The assassination of UnitedHealthcare’s CEO on Dec. 4 sent shockwaves around the world—and not the kind that the rich and powerful would have wanted.
Rather than condemning the murder, the prevailing feeling among the population was, in the words of alleged shooter Luigi Mangione, that “these parasites had it coming.” Luigi became a hero glorified on social media by millions of people, particularly the youth.
Polls have quantified this mood. An incredible 41 per cent of Americans aged 18–29 consider this murder “acceptable”. Another poll of American college students shows that 48 per cent consider the murder totally or partially justified. Asked who they sympathized with more, 45 per cent said Luigi, and only 17 per cent said the CEO of UnitedHealthcare.
These staggering figures are a sign of the times. Private health care means millions of Americans are one health problem away from bankruptcy. Those who have private insurance are not safe, as these bloodsuckers frequently deny claims—UnitedHealthcare being the worst offender with a 32 per cent denial rate. They have destroyed countless lives in the U.S., sending thousands to an early death.
Support for public health care is overwhelming. While Bernie Sanders captured the imagination of millions with his demand for free, universal public health care, his capitulation to the Democratic Party establishment has meant that no political force is seriously fighting for this. Into this vacuum steps Luigi Mangione, taking matters into his own hands. No wonder that his alleged actions found widespread support.
There is also a sharp class divide on this issue. Whereas the politicians and the rich mourn the death of their peer, the workers and youth celebrate, laugh, and mock.
But this goes further than simply the question of health care. Support for Luigi expresses the raw class anger that is brewing within the working class and the youth. When they read “these parasites had it coming,” millions think of the entire capitalist establishment. A growing layer wants to do away with the whole system, and sees in Luigi a man who expresses their desire.
The capitalists are sitting atop a huge volcano. The destruction of the quality of life of millions of workers is fertile ground for despair and a desire for revenge. But how can we end the suffering inflicted by these CEOs? By what methods can we overthrow the capitalist system and all its defenders?
This is not the first time in history that individuals have tried to settle scores with the ruling class through individual violence. To shed some light on today’s events, we propose to revisit a period when young people resorted to murdering the rich and powerful to try to shake up society: 19th-century Russia.
This was the time of the “Narodnik” movement, when young revolutionaries embraced “individual terrorism” as a means of bringing about a revolution. The destruction of this movement gave rise to a powerful Marxist movement that changed the face of the world. This period is rich in lessons for today.
The revolutionary intelligentsia
Russia in the mid-19th century was in turmoil. The Tsarist regime kept its population in the grip of severe repression. The overwhelming majority of the population, peasants, were oppressed mercilessly by the Tsarist regime and the clique of nobles and rising bourgeois that surrounded it.
Any attempt at liberal reform had been blocked. An uprising of liberal-minded military officials was suppressed in 1825. The liberal intellectuals of the 1840s were silenced by censorship, prison, and exile. The land reform of 1861, while abolishing serfdom, merely replaced it with crushing payments from the peasants to the landlords.
In these conditions the youth of the intelligentsia drew revolutionary, socialist conclusions. These sons and daughters of priests, state officials, or ruined nobles read philosophers like Hegel and Feuerbach, and had access to the ideas of European utopian socialists.
In the 1870s, the revolutionary intelligentsia attempted to mobilize the peasantry on a massive scale. Under the slogan “To the people!” hundreds, if not thousands, of youth went to the countryside to spread socialist propaganda and stir up a peasant revolution. But they were coldly received by a peasantry suspicious of anything that came from the cities.
The revolutionary intelligentsia remained completely stifled. On the one hand, the peasants weren’t moving. On the other, the Tsarist state kept a firm grip on power through ruthless repression. Importantly, the working class was still tiny and did not represent a visible revolutionary force.
It was in this context that the tactic of individual terrorism found fertile ground. In different epochs, individual terrorism has found its basis in petty-bourgeois layers of society. Due to their nature as a heterogeneous class of intellectuals, professionals, small owners, etc., the petty bourgeoisie does not develop a collective consciousness the way that workers do, but has instead an individualistic point of view. When they draw revolutionary conclusions, they are generally more prone to individual methods of action instead of collective struggle.
In Russia, faced with the relative calm of the masses, the revolutionary youth was essentially looking for a shortcut to revolution, and found it in attacks on governors, policemen—and the Tsar himself.
Vera Zasulich
Within certain limits, the story of Luigi Mangione today is reminiscent of one of the most famous cases of revolutionary terrorism in Russia at the time, that of Vera Zasulich.
On Jan. 24, 1878, this 28-year-old woman pulled a gun on Trepov, the governor of St. Petersburg, shouted, “Revenge!” and seriously wounded him.
Asked why she had acted as she did when arrested, she simply replied “For Bogolyubov”. The latter was a political prisoner flogged on Trepov’s order a few months earlier.
At her widely publicised trial Zasulich explained her rationale: “I didn’t see any other means [to avenge Bogolyubov]… It is terrible to raise one’s hand against one’s fellow man, but I decided that this was what I had to do.”
These words are remarkably similar to Luigi’s manifesto today: “I do apologize for any strife of traumas but it had to be done. Frankly, these parasites simply had it coming… Evidently I am the first to face it with such brutal honesty.”
The psychological basis of these individual acts is clear. As Trotsky explains: “The most important psychological source of terrorism is always the feeling of revenge in search of an outlet.”
For her exploits, Vera Zasulich, far from being hated, became a heroine—just like Mangione today.
In Russia, the police confiscated leaflets in factories describing Zasulich as “the fearless girl who did not shrink from the awful bloody deed and her own ruin when no other means remained for the defense of the rights of man.” She had shown that “tyrants are not almighty.”
Incredibly, Zasulich was found not guilty. Rather than a trial against her, the case became a trial of Tsarism and an indictment of the torture inflicted by Governor Trepov.
She was carried into the street on the shoulders of complete strangers to shouts of “Long live Zasulich!”
These events were to give a huge boost to the terrorist movement in Russia. But despite the initial shock of the Zasulich affair and despite the great support she enjoyed, terrorism did not overthrow Tsarism. And the more the terrorist movement grew, the more it was preparing its own destruction.
The Narodniks and the assassination of the Tsar
In 1879, the Narodnaya Volya (People’s Will) group was founded. For them, terrorism was more than an isolated act; terrorism was seen as a way of disrupting and intimidating the regime and bringing about its downfall. The movement was completely cut off from the masses. It had only 37 members.
The political perspective of these young revolutionaries was also very limited. As one Narodnik (as members of the group were known) leader explained:
“History moves too slowly. It needs a push. Otherwise the whole nation will be rotten and gone to seed before the liberals get anything done.”
“What about a constitution?”
“All to the good.”
“Well, what do you want—to work for a constitution or give history a push?”
“I’m not joking, just now we want to give history a push.”
So they were content to fight for a liberal constitution, simply by more extreme methods. Not for nothing were they nicknamed “liberals with a bomb”.
In 1881, the Narodniks pulled off the biggest feat imaginable: they succeeded in assassinating Tsar Alexander II himself. But this did not bring down Tsarism; it strengthened it.
The successor to the dead Tsar, Alexander III, mercilessly crushed the terrorists, hanging five of them and sentencing others to prison and exile. Even moderate liberals were not spared from repression. He deprived the universities of their autonomy and banned the books of Spinoza, Voltaire, Hobbes and others. Pogroms against Jews became widespread. Moreover, the assassination did not arouse any revolt among the peasantry, nor among the nascent working class. Instead, the assassination of the Tsar helped bring about a period of complete political reaction.
Groups continued to claim affiliation to Narodnaya Volya until 1885. The final event was the botched attempt on the life of Tsar Alexander III on March 1, 1887, organized by a young man named Alexander Ulyanov—the brother of the future Lenin. He was hanged along with four other comrades.
In court, Ulyanov revealed the mentality of his small group of conspirators:
“We have not any strongly united classes which might restrain the government…” At the same time, “our intelligentsia is so weak physically and so little organized that at present we cannot enter into an open struggle. The weak intelligentsia, very weakly imbued with the interests of the masses, can defend its right to think only with terrorism.”
As we can see, revolutionary terrorism is a cry of despair in a situation where mass struggle is perceived, rightly or wrongly, as impossible.
The irony with individual terrorism is that the more successful it is, the more widespread it becomes, the more counterproductive it is. Far from sparking mass action or hastening the overthrow of the regime, the terrorism of the Narodnaya Volya destroyed a generation of courageous, sincere activists, and ultimately strengthened the Tsarist state.
Russian Marxism
Fortunately, this experience did not pass in vain. The best revolutionaries of the time learned the lessons of the era of individual terrorism.
In exile in Switzerland, a tiny group of revolutionaries founded the very first Russian Marxist group in 1883: the Emancipation of Labor Group. Its main leaders were a former Narodnik, Georgi Plekhanov, and a far more famous former terrorist: Vera Zasulich herself.
From the outset, the Marxist group had to wage an ideological struggle against the advocates of individual terrorism. Plekhanov also wrote numerous texts defending the fundamental ideas of Marxist philosophy, and laying the foundations for a thorough Marxist analysis of Tsarist Russia.
At the time, Marxists were looked down upon, accused of dividing the revolutionary movement and discussing ideas that had nothing to do with Russia: “You people are not revolutionaries but students of sociology.” Such accusations are still in vogue today!
Although the Narodnik movement was disintegrating, revolutionary youth had not yet lost their illusions in terrorism.
But Plekhanov and his comrades, armed with Marxist theory, saw what others did not yet see. Huge factories were being built with the help of foreign capital, and strikes were on the increase. A new revolutionary force was emerging: the working class.
In contrast to the Narodniks, Marxists asserted the need for revolutionaries to work patiently to win over the workers, and not excite them with terrorist acts.
History has since delivered its verdict. While the Narodnik movement died out in this period, the small core of Marxists in exile laid the foundations for the formation of the Russian Social-Democratic Labour Party on solid theoretical grounds.
After 10 years of relative isolation and theoretical work, the Marxists had a breakthrough in the labour movement in the 1890s. The 1903 split of the RSDLP led to the formation of its revolutionary wing, the Bolsheviks. Fourteen years later, the Bolsheviks came to power, channeling the mass movement of workers and peasants against Tsarism, world war, and the evils of capitalism, towards its replacement by Soviet power.
Class struggle
The ruling class’ reaction to the murder of UnitedHealthcare’s CEO laid bare its absolute moral hypocrisy for the world to see. The condemnation was unanimous across Republicans and Democrats, from Trump to Biden, from CNN to Fox News.
For these people, it is only wrong when you kill the rich. UnitedHealthcare’s corporate practices of denying claims and refusing coverage have certainly caused an incalculable number of deaths amongst poor and working class people. But since these murders were committed not with a gun but at the stroke of a pen in a corporate boardroom, the ruling class doesn’t bat an eye. This is what Friedrich Engels called “social murder”.
The ruling class today defends the worst horrors imaginable. They invest in a pointless arms race while letting public services collapse. They funded and politically supported the mass murder of Palestinians in Gaza. They are the direct cause of needless, avoidable deaths all the time.
When looking at Luigi Mangione’s alleged act, as on individual acts of this kind earlier in history, our view has nothing to do with the hypocritical worthless morality of the ruling class. The real terrorism comes from the state, the police, and capitalist armies.
But the reality is the individual assassination of a CEO, a hated politician or any other representative or member of the capitalist class will not end the suffering these people cause. This suffering is caused by the capitalist system. The system is based not on crooked individuals (although there is no shortage of these), but on the domination of a class. And a class doesn’t disappear by individual assassinations.
If such assassinations were to be multiplied, we would see an immense rise in state repression, as we saw in the days of Tsarism and the Narodniks. As we said earlier, individual terrorism is all the more counterproductive the more it works. It invites state repression without getting anything in return. This has been the case whenever individual terrorism has taken place on a large scale.
But there is a more important angle to the question. History has shown that the working class is the only force capable of overthrowing capitalism and building a socialist society.
Engaged in social production, the working class is the best place to develop a collective psychology and the corresponding collective methods of struggle. Through its numbers and its role in production, it has the power to paralyze the economy and hit the bosses not with a bullet to the head, but by taking away their power to exploit anyone.
With this in mind, Marxists defend everything that strengthens the unity of the working class, its confidence in its own forces and its understanding of its role, of the necessity and effectiveness of a mass class struggle against capitalism. Moreover, Marxists are not pacifists. The workers and poor have every right to defend themselves against the violence brought by capitalism.
But individual terrorism, while it sometimes enjoys the (passive) support of many, relegates the working class to the role of spectator. The lesson it teaches is not that the working class must enter the struggle as a class against the bourgeoisie, but that they can rely on individual heroes to do the work for them. It is not through such methods that the working class becomes aware of its strength and learns to fight the capitalists. It belittles the role of the masses.
As Trotsky explains:
“The more ‘effective’ the terrorist acts, the greater their impact, the more they reduce the interest of the masses in self-organisation and self-education. But the smoke from the confusion clears away, the panic disappears, the successor of the murdered minister makes his appearance, life again settles into the old rut, the wheel of capitalist exploitation turns as before; only the police repression grows more savage and brazen. And as a result, in place of the kindled hopes and artificially aroused excitement comes disillusionment and apathy.”
While the murder of a bastard capitalist like the CEO of UnitedHealthcare might feel like well-deserved justice, it does not alter the system. And that is why communists do not adopt these tactics.
Filling the vacuum
While the bourgeoisie was shocked by the outpouring of support Luigi received, communists see it as an unmistakable sign of the anti-capitalist mood growing among all sections of the population. What we need is to transform this mood into a political force capable of overthrowing capitalism.
In his manifesto, Luigi says that “it had to be done”. The communists of the RCP say that there is another way.
We call on all those who feel that “these parasites had it coming”. We have a long struggle ahead of us. We face a ruling class that has all the wealth and political power on its side.
What the working class lacks in wealth, it makes up for in strength of numbers. The potential power of the working class to overthrow capitalism and build a society free from the dictatorship of the rich is immense. But it is currently led by union leaders and so-called “left” parties who offer no solutions—and this potential remains stifled.
This contradiction cannot be resolved overnight. The anger revealed by the support for Luigi must be channeled politically. But to do this, we must build a political vehicle to represent the millions of workers who agree with Luigi and direct them into a mass movement, a collective struggle to overthrow capitalism. This is why we need a revolutionary party, a communist party.
We will leave the last word to Trotsky:
“If we oppose terrorist acts, it is only because individual revenge does not satisfy us. 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, in order 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.”
