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.
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John Brown's actions were part of a tradition of religious fundamentalist opposition to Christian slavery, they were based on a radical theory and should not be dismissed as just individual zealotry. He did not just throw his life away to harm some slave owners, he had a plan for a guerrilla war waged from the Appalachian mountains by freed slaves and northern volunteers. You might argue that it could never have worked, but it was still different from just doing a cool thing and justifying it by believing it would inspire others to do the same.