Now that the Epstein files have largely come out, the Luigi movement has taken on a new role. One where it provides hope that America’s people will be able to wage an actual mass resistance against the pedocracy, which seeks to use Epstein as a way of containing revolutionary sentiment. One doesn’t need to support adventurism to view Luigi in this way; as a Marxist, I would never practice adventurism, but I am seeing how Luigi’s supporters have proven that a popular struggle can be sustained. And to overcome the schemes our rulers are orchestrating right now, we must identify where this strength among the masses can be found.
Our ruling class has maneuvered the revelations about the Epstein network’s crimes in a way that makes them not pose a genuine threat towards the existing social order—unless the people introduce a variable which the pedocracy didn’t anticipate. Unless we build a popular organizational force that’s capable of winning power for the workers, and fighting off the extremely violent resistance that’s going to come from our class enemies. The Luigi movement, which recently got a win with Luigi’s being saved from the death penalty, represents proof that the masses are capable of such a feat.
To understand the relationship between the Luigi movement’s inciting event in December 2024, and America’s coming proletarian victory, we need to look at the role which has historically been played by the rogue actors within the class war. By the members of the disenfranchised “lumpenproletariat” who aren’t part of the destructive and reactionary trends which can grip the lumpen social class; but rather are able to provide a critical teaching role for those training to become part of the vanguard. In his analysis on the potential for the lumpen to become part of the revolutionary movement, Bruce Franklin pointed out how
Marx provides a key insight in a passage which foreshadows the analysis of Mao and Fanon and relates directly to the development of the Revolutionary Youth Movement. At a “youthful age,” he says in The Class Struggles in France, the lumpenproletariat is “thoroughly malleable, as capable of the most heroic deeds and the most exalted sacrifices as of the basest banditry and the foulest corruption.” (Selected Works, I, 155). If so, at least the youth of the lumpenproletariat should be able to play an extremely important part in revolutionary struggle, because they are the only group to combine this potentiality for heroism with an intimate daily knowledge of how to cope with the police and to engage in underground activities as a way of life. And remember that in What Is To Be Done? Lenin makes the mastery of these skills the primary requirement of the professional revolutionary and of the revolutionary party as a whole, primarily because these skills are needed to survive.
Luigi Mangione himself is not lumpen, and more importantly we don’t even know if he did what he’s accused of. Whoever the person behind it was, though, the image of Luigi has rallied much of the working masses around these same sentiments which make up a young revolutionary struggle. The sentiments where working people, looking for a way to fight back against the social violence that comes from their exploiters, look to the renegade individuals who initially drive the class war forward. This is why within the Luigi movement, there’s a mixture of ideas about Mangione being a scapegoat for the ruling class who must be defended from false charges, and a figure of collective self-defense. These ideas aren’t contradictory, not if you look at this from the perspective of the class struggle as it actually exists; the important thing is that Mangione embodies a sense of hope for victory against our sadistic and vile ruling elites.
The question is what form this movement will evolve into in a post-Epstein files world. As a Marxist, my goal with mass movements is always to shape them into a force which is maximally disciplined and organized; this is my core intention, and I came to this mindset by learning from the communists who are serious about the class struggle. It’s because proletarian organizing requires such discipline that our work has an inherent friction with the lumpen. At the same time that we act to proletarianize those who’ve been pushed out of the working class, we must be merciless in combating drug culture, the sex industry, and other destructive tendencies which the capitalists seek to draw this class into.
This is where it becomes more complicated, though. One of these lumpen tendencies is adventurism, which the Luigi movement’s inciting incident fell under; however, just because an action is adventurist, it doesn’t universally mean this action is destructive towards the working-class cause. There are times when an adventurist act just happened to be how revolutionary energy got released, and therefore it would have a counterrevolutionary effect to denounce this act. It’s undeniable that Luigi, and the act which made him famous, have galvanized a new momentum for popular struggle; this doesn’t mean we should pursue adventurism, it means we need to find a way to adapt our practice to conditions that will inevitably include adventurist actions. There is no stopping the chaotic events that will come about from the heightening of class contradictions; we cannot control what 300 million or so Americans do amid the catastrophes we’re experiencing. And because we’re not capable of such control, our only path forward is to navigate America’s “years of lead” as it continues to unfold.
When we understand this principle of the mass line—where those seeking to lead the masses can only do so when they’re actually relating with what drives the masses—we can avoid the objectively harmful kind of adventurism. This is the adventurism in which a self-professed revolutionary organization goes ahead of the people, and dismisses the masses for the sake of ideological purity. It would only isolate us from the masses to condemn the act behind the Luigi movement, and we must lead our fellow Marxists away from such an error.
Our foes are trying to turn Epstein into a psyop, and an exceptionally dangerous one; they seek to use selectively revealed horrific truths to desensitize us towards violence against children, with Gaza being the most large-scale manifestation of this. The way we defeat this scheme is by working to reconcile the proto-revolutionary mass sentiments in trends like the Luigi movement, with the historically informed theory which is possessed by those studied in dialectical materialism. Knowledge in Marxism means nothing unless you apply this knowledge to the real political struggle. Luigi provides us with clarity about which kinds of sentiments animate the masses; they are compelled by the idea of self-defense against powerful people who inflict violence against the vulnerable. Our role is to give the people the means for overthrowing their pedocratic dictatorship, giving them the organizational capacity that can change the power balance.
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