Social Murder, Social Rage: the Luigi Mangione Reading List

Exploitation, neglect, deprivation, death. These are not accidents of fate but the calculated outcomes of a system that prioritizes profit over human life. Friedrich Engels called it “social murder,” a term that cuts to the heart of capitalism’s hidden violence. It is murder disguised as policy, hidden behind the cold machinery of economic necessity, and suffered quietly by those whose lives are deemed expendable.

As Engels wrote in The Condition of the Working Class in England in 1845:

"When one individual inflicts bodily injury upon another such that death results, we call the deed manslaughter; when the assailant knew in advance that the injury would be fatal, we call his deed murder. But when society places hundreds of proletarians in such a position that they inevitably meet a too early and an unnatural death, one which is quite as much a death by violence as that by the sword or bullet; when it deprives thousands of the necessaries of life, places them under conditions in which they cannot live—forces them, through the strong arm of the law, to remain in such conditions until that death ensues which is the inevitable consequence—knows that these thousands of victims must perish, and yet permits these conditions to remain, its deed is murder just as surely as the deed of the single individual; disguised, malicious murder, murder against which none can defend himself, which does not seem what it is, because no man sees the murderer, because the death of the victim seems a natural one, since the offence is more one of omission than of commission. But murder it remains."

Following the brazen shooting of United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson, Luigi Mangione has been arrested and charged with murder. His handwritten manifesto reads like a contemporary echo of Engels’ description of “social murder,” this time carried out by health insurance executives, shareholders, and the rapacious profit motive that animates them.

Mangione has become an overnight hero after his arrest, channeling the rage of millions of Americans left to rot by their for-profit healthcare system. Bipartisan lines have blurred—if only briefly—as people across the political spectrum cheer "Free Luigi" and pray for his escape. It’s no accident that their would-be revolutionary is an athletic and strikingly attractive 26-year-old, his body wrecked by the pain of a botched spinal surgery. Who better to embody the profound desperation of loss than a man who seemed to have it all, only to lose everything anyway?

A handsome 26-year-old computer engineer with metal rods through his spine and, allegedly, a 3-D printed plastic pistol has become the face of a movement—or at least a moment of catharsis—quickly inspiring memes, merchandise, and even a secular prayer candle. But the backdrop to this tech-noir thriller, unfolding over mass media, is the stark reality that in America, one’s life and health are held hostage by capitalism, ransomed back through deductibles, copays, premiums, and the relentless financialization of every aspect of our well-being. If Engels had foreseen a future where algorithms dictate who lives, who dies, who suffers, or who watches a loved one fade in agony, we might not have believed him.

And yet here we are, with our loved ones and livelihoods reduced to metrics on a balance sheet. Social murder might have found more sophisticated methods, but its victims remain the same. It’s little wonder that such raw acts of vigilantism resonate so deeply, even if their political consequences remain uncertain. This rage is visceral in the truest sense of the word.

Various outlets are accusing the "capital L" left of celebrating the death of a "husband and father" at the hands of a disaffected young man. It is true that left intellectuals have long grappled with the ethics of violence, the immorality of for-profit industries like healthcare, the dynamics of power and oppression, and the complexities of both violent and non-violent resistance. But this issue—like all meaningful ones—is not partisan. If there's an audience with an appetite for blood it was created by the very industry and elites who now condemn it. Our ability to experience joy and dignity in our bodies is a fundamental and universal concern. The barbarity of capitalism, which has disfigured this basic human right, is felt by every American, no matter what they recite from a teleprompter.

In that spirit, here is Verso’s Luigi Mangione Reading List:

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Written by co-hosts of the hit “Death Panel” podcast and longtime disability justice and healthcare activists Adler-Bolton and Vierkant, Health Communism first examines how capital has instrumentalized health, disability, madness, and illness to create a class seen as “surplus,” regarded as a fiscal and social burden. Demarcating the healthy from the surplus, the worker from the “unfit” to work, the authors argue, serves not only to undermine solidarity but to mark whole populations for extraction by the industries that have emerged to manage and contain this “surplus” population. Health Communism then looks to the grave threat capital poses to global public health, and at the rare movements around the world that have successfully challenged the extractive economy of health.

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Here, philosopher Elsa Dorlin looks across the global history of the left - from slave revolts to the knitting women of the French Revolution and British suffragists' training in ju-jitsu, from the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising to the Black Panther Party, from queer neighborhood patrols to Black Lives Matter - to trace the politics, philosophy, and ethics of self defense. In this history she finds a "martial ethics of the self": a practice in which violent self defense is the only means for the oppressed to ensure survival and to build a liveable future.

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Capital is currently cannibalizing every sphere of life-guzzling wealth from nature and racialized populations, sucking up our ability to care for each other, and gutting the practice of politics. In this tightly argued and urgent volume, leading Marxist feminist theorist Nancy Fraser charts the voracious appetite of capital, tracking it from crisis point to crisis point, from ecological devastation to the collapse of democracy, from racial violence to the devaluing of care work. These crisis points all come to a head in Covid-19, which Fraser argues can help us envision the resistance we need to end the feeding frenzy.

What we need, she argues, is a wide-ranging socialist movement that can recognize the rapaciousness of capital - and starve it to death.

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Surveying the literature of revolution, from the poetry of Shelley and Byron to the novels of Émile Zola and Jack London, exploring the writings of Frantz Fanon, Che Guevara, and Assata Shakur, Class War reveals the interplay between military action and the politics of class, showing how solidarity flourishes in times of conflict. Written with verve and ranging across diverse historical settings, Class War traverses industrial battles, guerrilla insurgencies, and anticolonial resistance, as well as large-scale combat operations waged against capitalism’s regimes and its interstate system.

In our age of economic crisis, ecological catastrophe, and planetary unrest, Steven tells the stories of those whose actions will help guide future militants toward a revolutionary horizon.

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Big Pharma is more interested in profit than health. This was made clear as governments rushed to produce vaccines during the Covid pandemic. Behind the much-trumpeted scientific breakthroughs, major companies found new ways of gouging billions from governments in the West while abandoning the Global South. But this is only the latest episode in a long history of financialising medicine – from Purdue’s rapacious marketing of highly addictive OxyContin, through Martin Shkreli’s hiking the price of a lifesaving drug, to the 4.5 million South Africans needlessly deprived of HIV/AIDS medication.

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Burnout considers despairing former Communards exiled to a penal colony in the South Pacific; exhausted Bolsheviks recuperating in sanatoria in the aftermath of the October Revolution; an ex-militant on the analyst’s couch relating dreams of ruined landscapes; Chinese peasants engaging in self-criticism sessions; a political organiser seeking advice from a spiritual healer; civil rights movement activists battling weariness; and a group of feminists padding a room with mattresses to scream about the patriarchy. Jettisoning self-help narratives and individualizing therapy talk, Proctor offers a different way forward - neither denial nor despair. Her cogent exploration of the ways militants have made sense of their own burnout demonstrates that it is possible to mourn and organise at once, and to do both without compromise.