The CEO
I was working on a piece yesterday that I’d decided to title “Propaganda of the Deed” when I made the mistake of glancing over at Twitter and discovering what you might call ‘new developments’. I got sucked down the Luigi rabbit hole and sort of passively decided I wasn’t going to publish what I’d been working on. But it really is irrelevant who this guy is, so here is the unfinished bit with a little follow up.
Propaganda of the Deed
Kissinger died last year. Finally. Too many of these bastards live to ripe old ages. When he died, millions of people around the world were ecstatic. Of course, many of those people were on Twitter and they were scolded by others over their glee at a man’s death. I find this kind of moralizing to be empty because it disregards the material source of the hatred for a man like Kissenger in favor of the idea of a civil society that can only exist in sinless Eden. It imagines that injustice is merely a legal matter that has no bearing on the emotions of the members of a society. If someone is killing people and there is no legal recourse, then you must simply accept that they are acting lawfully and you have no right to wish ill upon them.
So now we have an even more interesting case involving the death of a much-despised figure. This one is far more immediate and more personal to many Americans. Plus, the guy was murdered. Some people say executed. Some say assassinated. Based on what we know so far, the motive appears to be vengeance. It makes sense because his job was to fuck people over in some seriously heinous ways. All for that master of all masters: profit. And yet there are plenty of people who believe that everybody should have sympathy for this guy. Or at least not say out loud that the guy got what he deserved. But if people believe it, they definitely should say it. These are American citizens. A people born out of the Declaration of Independence. If they hate the ruling class, they should say so. The ruling class needs very much to be told that they are hated by the people.
But should they be gunned down in the street? You obviously couldn’t make a legal case that they should be, but you could make a moral case that they should be. You just have to tie his decisions directly to the deaths of others and it’s an eye for an eye. If you go in for that sort of thing. But that doesn’t really answer the question.
Should these people be gunned down in the street?
The real question within that question is does it do any good to gun these people down in the street. On the face of it, it doesn’t seem like it does any good. It will change nothing in the American insurance industry, other than maybe the companies providing security details for their executives. They have more than enough money for that even if they can’t cover your cancer treatments. In fact, they’ll probably cancel a lot of treatments just to cover their security costs. The insurance industry will only become more vindictively ghoulish.
So killing these people has no direct impact other than a negative impact. But there is another theory specifically about these types of acts. In the late 19th century there was a German immigrant to America named Johann Most. Most came to America by way of England after he was kicked out of Germany for being a revolutionary anarchist. He brought with him an idea called “propaganda of the deed.” It’s just what it says. Sending a message with an action. You can give speeches and pass out pamphlets but if you really want to get the workers’ attention, kill a robber baron.
So if we take this CEO shooter and put him in the role of a sort of masked avenger delivering justice to the oppressed we have a perfect picture of the propaganda of the deed. A perfect video, even. A video probably viewed by billions. It’s far beyond anything Most could have ever even dreamed of. This mysterious CEO shooter must be the perfect embodiment of the Mostian Man. Propaganda of the deed has been given its moment in America and now we will know once and for all if Most was a genius or a fool.
Some time back, I’m not sure how many months (the pace of events confuses our sense of time), right-wing Twitter had its panties in a wad over the Joker sequel. Apparently Todd Philips wasn’t pleased with the Right’s reaction to the first movie and he trolled the living shit out of them with the sequel. Sort of a Twitterbrained move imo. He was riding a zeitgeist with the first movie that is historically significant and exists across the entire political spectrum. Better to have let the thing rest on its laurels. But whatever. Blow that corporate cash, if you can get it.
Deny. Defend. Depose.
That’s some Joker shit. Taking the time to etch the brass. Racking the slide with steady hands. Vanishing into the shadows of Gotham. And how does the Right react? You’ve never seen such pearl-clutching. Did these dumbasses even watch the Joker? Dude was dependent on social services for medication to treat a neurological disorder! His existence was a metaphor for capitalist alienation! What did these people even see in this movie?
The right wing of America is the vanguard of capitalism. They are simultaneously proud of this fact and completely unaware of it. They are the embodiment of the contradiction. The “establishment”, the “elites”, the “deep state” are stripping them of their liberty and the only way to stop them is to empower them. It is literally Orwellian. Doublethink.
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Capitalism produces mirrors. Reproduces mirrors. Daniel Penny is on trial in New York. For killing a poor person. A homeless, drug-addicted clown. As the story goes. True or not, real or not, it’s more than real. It’s hyperreality.
The Baudrillard effect.
The Right has been provided with a model of society that lets them put Daniel Penny’s prosecutor into the same box as Brian Thompson’s killer. Johann Most, unlike Baudrillard, underestimated the difficulty of the problem.
I’m skeptical about the effectiveness of propaganda of the deed in terms of revolutionary change. Polarization protects power from the propagandizing effects of such acts. I’m just an armchair revolutionary, but the experts, Lenin and Trotsky, both disagreed with Most’s theory of energizing and inspiring a demoralized working class through individual action. They understood that you need more than an individual. There must be a well-organized force in place before the killing begins.
How many people do you know who are ready to sign up for the killing? I don’t know any. Including me. I’ll just go to work in the morning instead. As much as I’d rather there were an alternative.
[END]
That’s as far as I got. The moral of the story: No. Propaganda of the deed is not a solution to anything and will not inspire a revolution. As Lenin said, such actions only give the state an excuse to crack down on dissidence. Note how they are trying to make it illegal to criticize Israel, and don’t be surprised when they do the same thing with criticizing corporations.
Also, as disgruntled as people might be, there is no revolutionary fervor in the US. Our system has a way of taking such energies and redirecting them back into the normal political channels.
Donald Trump is an op.
As much as I hate the libertarian tech bro set, I like the more freewheeling version of Twitter that Elon Musk has overseen. I know everybody hates all the nazis over there, but I was already following all the big ones anyway, so I haven’t really noticed a difference in that area. But I don’t really use the “For You” tab. Algorithms don’t work for people like me. I’m not interested in one particular thing or one particular group. Or what’s popular. I want it all.
At any rate, Elon reinstated Luigi Mangione’s Twitter account after somebody at the company had taken it down. I know he had his own reasons for doing that (it drives traffic), but I think it’s nice to have somebody like Elon who will tell the state to take a hike and just let the internet be the internet.
So as it turns out, Mangione is “right-coded.” “Tech-bro-coded” even. A fan of Peter Theil (lmao). He also comes from a wealthy family. What are we to make of this? Nothing. Yet. The full story is a long way from being public. But, if this really is the guy, it could tell us a lot about the incoherence of modern ideology. It’s like Trump himself. An anti-war war monger. A pro-choice champion of pro-lifers. A Wall Street populist. There is no consistent narrative to the Trump worldview.
I’ve yet to find any mention of Trump on Mangione’s page. It’s almost all retweets. Eclectic stuff. Science and tech. Relationships. Fertility rates. Architecture. He thinks Japanese society is somehow problematic (see fertility rates). He seems like a smart guy who is just looking for a way to make sense of the world. Most of the ideas and literature he read probably came out of the tech world, because that’s where he lived.
If he had gone in for the humanities instead of computer science would he be wearing a keffiyeh and chanting “from the river to the sea” instead of gunning down CEOs?
There’s something going around that purports to be a CEO shooter manifesto. Everybody thinks it’s fake, but if so, it’s very well done. The writer speaks of being his own chief executive. This immediately made me think of Curtis Yarvin who is always talking about how you need a CEO to be able to get things done. Yarvin complains that the president isn’t the CEO of the US, but is just an administrator, and that this is the reason presidents can’t get anything done. Whoever wrote this “manifesto” at least understood the world where Mangione was getting his ideas. This idea of taking charge and taking action is at the center of the tech-bro movement. It’s also very individualist. An individual must themselves take charge and take action. You don’t organize and seek solidarity with a group. If something is going to get done, you have to do it yourself.
That’s my two cents on this thing so far. But all ideology aside, things like assassinations are bound to become more common in modern America. The Gilded Age is back. It’s time to do this whole thing all over again.
