We’re all a little disappointed he didn’t turn out to be our Exact Type of Communist. You’re a little put out about his referencing Kaczynski and his Twitter retweets. Here’s why, despite that, I’m vehemently pro-Luigi and you should be too.

His arc is a normal dude in America. He’s a mid 20s Silicon Valley guy. He engages with mainstream ideas in his cohort, but is otherwise not particularly political. To the extent that he has an ideology, like for society at large, it’s the ideology of the dominant class.

He suffers under his material conditions, but like everyone feels powerless. Despite his position of relative privilege, he has an invisible disability, a really gnarly injury to his spine. He, like everyone else, and more than most, feels the injustice of the US healthcare system in his bones.

Kaczynski is the tinderbox that sparks the explosion, not because of Kaczynski’s ideology, but because of a simple proposition: political violence is possible.

From there, the man needs no political education. He doesn’t need Marx or Lenin. His education is literally welded into his spine. He knows What Is To Be Done, and he does it without Delay.

His (class) character should be judged not for muddled beliefs he had before he became a political actor, but rather for the political action he took. Not who he retweeted: who he killed.

  • PKMKII [none/use name]
    ·
    9 days ago

    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.

    • Mark Twain