Deny, Defend, Depose
On December 4th, 2024, Brian Thompson, CEO of United Healthcare, was assassinated in broad daylight on the city streets of New York. This led to widespread fanfare among the working people of the u.s.a. In his 3 year tenure, Thompson had skyrocketed the profits of his company at the expense of everyday people by spiking UHC claims denials to 1/3 of all filed — the highest denial rate in the industry.
This week Thompson's alleged assassin, Luigi Mangione, was brought up on charges for "murder as an act of terrorism": attempting to "influence the policies of a unit of government by intimidation or coercion." This is an admission in all but name by the state to what has become increasingly clear in this century: that the state is, first and foremost, an instrument for the domination of the working class by the ruling bourgeois class and their corporations.
Through the intensity of the charges filed, the storm of propaganda in the news, and the repeated attempts to villainize Mangione, we can see that the positive reaction to the assassination of the parasite CEO shocked the capitalist class. After all, with the recent farce of the 2024 election, the ruling class may have believed that they had once again succeeded in hiding their plunder of the proletariat — at home and globally — behind the mask of factional politics.
However, since the parasite CEO's assassination, working people have loudly denounced their oppression by these capitalist oligarchs. They've announced their knowledge of the fact that the pens, paper, and bureaucracy of the capitalists which monetize their suffering, grief, and death are just as violent as a bullet to the skull. They've shared their stories of claims denials which killed loved ones, and their knowledge of the fact that the talking heads which try to soothe justified rage at the capitalist parasites only obscure, deny, and lie to hide reality: that the working class has one true enemy — the bourgeois ghouls who exploit them, from the towers of Wall Street to the red text of a 'prescription renewal denied' popup window in their care provider portal.
Most of all, we've seen the emerging consciousness that we are more united as workers — as the proletariat — in our oppression by the owning class of the bosses, managers, and CEOs than we are divided by the manufactured discord they stoke. We, the working class, know who we are and who our enemies are.
We see through the false glorification of non-violence by the ruling class. We see through it both because of the violence they commit against us every day, in every area of life. We see through it in their lionizing of people like Daniel Penny, who was lauded as a hero in the reactionary press after choking Jordan Neely, an unhoused Black man, to death on a subway, and was acquitted on the same day Mangione was charged. We also see this two-facedness directly from representatives of the ruling class themselves such as Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro, who in one public appearance condemned the killing of the UHC CEO, and another signed bombs to be used in the genocide of the Palestinian people.
We understand we must defend ourselves against the violence capitalists perpetrate and turn on us. But we also see that alone, no one can truly strike blows against, nor withstand the force of capital, the state, and the ghouls and goons they use to crush dissent and keep the working class down. We understand that a CEO is only one part of a larger problem.
Only through collective action with the clear-eyed and conscious leadership of and by the organized working class can we defend ourselves and truly stand up against the ruling class everywhere — against the bosses who exploit us in our workplaces, against the landlords who exploit us in our homes, against the healthcare profiteers who exploit us at our doctors' offices, and against the imperialists who export untold more violence and suffering abroad.
Organize! Organize! Organize!
Dare to struggle! Dare to win!