The popular movement that’s emerged around Luigi Mangione is a prelude to when America’s class war reaches its “prairie fire” moment. This next spark isn’t guaranteed to bring working-class victory; that will depend on whether we’ve built sufficient proletarian organizational strength. What the Luigi movement has done for us, though, is show where the different proto-revolutionary tendencies are right now, and where they’ll stand when a new mass revolt inevitably occurs.
It’s revealed not just that the working class is already quite advanced in its consciousness, as shown by how many workers sided with Luigi; but also that growing elements of the petty bourgeoisie can come to share these kinds of sentiments. You could point to the professional-class liberals who support Luigi, and conclude this means the Luigi movement is a liberal thing; but if this is the case, why does the petty-bourgeois Luigi support overlap with great working-class support? The true nature of this phenomenon has been one where broad elements of the people embrace a militant opposition to the ruling class. As these elements continue to develop in their political experience, our task is to bring in all of the proletariat’s potential class allies, while making sure the next uprising isn’t defined by petty-bourgeois idealism.
Within the Luigi movement, there have been both proletarian tendencies and idealist tendencies. The more idealist reactions to Brian Thompson’s killing have consisted of glorifying violence in and of itself, without any interest in building actual power for the workers. But there have been genuine dialectical efforts to guide the Luigi reaction towards such a substantive project. The important thing is whether one’s agitation has been about simply celebrating the event, or about speaking to the masses and giving them solutions to their grievances. This isn’t the last time America will have a discourse such as the one around Luigi, and the next time might be when our own prairie fire gets lit. We might be at the same place that China was in 1930, when Mao concluded that a spark was about to come:
Because the reactionary government, though short of provisions and funds, endlessly expands its armies and thus constantly extends the warfare, the masses of soldiers are in a constant state of privation. Because of the growth in government taxation, the rise in rent and interest demanded by the landlords and the daily spread of the disasters of war, there are famine and banditry everywhere and the peasant masses and the urban poor can hardly keep alive. Because the schools have no money, many students fear that their education may be interrupted; because production is backward, many graduates have no hope of employment.
Once we understand all these contradictions, we shall see in what a desperate situation, in what a chaotic state, China finds herself. We shall also see that the high tide of revolution against the imperialists, the warlords and the landlords is inevitable, and will come very soon. All China is littered with dry faggots which will soon be aflame. The saying, "A single spark can start a prairie fire", is an apt description of how the current situation will develop. We need only look at the strikes by the workers, the uprisings by the peasants, the mutinies of soldiers and the strikes of students which are developing in many places to see that it cannot be long before a "spark" kindles "a prairie fire".
Our main obstacle to victory in the class war is that the American workers have become overwhelmingly disorganized, and we don’t have the time to close this gap before the coming upheaval. Therefore while we construct our working-class infrastructure, something we must focus on is drawing the popular energy away from the idealist illusions that will inevitably arise in these dramatic moments. We need to make it so that the proletarian tendency wins out, instead of the petty-bourgeois tendencies that can only lead the masses to a dead end.
Adventurism is one of these petty-bourgeois deviations that we’ll need to struggle against; this does not mean, though, that we should respond to the next Luigi-type events by joining in on the moralist denunciations from the ruling class. This is something which many in our own political tendency don’t see: that the revolutionary upsurges aren’t going to take the forms we would imagine for them, and conform to a preexisting doctrine. When American life itself is breaking down, and ever-more of the masses are being de-classed, the direction of the American masses is to embrace our nation’s wild west spirit.
Bourgeois morality and the old modes of discourse can’t withstand this consciousness shift; neither can whatever theoretical viewpoints that fight against the masses as they become radicalized, rather than seriously engaging with them. An American years of lead is coming, and it can’t be stopped by anything we say; what we need to do is turn the years of lead in favor of proletarian revolutionary politics.
The idea that we can prevent an American years of lead, or stop the people from having their raw reactions towards the next events in this process, parallels the kind of liberalism which shuns mass organizing in favor of adventurism. Lenin observed how the ultra-leftists who pursue “revolutionary” terrorism as a political program mirror the liberal reformists who endorse these acts, because both tendencies come from a place of not believing in mass organizing. This lack of connection to the people also brings about the perception that we, as members of the radical intelligentsia, can negate the popular trends as they arise and replace them with the “correct” positions.
You can’t negate a popular trend, at least not when this trend comes from a real revolutionary energy; you have to sublate it. This was the logic behind MAGA communism, and it’s our only way to remain relevant amid the class war’s next escalations.
The different proto-revolutionary currents are in the process of coalescing, and they’ll no doubt mostly find a home within populist tendencies of a petty-bourgeois character. This kind of partial consciousness is what always initially gains traction during the leadup to revolutions, so we must not simply interpret it as a defeat; it has the potential to be a critical step towards working-class victory, if we’re there to bring the people to the next phases. To do this, we’ll need to adopt a more open view towards developments like the Luigi phenomenon, one in which our first question is where they may contain the next spark.
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