Cops capture suspected CEO shooter Luigi Mangione

After evading authorities for five days, Brian Thompson’s assassin was finally caught at a McDonald’s in Altoona, PA. Dubbed “The Adjuster” on social media, Luigi Mangione has been received as a modern-day folk hero. The following is an update and supplement to our original article, written before his capture.

[Originally published at communistusa.org]

Luigi Mangione’s targeted assassination of UnitedHealthcare’s CEO brought the deep-seated class hatred felt by millions explosively to the surface. Security cam images of the shooting and the shooter flooded social media, with the overwhelming majority lauding him as a hero and champion of the oppressed. Far from being a left-right issue, outrage over the country’s for-profit healthcare system overflowed the cup across the political spectrum, a classic example of accident expressing a deeper necessity.

The scion of a wealthy Maryland family, Mangione is a data engineer with an Ivy League education. He was the valedictorian of his high school class. On his social media are travel photos that look ripped from a magazine ad. By all accounts, he was “super normal” and an “exceptionally kind and compassionate friend.” He worked on video games and lived for a time in a surfer community in Hawaii. According to a former classmate: “I don’t think he is a crazy person. I hope that there’s a public trial and he gets the chance to explain how all of this happened in court.”

On the surface, Mangione had everything going for him. And yet, the grinding crisis of capitalism and the misery it inflicts on humanity affected him deeply / Image: Luigi Mangione, Facebook

On the surface, Mangione had everything going for him. And yet, the grinding crisis of capitalism and the misery it inflicts on humanity affected him deeply. Suffering from extreme back pain himself, he couldn’t turn away from the world despite his relative “privilege,” and he had an inexorable urge to “do something.” What he ended up doing was akin to tossing a boulder into a pond, and the ripple effects will be far-reaching.

Shell casings engraved with the words “deny,” “defend,” and “depose” were found at the scene of the shooting. A handwritten note he was carrying when arrested expressed “ill will towards corporate America,” according to police officials. And while the entire text has yet to be released, it allegedly includes the lines: “These parasites had it coming … I do apologize for any strife and trauma, but it had to be done.” Internet sleuths also found a positive review of the Unabomber manifesto, penned by Mangione. In short, there can be no doubt about the political motivation behind this act.

Mangione must have known he’d be caught, yet he went through with his plan anyway. His commitment and audacity cannot be questioned. But we must ask: can such actions meaningfully contribute to capitalism’s overthrow? Would a wave of politically motivated killings bring us any closer to the socialist revolution? Or would CEOs like Thompson merely be replaced by others equally committed to continuing the system, while the state uses it as justification for intensifying its repressive apparatus?

As revolutionary communists, we, too, oppose capitalism with every fiber of our being. However, what methods we choose to achieve our aims are not a secondary matter. It is not a question of abstract morality, but of efficacy. As always, the experience of the Bolshevik Party is highly instructive. In its early years, the party was forged in a political struggle against the petty-bourgeois Narodnik trend, which espoused individual terrorism in the fight against the tsarist autocracy.

Lenin explained, “As revolutionary tactics, individual attacks are inexpedient and harmful. Only the mass movement can be considered a genuine political struggle” / Image: public domain

Commenting on a political assassination carried out by Friedrich Adler in Austria during World War I, Lenin referred to those earlier ideological battles and clarified the communist position:

As regards the political assessment of the act, we maintain, of course, our old conviction, confirmed by decades of experience, that individual terrorist acts are inexpedient methods of political struggle …

We are not at all opposed to political killing … but as revolutionary tactics, individual attacks are inexpedient and harmful. Only the mass movement can be considered a genuine political struggle. Only in direct, immediate connection with the mass movement can and must individual terrorist acts be of value. In Russia, the terrorists (against whom we always struggled) carried out a number of individual attacks, but in December 1905, when matters at last reached the stage of a mass movement, insurrection—when it was necessary to help the masses to use violence—then just at that moment the ‘terrorists’ were missing. That is where the terrorists make their mistake.

Adler would have been of much greater help to the revolutionary movement if he had systematically gone over to illegal propaganda and agitation … Not terrorism but systematic, prolonged, self-sacrificing activity in revolutionary propaganda and agitation, demonstrations, etc., etc., against the lackey-like opportunist party, against the imperialists, against one’s own governments, against the war that is what is needed.

Given the vacuum on the left and the absence of class-struggle alternatives, it is unsurprising that individuals like Luigi Mangione and Aaron Bushnell saw no alternative but to take things into their own hands. If we don’t build a party that can organize young people driven to change the world, they will end up outside of the class struggle, smothered or killed by the state’s bodies of armed men. Others will remain doomers and apathetic, and that is equally unacceptable. We can only prevent this by making the Revolutionary Communists a household name. Join the RCA and help build your party!