Reflections on the Legitimacy of Political Violence

With a genocidal, censorship-mad ruling class that sees violence and as the best means of conflict resolution, you must ask yourself: Are they now waging war on average Americans?

The above image is a photo of Pasolini’s body after his assassination in 1975. While out cruising for sex, he picked up a 17-year-old hustler who turned out to be a bit more than the usual rough trade: the kid would later beat him half to death and run over his body with a car. While we do not know exactly who was behind the assassination, Pasolini’s virulent attacks on the Catholic Church and the ruling class of Italy lead most to believe this was a killing ordered by reactionary governmental forces or the Mafia.

Pasolini was a Marxist writer and filmmaker who stands alongside Godard, Bresson, and Fassbinder as one of the most important cineastes of the 20th century. Somehow, even in death, he was able to transform his body into a gruesome but sublime work of art, his last act of rebellion. His murder is what I consider an illegitimate act of political violence: silencing a man whose ideological values you see as threatening but who poses no real danger to you or your class.

In a piece from The Guardian, Ed Vulliamy reminds us of why Pasolini was targeted:

”Pasolini's view of a new totalitarianism whereby hyper-materialism was destroying the culture of Italy can be seen now as brilliant foresight into what has happened to the world generally in an internet age. But his critique had been, for months before the murder, more specific. He had singled out television as an especially pernicious influence, predicting the rise and power of a type such as media-mogul-turned-prime minister Silvio Berlusconi long before time. More specific still, he had written a series of columns for Corriere della Sera denouncing the leadership of the ruling Christian Democratic party as riddled with Mafia influence, predicting the so-called Tangentopoli – "kickback city" – scandals 15 years later, whereby an entire political class was put under arrest during the early 1990s. In his columns, Pasolini declared that the Christian Democratic leadership should stand trial, not only for corruption but association with neo-fascist terrorism, such as the bombing of trains and a demonstration in Milan.”

Someone fighting for the dignity of working people and the oppressed, someone fighting corrupt forces, someone who uses a pen and not a sword, is never a legitimate target of political violence. Pasolini’s radical queerness and revolutionary politics were no direct threat to anyone’s health, happiness, or well-being.

But his ideas were a threat to the ruling class, the mafia, the church, and corrupt politicians who saw his critique of their criminality as something that needed to be silenced.

Was Brian Thompson, CEO of the crooked and ruthless UnitedHealth, a victim? Or did he, like everyone else in his line of work, place a gaggle of litigators around a giant table to decide just how much death and environmental harm they could inflict and still make money? Just how many babies could be born blind, how many elderly cancer patients could get refused treatment before the fines would start to outweigh the profit? Corporate administrators will move right ahead and engage in behavior that they know will kill or harm both human beings and the environment in the ruthless pursuit of capital. If you don’t believe it, watch capitalists describe this process themselves in Mark Achbar and Jennifer Abbott’s The Corporation from 2004.

This is how Brian Thompson determined if people were going to die or not. That’s premeditated murder motivated by the need for constant capital accumulation and growth. It is a violent and repressive act by a ruling class that will not give Americans medical insurance, a liveable minimum wage, or any kind of rent control. People like Thompson are why your grandma dies, unable to get her diabetes meds. It’s why children needlessly perish from leukemia. It’s why millions suffered from Fauci’s mismanagement of the AIDS and COVID crises, leading to untold numbers of dead gay men for no other reason than a lack of access to anti-viral drugs, not to mention those who died needlessly from myocardial infarction, a side-effect of the mRNA vax that Fauci tried to downplay.

It is horrific and immoral, and it is done to protect a class of criminal wealth hoarders (I’m trying to use “wealth hoarder” instead of “billionaire” as much as possible).

I suppose the names Luigi Mangione and Aaron Bushnell evoke a range of responses, from extreme outrage to sincere compassion. It probably brings forth conflicting emotions, as do the stories of anarchist revolutionaries Sacco and Vanzetti and abolitionists Jim Brown and Nat Turner, whose actions, like those of Bushnell and Mangione, demand that we consider the morality, or lack thereof, behind any decision to resort to political violence. But while I oppose vigilantism in general, I do not see Luigi Mangione’s actions as either vigilantism or terrorism. He targeted an enemy soldier, and it is disingenuous, specious, and misleading to frame this as an act of terror when it was in fact an act of self-defense against a class of people intent on exterminating us.

I understand that the government needs to mete out some form of justice to keep the oligarchy happy, but if Mangione is sentenced to death, we need to take to the streets. I will, and I’ll keep you up to date on how to get involved should that happen.

However, let’s dig more into the morality of political violence. Žižek recently wrote on Robespierre and the necessity of terror. Of course, we must remember that Žižek is only half-joking when he refers to himself as a Stalinist. Of course, he recognizes Stalin’s atrocities, but at heart, Žižek still believes in a dictatorship of the proletariat and has even invoked the need to have a party figurehead, to cultivate a sort of cult of personality amongst the public. Žižek defends the need for political violence, but he is speaking of large-scale revolutionary politics and not the actions of an individual:

The harsh consequence to be accepted here is that this excess of egalitarian democracy over the democratic procedure can only "institutionalize" itself in the guise of its opposite, as revolutionary-democratic terror. So, again, how to re-invent this terror for today? In his Logiques des mondes, Alain Badiou [27] elaborates the eternal Idea of the politics of revolutionary justice at work from the ancient Chinese "legists" through Jacobins to Lenin and Mao - it consists of four moments: voluntarism (the belief that one can "move mountains," ignoring "objective" laws and obstacles), terror (a ruthless will to crush the enemy of the people), egalitarian justice (its immediate brutal imposition, with no understanding for the "complex circumstances" which allegedly compel us to proceed gradually), and, last but not least, trust in the people - suffice it to recall two examples here, Robespierre himself, his "a great truth" ("the characteristic of popular government is to be trustful towards the people and severe towards itself"), and Mao's critique of Stalin's Economic Problems of Socialism in the USSR, where he qualifies Stalin's point of view as "almost altogether wrong. The basic error is mistrust of the peasants."). [28] And is the only appropriate way to counter the threat of ecological catastrophe that looms at our horizon not precisely the combination of these four moments?

That sounds good, but after the lessons of the twentieth century, I have never been able to accept the notion of an all-powerful centralized authority with a revolutionary vanguard ruling by fiat. How do we decide when someone is “the enemy of the people?” and exactly how do we go about the business of imposing this “ruthless will?” That didn’t work out so well last time around. Remember, the endgame for Marx was communism: a stateless society. Marxists and anarchists had the same goal and both saw the state as reactionary and violent, a coercive and alienating force in society. But they had different ideas about how to abolish state authority, even in their respective camps, as the assassinations of Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht so poignantly illustrate.

It’s very difficult, probably impossible, to say to an administrative governmental body: “Here’s a bunch of power that you can use, unsupervised, in any way you want. Your job is to eventually relinquish all your power and make yourselves obsolete.”

It’s irrational and counter-intuitive to do this, but that’s exactly what happened.

It didn’t work very well. Large, powerful bodies get corrupted in the same way individuals do, as Montesquieu points out in Esprit Des Lois. This leads to exactly the kind of indiscriminate terror seen under Pol Pot, Stalin, and Mao, and that terror leads to the death of innocents on a mass scale and is usually rooted in the pathology of a group or an individual who’s been corrupted by power. This was true under Robespierre as well. I don’t believe he wanted it to get out of hand, and I think Robespierre was a very moral and ethical human being in the beginning. But it did get out of hand: another example of the problem with allocating huge amounts of power to revolutionary bodies and/or individuals.

Plus, whenever one of these regimes goes off the rails and starts butchering people, it becomes great propaganda for reactionaries who do not want to see radical reform, more unions, decent wages, social welfare programs, and universal health insurance. The wealthy and the powerful see writers like me, who are staunchly anti-imperialist and anti-capitalist, and get nervous. They get even more nervous when someone like Lugi Mangione acts out in a manner that is emblematic of the way 90% of Americans feel.

Of course, the newspapers and online media will squeal in outrage — they’re owned by the people who are actively involved in killing and poisoning us and our planet, pretending that what really belongs to every human, every animal, and every other life form on this planet is theirs to cannibalize.

Violence was necessary for the French Revolution to succeed. It was a true revolution, a class war, and the most important moment in modern history, signaling a shift to liberal democracy and capitalist market economies. Crushing it may have meant another hundred years of absolutism, so anything smelling of counter-revolutionary conduct was immediately stamped out. Even many of the beheadings were necessary, especially those of the more sinister aristocrats who were symbols of ruling class greed and evinced utter disregard for the misery and death of average citizens. Still, it was in no way necessary to do something like grab a cobbler off the streets and lop off his head because he accidentally spoke to the wrong person. Things like that happened, and again, this is an illustration of the dangers of centralized networks of power.

In his piece “On Political Morality,” Robespierre says that terror is nothing but prompt, severe, inflexible justice. I can’t consider the act of a centralized authority killing an innocent cobbler to be justifiable in any way. But when it comes to Luigi Mangione, I think that many would agree that his actions represent a legitimate act of political self-defense, whether or not they believe he should be punished. I believe it was a righteous act of political violence for the reasons I detailed above, and while I believe in collective struggle rather than vigilantism, I do believe he deserves a reduced sentence, bail, and maybe even home confinement with an ankle monitor. Nothing more.

A sentence like that would spark outrage, but also debate, possibly even more awareness among the hordes of politically illiterate Americans.

History is almost always written by reactionary forces after they crush any initial revolutionary sentiment or dissent. Those reactionary forces are the ones telling you what a tragedy it was that this nice guy, this “father and husband” (that’s an important part of their hustle) Brian Thompson, in no way deserved what happened to him. How about all the “fathers and husbands” who are dead now because of his decision to engage in the business of putting people before profit? They tug on your heartstrings by leaving out the most important information: Brian Thompson and his cohorts knew exactly what they were doing. They purposely and knowingly caused the deaths of thousands of Americans. They got rich doing this; they got wealthy from imposing misery and suffering upon us simply to amass capital and continue to grow.

That’s evil, and also unsustainable.

We have lost not only our democracy to a corrupt government that serves the billionaire donor class. As a nation, we’ve lost our collective soul. We are a country run by criminal sociopaths no different than the lords of feudal manors who would mount their trusty steeds and ride off to go rape some poor villager’s wife on his wedding night.

They’re doing this to you and me, right now.

Luigi Mangione reminds us all of this truth, and that is why the press needs to vilify him. Unfortunately, more violence is on the way, and right now it looks like the right is organizing much more effectively than the left. There will be more fascist crackdowns and attacks on our Bill of Rights, and until the left organizes across demographic lines by speaking to working people, we will continue to be poisoned, lied to, and driven into poverty by the people telling you that shooting a mass murderer is an act of terrorism.

The truth is exactly what they want to eliminate. Along with nuance, research, literacy, critical thinking, dissent, and compassion for our brothers and sisters across this planet.

Don’t turn off your brains. Stay literate, stay critical. While anyone with a heart and a bit of empathy can understand the desire to see an evil motherfucker brought to heel, it would be better to get involved, organize, volunteer, and protest.

Stay safe in these upside-down days as we all bear witness to the death pangs of a corrupt and bloodthirsty Empire.