Hello comrades. In the interest of upholding our code of conduct - specifically, rule 1 (providing a friendly, safe and welcoming environment for all) - we felt it appropriate to make a statement regarding the lionization of Luigi Mangione, the alleged United Healthcare CEO shooter, also known as “The Adjuster.”
In the day or so since the alleged shooter’s identity became known to the public, the whole world has had the chance to dig though his personal social media accounts and attempt to decipher his political ideology and motives. What we have learned may shock you. He is not one of us. He is a “typical” American with largely incoherent, and in many cases reactionary politics. For the most part, what is remarkable about the man himself is that he chose to take out his anger on a genuine enemy of the proletariat, instead of an elementary school.
This is a situation where the art must be separated from the artist. We do not condemn the attack, but as a role model, Luigi Mangione falls short. We do not expect perfection from revolutionary figures either, but we expect a modicum of revolutionary discipline. We expect them not simply to identify an unpopular element of society 
, but to clearly illuminate the causes of oppression and the means by which they are overcome. When we canonize revolutionary figures, we are holding them up as an example to be followed.
This is where things come back to rule 1. Mangione has a long social media history bearing a spectrum of reactionary viewpoints, and interacting positively with many powerful reactionary figures. While some commenters have referred to this as “nothing malicious,” by lionizing this man we effectively deem this behavior acceptable, or at the very least, safe to ignore. This is the type of tailism which opens the door to making a space unsafe for marginalized people.
We’re going to be more strict on moderating posts which do little more than lionize the shooter. There is plenty to be said about the unfolding events, the remarkably positive public reaction, how public reactions to “propaganda of the deed” may have changed since the historical epoch of its conception (and how the strategic hazards might not have), and many other aspects of the news without canonizing this man specifically. We can still dance on the graves of our enemies and celebrate their rediscovered fear and vulnerability without the vulgar revisionism needed to pretend this man is some sort of example of Marxist or Anarchist practice.
“Reading the reaction as the lionization of an individual rather than an emotional outburst of an entire class of people suffering from years of oppression will, of course, lead the American left to miss their mark once more.”
I second this. And I resist the urge to think “correctness” means anything in a vacuum and removed from action. I’m disappointed in the mods reactions to this because the reality is that it is absolutely fucking meaningless how “correct” our opinions are on this if we are never going to connect them to meaningful action.
It is very terminally online IMO to think that these discussions being had about how to leverage this moment and what can be done with the momentum stirred up by The Adjuster only amount to “lionizing a fascist”. If all we can accomplish with this moment is another terminally online struggle session that ends with simply the conclusion “we shouldn’t lionize a fascist” then we deserve to lose the future. To me that is the most self defeating lesson we could possibly take from this.
I think very often of this scene from the early days of the DPRK. Kim Il Sung had come into possession of a ledger containing the names of all the Korean people who had been collaborating with the Japanese colonizers. Rather than use it to purge his growing movement, he very publicly burned it as a sign of amnesty towards those amongst him who had collaborated, coercively or not.
America is obviously not post WW2 Korea. America is a fascist country. It goes without saying that the biggest victims of fascism are the colonial subjects and persecuted “other” within the nation.
That said, someone once told me that one of the many terrible things about living in a fascist country, one of the more subtle things, is that all of the ostensibly “good” people end up having to lie about who they are and what they believe, constantly, as a matter of survival. In America this tendency runs so deep it’s not even seen as dishonesty, it’s “grindset”.
I am absolutely not saying Luigi Mangione is some sort of secret communist. That is obviously absurd. I guess what I take issue with is the idea that we can take his internet history as some sort of cross section of his human soul. I think that is over simple and a disingenuous interpretation of someone who should be deserving of a more charitable interpretation. Because if he doesn’t deserve that then no one in the west ever will. I mean for gods sake the guy wasn’t even 30 years old; aren’t we supposed to be the side that has a heart? It all just feels so callous to act as if it’s a betrayal to some bullshit revolutionary discipline to recognize that he is a sympathetic character whether you like him or not.
This may not be true for most of us; but I think for a lot of young people your online persona is a PERFORMANCE of who you THINK YOU SHOULD BE.
And yes I have read settlers and I understand “narrow self interest is not the same as class consciousness”.
I think it is a mistake to read this quote and take it to mean “if it aligns with a westerners self interest it cannot possibly be class consciousness”
I think it’s also missing the point of what has made third worldism arguably the most successful branch of communist thought: it can be brought into alignment with the self interests of the masses basically immediately. The early raids by the Vietcong on Chinese grain reserves happened because it not only took advantage of pre existing antagonism to the Chinese, it also gave people a real material example of class struggle being in their immediate self interest.
Luigi Mangione is not a revolutionary to be emulated. He’s not a principled revolutionary and it’s absurd to expect revolutionary discipline from him. The point I’m trying to make here is that no matter where it is, in the first or the third world, building a revolutionary movement is a risky endeavor. It necessarily involves trusting in other people which always carries a certain amount of risk that only multiplies the more people you trust.
As conditions deteriorate and life gets worse and worse for the average westerner; at some point the interpretation of the past will cease being relevant and we will be forced to reckon with different material conditions. I would echo the other voices in this thread saying that the point of revolutionary leadership is to lead people towards your position, not find the perfect revolutionary subjects already formed and ready to go.
Until we have the courage to accept the risks inherent to trusting other people; flawed, imperfect people, and building a revolutionary movement, I don’t know what kind of future the western left has.
Yes the average westerners self interests is aligned against understanding class conflict, yes you can’t get someone to understand something that it’s against their self interest to understand, yes “read settlers” blah blah fucking blah. If there’s one single fucking thing we should be able to glean from this moment it is that those things are not as true as they used to be and they will only continue to decay as U.S. Global hegemony does.
The question I keep asking myself is; what is the fucking point of trying so hard to be CORRECT all the time if WE don’t even seem to believe we can use that to change hearts and minds?
This has consistently been an issue of mine with a lot of the recent struggle sessions: you cannot build a mass movement among a population that often has reactionary views without being willing to educate and convert them. A cursory glance at any successful communist revolution in the past 200 years proves this time and time again. Tsarist Russia was not a bastion of progressive beliefs. Warlord-era China did not have the correct takes on feminism. Batista Cuba was dominated by traditionalist Catholics and all the cultural brainworms that go with it. That did not prevent vanguards from overthrowing the existing order and bringing about a worker’s state, and it certainly did not prevent those worker’s states from then correcting those beliefs over time.
That doesn’t mean we should excuse reactionary beliefs. That doesn’t mean we should ignore vitriol or abuse being hurled at marginalized comrades. That certainly doesn’t mean we should lionize the shooter as an individual’s random Twitter takes from 2022. But that does mean we should be quicker to educate good-faith commenters when they post something that can be taken as reactionary in nature rather than immediately shut them down with zero discussion and/or ban them, because that has a chilling effect on engagement and makes growing leftist outreach extremely difficult.
The overwhelming majority of people in the west have completely incoherent political and social beliefs driven by the miasma of ideological garbage they’re subjected to the way a fish is subjected to water; the good news is that you can yank them out of it by presenting a coherent ideology that matches their lived experiences, and the bad news is that it’s going to take some effort to yank them out because the counterpropaganda is literally all-encompassing. You’re going to have to let them have some opportunities to find out what their particular brainworms are and have a chance to pull them out; if they make it abundantly clear they have no intention of ever doing so and are perfectly content to remain reactionaries then fuck 'em, but most people don’t fall into that category.
If Lenin had concentrated this much on his coalition having All the Correct Opinions All the Time with No Exceptions Lest You Be Immediately Purged™ prior to going out and actually doing something, Russia would’ve likely spent the twentieth century as a reactionary hellhole that modern Russian far-right nationalists could only have wet dreams about.