Above: oil painting of Luigi, made by a Reddit user two years ago.
In these last couple years, since Trump 2.0 brought an acceleration of the war on the world’s working class, two big movements have emerged: the effort to defend Luigi Mangione, and the effort to stop the building of data centers. What’s defined both trends is a major presence of petty-bourgeois professionals, in addition to the working-class people who also support these causes. The question is what role these professionals (and the aspiring professionals who’ve been excluded from their desired careers) will take on in the class war. And it is an open question; many of these activists have a genuine passion, and we must account for how to bring them into the revolutionary struggle.
What this will mean is clarifying the continuity between the Luigi phenomenon, the anti-data center push, and the independent working-class force that these developments will help create. We need to apply the logic of MAGA communism, where you build a revolutionary movement from the preexisting mass consciousness, to the backlash against the data centers. This backlash absolutely has contradictions, as it’s being led by the petty-bourgeois elements who hold a reactionary hostility towards AI itself; like with MAGA, though, we must recognize the larger historical role that this upset is playing.
Compared to the Luigi movement, with the data center movement these professionals are more prominent. But this is not necessarily a bad thing, because it means the metropolitan progressive strata are finding solidarity with the rural masses they’ve long looked down on; there’s a newfound unity between urban liberal activists, and the rural Americans whose land is being destroyed by big tech. Because this unity is centered around defending the farmers, it represents a merging of two wings within the petty-bourgeoisie, one that’s alleviating cultural-geographic divides which are even older than America’s two-party system.
This development does have the potential to endanger our duopoly, and to bring the class war forward; the critical question is whether we’ll turn this energy towards building an independent political force, led by the working class rather than by an intellectual elite.
The DSA takes the position that only the elites can make revolution. This is reflected both in its form of politics, which is oriented around the sensibilities of the petty-bourgeois metropolitan strata, and in how it’s still only proven to be capable of winning in the affluent urban centers. Yet within this tendency, there keeps emerging sentiments that bring the professional strata towards a renegade mentality. I’m not just talking about the fetishization of adventurist violence that Lenin observed is common among many liberals; such behaviors are indeed on the rise right now within liberal circles, but they’re just one form of the chaos that today’s conditions are producing inside petty-bourgeois politics.
There are parts of the DSA’s camp that have adopted genuinely revolutionary positions; namely the anti-imperialist stances that Hasan Piker has put forth. Hasan recently gave up these stances by condemning Hamas on an Israeli outlet, but his followers can’t simply be de-radicalized. Hasan himself will probably never break from the Democratic Party, but what his audience does remains to be seen; especially as the DSA continues refusing to let this hardcore anti-Zionist faction win out, leaving the most radical parts of its base increasingly restless.
This is where we can see a continuity between the Luigi phenomenon, and the intensifying ideological conflict inside the DSA. Because these individuals within the DSA coalition who desire a serious anti-Zionist program, but can’t get it from their org, are of the same orientation as the camp that got behind Luigi. It’s likely that there’s large overlap between the two. And Hasan’s refusal to give up Democrat tailism can only keep so many within this camp from seeking out their own paths; we’re going to see ever-more of the disgruntled petty-bourgeois professionals become rogue, and try to find a continuity with past revolutionary moments.
This is what it always looks like when a revolutionary movement grasps for a foundation, as Marx described in The 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte:
Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living. And just as they seem to be occupied with revolutionizing themselves and things, creating something that did not exist before, precisely in such epochs of revolutionary crisis they anxiously conjure up the spirits of the past to their service, borrowing from them names, battle slogans, and costumes in order to present this new scene in world history in time-honored disguise and borrowed language. Thus Luther put on the mask of the Apostle Paul, the Revolution of 1789-1814 draped itself alternately in the guise of the Roman Republic and the Roman Empire, and the Revolution of 1848 knew nothing better to do than to parody, now 1789, now the revolutionary tradition of 1793-95. In like manner, the beginner who has learned a new language always translates it back into his mother tongue, but he assimilates the spirit of the new language and expresses himself freely in it only when he moves in it without recalling the old and when he forgets his native tongue.
For these aspiring historical agents in the DSA’s radical wing, the missing element is independent working-class organization. The only way they’ll gain the effectiveness they desire is by theoretically jumping from the bourgeois revolutions to the proletarian revolutions, and practicing the level of dialectical smarts that Marx ascribed to the latter:
Bourgeois revolutions, like those of the eighteenth century, storm more swiftly from success to success, their dramatic effects outdo each other, men and things seem set in sparkling diamonds, ecstasy is the order of the day – but they are short-lived, soon they have reached their zenith, and a long Katzenjammer [cat’s winge] takes hold of society before it learns to assimilate the results of its storm-and-stress period soberly. On the other hand, proletarian revolutions, like those of the nineteenth century, constantly criticize themselves, constantly interrupt themselves in their own course, return to the apparently accomplished, in order to begin anew; they deride with cruel thoroughness the half-measures, weaknesses, and paltriness of their first attempts, seem to throw down their opponents only so the latter may draw new strength from the earth and rise before them again more gigantic than ever, recoil constantly from the indefinite colossalness of their own goals – until a situation is created which makes all turning back impossible, and the conditions themselves call out: Hic Rhodus, hic salta! [Here is the rose, here dance!]
It is only by embracing this proletarian mode of struggle, where you’re constantly refining your efforts based on what reality has revealed, that these professional-class activists can truly advance the ideals which drive them. Otherwise they’ll keep going in circles, and all of their efforts will be funneled into controlled opposition orgs like DSA.
As more of those within DSA’s sphere become burnt out over their defective mode of practice, the default will be for them to resort towards ultra-left adventurism. The great danger is that they’ll be recruited by counter-gangs, the militant anti-revolutionary groups the capitalists set up to recapture aspiring revolutionaries. Luigi will be the icon that this reaction centers around, the historical foundation that the alienated petty-bourgeois radicals look to for a source of continuity. But this doesn’t show that invoking Luigi is inherently counterproductive; it shows that we need to get ahead of the ultraviolent left counter-gangs in defining what the idea of Luigi should mean.
Jackson Hinkle has done this in his response to Oracle CTO Larry Ellison’s statement that: “Citizens will be on their best behavior because we're constantly watching and recording everything that's going on.” To this, Jackson replied that “Luigi did nothing wrong.” Jackson is somebody who recognizes that even though the Luigi movement has petty-bourgeois elements, it’s a real reflection of advanced consciousness among the masses, and it proves the masses will be receptive if we align ourselves with this trend. What communists offer these kinds of renegade movements is the ruthlessly self-critical practice Marx described, which lets proletarian revolutionaries do what petty-bourgeois radicals can’t.
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