On the Immediate Utility of Violence
The Revolutionary First Shot Against United Healthcare
The longer this barbaric age of bourgeois pre-history drags on, the more complex the problems created by it and the messier their necessary solutions.
During the lower stage of socialist construction, we focus on freeing humanity from material scarcity and other adverse positions otherwise imposed by the great errors of preceding time periods. We do this in order to improve our position, so that we might have far greater agency later on. Building this agency and the democratic and social institutions to manage it is the real meat of the transition from lower-stage socialism to higher-stage communism.
The lowest stage of struggle, the stage in which we overthrow the bourgeoisie, is the period of absolute minimal revolutionary agency, the period in which the only action that may be freely and honestly undertaken by the good working people is immediate revolutionary violence geared to the survival of our planet and our species, along with everything else we decide is more important than some criminal’s stock portfolio.
The assassination of United Health CEO Brian Thompson has done more for the working people of the United States towards this end than any action of any American communist since the 1930s. The Americans can now almost play out an entire liberation struggle virtually from the level of understanding that they have now attained because of this leap out of ignorance.
When the US subjugates a people and territory, it is the style that within that territory it fosters and normalises, deep in the cultural psyche of the subject people, certain kinds of violence to the exclusion of others. In the United States itself, that traditionally condoned form of violence has been of the lone wolf gun variety.
For decades we have been told that lone wolf gun violence is the product of psychological weakness and male loneliness. We have been trained to view its perpetrators with pity and a tinge of glamour as if it were carried out by especially sophisticated sick dogs rather than by grown adult men. For decades it has been known that favourable media coverage of these acts was a factor in the frequency with which they were carried out. And yet the favourable coverage continued. We know the role of the media in bringing about this sometimes warlike status quo of violence against the American working people. It is known. It has never been disguised.
This lone wolf terrorism shared a common goal with the bourgeoisie, including media execs, in keeping the American people in a state of fear, ignorance, and financial and spiritual dependence. This was the agenda of the American bourgeoisie and the American intelligence community which answers to it, working for its interest. For decades, these fascist terrorist attacks have left their scars on the American working people as they were intended and incited to, and in doing so the fascist “lone wolves” collaborated with the bourgeois enemies of the people and were tolerated and valorised by them. The far-right manifestos usually accompanying such acts, widely circulated online and by the media, often spelled this out explicitly for those who cared to see. The promotion of these attacks is a decades-standing deliberate act of the American media and intelligence community.
The American people, trained for decades in this particular form of violence, now understand the possibility and necessity of turning it against the oppressors. Once any people on Earth find out who their enemies are, they point their weapons in that direction, whatever those weapons may be. They do not wait to invent and master some new, morally pure tool other than the one with which they were already provided and with which they have already built the master’s house.
The conflict is naked now. Although increasingly denied so much as a functional public park bench in the way of public fora, the American people have made themselves heard on some of the worst communications platforms ever devised, such as TikTok and LinkedIn, to share their chilling indictments of the market system of healthcare distribution in their country and the bone-chilling evil of those who control it. The American people have virtually no contact with people outside of their households and sometimes workplaces. But even these highly censored, filtered, and curated content feeds are sufficient for the purpose of taking inventory of these the evils present in their lives. The solutions present themselves. The solutions are too obvious to need to be discussed.
Naturally, this is an indictment of the market system as a whole, not only of the healthcare system. A similar development in other industries(!) is only a trigger away — what are we to do if the next assassination is against a real estate developer, an oil baron, a prison warden, or a drone manufacturer? When the American working class are asked if those individuals deserve to continue to draw breath, if their loss is really such a tragedy for the world, what will the American working people say? Even Thompson’s co-conspirators simply stepped over his dead body on the way to their meetings and went about their day, posting his vacant seat up for new applications in a matter of hours. A small number of them took to social media to attempt to show the working people that they gave a shit or had any feelings at all — these gestures were just very silly, and were laughed at.
So the American people have begun their reckoning. It is true that this reckoning cannot be carried out in the orderly manner of a Stalinist purge. It is perhaps regrettable that there can be no humanitarian response in the form of re-education or penal labour. But this is the grave that the American bourgeoisie have dug for themselves. They have chosen their own enemy by telling the American people which forms of violence are acceptable and accessible to them for decades and decades. And the weapons they have are the ones they will use. The people cannot build the humanitarian technologies for a cleaner, less bloody struggle, that is to say, they cannot educate and organise themselves to the degree eventually necessary to complete the struggle, without first ridding themselves of their fetters which have deprived them of scientific knowledge and reasoning and therefore of the agency it bestows, and therefore of the capacity to do so in the first place.
It is the bourgeoisie who rob the proletariat of the possibility of a bloodless transfer of power, and it is only in the struggle to wrest freedom from the bourgeoisie, after the firing of the first shot, that a revolutionary organ, prepared to operate under conditions of extreme illegality, and free to speak freely in support of “terrorism”, “treason”, “un-American activities”, and other subjects of which the American people have in true point of fact not had the freedom to discuss in the better part of a century, can realistically be born.
