In the early hours of December 4, Brian Thompson, the CEO of UnitedHealthcare, was shot and killed by a lone gunman on his way to an investor meeting in Midtown Manhattan. UHC is the largest health insurer in the United States, covering over 50 million people — more than the population of Spain.
This shocking murder dominated the news cycle and social media for days, and set off a massive manhunt for the perpetrator. A few hours ago as of this writing, a suspect, 26-year-old Luigi Mangione, was arrested in Pennsylvania. Police say he had a manifesto when he was apprehended, but they have not released it to the public, and so far we don’t know much about Mangione’s motivations if indeed he is the killer. Judging from his social media, his politics are unimpressive if not problematic, a mix of center-right tech-bro ideology with some antiestablishment sentiment sprinkled in.
However, one clue to Mangione’s motivations is the shell casings of the bullets used to kill Thompson, which had the words DELAY, DENY, and DEPOSE etched on them. This is likely a reference to the “three D’s” of the insurance industry: delay, deny, defend — the widespread tactics, defined by critics, that are used by insurance companies to prevent payouts. Insurers “delay paying claims, deny valid claims in whole or part, and defend their actions by forcing claimants to enter litigation,” according to author Jay Feinman. Feinman’s 2010 book Delay, Deny, Defend: Why Insurance Companies Don’t Pay Claims and What You Can Do About It, exposed industry practices to a broad audience and introduced the three D’s into the popular lexicon.
These tactics do not represent a flaw in the system or some extreme form of corruption — it is the very reason health-insurance companies exist. They make their profits by denying customers’ claims; if they didn’t, they would go out of business. That such denials often result in bankruptcy, lack of healthcare, or even death for their customers is not a dealbreaker for them. They are predatory by nature, and the stakes are huge: UHC’s parent company, UnitedHealth Group, is the fourth highest-earning corporation in the US, after Walmart, Amazon, and Apple, with expected revenue of $450 billion in the coming year.
Insurance executives directly benefit from this predation: Thompson’s pay package amounted to more than $10 million a year.
So it seems the killer’s motivation was anger over the greed and deadly policies of UHC and insurance companies in general. While all insurers deny claims for care, UHC is reputed to be particularly egregious on this score. Claim denials are kept hidden by the industry, but according to some reports, UHC reject a third of all claims submitted. Additionally, UHC recently introduced an AI-powered claims-management system that is more likely to deny claims — and was also accused in a lawsuit of a 90% error rate.
An outpouring of class rage and the making of a folk hero
By far the most significant thing about the murder of Thompson is not the killer nor his motive, but instead the breathtaking response of the public. Instead of condemnation, the reaction to Thompson’s killing, especially among the working class, has been overwhelmingly characterized by cold indifference, gleeful Schadenfreude, or outright celebration. The comments on any post about the killing, even on mainstream outlets, are a cavalcade of snarky comments and simmering anger about the US healthcare system. Many comments satirize the language of insurers: “Is being shot a preexisting condition?” “Hope his ambulance was in-network.”
By far the most significant thing about the murder of Thompson is not the killer nor his motive, but instead the breathtaking response of the public.
The few commenters who have tried to push back by reminding others that Thompson was a “human being” with two kids have been told to sit down.
Ultimately, UnitedHealth Group had to turn off the comments on its Facebook announcement of Thompsons’ death; and then it had to limit who could see the number of reactions when tens of thousands of laugh-reacts dwarfed all other engagement.
Meanwhile, the authorities’ efforts to hunt the suspect were impaired by the solidarity of thousands of people. The New York Police Department’s Twitter posts pleading for help received another wave of snarky replies — many referring to the climactic scene of Stanley Kubrick’s 1960 classic Spartacus, in which the rebel leader’s comrades confess en masse in order to protect him: “I am Spartacus!” A widely shared meme cautioned us all: “Remember that if you see someone shoot a healthcare CEO, no you didn’t.” A police tipline was flooded with prank calls.
As the suspect eluded police for days, he became something of a folk hero for the age of memes. Pixellated images of his hooded visage and grinning face captured by surveillance cameras and shared by police became iconic, as if he were a modern-day Robin Hood. People posted about their romantic feelings for the hooded perp and wrote folk songs about him. A lookalike contest was held in New York. Soon the internet had bestowed upon him a comic-book moniker: The Claims Adjustor. The pointed message on the shell casings, his unusual 3D-printed gun, and his clever prank of leaving a backpack full of Monopoly money for the police to find only added to his mystique.
All of this looks to continue and deepen as Mangione’s image and news of his capture have sparked a new round of solidarity and sympathetic memes.
“Profiteers like Thompson should live in fear”
It should not be hard to understand the reasons behind the macabre celebrations, collective grievances, and solidarity with the lone assassin. The pain and rage uncorked by these events is very real and very widely felt. According to one report, an estimated 45,000 people die each year in the US as a direct result of lack of health insurance; while a staggering 530,000 people are plunged into medical bankruptcy annually.
In those comments sections and all over social media, countless people have shared personal stories of loved ones’ lives ruined or lost due to the cruel policies of insurance companies like UHC — and their justified anger: “For years my mom couldn’t get proper health insurance coverage because of her preexisting conditions,” one person wrote on Democracy Now!’s Instagram page. “So she turned to pain management and became addicted to OxyContin. Her addiction eventually killed her. Profiteers like Thompson and the Sacklers should live in fear.”
It should not be hard to understand the reasons behind the macabre celebrations, collective grievances, and solidarity with the lone assassin. The pain and rage uncorked by these events is very real and very widely felt.
As many have pointed out, no serial killer or mass murderer could ever hope to take as many lives as Thompson was directly responsible for taking. For once, the moral outrage of the public has been focused not on the murderer of one man but, correctly, on the mass murderers of thousands — insurers and other culprits in the capitalist class.
This is what Friedrich Engels defined as social murder in his pivotal 1845 book The Condition of the Working-Class in England: “The class which at present holds social and political control places hundreds of proletarians in such a position that they inevitably meet a too early and an unnatural death.”
As improbable as it would have seemed a week ago, a significant number of ordinary people now hold a position on social murder and the assassin’s apparent retribution that echoes Mark Twain’s famous take on the bloodshed of the French Revolution, from his 1889 novel A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court:
There were two “Reigns of Terror,” if we would but remember it and consider it; the one wrought murder in hot passion, the other in heartless cold blood; the one lasted mere months, the other had lasted a thousand years; the one inflicted death upon ten thousand persons, the other upon a hundred millions; but our shudders are all for the “horrors” of the minor Terror, the momentary Terror, so to speak; whereas, what is the horror of swift death by the axe, compared with lifelong death from hunger, cold, insult, cruelty, and heart-break? What is swift death by lightning compared with death by slow fire at the stake? A city cemetery could contain the coffins filled by that brief Terror which we have all been so diligently taught to shiver at and mourn over; but all France could hardly contain the coffins filled by that older and real Terror—that unspeakably bitter and awful Terror which none of us has been taught to see in its vastness or pity as it deserves.
This is a remarkable development in class consciousness, reflecting the dramatic shifts in opinion that occurred during the George Floyd Rebellion in 2020, as over half of Americans polled said they felt the burning of the police precinct in Minneapolis was justified. As history has taught us many times, broad masses of people can be radicalized very quickly.
Signalling this turn of the tide, the liberal media has been forced to set aside or at least condition their usual moralizing about violence and instead acknowledge the barbaric state of the US healthcare system and how it led to this moment. “The words written on the bullets he used to kill a man in cold blood… have become, for some people, a rallying cry,” observed one New York Times article.
Even Fox News’s comment sections have been inundated with support for the killer and criticism of Thompson; while infamous reactionaries Ben Shapiro and Matt Walsh have been roasted by their own followers after defending the slain CEO.
As improbable as it would have seemed a week ago, a significant number of ordinary people now hold a position on social murder and the assassin’s apparent retribution that echoes Mark Twain’s famous take on the bloodshed of the French Revolution.
That many of those celebrating Thompson’s demise are conservatives is instructive. The entire working class suffers in these times of neoliberal austerity, inflation crisis, and climate catastrophe. In particular, the viciously extractive for-profit healthcare system is the source of increasing resentment, despair, and fury in every layer of the working class. The Affordable Care Act (“Obamacare”) was ostensibly meant to fix this but what it really did was shield insurers from popular demands for universal healthcare. The onset of the COVID pandemic, in which a million Americans have died to date, further revealed, and worsened, the ravages of healthcare in the US.
In recent years, the legitimate anger and alienation of the more conservative elements of the working class (especially the white working class) has been hijacked by reactionaries like Donald Trump and typically turned against immigrants and the oppressed, or siphoned off into destructive conspiracy theories. This is, of course, of great benefit to the true enemies of all workers: the capitalist class.
The killing of Thompson has revealed new possibilities for where that collective, class-wide anger could be channeled, and how it could represent a threat to the system. Given the doom and despair many were feeling as Trump’s second administration looms, it’s an unexpected and refreshing glimmer of hope.
Not a great avenger, but a revolutionary workers’ movement
We in Firebrand count ourselves among those who have no tears for Thompson. As many have remarked, our sympathy is “out of network” for someone like him.
Moreover, it is good for the ruling class to be afraid for once. In the days after the murder, corporate security officers from Fortune 500 companies attended an emergency online meeting to huddle about protective measures, and several companies removed their executives’ images and biographies from their websites. In a move that seemed to indicate caution amid the public’s widespread mood of anger, Anthem Blue Cross Blue Shield reversed its horrifying decision to impose time limits on its coverage of surgical anasthesia. New York governor Kathy Hochul was among the elected officials who hastily intervened to convince the company to scrap its depraved new policy.
A revolutionary workers’ movement would wield weapons infinitely more powerful than a lone assassin’s gun.
As one security expert told the New York Times, “It’s being framed as some opening blow in a broader class war.”
Let them tremble! Let them feel the consequences of cold-blooded calculations that impact real people. Let them taste a little of the terror that Twain wrote of as down payment for the terror they’ve overseen for decades.
However, as satisfying as it may be to see a wealthy death profiteer finally get what they deserve, we must take stock of what has actually been achieved. UHC is, of course, still in business, and continues to deny patients lifesaving care while enriching its investors. Millions of working-class Americans continue to rack up hospital debts they can never pay off. The slain CEO will soon be replaced. The systemic violence against the sick and poor continues unabated.
Indeed, in the ultimate sign of how the system grinds on, UHC’s investors all but stepped over Thompson’s still-warm body and held their meeting in New York that morning without a hiccup.
Unfortunately, assassinating a single CEO does nothing to arrest the systemic violence that the capitalist class metes out every day. In fact, the gunman’s actions and the public’s reaction can be understood as a sign of powerlessness, not strength. Individual terrorism may be exciting and satisfying — but it is no substitute for class struggle.
As Trotsky explained in his classic 1911 essay “Why Marxists Oppose Individual Terrorism”:
If it is enough to arm oneself with a pistol in order to achieve one’s goal, why the efforts of the class struggle? If a thimbleful of gunpowder and a little chunk of lead is enough to shoot the enemy through the neck, what need is there for a class organisation? If it makes sense to terrify highly placed personages with the roar of explosions, where is the need for the party? Why meetings, mass agitation and elections if one can so easily take aim at the ministerial bench from the gallery of parliament?
In our eyes, individual terror is inadmissible precisely because it belittles the role of the masses in their own consciousness, reconciles them to their powerlessness, and turns their eyes and hopes towards a great avenger and liberator who some day will come and accomplish his mission. […] The more “effective” the terrorist acts, the greater their impact, the more they reduce the interest of the masses in self-organisation and self-education. But the smoke from the confusion clears away, the panic disappears, the successor of the murdered minister makes his appearance, life again settles into the old rut, the wheel of capitalist exploitation turns as before; only the police repression grows more savage and brazen. And as a result, in place of the kindled hopes and artificially aroused excitement comes disillusionment and apathy.
Though Trotsky wrote this over a hundred years ago, it is as relevant as ever. With Mangione’s arrest it now seems likely that the assassin has been caught. Whatever his fate in the coming months of interrogation and trial, the next CEO will continue UHC’s same cruel policies, and likely worsen them. Police repression against protesters will increase and will be publicly justified by the killing. Tens of thousands of people will continue to die every year because of inadequate healthcare.
What is needed is not heroic actions by individuals, not a great avenger, but a revolutionary workers’ movement to combat the capitalist class. Such a movement would wield weapons infinitely more powerful than a lone assassin’s gun (or a Maoist insurgency for that matter): mass strikes that could shut down the economy, workers’ councils and other organizations that could challenge the power of the capitalist class and their governments, peoples’ militias that could defend workers against the cops and the military.
A revolutionary movement of this kind is what the capitalist class truly fears — and the recent passage in the House of Representatives of a resolution condemning the “communist influence” on education in the US is one of the more obvious signs of this growing fear on their part.
CEOs can be easily replaced, but the wealth and privilege of the entire capitalist class are much harder to reclaim once they are expropriated by revolution.
Let them tremble! Let them feel the consequences of cold-blooded calculations that impact real people. Let them taste a little of the terror that Twain wrote of as a down payment for the terror they’ve overseen for decades.
We are a long way from such a mass movement or from building the kind of revolutionary party that could organize and lead it. Our tasks right now are to recruit cadres, to grow the revolutionary movement from the margins, and to sharpen the consciousness of workers and the oppressed about the nature of the capitalist system and the class struggle — to galvanize working-class anger and channel it in the right direction.
However, we can hold to these revolutionary principles and strategies while still celebrating the assassin’s actions, and especially the sudden and surprising surge in class consciousness. Any such advancement in consciousness brings us closer to the needed movement.
Another passage from Trotsky clarifies this point. In 1939, he wrote a tribute to Herschel Grynszpan, a Jewish teenager who shot and killed a Nazi diplomat in Paris the year before:
People come cheap who are capable only of fulminating against injustice… But those who, like Grynszpan, are able to act as well as conceive, sacrificing their own lives if need be, are the precious leaven of mankind.
In the moral sense, although not for his mode of action, Grynszpan may serve as an example for every young revolutionist. Our open moral solidarity with Grynszpan gives us an added right to say to all the other would-be Grynszpans, to all those capable of self-sacrifice in the struggle against despotism and bestiality: Seek another road! Not the lone avenger but only a great revolutionary mass movement can free the oppressed, a movement that will leave no remnant of the entire structure of class exploitation, national oppression, and racial persecution.
Comparing Mangione to a World War II-era antifascist is a necessarily limited exercise, and certainly, for now, his apparently muddled politics are reason to be cautious about supporting him. But the ripples of class anger that his action set off are far more important than the individual himself. Those ripples have given us reason to hope for a future wave of revolutionary transformation.
