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.
Luigi deserves our critical support without question. If I was on the jury, I'd never convict him. It doesn't matter if he had cringe takes on social media or our critiques of adventurism etc.
He took the fight to the enemy. His trial will continually raise the question of the injustice of US society under the dictatorship of Capital. It is our duty to take advantage of that.
They'll try to character assassinate him. They'll claim because he came from a relatively well-off background that therefore he is a phony (while they'd claim he was biased if he was poor). They'll try to claim he was deranged or deluded. We need to continually ignore that and drive home to the point that--regardless of any shortcomings--he acted in self-defense against an inhuman monster, against an avatar of Capital.
Taking advantage of the circumstances is right. The most critical support, and indeed, the circumstances and events are far more important than the man. If he is truly cringe we can let him be while pushing on the real issues and system that he found himself (at least potentially) ground up by