What we all must understand about the Luigi movement is that its class origins and motivations are fundamentally different from those of the ultraviolent left. The leftists and liberals who glorify political violence for its own sake are not coming from a working-class perspective, unlike the pro-Luigi masses are. Petty-bourgeois radicals, lumpen chaos agents, and professional-managerial class liberals are where we’re seeing the sentiments that say it’s okay to murder someone just for thinking differently. From the Luigi supporters, though, the message and the intentions are not the same. In their case, the sentiment isn’t even really about celebrating violence; the focus is on the victims of the violence that our economic system inflicts, and the movement’s participants are unified behind among the most positive of goals: to fight back against what our ruling class is doing to us.
This is the kind of social phenomenon that emerges in response to the crisis the elites are engineering, where as part of a deliberate design by the Federal Reserve and the banks, more and more people are being thrown into desperation. After the pandemic recovery created a brief period where job seekers held the leverage, Wall Street executives stated in a memo that they sought for the workers to lose this power, which would require increased unemployment. The Fed raised interest rates, putting on the pressure that would lead employers to reduce head count; now even according to the absurdly under-reported official unemployment numbers, there are more unemployed people than there are job openings. (With much of these supposed job openings being “ghost jobs” that companies falsely list as available.)
The mass will to resist this assault on working Americans is there; the Luigi movement proves it. To know how to organize the masses in their present conditions, where the ruling class is increasingly taking away their ability to work, we must look to history. We must look to William Z. Foster’s solution for countering the bourgeoisie’s attempts at dividing the employed from the unemployed:
The question of the unity of the unemployed with the employed, especially during periods of deep industrial depression, is a matter of the most vital consequence in the working out of a successful strike strategy. The policy of the employers in this respect is simple and brutal. They try to drive a wedge between the unemployed and the employed, to make the unemployed a hunger-driven mass ready to take the jobs of the employed when they venture to strike in defense of their standards of living.
As usual, the reactionary trade union leaders, with their traditional policy of abandoning the unemployed to their own devices, assist the employers in using them as a weapon against the employed workers. Many a strike has been lost from this cause.
A task of the strike strategist is to unite the unemployed and the employed in a common fight against the employers. But as in the case of so many problems of strike strategy, work on the solution of this task must be started long before the outbreak of a particular strike, and even before the growth of the industrial crisis produces its vast army of unemployed. It must be a settled policy in the unions to identify the interests of the employed with those of the unemployed. There must be a whole series of measures fought for, such as the shorter work-day and work-week, equal division of work, etc., which tends to eliminate the number of unemployed.
These are the next steps that the Luigi movement—or rather the workers movement—must take in order to turn this revolutionary energy into something materially impactful. The core of the Luigi movement’s base is the proletariat, and there will always be a proletariat under a class society. But with America’s de-industrialization, the proletariat has been reduced in its numbers, with the displaced former working-class people then forced to take on different class roles. These roles don’t make them into class enemies of the proletariat; but as long as ruling-class politics defines which messages the masses are exposed to, and which political tendencies they’re able to access, the unemployed or otherwise de-proletarianized masses will be separated from the proletariat.
The Luigi phenomenon and other class-conscious trends like it provide a counter towards these tactics of division, because such trends are able to unify all kinds of exploited people around the idea of justice. We should place great value in this benefit that comes from anti-systemic movements which function memetically, and cut through the anti-solidarity propaganda that our ruling class targets the masses with. It’s these movements that can unify people amid manufactured culture war dramas, or lead people to form bonds of solidarity rather than treat each other like competitive objects, or commit to the class struggle when they would otherwise stay on a passive path.
When it comes to the workers struggle in particular, one of the biggest obstacles towards progress that we see in the post-industrial “gig economy” era is when workers lack a sense of permanence in their current employer, so don’t see a reason to fight for long-term benefits. This also has to do with how in conditions where hiring is becoming more and more rare, those who do have work are scared to rebel; which is a mentality that the bosses have very deliberately cultivated. One of the biggest reasons companies have adopted the “ghost jobs” practice is because this makes their employees feel replaceable, adding another layer to the sense of precarity among the workers. Our class enemies want the employed workers to be psychologically controlled by the threat of becoming jobless, and want the jobless to react towards their desperation by turning against their class allies.
The desperate turning against their class allies looks like mass shooters murdering fellow community members, lumpenized individuals gravitating towards ultraviolent counter-gangs, or people with no economic prospects embracing a criminal lifestyle. Part of the element that we’ve seen wantonly celebrating political violence is this lumpen current which feels alienated from society, and has therefore stopped having respect for life or for death.
There certainly are anti-social forces within our society, ones that the feds are doing everything they can to nurture. A good sign, though, is that these forces have not been able to co-opt Luigi, because it’s against the interests of our ruling class for Luigi to stay in the discourse. We saw this when a Blackstone CEO was targeted by a vigilante attack in July, and the media buried the story to avoid sparking a new conversation about Luigi. The ideas behind the Luigi movement have the power to overthrow our capitalist dictatorship. If we use the image of Luigi as a way to rally the masses, and connect these masses with the history of working-class organizing, we will build a movement that no ruling-class tactics can thwart.
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