Violence Is Not Anti-System Work
Image by Mike Erskine.
Why spectacle, attention, and violence strengthen the systems they claim to oppose
Luigi Mangione is being talked about like he is some kind of anti-system insurgent. The story is seductive because the target was a corporate executive. People want a clean villain and a clean hero. They want a symbol they can point at because the institutions that run their lives feel untouchable. Mangione offered nothing close to that. He moved through an environment built on attention and understood how to use it.
You do not kill a capitalist to free yourself from capitalism. You kill a capitalist because you want to be seen.
There is a reason the public latched onto Mangione so quickly. The target was not a surprise. The public already holds deep resentment toward the health insurance industry and UnitedHealthcare in particular. The industry is synonymous with extraction and denial of care. When a manhunt kicked off, people filled in the gaps with whatever fantasy they needed. They cast Mangione as someone striking upward at a structure they already resent. Ideas about rebellion came from spectators looking for meaning. The same system they believe he opposed is the one that elevated him.
Everything Mangione did looked designed to draw attention. The forged IDs, the operational notes, the shifts in appearance, the recorded remarks, and the courtroom composure created an image that the country consumed as performance. None of it suggests he was trying to dismantle anything. The behavior fits someone moving through a world where visibility is treated like currency. He watched proceedings unfold, took notes during hearings, and the public interpreted the behavior through the lens of narrative instead of fact.
This is where attention turns into desire. Mangione has already been labeled a heartthrob in coverage and casual discussion. The fixation grew fast because the country has a long record of turning violent men into desirable figures. Attention locked onto his appearance instead of the reality that he is accused of killing someone. That shift happens because people look for intensity wherever they can find it, and dangerous men often become the closest thing the culture recognizes as compelling. Mangione slid into that role without effort. The reaction around him shows how quickly the public will turn a homicide case into a place to project desire.
Once that framing takes hold, the act itself stops mattering. Violence becomes content. Desire replaces analysis. The killing is no longer examined for what it does or does not change. It is absorbed into the same media machinery that produces celebrity, fascination, and endless circulation. That machinery only feeds power. It will never threaten it.
Actual anti-system work avoids theatrics, ignores visibility, and refuses the media systems it claims to challenge. It stays small and deliberate, rooted in decisions that never show up in headlines. Anti-system work is slow, unglamorous, anonymous, and drains power from institutions by cutting off participation. That work does not produce a body. Mangione did the opposite. His actions gave institutions everything they needed to build a storyline, a prosecution, and a steady stream of content. That places him inside the system, not outside it.
People who actually work against a system start by taking pieces of their life out of its reach. They move their labor, money, time, and daily survival outside the channels that keep institutions alive. They close accounts, break contracts, grow their own food, fix their own problems, and remove their stability from structures that exploited them. The work is methodical and grounded. It looks like stepping away from workplaces, agencies, programs, and markets that drained them. None of it needs a dead executive or a headline to justify itself because the work is aimed at weakening a structure, not staging a moment.
America mistakes spectacle for critique because it no longer has a stable framework for dissent. The culture hands the spotlight to men who tear holes in the social fabric, then treats the reaction as meaning instead of a symptom of failure. Killing a corporate figure inside the machinery that produces celebrity does not disrupt anything. Once violence becomes spectacle, it reinforces the same logic that elevated Mangione. A country exhausted by its own failures treats any shock as awakening, even when the shock has no direction.
The reaction to Mangione revealed how unfamiliar people have become with the kind of work that actually undermines a system. They recognized the violence but not the discipline real resistance requires. Anti-system work depends on patience, withdrawal, and persistence, and none of that looks dramatic enough to anchor a narrative. The country mistook a killing for a challenge to power because it no longer knows how to recognize resistance that does not announce itself through the spotlight.
That confusion is the real story here, not Mangione.
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