The Futility of Violence
Herbert Marcuse Revisited
By John Foster
In September 1977, during the wave of leftist terrorism in West Germany that would come to be called the “German Autumn,” Herbert Marcuse published an article in Die Zeit bearing the title, Mord darf keine Waffe sein (Murder Cannot Be a Weapon of Politics).
Marcuse wrote: “Do terrorist actions contribute to the weakening of capitalism? Are these actions justified in view of the demands of revolutionary morality? To both questions, I must answer in the negative.”
What followed was a devastating critique of the campaign of violence undertaken by the Rote Armee Fraktion (Red Army Faction or RAF) and other groups.
A week earlier, the RAF, whose politics approximated Marxism in roughly the same degree that Branch Davidian theology approximated Christianity, had kidnapped Hanns Martin Schleyer. He would later be murdered and left in the trunk of a car in the French city of Mulhouse.
At the time, Schleyer was the president of the Confederation of German Employers’ Associations, an umbrella organisation formed to combat trade unions. Between 1933 and 1945, he was a member of the SS, working during the war on the “Aryanisation” of the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia.
Marcuse argued that assassinations aren’t an effective tool for achieving political change because it was a question of systems rather than people. “Obviously, the victims of terrorist actions represent the system – but they only represent it,” he wrote. “That is to say, they are replaceable and exchangeable.”
While acts of political violence could not change the system, they did have the capacity to provoke the repressive power of the state.
The effect, especially given that the terrorist groups were isolated from mass support, would be “preventive counterrevolution” on oppositional forces that were already weak and disorganised.
Further, Marcuse stressed, “the goal of the liberated individual must appear in the means to achieve this goal”. Brutal acts of violence are both morally deficient and ineffective in terms of trying to address systems of domination.
These considerations seem especially relevant in the murder of a healthcare company CEO. Brian Thompson, the chief executive officer of United Healthcare, was gunned down on a New York City street by Luigi Mangione, who was enraged over the care he had received for a spinal condition.
A University of Pennsylvania graduate and former tech bro, Magione is not directly comparable to the members of the RAF, other than in the fact that both came from relatively well-to-to backgrounds. But his actions sparked a storm of controversy, memes and hot takes.
While few specifically sought to justify Thompson’s killing, social media was flooded with stories of frustration, pain, and death resulting from Americans’ treatment at the hands of their hyper-profitable healthcare industry.
The United States is the only industrialised country in which the provision of healthcare is primarily undertaken by private companies.
Although some care is provided by the state for the elderly (Medicare) and the severely indigent (Medicaid), the vast majority of Americans who have health insurance (25.6 million American adults have none) get it through their jobs.
The United States has achieved a “worst of both worlds” scenario. Per capita healthcare spending is twice that of other industrialised countries, yet the results are not commensurate. In 2019, the US ranked 33rd out of 38 OECD countries in infant mortality and 30th in life expectancy.
The provision of health insurance through employment involves numerous pernicious features. It is complex and challenging for employers, especially since the costs are such that they are forced to subsidise it.
Healthcare functions to discipline workers since losing one’s job ends health benefits, and getting on a new healthcare plan often exposes applicants to the danger that ongoing health issues will be adjudged “pre-existing conditions”, which can lead to denial of coverage.
The worst feature of the system is the often Kafkaesque procedures that policyholders are forced to endure to get medical bills covered. This is a matter of life and death in many cases. Even when immediate survival is not the issue, medical emergencies can drain the resources of even the well-to-do.
Numerous recent studies have shown that healthcare costs are a key factor in a significant portion of individual bankruptcies in the US.
But it is the endless litany of stories of pain, of doctor-ordered treatments denied, of lives cut short, that has emerged since Thompson’s murder seized the headlines.
A toxic brew of anger has percolated beneath American society’s surface for years. Now, in the wake of this spectacular act of violence, it has burst into the open.
Mainstream media has been quick to respond with predictable arguments.
This is a case of deranged violence, pure and simple. The purported misdeeds of the health insurance industry are irrelevant. All that matters is that the law was broken, and a husband and father was killed. Discussion of the event need not go any deeper.
This response is baked into the act itself. In a nutshell, this explains why acts of violence are not an effective means of addressing the problem.
According to reports, a notebook was found after Mangione’s arrest in which it was written that the solution to corporate healthcare was to “wack the CEO at the annual parasitic bean-counter convention. It’s targeted, precise, and doesn’t risk innocents”.
While this turned out to be true, the sad fact is that is that a human being is dead, and the agenda of fixing the dysfunctional healthcare system in the US has not been materially advanced.
Much as there has been an outpouring of stories (of the kind most of us have heard before), the means employed mean that the narrative will be determined by the carceral state: forensics, trial, and punishment visited on the offender to recoup the health of society.
Brian Thompson was not Hanns Martin Schleyer. He was never a member of the SS, and if his actions contributed to suffering and death, context makes all the difference.
The SS was a criminal organisation engaged in a genocidal project. United Healthcare is an organisation which does good in addition to harm and is subject to the mute compulsion of the system, which commits the firm to profit maximisation, whatever else it might accomplish.
Killing Brian Thompson will not change that.
The outpouring of stories of victimisation will be lost in the vicissitudes of the juridical response to Thompson’s murder, and the whole system will continue as before. The tragedy of this case is that more lives have been damaged without advancing the prospects for systemic change.
This is the point at which Herbert Marcuse’s critique touches upon today’s situation. Without a movement in which masses of people are engaged in changing the system, sporadic violence becomes simple brutality, and the world remains as it was, if slightly sadder.
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Photograph courtesy of Joel Schalit. All rights reserved.