Luigi's Revenge?: Theorizing Modern Reactions to Social Murder and Class Morality
On the routinized murder of the masses
“Frankly, these parasites simply had it coming. A reminder: the US has the #1 most expensive healthcare system in the world, yet we rank roughly #42 in life expectancy.” - Luigi Mangione alleged manifesto
Parasite Down: The killing of Brian Thompson
On December 4th, 2024, Brian Thompson, the CEO of American multi-national health insurance agency UnitedHealth Group, was shot dead. The suspected shooter is 26 year old Luigi Mangione, seen in the picture above.
To say the internet went wild when news of the shooting broke, let alone the revelation of the potential killer, would be an understatement. People were ecstatic. I’d like to imagine it’s a drop of what the peasants using the guillotine on aristocrats felt during the French Revolution. While the mainstream media acted like Thompson’s death was a horrific loss, the majority of people knew the shooter committed a public service.
As more information released about the CEO, everyone’s assumptions were proven correct. The media has been trying to portray him as a “regular guy with a wife and kids!” This was all part of the media’s attempt to protect the image of someone in the ruling class. In reality, Thompson separated from his wife for some time, living alone apart from his children. But his professional, not personal life, is what matters most here.
United Healthcare (UH) insures more than 29 million Americans and has been subject to rampant criticism. In November 2024, a ProPublica investigation showed the company was using an algorithm to limit therapy expenses, despite states such as California, New York and Massachusetts deeming this illegal. There is evidence this practice led to increased coverage denial at UH. In 2019, the industry initial denial rate for post-acute care prior authorization rates was 8.7%, increasing to 22.7% by 2022.
UH however was the top parasite out of all the insurers. UH had a notorious reputation of denying coverage and forcing people to pay out of pocket (see the pictures below for direct comments from customers, source:
). The industry average for claim denials is around 16%, for US it’s 32%. The information starts to paint a clear picture as to why this man was the target.
These pratices exist for all sorts of care. A Senate staff report released in October of this year revealed that many insurers failed to cover the cost for elderly people who had strokes. Interesting information, given that early rumors have spread that Mangione was partially influenced by the death of both his grandparents.
Thompson was also in some hot water for potentially engaging in fraudulant stock trading, not disclossing to the Justice Deparment his company was being investigated for anti-trust pratices. Thompson and other executives used this informational asymmetry to dump their own stock before the information broke, making a hefty profit as a result. This was a stain in an otherwise successful tenure as CEO (by the ruling classes standards), as profits rose from $12 billion in 2021 to $16 billion in 2023. Lucky them!
Thankfully, the parasite Thompson himself got an annual compensation package in 2023 valued at 10.2 million, ranking him among the highest paid at the company. I guess he was just a successful businessman, who worked hard and got what he deserved! At least that’s the idea you would get from watching the news.
One of the funniest elements of this ordeal was in the early days hearing journalists, commentators and police in the mainstream state “we don’t know the motive yet” as stated in a CBS report. Of course no one was sure, but many of us were right with our guess. The comments on what video in particular reveal the sentiments people in general have on the American healthcare system, I suggest taking a look at them.
Instead, normal people understood this man was a parasite, a criminal, a crook, and a murderer in his own right. What else do we call someone whose actions directly lead to the premature death of hundreds, nay, millions? What else is he but a parasite, living off the money he “saved” by denying people their lives. He was not only a businessman, a CEO, but a social murderer.
Deny, Defend, Depose: The pratice of social murder
Written on the bullet casings were three words, deny, defend, depose. The words are in reference to the title of a book by American Law professor Jay. M Feinman called Delay, Deny, Defend: Why Insurance Companies Don't Pay Claims and What You Can Do About It. It covers the practices used by policyholders in the insurance industry to delay or deny legitimate health care claims in the name of profits. He also discusses the use of things like algorithms to deny patient claims.
These practices have surely led to the death of millions from avoidable conditions, not to mention the suffering it caused in general to patients and their families. What do we call these sorts of crimes? What distinguishes it from the kind of murder we typically think of? There are similarities, but also key differences.
The politician, the capitalist, they are murderers, but a specific kind of murderer. To see why and how, let’s look at the words of Friedrich Engels in which he describes the phenomena of social murder:
“When one individual inflicts bodily injury upon another such that death results, we call the deed manslaughter; when the assailant knew in advance that the injury would be fatal, we call his deed murder. But when society places hundreds of proletarians in such a position that they inevitably meet a too early and an unnatural death, one which is quite as much a death by violence as that by the sword or bullet; when it deprives thousands of the necessaries of life, places them under conditions in which they cannot live – forces them, through the strong arm of the law, to remain in such conditions until that death ensues which is the inevitable consequence – knows that these thousands of victims must perish, and yet permits these conditions to remain, its deed is murder just as surely as the deed of the single individual; disguised, malicious murder, murder against which none can defend himself, which does not seem what it is, because no man sees the murderer, because the death of the victim seems a natural one, since the offence is more one of omission than of commission. But murder it remains.”
To summarize, social murder is the institutionalized killing of the masses by the ruling class through the normal operations of capitalist society. The system of class rule constantly puts people in conditions, as citizens, workers and consumers, which lead to their untimely deaths. A laborer who is pushed to overwork themsleves to a fatal point, a consumer who dies from the use of an unsafe product, a citizen who is killed by auesterity or government negligence, these are all victims of social murder. Those in charge or our governments and our corporations, they are social murderers.
Few have the body count of managers, politicians, board members, and CEOs, the desk murderers who make decisions that lead to countless premature deaths. Politicians use the state, through its legal and policing capacities, to not only permit these deadly conditions to remain but enforce them. The corporation raises prices, fires people, pollutes rivers, creates dangerous products, all with the backing of the state. These policies result in the death of millions. Yet, no one bats an eye. No one sees them as murderers because the death of the victims seem to be natural, merely “the way things are”. Nonetheless, it is social murder.
The ruling class, those in political and economic power, often aren’t ignorant to the effects of their actions. However, we don’t see the deaths caused by the actions of politicians or capitalists as we do say the victims of violent crime. Instead, through the media and other hegemonic apparatuses, they impose their own notions of morality, and hope that we ignore the mass slaughter that takes place daily right in front of our eyes. They distract us with issues that don’t challenge the status quo, and hope we never realize whose to blame for all this suffering.
Class Morality: Is it right for people to be cheering?
"…have we, as a society, lost our moral compass?” - Ben Mulroney
I know what you’re going to say. “But he was just doing his job! How could you blame him for just being a CEO?” That’s something most of us are pressured to immediately say and think. However, that’s ruling class ideology speaking. Because if it was a poor man who committed a crime, the context of his life would be all we would be talking about. But when a rich man (regularly) commits crime, they’re just doing their jobs. They want you to ignore who this man actually was, what he actually did, and most importantly to whom he actually did it. He killed dozens of people in the name of profits. The masses intuitively understand its wrong. That is because they have the kernel of a sense of class justice, a class morality for the masses.
Instead, those of the ruling-class, such as the son of former Canadian Conservative Prime Minster Brian Mulrooney, can’t see why people would be happy. Ben, coming from the Canadian elite, can’t possibly understand why those people would be cheering this murder!
Important to note, this is someone who has been cheerleading the Zionist genocide of Gazans and agreeing with reactionary coloumnists that we should commit mass deportations. Makes me question his moral compass?
Unfortunately, those in the ruling class are too busy clutching their pearls to even attempt to understand why people are cheering. The problem is not that we’ve “lost our moral compass”. Rather, what Ben doesn’t realize is that the masses have a different moral compass all together.
Let’s look once more at the work of Engels, but this time at his brief comments on morality where he states:
The conceptions of good and evil have varied so much from nation to nation and from age to age that they have often been in direct contradiction to each other…
[people] consciously or unconsciously, derive their ethical ideas in the last resort from the practical relations on which their class position is based-from the economic relations in which they carry on production and exchange…
And as society has hitherto moved in class antagonisms, morality has always been class morality; it has either justified the domination and the interests of the ruling class, or, ever since the oppressed class became powerful enough, it has represented its indignation against this domination and the future interests of the oppressed (Tucker, 1978, p. 726)
In short, their morality justifies the domination of the masses and interest of the ruling class. No one questions if we’ve “lost our moral compass” when states and corporations oversee the slow death of the mass. In fact, the ruling class says we should thank them for the relative safety we have as those in the global north (ignoring that they are the reason for the horrors in the south). Their morality justifies our domination. They see justice in actions that continue and protect their domination of others.
The class morality of the dominated is the reverse. When the masses see retribution against their domination in a system which has no other means of resolution, they understand those actions as justice. It represents a moral impetus against the values of a system which promotes routinized killings of the masses.
Conclusion: What to take away
I’m not here to potray Luigi (or whoever is the killer) as some sort of working-class super hero. However, I’m not going to simply reduce his actions to nothing either, or the good dead of a lunatic. He developed a political consciousness to the extent that it spurred them into action. We still don’t know if he was was the one who did it, if the evidence was planted, or really anything else. We can’t be sure of anything.
Nonetheless, we can still analyze the overwhelmingly positive reaction of the masses to this event. The masses understand Thompson was a social murderer. They find joy in his death because it’s justice against the system of social murder that everyone has been effected by. Finally, they are rejecting the moral condemnation of their joy by the ruling class. For those who wish to spur revolutionary politics, these are qualities that must be built on. Identifying the injustices caused by our system, linking them to the nature of class rule, this is the foudantion of building a revolutionary political movement.
love your stuff but mind the typos! <3