By Dandy Andy
Recently, an article written by Alexander Reid Ross addressing Luigi Mangione’s action (the alleged killing of insurance CEO Brian Thompson) and its implications for broader social struggle has been making the rounds in some circles of the antifascist and revolutionary left. I haven’t read Ross’s well-known book Against the Fascist Creep (although I always enjoyed the double entendre, intentional or not). In fact, I’ve only skimmed a few of his articles, and for the most part filed him away as part of the “liberal antifascist” current. So I was fully prepared to ignore this article, until i realized it was clearly gaining some traction, as the day it was published several people forwarded it to me and a friend i met for breakfast mentioned it.
Having now read it, i feel like one could take it apart sentence by sentence, but rather than thusly test the reader’s patience, i’ll limit my comments to the high points.
Laying the groundwork for what is to come, Ross begins by placing Mangione within a putative longstanding US cultural celebration of murder, using the subject matter of three songs, the Dixie Chicks (now just the Chicks) song “Goodbye Earl,” the Hendrix hit “Hey Joe,” and Woody Guthrie’s “Pretty Boy Floyd.” The point here seems to be that Mangione is nothing more than another expression of an American proclivity for violence—he trots out a series of stats to this effect. He also returns to this theme toward the end, when he compares Mangione to the Madison school shooter, neatly disposing of both as examples of “accelerationism.” I can’t say for Natalie Rupnow, but i see little evidence that Mangione had accelerationist intentions. Muddling together “Hey Joe,” Mangione, and Rupnow in this way allows Ross to purport to be providing an analysis, while studiously avoiding the politics of Mangione’s action, something that he only addresses in a relatively muted way out of necessity.
He then rehearses the already well-worn “neither left nor right” narrative. From my point of view, the fact that Mangione is neither left nor right is the most important element at play here. I do not believe that Mangione would have gotten the same degree of support if he was easily classified as either left or right. The fact that Mangione’s action can’t be dispensed with as the expression of a particular ideology is, i believe, why it resonates so broadly. Mangione touched a wedge issue in the US that cuts across class and across the political spectrum, the massive, voracious corruption of the health insurance industry, and the American health care system overall. This is not the only possible wedge issue of this sort at this point; big pharma, corporate grocery chains, and corporate landlords all qualify. This action, i think, tells us where the left needs to focus its attention. If we can build realistic nuts and bolts campaigns around the issues that impact virtually everyone’s daily lives in practical ways that meet their needs, we can perhaps begin to build a response to the current right-wing upsurge that can to some degree penetrate the larger society—as this action has.
It would seem that Ross to some degree understands this, because he devotes the bulk of this essay to a tortured attempt to draw a parallel between the Mangione action and its popular reception and the Italian so-called “leaden years.” The comparison is, of course, flawed in the extreme. There is no commonality between one pissed-off man killing one CEO and a movement that was built over decades and evolved into massive extraparliamentary opposition that included violent confrontation in its much broader arsenal. Typical of the politics Ross has staked out here, he largely presents his “leaden years” through the eyes of two intellectuals, the widely read left liberal novelist Umberto Eco and the Eurocommunist literary critic Alberto Asor Rosa, both of whom were generationally and practically removed from the youth revolt that tore through Italy (and most of the world) in those years.
Ross then dances around for a while before he gets to the Red Brigades, arguably the most significant of the non-nationalist guerrilla groups active in the European world in the seventies and early eighties. The one paragraph he devotes to the Red Brigades relies entirely on the observation of one well-known repenti. He concludes his autopsy of the Italian experience with a quote from an Il Manifesto member, Sandro Portelli, that has nothing to do with the debate at hand but is a critical reflection on the sectarianism of the far left overall in the years in question. The sole purpose of this peculiar interjection, besides name dropping, appears to be to assert that Il Manifesto, whom Ross describes as “one of the most influential Marxist groups” of the era, rejected armed struggle. Why not a quote that addresses the Il Manifesto position on armed struggle, if that is the case?
Interestingly, this whole exercise unfolds with only one mention of the “working class,” and then only to disparage the Red Brigades, and one reference to “workers’ organization,” in that case when discussing Asor Rosa’s critique of political violence. Ross’s overview of the Italian revolutionary upsurge from the late sixties to the early eighties reflects an understanding of politics whereby the intelligentsia and the state are the motor forces of history, and popular movements, to the degree that they exist, are simply elements to be analyzed and neutralized or instrumentalized. It would seem that Ross, whom i gather was once on the radical left, has chosen to carve out a place for himself in the liberal academy as a critic of his own former politics. I bet the pay’s good.
Why, one asks, spend all that time and energy discussing the Italian “leaden years,” while allegedly examining the Mangione action, given that there is close to no relationship between the two. The answer comes in the third to last paragraph:
In light of such political violence, it is necessary to defend the state, despite its inefficient bureaucracies of forms, functionaries and guarantees. The state must be defended because it can actually help people through the social safety nets it provides, however imperfectly.
Ross—and he’s clearly not alone—fears that an environment where a significant number of people in no way connected to the left show a spontaneous support for militant and even armed action against what we once would have called “a class enemy” creates an opening for the reconstruction of a left willing to adopt more militant tactics. I think he is, to a limited degree at least, right about that. This is an opening that needs to be seized upon, and Ross’s article is counterinsurgency.
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“Ross fears that an environment where a significant number of people not connected to the left show a spontaneous support for armed action against ‘a class enemy’ creates an opening for the reconstruction of a left willing to adopt more militant tactics. I think he is right about that. This is an opening that needs to be seized upon, and Ross’s article is counterinsurgency.”
Some readers of an earlier draft of this article saw a tension, or even a contradiction, between my assertion that the fact that Mangione could not be classified as either left or right was essential to the support his action has gained and my subsequent argument that the action created an opening for the left. I don’t believe that Mangione would have gotten the support he did had he been easily qualified as either an ideological leftist or rightist. In that case, he would have been seen as just another example of the ongoing power struggle we have come to call the “culture war,” a term that, like “woke” before it, has been so widely misused and mangled as to mean so many different things to different people that it no longer serves any useful analytical purpose.
That said, the novelty of Mangione’s action plays no small role in its popularity. Were it to be repeated several times, it would no longer attract the same attention. It would become one of those things that happens from time to time. For example, Paul Watson was recently arrested for the umptyninth time for blocking whaling ships. Who noticed? Who cared? I saw it as a brief on some online news site. For Mangione’s action to have an enduring impact, the core issues that underlie it need to be made clear and turned into points around which organizing occurs. That will not happen spontaneously, nor is it likely to be the product of people who are not ideologically cohesive and motivated. In short, Mangione created an opening. If that opening is not seized upon in a structured way, Mangione’s action will simply become one of those odd historical things that happened—”Remember when that guy—what was his name?—shot that health insurance CEO guy?”