Killing a Farmhand

Class migration at the scene of an assassination

We need to welcome with open arms this grand new era of working class visibility.

So clear is this visibility that an actual conversation about class composition is making the rounds, in connection with the recent CEO assassination.

The media has pored over the resumes of the two parties involved, Brian Thompson, the CEO, and Luigi Mangione, the young assassin, stirring up a new frontier of discourse within this multi-layered news story.

Admittedly, class composition is not the most frequently encountered topic amongst the commentariat. But here it is flowering into view. We are wringing our hands as to “who was really working class” in an encounter that involved no less than the assassination of one of its participants. Though it comes on the heels of a tragic murder, nevertheless, that it has evolved into a discussion of this form presents an important moment for working class life.

And of course there are going to be some miserable takes within this debate, like this lemon by Bret Stephens (of course it goes without saying that going to Bret Stephens for a good take is like going to Taco Bell for good food).

So, given there’s this great discussion in the air, though with some predictably thick-headed perspectives, why don’t we try here to clear some things up.

First of all, Brian Thompson’s working class roots do not the story of collective action make.

In other words, his humble beginnings as a farmhand and their subsequent development into the upper echelons of corporate life say nothing important about the working class and its need for solidarity.

What they really speak to is something totally separate. For if there’s anything meaningful to find in Thompson’s story of class migration it is in the way it serves as yet another example of the meritocracy’s power to mold narratives around wealth and success.

It is hardly an advertisement of the nobility of working class life to eulogize a system’s capacity to allow a member of that class to “escape” it somehow.

Working class solidarity is not about cheering on the abilities of an infinitesimal portion of its members to transform themselves—bootstraps and all—into members of the professional managerial class and beyond.

Working class solidarity is about the vision of a transformed society in which wage labor is considered, not as a “humble start,” some dispensation one strives as hard as possible to climb out of, but a meaningful standard of living the good life in its own right, with all of the benefits associated with a dignified existence.

CEOs, therefore, no matter the so-called humility of their origins, are poor representatives of the struggle for socialism. Truly, we are getting horribly confused if we point towards examples of successes in class migration within the meritocratic order, such as that of Brian Thompson, as some meaningful indicator of working class dignity.

Secondly, meritocracy has something to say, as well, about Luigi Mangione’s positionality within the struggle for socialism.

Predictably, voices on the right are left-baiting followers of this story into thinking there is some contradiction between the elite beginnings of the 26-year-old alleged assassin and his acquisition of folk hero status.

But there shouldn’t be any difficulty imagining how the actions of a member of the ruling class could nonetheless legitimately inspire the level of idolatry he seems to be enjoying at the moment.

This is because his success within the meritocratic order is not dispositive of the relevance of his actions last week for the struggle for socialism. Rather it is indicative of how certain actions within that struggle can only ever be accomplished by actual members of the elite.

The one thing proven by Mangione’s rarified pedigree is that the successful carrying out of retributive impulses towards the plutocratic interests of the ruling class are only feasible in the hands of those who already harness the resources of that very ruling class.

In this way, the meritocracy promotes the ability for other beneficiaries of its system to carry out assassinations on its other members, since only someone with such “merits” could ever achieve that level of organizational precision—along with having access to some of the unstructured time which many elites take for granted and which members of the working class almost never experience.

Rest assured that if it were possible for the average person to carry out a complex action such as the one Mangione carried out last week, one which requires relatively sophisticated preparation, the 3D printing of a gun, the usage of a silencer, skill in firearms, literacy in the writing of a manifesto, etc., there would have already been tens, if not hundreds, of Brian Thompsons.

The fact of the matter is that the limits placed on working class life—poor education, time drains from multiple employers, mounting debt and the array of family responsibilities—fundamentally preclude the carrying out of the type of vendettas Mangione actualized last week. There’s no time in the week to learn how to shoot a gun or work incognito or sustain yourself for six months while you don’t engage with the world, as Mangione was privileged enough to do so.

At some point, a CEO was going to be assassinated (this has to be accepted given the extremes of wealth inequality in our country), which means that, as well, his assassin would have to come from within the ranks of the ruling class of which CEOs are themselves members, given that the level of complexity involved in such targeted assassinations of important people like Thompson exceeds the capacity of the average American to accomplish.

But this doesn’t mean the thirst for vigilante justice towards oligarchic figures like Thompson does not exist outside of the ruling class.

It doesn’t mean there isn’t an absolutely homicidal rage, a justifiably homicidal rage, brewing within the working class like an infernal stew in the gut.

It doesn’t mean that there are not many, many working class folk that wouldn’t dive at the chance to take out their fury onto a Brain Thompson in the manner of a Luigi Mangione.

It doesn’t mean that, contrary to Fox News punditry—whose smug shaking heads and whose issuances of lay judicial writ on air in the form of sotto voce utterances (“Just reprehensible . . .”)—the online fury towards the “healthcare” industry is indicative of some moral failing and not what it really is which is the temperature read on seething rage over subjugation to a murderous insurance regime no one has any choice but to accept.

In fact, Mangione admitted this himself in his manifesto when he wrote of how his “tech is pretty locked down” because of his “work in engineering.”

That is, he himself admits it takes much room for higher order thinking and planning, financial resources, and uncommon ingenuity in order to carry out an operation the likes of which he did, all of which are impossible to attain when juggling the equally varied and complex responsibilities that come with the multiple jobs and low pay working class folks endure all the time.

In other words, it takes a member of the elite ruling class in order to snuff out another member of the elite ruling class.

Yet, even so, the event, in its symbolic capacity, contains kernels of legitimate expression of working class anger.

To be clear, acts of terrorism cannot be counted as legitimate forms of revolutionary action (Lenin called acts of terrorism a form of “revolutionary opportunism”).

Rather, the relevance towards the struggle for socialism which terroristic actions like that of Mangione’s has lies in how they constitute a symbolic, though ultimately futile, expression of working class anger.

Insofar as anger must always find an outlet, even if it be destructive and unproductive, the online spitting on the grave appears understandable within the borders of the larger struggle—though not ultimately a useful part of it.

I am not defending Mangione’s actions, nor am I joining the celebration of a man’s murder. I’m with Lenin and don't support terrorism nor homicide. In many respects, the grotesque online circling of the wagons around the corpse of a human being, with its jokey memes and mercenary influencers, has made me ill at ease with its malodorous air of bread and circuses.

And in some important respects, given that the event will create further regression on the part of the elites while amounting to nary a meaningful bit of progress for the working class, the assassination seems to speak volumes about antagonisms within the ruling class itself, much in the same way that modern warfare between nations is an inherent expression of the same types of disputes and never has at stake any real working class concerns.

The actual event, in its most basic phenomenological constitution, presents an intra-class dispute, a kind of settling of scores between peers, not the sort of dramatic David-versus-Goliath confrontation that often characterizes our fantasies of “the little guy” taking justice into his own hands against his oppressors.

Nonetheless, the reflex towards left-baiting embedded in the discussion of class composition with regard to the CEO killing reveals nothing about the true class character of the event in its wider social implications. Rather, that class character can be understood as inhering in the symbolism of the assassination itself.

You can’t have it both ways. If voting for a right populist to be the next President of the United States is to be counted as a legitimate expression of working class anger, irrespective of how far such an action would take us from the goal of greater working class solidarity and subjectivity, then the absence of empathy for the brutal murder of a CEO of a giant corporation, a supposed moral failing that a great number of working class folk online are “guilty” of, must instead be understood as precisely the same sort of legitimate expression of the same kind of anger as we saw on Election Day.

The class composition of the two actors in the deadly encounter which occurred last week has no bearing on the legitimacy of the immediate schadenfreude expressed online in the wake of the incident.

The only thing that class composition makes clear is the ability of the meritocratic order to make CEOs out of farmhands and assassins out of U Penn grads.