The Ruling Class Should Fear For Their Lives Every Single Day
One of the constant themes that crops up in this newsletter is the observation that those with immense power have the capacity, and apparently the inclination, to commit immense, unforgivable harms against the peoples of the world which the rest of us could never even dream of being able to commit. A couple things follow from this: 1) the crimes that we commit are comparatively puny, unworthy of all the pearl-clutching, and to be expected from a populace deprived of its fundamental rights, and 2) any reactionary, terroristic violence directed against the elites is both expected and deserved.
It’s that last point which has been at least implied throughout much of my work if not made explicit and which I would like to expand and defend here, particularly since the assassination of the fabulously wealthy UnitedHealthcare CEO in midtown Manhattan last week by the man the internet has dubbed “The Claim Adjuster.”
Simply put, Richie Rich had it coming.
I don’t need to tell you how immoral our healthcare system is in the United States. It is an unending parade of unmitigated horrors for those who are sick and their family members, whether they have health insurance or not. The fact that the predatory health insurance industry exploits all of us, because we all get sick, and the fact that it is assiduously protected by both Republican and Democratic politicians, means that it is universally reviled by the populace. Under the direction of the recently slain CEO, UnitedHealthcare’s rate of claim denials surged from 8 percent to 23 percent, double the industry average. The company began using A.I. algorithms to automatically deny claims, thus using robots to kill you. It committed outright fraud by inaccurately reporting doctor recommendations in order to deny claims. As journalist Chris Hedges notes:
The revenue of the six largest [health] insurers — Anthem, Centene, Cigna, AVS/Aetna, Humana and UnitedHealth — have more than quadrupled from 2010 to $1.1 trillion. Combined revenues of the 3 biggest — United, CVS/Aetna and Cigna — have quintupled.
These corporations, in moral terms, are legally permitted to hold sick children hostage while their parents bankrupt themselves to save their sons or daughters. That many die, at the very least premature deaths, because of these policies is indisputable.
The pharmaceutical company Novartis has a single-dose, highly effective treatment for leukemia — you know, a cure for cancer — called Kymriah. Other companies such as Gilead have developed similar cures for other cancers like lymphoma. If the executives of these pharmaceutical companies really cared about treating diseases, they would release all of their patents into the public domain and share all of their research and manufacturing technologies with the world. But nope, there’s no money in that. So if you’ve got a deathly ill family member who can’t afford the hundreds of thousands of dollars for the cancer cure, and your insurance company is just gonna deny you, then how should you seek justice for your family member who was allowed to die? And not just them, but for the many millions who have suffered debilitating pain and untimely deaths because there is just so much profit to be syphoned out of their diseased marrows? Well, if you picked up a gun and started shooting those men and women in fancy suits who are sucking the blood from your loved one’s neck, I wouldn’t blame you. And more than that, I would wish you godspeed and give a hearty bravo! If a cop or a fed asked me if I knew your face, I would say “I don’t talk to pigs.”
Those who talk only of peaceful means to achieve justice don’t know what they are talking about. They clearly have little sense of history, and have apparently never engaged in a collective struggle for change. I’m not arguing that nonviolent means are themselves incapable of achieving justice, but rather that we are currently faced with immense, overpowering, organized violence on the part of the state and the business class it represents against any attempts to achieve a modicum of justice for ourselves, nonviolent or otherwise. In such a situation, pyrrhic acts of violence are going to be carried out by the disaffected. This is basically a sociological truism at this point. As President Kennedy is often quoted as saying: “Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable.” But more than this, given the levels of deathly exploitation we have suffered through, when someone stands up, says enough is enough, and removes an unapologetic capitalist from this earth, I regard them as having fired a necessary shot in this ongoing class war of ours.
Those who talk of the value of peace seem not to understand that peace has a price. That peace and justice are not the same thing. That to live under an unbearable corporate yoke is no kind of life. That what we unthinkingly call peace is in fact rampant exploitation unperturbed by protest. “Society’s tendency is to maintain what has been,” Howard Zinn wrote. “Measure the number of peasant insurrections against centuries of serfdom in Europe — the millennia of landlordism in the East; match the number of slave revolts in America with the record of those millions who went through their lifetimes of toil without outward protest. What we should be most concerned about is not some natural tendency towards violent uprising, but rather the inclination of people, faced with an overwhelming environment, to submit to it.”
Given our topsy-turvy world, those who take up arms against our oppressors are the true peacemakers. As Father Daniel Berrigan explained:
But what of the price of peace? I think of the good, decent, peace-loving people I have known by the thousands, and I wonder. How many of them are so afflicted with the wasting disease of normalcy that, even as they declare for the peace, their hands reach out with an instinctive spasm in the direction of their loved ones, in the direction of their comforts, their home, their security, their income, their future, their plans… “Of course, let us have the peace,” we cry, “but at the same time let us have normalcy, let us lose nothing, let our lives stand intact, let us know neither prison nor ill repute nor the disruption of ties.” And because we must encompass this and protect that, and because at all costs — at all costs — our hopes must march on schedule, and because it is unheard of that in the name of peace a sword should fall, disjoining that fine and cunning web that our lives have woven, because it is unheard of that good men should suffer injustice or families be sundered or good repute be lost — because of this we cry peace and cry peace, and there is no peace. There is no peace because there are no peacemakers. There are no makers of peace because the making of peace is at least as costly as the making of war — at least as exigent, at least as disruptive, at least as liable to bring disgrace and prison and death in its wake.
I do respect the principled pacifist position. There is a kind of transcendent, stoic beauty to a human being who would sooner die than physically harm another human being. And true pacifists very often are the target of violence when they refuse to kill on behalf of the state or any other organization. The United States has killed pacificists precisely for that reason. There are, however, vanishingly few true pacifists in the world because most people believe in self-defense. The moment you begin to make any exceptions for violence, in self-defense or otherwise, you cease to be a pacifist, and are rather just another human who understands that violence can in fact be effective in achieving certain aims. I respect the true pacifist position because it represents a rarified, singular integrity that is so needed in this fallen world. I would not, however, respect a pacifist that sanctimoniously tells everyone else that they too should be pacifists when faced with violence. I would not respect a pacifist who tells those who are fighting for their lives in a class war that they should all peacefully accept their wretched state. I think about the L.A. ‘92 riots, where one rioter said, standing outside of a packed black church: “They sitting in there talking about peace. Every time somebody talk about peace we get a foot in our ass! I’m not talking about peace no more!” Another says, “Turn the other cheek so they can kick it.”
When our laws are made to protect the powerful, concentrate their wealth, and punish the rest of us, I have no patience for talk of peace. The ruling class is not moved by peaceful means. As Frederick Douglass said, “A long course of peaceful slaveholding has placed the slaveholders beyond the reach of moral and humane consideration. They have neither ears nor hearts for the appeals of justice and humanity. … The only penetrable point of a tyrant is the Fear of Death. The outcry that they make as to the danger of having their Throats Cut, is because they know they deserve to have them Cut.”
These people deserve no peace. The health insurance CEO who tells the company they need to cut costs, not by decreasing executive pay, but by denying more customer claims thus leading to their poorer health and untimely deaths, deserves no peace. The general who sends propagandized working-class men and women to die in wars meant to kill even further impoverished men and women across the world deserves no peace. The lawmaker who cuts regulations from corporations, thus allowing them to pollute the environment of working-class neighborhoods, deserves no peace. The judge who was purposely appointed to destroy the ability of labor unions to function deserves no peace. Zionists partying at a dance festival high on MDMA, where just across the border millions of dehumanized Palestinian souls live and die in a massive killing cage, deserve no peace. These decadent lifestyles have a cost, borne by the wretched, and the bill is in.
None of us, save the family of the slain, should be crying tears for a whacked health insurance CEO. Him and his executive ilk have been running on borrowed time. Thankfully, this sentiment largely cuts across party lines. But here’s a sentiment that today sadly seems verboten amongst any circle that is left of center: I rejoiced on January 6th, 2021. I laughed. I watched with glee. I hoped the rioters in the Capitol would go further and further. I cannot tell you the sense of catharsis I felt at witnessing, in real time, lawmakers run in fear for their overvalued little lives. It’s unfortunate that that fear was engendered by right-wing conspiracy theorist idiots and not an organized, militant leftwing movement (it’s unfortunate that today’s left doesn’t do a whole lot of what today’s right does). But the fear was the important thing. Finally — finally — after generations, our rulers tasted just a little bit of the adrenaline in their blood which the rest of us are poisoned with every single day of our lives from the constant low-level stress of trying to survive in this fucked up society. Those above us should be made to feel that fear constantly.
And to those who might think, hey, you better be careful about what you say; they’re always watching; saying that representatives of the ruling class should be killed could be considered incitement, or at least cause for further monitoring — first off, I don’t give a shit about prying feds and neither should you. If you regulate your speech out of fear of being watched, that just goes to show that this whole universal surveillance system is damn effective in suppressing popular movements just by virtue of being an accepted facet of modern life. It should be defied at every turn, and that includes by simply being frank. Secondly, if I was gonna commit any specific crimes I wouldn’t write about it before or after. Obviously you shouldn’t broadcast your felonious plans unless you really don’t care about being caught. But it should be noted that the CEO killer was found to have written positively about the Unabomber’s manifesto (as have I) only after he was arrested. What you say can certainly be used against you after you’re caught, but it rarely prevents a crime from actually being carried out in the first place. Thirdly, that’s not what incitement is. Incitement is when you are literally standing outside someone’s house with a group of people and you say “Let’s get them!” Or you’re marching in the street and tell everyone to start breaking some windows. Incitement is an imminent threat of violence — as in you are directing real physical harm in the immediate here and now. But writing that the ruling class should face violence, or even saying out loud that a specific person, let’s say Nancy Pelosi, should be murdered for her role in fleecing the American public and protecting the NSA’s right to spy on you, is not incitement. It’s not any crime at all, because we have the first amendment. And even if free speech wasn’t a lawful, protected right, it would still be okay for someone to say that Joe Biden should be murdered for pardoning his son of any and all crimes while millions continue to languish in prison because of the tough-on-crime laws he passed in congress, because certain fundamental human rights always exist within us, regardless of what our dusty old laws have to say. If you believe someone should be killed, that they deserved it, that it was about time, that you would do it too if you had the chance and the courage, you should say that. This is serious business, a class war, and your thoughts are too important to be locked away forever inside your head with no consequence. The ruling class is full of flagrant scofflaws, of adherents to the most brazen project of organized violence and dispossession the world has ever seen. The working-class should be just as brazen, just as swaggering, just as organized, and, if necessary, just as hatefully violent.
I should make clear that my defense of targeted assassinations such as these, on a moral level, is distinct from the question of strategy. While it is true that targeting specific evildoers for death is a much better tactic than killing a bunch of innocent people (even Timothy McVeigh said that if he could do it all over again he would have instead carried out targeted sniper attacks against federal agents), the idea that such targeted killings could actually achieve meaningful change in the direction that you want is highly questionable. The Weatherman, those disaffected college kid terrorists who came out of the failures of Students for a Democratic Society in the early 1970s, planned to assassinate political and criminal justice figures but succeeded only in blowing themselves up and going on the run. The same was largely true for the Symbionese Liberation Army. As Frederik DeBoer writes in How the Elites Ate the Social Justice Movement, groups like these “set off some bombs, made a lot of noise, and had zero appreciable effect on American politics.”
In comparison, the global anarchist movement of the late 19th and early 20th centuries carried out a shockingly high number of successful assassinations against heads of state and other high-level government employees and businessmen. These mostly resulted in reactionary state violence that absolutely crushed nascent leftwing labor movements. Today’s atmosphere is even less conducive to such “propaganda of the deed.” As Vincent Bevins amply demonstrates in his survey of popular protest action throughout the 2010s, if you’re gonna start some shit you better be prepared for what happens next, otherwise you’re gonna get the shit kicked out of you by the better organized fascist elements in society, as was true throughout the Arab world (looking at you right now, Syria), Latin America, and Asia. Today, the state’s capacity for violence is much more significant than it was during anarchism’s militant heyday. As Deboer writes, “the establishment military’s advantage over any potential revolutionary movement or terrorist cell is vastly greater today than those faced by successful left resistance movements in the past. … You cannot possibly defeat the American system with force of arms. The idea is absurd.” Even with a potential upsurge of lone wolf assassins inspired by the so-called “Claim Adjuster” (perhaps using a similar modus operandi as the shockingly effective D.C. sniper), I have no illusions that such actions would stir a populist revolution. Most Americans have “more to risk than those people who took up with Lenin, with Castro, with Ho Chi Minh,” DeBoer writes. “When I look at the history of successful revolutionary movements of the past, I see countries of vast need in the most basic elements of human life.” Though the U.S. citizenry at all levels except the very top is becoming increasingly pauperized, it’s going to take a hell of a lot more immiseration for mass armed resistance to even be entertained by people. I mean, the Claim Adjuster guy was turned in by a McDonald’s employee for fuck’s sake (class traitors get stitches). Though I must remind you, we never know what spark will get the fire going. Frederick Douglass himself noted that the murderous actions of a Christian zealot, John Brown, did “more to upset the logic and shake the security of slavery, than all other efforts in that direction for twenty years.”
But that’s not what this is all about. I’m not arguing from a strategic perspective, but a moral one (with the necessary caveat that those things aren’t mutually exclusive). In a healthy, civic society built on equality, targeted assassinations of the rich would not be seen as heroic. But we don’t have such a society, we have a hellscape. For too long these people have been living high on the hog at the expense of our very lives. The fact that the ruling class thinks they can walk around on a public street in perfect safety only amplifies their casual evil, and makes it clear that the rest of us have been failing in our duty to take back what is ours, with interest. The best way to do that, in a way that is both long lasting and good for the soul, is through militant, organized labor taking power over their workplaces from the bosses. That takes time, a hell of a lot of work, and a little something called solidarity. Until then, let the bullets rip. Whether you like it or not, we are in a war. We have been losing that war, badly, for multiple lifetimes. It is literally life and death. Those are the stakes. I suggest you recognize that reality, make your own choices, and either try to help or get the fuck out the way of anyone who chooses to take up arms in that fight. Blessed are the true peacemakers.