The assassination of the CEO of United Healthcare has brought a not-always-evident rage about the state of US healthcare, and corporate power as a whole, to the surface in a stunning way. The person who committed the murder clearly had an intent to their act etched into the bullet casings and as we may now be seeing through their manifesto. This was an intentional, politically motivated act, but what should we actually make of it?
On the surface, there is the fact that this was an act of murder. An individual, outraged at the US healthcare system targeted someone who symbolically represents not merely that system, but the worst, most egregious company at the very head of that system, a system that intentionally sanctions the suffering of millions and the death of thousands every year in the name of profit, stock prices, "shareholder value" and infinite accumulation of wealth.
The insurance system is indeed a mob protection scheme that tells people, "If you want protection [from sickness, disease, injury], you have to pay us in order to get access to the services that would help you." Insurance companies are, even in the context of capitalism, a scam fee structure that adds enormous expense to medical care without adding a single mote of value. So much so that in all other developed countries, some manner of single-payer or nationalized healthcare system exists that at least minimizes the ability of this protection-peddling racket to cause excessive direct harm. But not so in the United States.
Drawing on popular culture, consider the CEO series done by College Humor (now Dropout TV), specifically the "GoFundMe CEO: We Could Use A Few Fun Ones" skit which details in painful detail the horror show that is the US healthcare system. This skit on Youtube has 5.4 million views. It addresses how GoFund me became a major supplemental source for US citizens healthcare needs. I will draw on another, even more popular, example below, but suffice to say that such pop culture moments clearly strike a chord with our everyday experience. The breadth and depth of the anger isn't really all that surprising then.
- People who otherwise accept as justified the anger of those who support this act thus find themselves against what this person did. But there are a variety of different angles from which this rejection of the act comes.
- For some, nothing the elites do justifies such an act. One might simply respond by asking why such elites, such corporate leaders, should not be considered criminals subject to prosecution for mass murder? If your problem is that a person acted outside the law, what do you do when the law sanctions murder? No movement that has made the world better has not broken the law and even killing defenders and beneficiaries of that "order". This view relies on a moralism in which only the victims, in struggling to no longer be victims, must behave like angels, while the oppressors are allowed to behave however they wish.
- Some want to know why this young person, clearly from privilege, would do this, since they nominally are a beneficiary of the system and have no real skin in the game. This notion that the privileged have no skin in the game of antagonism to capitalism as individuals precisely eliminates the idea that a human being as an individual may be ethically appalled by and opposed to oppression without themselves being directly a victim of this or that particular oppression. In the name of a very moralistic view of the world in which authenticity can only extend from one's identity, it negates the possibility of any individual to become a truly ethical being. It is a weird kind of determinism that denies precisely that any individual may become an enemy of oppression, that is, be an ethically decent human being, and that only identity grants authenticity. No Marxian thinker, no one familiar with psychoanalysis, should accept this fundamentally Heideggarian love affair with identity and authenticity because it is precisely non-identity, a desire to no longer be true to something that can only be socially imposed. All desire to be free is a rejection of any identification with the existing order and its categories, the rejection of the unfreedom of all existing identity.
However, from what is now coming out, it is becoming clear that this young man and his mother were both victims of our monstrous healthcare system. Being relatively privileged according to some list of identity antinomies (white vs black, male vs female, worker vs capitalist, etc.) doesn't determine an individual as good or bad, oppressor or oppressed, and it does not make that individual incapable of rejecting precisely what is supposed to define them. To restate my earlier point, if no one rejected what defined them, positive radical change, much less revolution, would be utterly impossible. This kind of thinking further misses that capital could not care less what your identity is and that at any moment any individual may become a victim of some element of its indirect, impersonal, radically indifferent necessity of infinite accumulation. The logic of accumulation, not a cabal of horrible capitalists with top hats and twirling mustaches, runs the show.
Let's also consider that what this person did is not without precedent. The Russian Narodniks carried out assassinations of Russian aristocrats and even a Czar. Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria, heir presumptive to the Austro-Hungarian throne, and his wife, Sophie, Duchess of Hohenberg, were assassinated on 28 June 1914 by Bosnian Serb student Gavrilo Princip. On 27 February 1933, frantic days, the young Dutch communist Marinus Van der Lubbe set the Reichstag, the German Parliament building, on fire and burnt it down. All of them considered themselves some form of liberation fighters, acting against autocracy, oppression, and even a rising fascism in Van der Lubbe's case.
In the U.S. context, there are also precedents. Some of them are quite celebrated. John Brown engaged in the murder of pro-slavery families in Missouri and eventually organized an attempt to capture an armory in Harper's Ferry and engage in a para-military attack on the Southern slavocracy. The group Black October in Baltimore in the early 1970's killed multiple drug dealers and a Maryland House of Delegates member James “Turk” Scott, bringing the drug trade in Baltimore to a virtual halt. The Weather Underground carried out bombings against symbolic targets, government buildings and banks, in the 1970's, in the name of the propaganda of the act.
All of the above are not fundamentally different from this execution. They were acts of violence, often murderous, outside the law, done with an intent to punish and terrorize those in power or their representatives, those responsible for atrocious, continuous, and largely ignored violence against the exploited and oppressed. Most importantly, they accepted the idea of the propganda of the deed, the idea that if only the powerful were shown to be vulnerable, if only we show our commitment to the oppressed and exploited, the oppressed and exploited will be ignited. In fact, groups like this already lay the groundwork for or adopt the ideas of anti-imperialism and identity politics, that the problem isn't actually capitalism, the domination of the mass of humanity through generalized wage-labor, but imperialism, [white skin] privilege, and so on.
- Some are shocked that people are condoning assassination in the name of justice, something these days largely associated with right-wing terrorist organizations.
But isn't it in fact slightly disingenuous to be horrified when for a long time now, this kind of action is lauded as long as it remains fictionalized in popular culture? I'll just address one specifically relevant example, in the form of an excedingly popular cartoon film meant to bridge an appeal to children and adults.
I have in mind the cartoon movie The Incredibles, which premiered 30 years ago. Early on in the movie, the lead character, Mr. Incredible, is living in hiding after the "Golden Age" of super heroes has passed. He is working as an insurance company call center worker. He gets a call from an elderly woman who is being denied access to her claim and he tells her all of the ways necessary to get around the arcane bureaucracy designed to deny her care in order to get approved to get the help she clearly needs. He is immediately called into his manager's office and run down for actually helping this elderly woman, as his manager explains how the insurance company makes money by following the method of "deny, defend, depose". Mr. Incredible, horrified by being expected to do the opposite of everything he believes he is supposed to do, which comes down to "help, serve, protect", punches the manager through multiple walls, hospitalizing him [in reality it would have killed him], and loses his job because his violent response was against the law and against "only following orders", the Nazi justification on display at Nuremberg.
No one was shocked by what Mr. Incredible did. In fact, it establishes the ethical credibility of Mr. Incredible as a hero. It is the single most important moment of the film that establishes Mr. Incredible ethically as a decent human being with an unshakeable moral compass. There is no fundamental difference between supporting Mr. Incredible and supporting this execution, except that it is apparently acceptable to symbolically support it as long as no actual human being in real life pays the price. And in reality, a CEO is the master and commander of the little monster in the cartoon, the symbolic head of the health insurance company hydra, the Fuhrer who the little manager is "only obeying orders" from. Though in fact the even deeper truth of that moment is that the department supervisor character actually enjoys what they do, they truly believe.
- But let's return to those who not only support the anger motivating such an act, but the act itself. Was this not a direct action against horrible elites, corporate power or the capitalist class? Was this not both a justified act and, for some, a first spark that might light a fire?
The popularity of individual or small group acts of violence against systematic oppression is widespread. The moral horror at what this person did is, frankly, dubious. Why is what this person did unethical when what the C-Suite individuals sanction day in and day out is the systematic terrorizing and murder of a large mass of humanity?
However, there is a profoundly negative aspect of this as a supposedly political act. This kind of act betrays a profound sense of powerlessness underneath the anger. It does not offer a perspective of fundamental transformation. It misunderstands that the problems with the healthcare system, and every other negative, inhuman feature of capitalist society, is a problem of bad individuals (this or that politician or capitalist) or bad groups (the privileged, the capitalist class, the elites, etc.) It is an action that is mired in helplessness and desperation and which, as with other, earlier historical actions of this type, a profoundly individualistic and moralistic acting out.
Most importantly theoretically, the problem with capital is not individual bad actors and it isn't even the capitalist class. Capital is not an outcome of the capitalist class, their choices, their decisions. The Soviet Union and the entire post-WWII "socialist bloc" proved that capital doesn't require a capitalist class. The state can step in and guarantee that the separation of the laborer from the labor process, the continuation of wage-labor, that the access to the means of life is mediated by the wage-form, by money.
The elimination of the capitalist class, the statification of control, does not eliminate the separation of the producers from the means of production. It does not undermine capital at its core, but reflects a concrete situation in which the accumulation of capital on a national scale can only proceded effectively if a huge amouont of the capital is organized singularly under the state into one large pool, where individual capitals lack the ability to resist the global market. The end of capital only happens if we end the fundamental separations at the root of capital.
Critically, this kind of act does not lead to any kind of collective political formation that challenges, and could generate an alternative to, capital and its indirect form of domination. Instead of uniting the split between the political and the economic, instead of addressing the aporia of the ethical and the political, it bypasses both and presents direct violence as the mediation, the path of individual violence aligns with instead of undermining this society.
Like The Incredibles, it supports the idea of the need for superheroes, for exceptional individuals, as opposed to collective, democratic, social reorganization of society. Elevating what this person did leads us into the trap that salvation comes from exceptional individuals.
A central error is the idea that to abolish capitalist society, you have to abolish the capitalist class. This is aiming at the wrong target. The capitalist is a nothing, no more important to the game than chits on the green of a golf course. Only when we abolish the working class do we abolish capitalist society. Only when we abolish labor and pass from the realm of necessity to the realm of freedom (free time), do we abolish capital. Once labor ceases to be the mediation between what I neede and what I can have, the capitalist class ceases to exist as well. As someone recently expressed it, what we need is not class homicide (“killing/expropriating the capitalists”) but class suicide (eliminating our subordination to labor as that which sustains the non-labour of the few.)
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