democratic social contract, as the social contract’s inverse. It governs the working underclasses, who are not among the social contract’s intended beneficiaries, relegating them to social and economic purgatory, subjecting them to constant structural and institutional violence, and accelerating their physical deaths. The antisocial contract has, until very recently, operated mostly in the shadows of the law in liberal regimes, as equality and nondiscrimination are the formal law of the land in liberal nation-states, and ironically, it may be found hiding just beneath legal provisions insisting upon equality in its most formalistic senses. The antisocial contract, of which Charles Mills’s racial contract is an example, stipulates that enforceable agreements to which members of the underclasses are party may be breached, without notice and without remedy. Such contractual breaches— failures to maintain the habitability and safety of large apartment complexes housing low-income families, for example—often undergird incidences of social murder.

The antisocial contract may also be understood as a legally enforceable agreement that is antisocial in nature, entrenching class disparities, and even peonage, along gendered, racial, and colonial lines. This type of enforceable contract animates the antisocial social contract described above. As American society moves away from constitutionalism and basic recognitions of civil and social rights toward a strictly bifurcated social arrangement of overlords and laborers, contracts for housing, employment, and even commercial goods have increasingly come to resemble contracts of adhesion rather than exchanges of mutual agency and value. Contracts that once protected citizens from vulnerability to social murder and increased the fullness of human life are now bargained for out of desperation to avoid physical death and other immediate forms of ruin. Recognizing the antisocial contract and capturing its duality is critically prerequisite to understanding what social murder is and how it works.