‘Hail, ye solitary Ruins, Ye sacred Tombs, and silent Walls! … When oppressed humanity bent in timid silence throughout the globe beneath the galling yoke of slavery, it was you that proclaimed aloud the birthright of those truths, which tyrants tremble at while they detest; and which, by sinking the loftiest head of the proudest potentate, with all his boasted pageantry, to the level of mortality with his meanest slave, confirmed and ratified by your unerring testimony the sacred and immortal doctrine of Equality.’

C.F. Volney, The Ruins of Empire

‘And all this vast agglomeration of people, these real potential constituents, had been through this physiological process of being born. … And in due course every one of them would die. That was upsetting because he felt it was rather undignified. There was a nasty socialism about it.’

Anthony Gibbs, London Symphony

This cold equality is not an Event but an outcome. The movement is everything when the final goal is Nothing. In the long run, we are all dead.

Vulgarian rentier responses are unsurprising: swagger at or rage in denial of this interventionist, levelling, moderate, ineluctible, social-democratic absolute. Death is a Keynesian.

In the context of the crisis of neoliberalism, socialists may therefore offer limited critical support to death as a reformist measure.