Following the shooting of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson, Luigi Mangione, the alleged shooter, instantly became a folk hero for millions of ordinary American workers. The widespread sympathy for Mangione starkly revealed the enormous amount of class anger that has built up in American society in recent decades—a classic example of historical necessity expressing itself through accident. Millions of people couldn’t help but agree with Mangione’s alleged manifesto, which boldly declared that “these parasites had it coming.”

Young people, who have only ever lived under capitalism in decline, were especially sympathetic.  A YouGov poll found that 39% of adults under 30 view Luigi Mangione favorably, while another poll found that 41% of that same group believe that the killing of Brian Thompson was either “completely” or “somewhat” acceptable. There was also support for him across a wider age range and across traditional political lines. 69% of all US adults said that “coverage denials by health insurance companies” were one factor to blame for Thompson’s killing. These figures speak volumes about the simmering discontent in society.

The capitalist media, shocked by the degree of sympathy for the accused, closed ranks to condemn him as a “terrorist.” As always, these condemnations of “violence” by the bourgeoisie were utterly hypocritical. They have no such denunciations for Benjamin Netanyahu for instance, who is responsible for the wholesale slaughter of tens of thousands of innocent Palestinians, or any of the other war criminals who have been aided by US imperialism. And if we tallied up the body count left by UnitedHealthcare alone—all the lives that ended prematurely or were destroyed by insurmountable mountains of medical debt—we would have a receipt stretching for miles. In fact, for centuries the global capitalist class has stained its hands with the blood of millions, and a cursory look at history shows that the US ruling class stands first among butchers.

Months after the assassination, the US capitalist class is anxious about the possibility of more CEO shootings. Many executives have sought additional security and protection. Yet the capitalist system grinds on. Meanwhile many young people, supportive of Luigi, are asking themselves what exactly to make of the killing, and how we can fight to end the capitalist system. To shed light on this question, it is helpful to look back at past instances of politically motivated assassinations.

Narodnism

This is far from the first time in history that radicalized young people have attempted to settle scores with individual capitalists or capitalist politicians. In 1892, while the Amalgamated Association of Iron, Steel, and Tin Workers were embroiled in a bitter strike at the Carnegie steel mills in Homestead, PA, Alexander Berkman, an anarchist, attempted  to assassinate the industrialist Henry Clay Frick due to his violent response to the strikers. In 1901, President McKinley was assassinated by an anarchist sympathizer. And as recently as the 1970s, the Weather Underground carried out a series of political bombings in an attempt to protest against US imperialism.

The decades that preceded the 1917 Russian Revolution provide a particularly clear example. In tsarist Russia in the 19th century, desperate acts of revenge developed into an entire political trend of individual terror against tsarist officials. In the mid 1800s, Russian society was shaken by peasant uprisings. As the petty-bourgeois intelligentsia radicalized, they naturally looked to “the people” broadly—the peasantry—as the revolutionary class. These young radicals formed what became known as the Narodniks (Populists), a utopian-socialist trend which formed the dominant tendency  in the Russian revolutionary movement from the 1860s into the 1890s.

The Narodniks believed in a special Russian road to socialism, led by the peasantry, which would bypass capitalist development. Many of the most ardent Narodniks gave up their futures, donned ragged clothing, and went into the villages with socialist propaganda in an attempt to rouse the peasants into revolt. But the peasantry regarded them coldly and suspiciously, and their efforts failed.

Two trends crystallized in the Narodnik movement. One was Narodnaya Volya, a centralized terrorist organization. They espoused the anarchist philosophy of “propaganda of the deed”— the idea that a single act, like the assassination of a tsarist official, could rouse the masses into a revolutionary movement. As Zhelyabov, a leader of the terrorist wing, said: “History moves too slowly. It needs a push.” This wing carried out a series of assassinations, including that of Tsar Alexander II in 1881.

The harsh conditions of tsarist Russia produced the kind of person that was willing to give everything up for the struggle for a better world. Today’s capitalist crisis is forging just such a generation of people, desperately searching for a solution to society’s many problems. Unable to passively witness the genocide in Gaza, Aaron Bushnell committed the ultimate act of individual protest. These individual acts are symptoms of a deeper process happening in US society—part of what Trotsky referred to as “the molecular process of revolution.”

There was also a more moderate wing of the Narodniks, who argued for a period of propaganda and education of the peasant masses and began to adopt a gradualist, “little by little” approach, eventually becoming indistinguishable from the mainstream liberals with their “small deeds” such as organizing soup kitchens and literacy campaigns.

Georgi Plekhanov, the eventual founder of Russian Marxism, started his revolutionary career as a Narodnik. After being arrested twice, he fled to Switzerland in 1880, where he was convinced of the ideas of Marxism. He and a small group of other ex-Narodniks-turned-Marxists went on to form the Emancipation of Labor group in 1883. This included Vera Zasulich, who, somewhat like Luigi Mangione, had become a folk hero in her time for her attempted assassination of the governor of St. Petersburg in 1877.

Plekhanov’s group was the first Russian Marxist organization, which laid the theoretical groundwork for the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party, from which a revolutionary wing, the Bolsheviks, eventually emerged. In the 1880s and 1890s, the Marxists waged an implacable theoretical struggle against Narodnism. In works like Plekhanov’s Our Differences and Lenin’s first book, What the ‘Friends of the People’ are and how they fight Social-Democrats, they argued against the peasant-commune ideals of the Narodniks and the corresponding tactics.

By 1901, once Marxist theory had won out over Narodnism, Lenin took up the question of communist strategy and tactics in his works Where to Begin? and What Is To Be Done? His arguments remain strikingly relevant in our era. Terror in those conditions, he explained, was “inopportune and unsuitable…it diverts the most active fighters from their real task, the task which is most important from the standpoint of the interests of the movement as a whole.”

He went on:

The immediate task of our Party is not to summon all available forces for the attack right now, but to call for the formation of a revolutionary organization capable of uniting all forces and guiding the movement in actual practice and not in name alone, that is, an organization ready at any time to support every protest and every outbreak and use it to build up and consolidate the fighting forces suitable for the decisive struggle.

The arguments of the Marxists were not abstract moral arguments, but rather political and tactical ones. While fighting against Narodnik theory, Lenin and the Bolsheviks always recognized the heroism and self-sacrifice of the Narodniks. Although the Bolsheviks did not borrow tactics or theory from the Narodniks, they did take from them their revolutionary spirit. They saw the Narodniks as misguided, but courageous, young men and women who sacrificed everything in order to struggle for a better world.

Why Marxists oppose individual terror

As Marxists, we are in favor of everything that increases the unity, confidence, and class consciousness of the working class. History shows that individual terror does not automatically incite the masses into revolt, nor does it give them a sense of their power as a class. In fact, such acts tend to strengthen the repressive state apparatus, by giving the state a guise for increasing its repression. The methods of individual terror are wholly counterproductive and communists do not adopt them.

For instance, the individuals who carried out the assassination of Tsar Alexander II were clearly dedicated to ending tsarist oppression, risking their lives to do what they thought was necessary. But the assassination did not achieve any of their aims. The tsarist regime remained in place, and in fact, unleashed a wave of brutal repression in response, executing, imprisoning, or exiling many of the Narodniks.

We cannot be sure of the precise motivations behind the killing of Brian Thompson, though it has clear similarities to past political assassinations. At a minimum, it was an extreme act of protest against the parasitic health insurance industry. Undoubtedly, we can admire the conviction it took to carry out the act, but it obviously has not stopped the grind of that industry, or the capitalist system generally.

The public response to the killing certainly revealed massive class anger already boiling beneath the surface, but did the act itself raise mass consciousness and reveal to the proletariat its power as a class? Instead, most are passively living vicariously through Luigi. There are plenty of tweets and jokes featuring hated politicians and CEOs, symptomatically significant of the era we live in:

We need another Luigi” (posted with a picture of Trump)

 

We need another Luigi for TECH CEOs. #FreeLuigi

 

I’m not calling for violence against CEOs, but if there’s another Luigi out there ready to take down some tech CEOs, I’m not going to shed any tears about it. #freeluigi

However, individual terror relegates workers to mere bystanders, awaiting another individual hero to take aim at a capitalist or politician. Already since the assassination, there has reportedly been “an abrupt increase in police presence and armed guards at the homes of health executives.” A string of assassinations would surely result in a crackdown not just on the perpetrators, but on the “left” in general. To achieve even insignificant reforms to the US healthcare system, it would take a mass movement of the working class that threatened the capitalists’ system. They cannot be scared into granting reforms on the basis of individual acts.

Sometimes, this question is framed as a black-and-white question of “violence versus nonviolence,” but we must look at this on a broader, class basis. Marxists are also certainly not in favor of violence, but we are also not pacifists. Our starting point is the fact that no ruling class has ever given up its power without a fight. We stand for the right of the working class to defend itself against the violence of the ruling class and its state. From a class perspective, the balance of forces is decisively in favor of the working class, which has every interest in taking power peacefully—therefore, the responsibility for any violence in a revolution comes from the bourgeoisie, who are a numerical minority but hold a monopoly on the use of force and will ruthlessly exercise it to protect their rule.

Marxists highlight the need for collective acts, rather than isolated, individual acts, to end the horrors of capitalism. History shows that no individual act or small deed, be it an assassination, mutual aid, or smashing of machines, is sufficient to end the grinding suffering of the system. To right the wrongs of this system, the working class as a whole needs to expropriate the wealth of the capitalist class, which rightfully belongs in the hands of the working class, and reorganize society on a socialist basis. This will require immense conviction and heroism, but concentrated in a structured, coordinated way.

As Trotsky put it in “Why Marxists Oppose Individual Terror”:

The account we have to settle with the capitalist system is too great to be presented to some functionary called a minister. To learn to see all the crimes against humanity, all the indignities to which the human body and spirit are subjected, as the twisted outgrowths and expressions of the existing social system, to direct all our energies into a collective struggle against this system—that is the direction in which the burning desire for revenge can find its highest moral satisfaction.

How consciousness changes

History shows that individual terror does not produce the intended effect of rousing the masses to struggle. But if not from individual acts of heroism, how does consciousness develop?

We are dealing here with a complex, nonlinear process. In the first place, as materialists, Marxists understand that conditions ultimately determine consciousness. The experience of life under capitalism itself is the primary factor in radicalizing the working class. As Lenin was fond of saying, “life teaches.” In the days when capitalism was meaningfully raising living standards, there tended to be general acceptance of the system among the working class. But in our era of capitalist decline and instability, the general tendency is one of radicalization against traditional institutions and increasing rejection of the capitalist status quo.

For the most part, changes in consciousness develop beneath the surface of society, before eventually finding some kind of outlet for expression. The daily discontents and injustices of life under capitalism build up continuously, over years and decades, preparing ruptures and upsurges in the class struggle at a certain stage.

Sometimes, major societal shifts can sharply accelerate changes in consciousness. The British Marxist Ted Grant explained that “events, events, events” are what transform consciousness above all. Many times in history, a specific event has served as the catalyst to unleash broader pent-up anger.

In 2020, the killing of George Floyd ignited a mass movement in the United States. But it was not only the killing itself that caused the movement. The movement arose from the compounding discontent of years of racist police brutality, years of declining living standards, the chaos of the first Trump administration, the Covid pandemic, and more. George Floyd’s murder served as the straw that broke the camel’s back. We can confidently anticipate similar situations in the future, though such events cannot be artificially created by small groups of individuals, nor can they be predicted in advance.

Individual terror ultimately stems from a lack of understanding that, impelled by the crisis of capitalism, the working class will eventually move. Other forms of individual acts, such as small groups blocking access to a factory, or climate activists throwing soup on a Van Gogh painting, suffer from the same basic misunderstanding. Most direct action-focused groups tend to be small and disconnected from the working class, like Narodnaya Volya, an organization of only a few dozen. Our criticism is not of direct action in general—after all, an all-out general strike is a mass direct action—but is similar to our criticism of individual terror. It is inexpedient and doesn’t increase class consciousness.

Class consciousness

Opposing the system in general is an important first step in the process of working-class radicalization, but it is another thing for workers to become conscious of their collective power as workers.

The majority of the population is made up of the working class, which vastly outnumbers any other class in society. And in recent years, increasing numbers of people have come to understand that they are in fact workers. 45% of Americans identify as working class or lower class according to a 2024 Gallup poll. Additionally, support for unions is at a 60-year high of 70%.

The layer of radicalized youth and those who see themselves as workers and support unions is a result of an accumulation of events and experiences. Things like the 2008 financial crisis, the decline in living standards over the past few decades, and the Black Lives Matter movement have all contributed to this.

We’re still at the beginning of this process, and there is still confusion on this question, with many workers seeing themselves as “middle class.” But through struggle, more people will come to realize not only that they are workers, but that they are part of a vast class of wage laborers who have their own interests as a class that are opposed to those of the capitalists as a class. In Poverty of Philosophy, Marx explains:

The combination of capital has created for this mass a common situation, common interests. This mass is thus already a class as against capital, but not yet for itself. In the struggle, of which we have noted only a few phases, this mass becomes united, and constitutes itself as a class for itself.

By going through the experience of a strike or a mass movement, the workers gain an understanding of their collective class strength. It is not merely the act of stopping production during a strike that is progressive. Through collective organization the working class becomes conscious of its role in society as the producer of all wealth and its ability to transform society. Shutting down production is temporary, and most strikes and struggles of the working class will end in defeat. But through that experience, the working class gains class consciousness and awareness of their ability to transform society. No individual act can replicate this.

During a strike or in the heat of a revolutionary movement, the working class can learn very quickly. The working class in Russia was small, impoverished, and culturally backward at the time of the 1917 February revolution. But pushed by the crisis of Russian capitalism at the time, the workers and peasants overthrew the tsar, and between February and October, realized the inability of the bourgeoisie to solve any of their problems. By October, the working class had taken political power in Russia.

Besides Narodnism and the Russian Revolution, there are other historical examples of individual acts preceding a broader class movement. In the early 1800s, the Luddites in Britain smashed the machinery that posed an existential threat to their livelihood. Their methods were simple: smash the machines that replaced them and destroy the property of the industrialists. This represented very primitive methods of struggle, preceding the Chartist movement, which embraced a much broader layer of the working class and eventually led to a general strike and attempted insurrection. This was the first time in history a genuinely class-independent, working class party was formed—but the movement went through painful experience to learn these lessons, and it is now going through a similar process to rediscover those methods of struggle.

The righteous satisfaction revealed by Thompson’s shooting represents a raw, semi-conscious understanding that the interests of the workers and capitalists are completely opposed. This class hatred stems from real experiences with the US healthcare system, which leaves almost no American worker’s life untouched. We are at the beginning of the process of the development of class consciousness and the rediscovery of the traditions and methods of working-class struggle in the United States.

Our role as communists is to make the unconscious desires of the working class conscious. As Trotsky put it, our role is “not to extinguish the proletariat’s unfulfilled feeling of revenge, but on the contrary to stir it up again and again, to deepen it, and to direct it against the real causes of all injustice and human baseness.” This requires a strong communist organization, rooted in the working class.

Build the revolutionary party

In normal times, an assassination in broad daylight on a Manhattan street would not receive the massive sympathy that Luigi has gotten. But these are not “normal times.” Thousands of young people are becoming radicalized against the capitalist system. The resounding flood of support on social media—in discussions in classrooms, workplaces, and homes—is because something finally spoke to their burning sense of injustice.

Individuals rise to prominence or gain a wider echo when they represent the deeper needs of their historical era. This killing did not create that sentiment, but it did reveal the widespread anti-establishment sentiment, particularly among the youth. What Luigi has revealed, above all, is the accelerating development of mass consciousness.

Millions of Americans are concluding that the system is rotten to the core and that nothing short of revolution will solve their problems. For many, it feels like the world is going to end and they are powerless to stop it. But the crisis of capitalism has also produced a layer of young people who are willing to commit themselves entirely to overthrowing the capitalist system. This will be a key factor in the eventual victory of the socialist revolution, provided that the desires of the radical youth to struggle are paired with a scientific world outlook and channeled in a truly effective direction.

The widespread support for Luigi is a harbinger of titanic class battles that lie ahead. But one thing is necessary to ensure the victory of the working class: the urgent building of a revolutionary party, armed with the ideas of Marxism. On this basis, we can channel the power of the working class to take power within our lifetime, ending the rule of the capitalist parasites once and for all.