Deep Dive
Shownotes Transcript
So Richard, our first question comes from Callum, who says, What might the assassination of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson and popular support for the accused Luigi Mangione tell us about the class struggle and class consciousness in the United States? What parallels might be drawn to other periods and places where assassination was a common political tactic, sometimes symptomatic of a lack of political organisation?
You know, it's funny, this question overlaps with something that I wrote recently about Eric Hobsbawm's concept of the social bandit, which I think this is probably what the questioner is actually getting at. So Hobsbawm is describing periods in rural traditional life
where these bandit heroes emerge. Their enemies are the foes of the poor, traditionally. They're regarded as criminal by the state, but not by the people. So to that extent, the people protect them. And the critical point that Hobsbawm makes is that the social bandit is a kind of pre-political, non-revolutionary form of protest before people really discover more effective ways of resisting.
So a society that calls the social bandit into existence clearly has problems that it doesn't yet know how to solve. And so then the question is, you know, why should it be that the United States, an advanced capitalist society, should call into being this social type?
It's redolent of what Ernst Bloch calls the living yesterday. You know, there's a sense in which the United States is so paralyzed as a country, institutionally and politically paralyzed, that it's almost impossible to get any meaningful and effective political reform achieved.
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