With the rise of Flock cameras and data centers, the Luigi movement has gained a greater kind of relevance. Not because the Luigi movement itself will be what defeats these and the other ruling-class schemes; but because the example of the masses rising up in defense of Luigi will remain part of our collective memory while we wage the next popular struggles.
As our class enemies encroach more upon our privacy and freedoms, while accelerating the destruction of our communities, the personal anger that inspired so many to side with Luigi is becoming more potent. The question is if we can turn this anger into a force that embodies the truly revolutionary aspect within this movement, the one which comes not from ultra-left fetishization of violent action but from a collective desire for justice.
The effort to defend Luigi Mangione was the first major counter-force against Trump 2.0’s ruling-class offensive, so it will color every other act of popular defiance during this era. And I don’t believe this means these next mass struggles will be undermined by the Luigi movement’s violent origins; because whatever acts of adventurism may come from these developments, the movement itself is something that’s based within actual mass energy. Therefore the future movements that parallel it will have the foundations required for victory.
The fact that Luigi’s memetic presence wasn’t limited to the leftist niche, but gained reach in the broader masses, proves the limited influence of the actors who seek to turn social causes into opportunities for mindless violence or vandalism. This was the conclusion Lenin came to about the role of the adventurists within Russia’s popular movements, who couldn’t win the people over to supporting their destructive mode of practice:
Anyone who really carries on his revolutionary work in conjunction with the class struggle of the proletariat very well knows, sees and feels what vast numbers of immediate and direct demands of the proletariat (and of the sections of the people capable of supporting the latter) remain unsatisfied. He knows that in very many places, throughout vast areas, the working people are literally straining to go into action, and that their ardour runs to waste because of the scarcity of literature and leadership, the lack of forces and means in the revolutionary organisations. And we find ourselves—we see that we find our selves—in the same old vicious circle that has so long hemmed in the Russian revolution like an omen of evil. On the one hand, the revolutionary ardour of the insufficiently enlightened and unorganised crowd runs to waste. On the other hand, shots fired by the “elusive individuals” who are losing faith in the possibility of marching in formation and working hand in hand with the masses also end in smoke.
But things can still be put to rights, comrades! Loss of faith in a real cause is the rare exception rather than the rule. The urge to commit terrorist acts is a passing mood. Then let the Social-Democrats close their ranks, and we shall fuse the militant organisation of revolutionaries and the mass heroism of the Russian proletariat into a single whole!
That the masses will reject adventurism is a given. The reason why the ultra-lefts are still a problem, and will pose an increasingly bigger threat as contradictions intensify, is because adventurism is capable of winning over critical parts of the potential vanguard. Lenin pointed out how “revolutionary” terrorism doesn’t just find support among the lumpenized individuals who are opposed towards all “authority,” and who therefore have handicapped themselves as competitors towards Marxists; it’s also supported by certain kinds of liberals, who share ultra-leftism’s lack of faith in organizing the masses and therefore glorify adventurism as the path to change.
Why does this matter to working-class organizers when our position is revolutionary, and we don’t operate within the same camp as these liberals? Because though we’re not trying to reach the entrenched bourgeois Democrats, as they are our class enemies, they’re still capable of influencing the working-class movement and its leaders. In certain cases, the types of Democrats who praise Antifa or Black Bloc are themselves the leadership, as Democrats by default make up the ranks of the labor bureaucracy. So though anarchism is dying out right now within organizing spaces, and so are other traditional ultra-left trends like “Maoism,” there is a danger that the underlying ideas behind adventurist politics will resurface.
Within the petty-bourgeois professional class, there are a growing number of individuals who’ve become disgruntled due to being pushed out of the careers they’ve wanted; after our ruling class engineered elite overproduction, it’s now progressively dismantling the liberal institutions, and this will lead many of the cast-out graduates to feel they have nothing to lose. They’ll either embrace a lumpenized, ultra-left adventurism, or come to a true dialectical synthesis. A synthesis that reconciles their class position as petty-bourgeois professionals, with the need for a politics that’s genuinely based in the working class. All of the intellectuals throughout history who’ve joined with revolutionary projects have been able to gain this kind of clarity, so there’s no reason why we can’t bring many of today’s alienated intellectuals into the working-class cause.
The adventurist camp will employ the fallacy that because the workers want to tear down our ruling system, and have come to share such a potent personal rage, therefore committing adventurist acts equates to aligning oneself with the workers. But this misses the real lesson from the people’s reactions towards Brian Thompson’s killing, and towards parallel incidents like the Amazon employee arson attacks. When the people have refused to go along with ruling-class moral outrage over the death of a social murderer, or over the destruction of a tyrannical workplace, this doesn’t mean they’ve consented towards the self-styled vigilante programs of the adventurists. It means the people are now ready for revolution, and therefore it’s wholly unnecessary to try to educate them through dramatic actions.
The mass reactions towards these events are a gauge of where the masses stand, and now that we’ve seen proof of how advanced the masses are, our response must be to provide them with the working-class organization they’re looking for. When we understand this, and get our fellow travelers among the disillusioned graduates to understand this, we’ll be in position to actually give the masses what they need.
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