Terrorism and Despair
WF Kunkowski
14 December 2024
So, they found the killer of the UnitedHealthCare CEO... His name is Luigi Mangione, a handsome, Ivy League-educated 26-year-old who was arrested in Pennsylvania after a report from a McDonald's worker. Upon reading about his backstory and the reactions to it, I felt saddened by the depth of despair that motivated the act and the vulgar comedy surrounding the discourse. The online takes from so-called 'leftists' have been especially disheartening and, frankly, just plain stupid. I know I'm preaching to the choir here on Sublation, but the sadness I felt witnessing this exhausting spectacle made me reflect on what a serious Socialist might think about propaganda of the deed. As with most issues that popular discourse endlessly recycles, there is nothing new here; Marxists addressed this over a century ago.
It seems that Mangione was a bright and passionate youth from a well-to-do Maryland family. He earnestly believed in the better world that capitalist innovation could bring and had a promising future in the tech industry after graduating from the Ivy League’s University of Pennsylvania. His bohemian youthfulness led him to Hawaii, where he lived in a co-housing community called SurfBreak. He engaged in all kinds of energetic activities like hiking and surfing but, in so doing, he aggravated a debilitating back condition that consisted of a misaligned disk that would leave him bed-ridden in pain for days following strenuous physical activity. He soon left Hawaii and slowly shut himself in until he barely had contact with any of his friends or family.
Much ado has been made about his reading list from Goodreads, in which he kept track of over 300 books that covered a wide variety of topics, including back pain, the healthcare industry, self-help, pop philosophy, and history. He even started a book club at SurfBreak, in which he read such books in a group. But it was the reading of Ted Kaczynski's manifesto that broke up the group, and it's his Goodreads review of this text that nearly every article cites as some kind of smoking gun indicator of his motive. In it, Mangione characterizes Kaczynski as a political revolutionary employing violence for radical change and suggests that, essentially, he had some good points. Mainstream media holds this revelation up as an 'Aha!' to make the reader associate him with far-right violence and write him off accordingly, but the truth is that there is nothing remarkable about this review or any of his other interests.
Youths entertain all kinds of nonsensical ideas and actions for any number of juvenile reasons and it is all a part of exploring the world and the array of thought in society. The tragedy here is how youthful passion and optimism can turn to reactionary nihilism when the realization of society's coldness sets in. Kaczynski's manifesto collided with the existential disappointment resulting from his back condition that cut short his youth, swirling in concert to create a perfect storm of rage and resentment. The horror of his case is how typically he represents the disappointment of middle class youth when faced with the contradiction between capitalist totality and our bourgeois values.
And now the internet is aflame... across all platforms you have the usual murderous row of political hacks either celebrating or condemning his act of despair. The Right makes him out to be a crazy radical terrorist bent on the destruction of America, but that is to be expected. The reactions from the 'Left' have been especially disheartening and abysmal, when they make him out to be a revolutionary anarchist hero awakening the masses through propaganda of the deed. He even wrote slogans on the bullets! Indeed, this is a clear case of propaganda of the deed. They venture into even more excruciating territory when his shirtless pictures are circulated to gawk at as some kind of sex symbol. I can already hear the State's surveillance apparatus dinging with success upon locating its marks. Some 'leftists' even go so far as to characterize the McDonald's worker that reported him as a rat/sellout without mentioning the fact that the police put out a bounty of at least $10,000 for information. But why should that McDonald's worker be invested in Mangione's bloody adventure? Did his act advance the plight of McDonald's workers in any way? It seems that leftists love to champion the cause of the working class as long as they don't have to be reminded of the ugly reality of workers' struggle for individual existence. I imagine there is a special place in hell reserved just for him where he can review all the vulgar internet discourse mocking his despair for eternity.
It's been a while since I realized that what constitutes 'the Left' today is anything but a serious movement for socialism, but this vulgar discourse still floored me somehow by how twisted it really is. So, in my sadness from witnessing all this, I coped in my wannabe-Marxist way by revisiting what Lenin had to say about propaganda of the deed. With a little research I came upon an article that Lenin wrote for Iskra in 1902 entitled 'Revolutionary Adventurism' (https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1902/sep/01.htm) in which he roundly refutes the theoretical bankruptcy of the Socialist Revolutionaries. Here I cite him on their embrace of terrorism as a tactic of revolutionary struggle:
In their defence of terrorism, which the experience of the Russian revolutionary movement has so clearly proved to be ineffective, the Socialist-Revolutionaries are talking themselves blue in the face in asseverating that they recognise terrorism only in conjunction with work among the masses, and that therefore the arguments used by the Russian Social-Democrats to refute the efficacy of this method of struggle (and which have indeed been refuted for a long time to come) do not apply to them. Here something very similar to their attitude towards “criticism” is repeating itself. We are not opportunists, cry the Socialist-Revolutionaries, and at the same time they are shelving the dogma of proletarian socialism, for reason of sheer opportunist criticism and no other. We are not repeating the terrorists’ mistakes and are not diverting attention from work among the masses, the Socialist-Revolutionaries assure us, and at the same time enthusiastically recommend to the Party acts such as Balmashov’s [a Socialist Revolutionary] assassination of Sipyagin [the tsarist Minister of Internal Affairs], although everyone knows and sees perfectly well that this act was in no way connected with the masses and, moreover, could not have been by reason of the very way in which it was carried out—that the persons who committed this terrorist act neither counted on nor hoped for any definite action or support on the part of the masses. In their naïveté, the Socialist-Revolutionaries do not realise that their predilection for terrorism is causally most intimately linked with the fact that, from the very outset, they have always kept, and still keep, aloof from the working-class movement, without even attempting to become a party of the revolutionary class which is waging its class struggle. Over-ardent protestations very often lead one to doubt and suspect the worth of whatever it is that requires such strong seasoning. Do not these protestations weary them?—I often think of these words, when I read assurances by the Socialist-Revolutionaries: “by terrorism we are not relegating work among the masses into the background."After all, these assurances come from the very people who have already drifted away from the Social-Democratic labour movement, which really rouses the masses; they come from people who are continuing to drift away from this movement, clutching at fragments of any kind of theory.
Thus, terrorist violence represent a loss of faith in mass proletarian social movements. And when there are no mass proletarian social movements, the reflexive need for action will always bend toward a vacuous nihilism in theory. Luigi Mangione's propaganda of the deed is as clear cut an example of this as we could possibly be given.
Stay principled and sane, my fellow Sublation readers. In times like these, it's the most important thing we can do together.
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