It Will Take an Army of Many to Defeat Capitalism
On December 3, the day before UnitedHealth Group CEO Brian Thompson was blasted from this earth, Reuters news service reported that his company’s revenues for 2025 were projected to reach over $450 billion dollars, more than $30 billion over their own company forecast. In the second four months of 2024 alone, UnitedHealth Group made nearly $100 billion dollars in revenue. In 2023, the corporation was able to extract $32 billion dollars in profit, which in large part was gained through “denying” health coverage payments and instead retaining a percentage of the premiums paid by policyholders as income (referred to in the industry as the “medical loss ratio”). Profit margins for UnitedHealth Group are projected to rise substantially over each of the next three years.
Thompson himself made more than $10 million dollars annually as CEO for UnitedHealth Group before he was killed. He was in New York City to attend the company's annual Investor Conference to celebrate the corporation's bonanza year when he was shot and killed. The same day that Luigi Mangione was arrested and accused of the shooting, Daniel Penny, a white ex-Marine was acquitted for the public execution and murder of Jordan Neely, a homeless African-American man. Neely also had mental health issues for which he could not get adequate treatment. He was a victim of the same ruthless for-profit systems that made Brian Thompson a rich man.
These are the quantitative facts behind the public outrage that fell like rain after Thompson was shot and killed on a New York street.
But it is the qualitative character of that rage that is most important. In a flash, Thompson came to represent the face of capitalist greed, profit, and ruthless disregard for human life for millions of working-class people. More important than his salary was the fact that Thompson’s company is the leading denier of medical claims of all the major insurers in the U.S, with 1 in 3 sick people who came to United Health to claim the insurance benefits they had paid for were rejected. The words “delay”, “deny”, “defend” were inscribed on the bullet casings that killed Thompson have become a rallying cry against these grotesque injustices.
With Thompson’s shooting capitalism’s pornographic inequalities have again been exploded. The loudest open secret in the United States—that the government and the ruling class don’t care if you live or die—has blasted through to every media platform in the country, from the New York Times to private Instagram accounts. Also exposed is the government’s absolute complicity in the death industry that is U.S. insurance: since the passage of the Affordable Care Act (so-called Obama Care) profits in the insurance industry have reached record highs because of the mandate that people buy insurance. Rather than providing free government sponsored healthcare, the United States government has instead become the biggest enabling partner in crime of runaway profits in the private health care industry.
The result is economic and personal bloodshed on an epic scale. Unpaid medical bills is now the #1 form of bankruptcy in America. People in the United States collectively owe $220 billion dollars in medical debt. Almost 10 percent of people with medical debt cannot afford to pay anything on that debt. Eleven million people have had to use their credit cards to pay off medical debts. The most common way to pay off medical debt is to take out a second mortgage on a house. When that fails, the house becomes part of bankruptcy. People become health-less and homeless in one fell swoop.
It is the collective rage and pain underlying these facts that millions of people have projected onto Luigi Mangione as the alleged shooter of Brian Thompson. It is understandable that Thompson’s killing has been gratifying to people who have watched loved ones get sick and die at the hands of a U.S. medical system and insurance system that grinds profits from their bones. People sympathizing with Mangione’s outrage at the system and defending the use of violence against it remind us of two things Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky had to say about the “morality” of violence under capitalism. In his History of the Russian Revolution, Trotsky also said the ruling class “renounce violence when it comes to introducing changes in what already exists, but in defense of the existing order they will not stop at the most ruthless acts.” Trotsky also said in Their Morals and Ours: “A slave-owner who through cunning and violence shackles a slave in chains, and a slave who through cunning or violence breaks the chains—let not the contemptible eunuchs tell us that they are equals before a court of morality!” And as Martin Luther King, Jr. explained before he was assassinated: “The greatest purveyor of violence in the world: My own government, I can not be silent.”
But what should revolutionaries think of individual acts of violence in the absence of mass organizing and resistance?
Defeating the Violence of Capitalism
The violence inherent in the capitalist system manifests in hundreds of ways that impact us in our daily lives—from genocidal war to the impoverishment of more than half the world’s population so small handfuls of neo-oligarchs can horde immense sums of wealth; to the effects of climate catastrophe, and to the denial of lifesaving health care so an insurance executive can get a larger bonus. Furthermore, capitalism needs violence to enforce inequality, exploitation, underdevelopment—and to crush the resistance that inevitably springs from the victims and oppressed peoples as a result.
The violence of the capitalist for-profit “health care” industry has been put on full display by the targeted killing of UnitedHealth Group CEO Brian Thompson. Over 200 million people have to pay for private insurance policies, which operate to make profit through premium payments while incentivizing the gatekeeping and disqualification of the provision of care to an estimated one out of five claims (industry-wide) to extract maximum profit. People with private health insurance are more likely to have their claims denied than those with publicly funded health care. This is systematized into how massive “health insurance” corporations like United Health Groups, which “covers” 49 million people, can reap huge profits from the lives of those they deny.
An estimated 26 million people have no insurance at all due to unaffordability. As a result, an average of nearly 45,000 people die each year for lack of health care access. Additionally, more than 1 in 4 adults avoid or delay health care due to cost, and another 4 in 10 have someone in their household postponed healthcare due to cost. Furthermore, people of color made up 45.7% of the (nonelderly) U.S. population but accounted for 62.3% of the total nonelderly uninsured population in 2022.
The systemic violence of preventable and treatable death and suffering associated with lack of health care access is what led to the vigilante-style assassination of Brian Thompson. The killing refracted the rage of millions of people who have suffered from poor health, lost loved ones to treatable illness, were forced into economic hardship or bankruptcy, or otherwise experienced the violence of the system. It also called attention to how widespread and palpable the anger is amongst the working class, observable in a popular surge of fury against the health profiteers and in support of the shooter. Despite the social effects and repercussions of the shooting, the for-profit health care system will continue on. More people will continue to be denied, and thousands more will continue to die at the altar of enrichment for capitalist investors.
That is why if we must learn from this moment that to defeat the violence of the parasitic health insurance corporations that determine whether we live or die for the sake of profit, we have to overturn the system of capitalism itself. We cannot overturn capitalism through individual acts of violence, no matter how justifiable they may be. Only through mass organized struggle and revolution can we uproot and dismantle the capitalist system that enables corporate parasitic structures like the health insurance industry to exist and thrive through the management of death panels for profit.
As revolutionaries we have to counteract capitalism’s tendency to isolate us in our resistance. Alienation under capitalism is individual, but the solution is collective class struggle and solidarity. Collective working-class, self-defensive violence to uplift and improve the lives of the vast majority of people is necessary to make a revolution against an oppressive system that is contingent upon imposing perpetual violence to enrich a tiny minority. A revolution requires withdrawing our collective labor to shut down the means for capitalist profiteering, to seize and socialize control of the economy (i.e., the means of production), to disarm and suppress the state repressive apparatus and fascist counter-revolutionary forces that will try to reimpose capitalist rule and class domination, and to reorganize a socialist economy that replaces individual accumulation and profit with one that uplifts and develops the well-being of all.
