Burnwinter CEO assassin Luigi Mangione seems to have picked out a target who really deserved it.

This I would never contest.

However, I don't think spreadsheet logic will solve US healthcare any more than it'll solve the genocide in Palestine.

Burnwinter So I'd say yep, shoot a few more until they stop fucking around.

I don't think we want them to get serious. They'll kill many more if they ever stop fucking around, not less.

Coombs All they want is to stick it to the other side, they don't want to do any political work. They moan that they don't have time or energy, but we know that isn't really true.

People have considerable resources to resist everything that's happening but that if anything is cause for optimism. The Nick Land thesis is incorrect: capitalism is not an unstoppable, adaptive and inhumane machine, but a Rube Goldberg job that barely keeps operating.

People simply don't believe in the plans and efforts put before them, and that's not least because left vanguardists would rather refine their judgements than do anything. Which is another reason for anti-politics and the electoral successes of pseudo-fascist clowns.

Coombs The presence of the oligarchical super-rich hoarders of capital is a convenient excuse for people to pretend that nothing can be done.

It's just a descriptive fact about an absurd and historically unprecedented situation.

Coombs People are mean, stupid, and lazy.

And generous, intelligent and hard-working. But it is neither here nor there. People are people and fundamentally similar all over the world.

Coombs This killer isn't a hero

It's not important to me whether he is good or bad. That said, when I read his manifesto and his online output, the seeming broader landscape of thought struck me as conceptually incoherent, while his manifesto seemed comparably inarguable.

What is important is the pragmatics: what killing the CEO of a vast corporation does. So far, I would say it does little more than draw attention to the fact that these officials are just flesh and blood like everyone else. However, that's not nothing.

Captains of industry like Brian Thompson can be murdered as readily as their companies murder the public, and their wealth and privileges can be appropriated as readily as they appropriate the wealth and diminish the lives of others.

It's a banal orthodoxy that post-industrial economies have accepted a huge widening of the gap between the richest and poorest since the 70s at the same time as our labour movements have disintegrated and our parliaments have descended into an unrepresentative, managerialist farce.

Not controversial judgements, just descriptive facts. The system is killing people daily, so why shouldn't they kill it back? Why shouldn't the murder of CEOs be just as "systemic" as the losses of life and freedom inflicted by corporate abuses?

Coombs It says that our politics are so impotent and our convictions so weak that our only recourse is to address evil with evil. It's pathetic.

I don't see it as that. I think this is the kernel of our disagreement. I don't accept your claim "Murder is a bad solution for any problem, in all cases without exception."

Material struggle, armed struggle, these are a normal aspect of politics. Always have been. It is how the masses have obtained what they have. The rule of capital today is very violent, even if we are presently discussing only one aspect of this violence.

I do not accept any moral equivalence between a random guy with a grievance shooting a CEO, and that same CEO doing a terrible, corrupt and venal job of leading the administration of health insurance to 50 million customers.

These are questions of power. Your "evil with evil" reduction can't serve to answer questions about murder across such varying scales: a single assassination versus the anonymous carnage of tens or hundreds of thousands.

Coombs Why shouldn't the murder of CEOs be systemic? What a hopeless question. This is how vanguardism ruined any hope of there ever being a coherent left.

Are you saying I'm a vanguardist? Don't be silly. It's lost on me why you ratcheted up the hostility in this way, but you are projecting wildly.

The point I was making with that rhetorical question: the "systemic" is that which is rendered normal, expected and invisible.

If murdering CEOs really did become "systemic", then we would discuss CEO murders with as little day to day interest or moral outrage as we discuss the relentless statistical torments inflicted by the United States health insurance industry.

As an example, the Atrium Health debt forgiveness programme has just ended ~11,000 frivolously and viciously pursued medical debts. Despite the timing, this was nothing to do with Luigi Mangione killing Brian Thompson. But the headline by itself explains how much room there is for change here.

I would say yes, top level officials in that industry who own the decisions that prevent claims being processed fairly and promptly, and run the campaigns that prevent health care reform in the US, yes they are deserving of death.

Coombs When do we get an alternative, coherent programme that addresses real political problems?

Let's say hypothetically you were talking about M4A. The first thing you might ask is what the fuck anyone's been doing since it was first debated twenty years ago? And it's still being debated, still to be legislated. I think we can assume whatever political methods that have been pursued in relation to it thus far have not been effective.

I remember reading how the United States health system was 50% less efficient than the Australian health system dollar for dollar in the 1990s, almost entirely due to the lack of a universal single payer system such as the one we have.

If more generally you want a strong, organised left politics within the US system, you should consider the conditions under which that last came about:

1. Strong working class political action based on a demonstrated capacity to disrupt production and profit
2. External threats of upheaval (the former USSR)

If you think you're going to get it by moaning about the "evil" of ordinary people taking pleasure in the news that a profoundly awful person responsible for terrible things got shot, you're absolutely wrong. That urge to cramp any sort of enjoyment on the left is a huge impediment to solidarity.

Coombs I never said taking pleasure in it was evil. I find killing to be generally abhorrent, and I am suspicious of any politics that condones it, let alone asks for or celebrates it. I have reasons for this, and I think they are good ones. Have you seen someone bleed out after a gunshot wound? Whatever comes from that is corrupted, I'm sure of it.

I've been there when someone was shot. I didn't see the bullet. I didn't get the chance to sit around and watch them bleed out. I'm glad I didn't have to.

Have you been around when someone died from the pain of terminal cancer? Over about a week I witnessed a man get literally flogged to death by pain. This pain had no rational purpose, it wasn't a signal to change his behaviour, it was death pain. It manifested from every point of his body as his organs failed, despite him being on a nearly lethal regime of painkillers.

Deaths like that are what officials like Brian Thompson, and the owners of corporations like UnitedHealthcare should be held accountable for.

To me, you fail to close the gap between your premises "I never said taking pleasure in [murder] was evil" and "I am suspicious of any politics that … celebrates [murder]".

What Rahmani's quote above gets wrong is that people are not "heroising murder". They are enjoying the fact that just for once, as a treat, one of the right people got shot. Any why shouldn't he have? And why shouldn't another of his ilk get shot?

Perhaps the United States can just wait another year, ten years, twenty years for M4A to get legislated?

Coombs I also don't think that violence has won all that much at all. Whatever has been gained seems like it was in spite of violence, not because of it. The 20th century left was a failure, so I'm not sure why you bring it up as a model. All it did was produce the 21st century.

This is neither true, nor tenable in the face of your demands for "a coherent left".

It's the last day of work for an office I'm contracting to in Perth, Western Australia. Everyone in it is about to head off for a 1–2 week break with friends and family that they wouldn't receive were it not for the illegal strikes of 19C Britain.

Violent and illegal actions have always been a vital aspect of resistance to capital, because at its limit capital has always outlawed resistance and met it with violence.

The working class expressing its power to strike is what has eventually led to once-violent industrial action becoming pacified under the aegis of trade union bureaucracy, industrial relations law that legalised strike actions, collective bargaining protocols, and more.

We need not speak about historical movements of revolution or national liberation that depended upon violence, it goes without saying there have been many of them.

Coombs There are no masses - only ways of seeing people as masses.

Under capitalism, there are no people, only ways of seeing workers as people.