Luigi Mangione taught me the meaning of class war

On pacifism, violence, and feeling protected

This article is a philosophical reflection only. I do not encourage assassination.

Violence is not an abstract, disembodied concept for me. I cannot get into philosophical debates about violence without my body telling me a story. I remember, not in words, and not in pictures, in embodied, visceral sensation, the overwhelming force of violence. The drywall breaking as my body went through it. My body being used to knock a table out of the way so I could then be thrown on the floor. Being picked up and physically thrown off a streetcar, landing in the road, on the pavement, on my face. Being dragged by my hair, down stairs. Having my legs kicked out from under me, landing on the floor, and covering my head while the kicks kept coming. All of this but more so: the terror, the helplessness, the way my consciousness fractured as I was unable to make it stop. I tried everything from fighting and biting and screaming like a feral animal, to begging and pleading and apologizing, to submitting to rape.

When I talk to men about my fear of violence, or I tell them about a more recent sexual assault, they tend to suggest that I should learn about violence, get good at it, and then I will feel safe because I will know I can defend myself. When I was with my abusive ex partner, I started compulsively doing push ups and at one point I got up to a hundred push ups a day. After a while of doing this, I became emboldened. During one of his attacks I tried to fight back. He threw me down, pinned me, held my struggling body, and laughed in my face. He said something like: Oh you’ve been working out have you? My ex partner was not the biggest or strongest man in the world. But he was much bigger and stronger than me (most men are), and he had a lifetime of socialization teaching him about violence and how to enact it that I did not have.

When I tell men about my fear of violence they sometimes tell me that I should learn how to use a knife and carry one. I know that the most likely outcome of this course of action is me being stabbed. I find talking to men about violence exhausting and I find talking to people who have never been physically assaulted exhausting, and I most especially find talking to people who glorify violence and pontificate about violence while never having been physically assaulted exhausting. The most effective strategy I have found to protect myself from violence is to run. If at all possible, my advice is to run. This is not weakness or cowardice. It is just me being honest about my physical strength. Maybe if I spent hours every day training in a martial art I could one day feel confident in fighting rather than running but the truth is I have no desire to spend hours every day training in a martial art. I am a writer. I want to read books and I want to write and I don’t want to spend my life preparing for violence.

I also have a huge amount of trauma which means that even talking about violence, let alone experiencing it, can cause me to dissociate. The protective mechanism of turning off my senses so that I will feel less pain is not one I can yet control. And while this mechanism does work to make me feel the violence less, it also prevents me from thinking clearly or acting effectively at the precise moment when it is most crucial that I do so. I already work extremely hard at my trauma recovery and have for over a decade. The fantasy of becoming a gifted martial artist who somehow doesn’t dissociate when confronted with a real threat to my physical safety is just that: a fantasy. And more than that, someone else’s fantasy. Not mine.

This past summer I learned that a year prior my ex partner, the one who put me through a wall, died by suicide in jail. I was gutted, and grieved like someone I loved had died — because someone I loved had died. So much of my thinking about violence, and my commitment to pacifism, comes from my relationship with this man. Ashton was terrifying and abusive, cruel and contemptuous, and dangerous to anyone who knew him. Ashton was a survivor of severe and repetitive child abuse and neglect, physical and sexual violence, and he spent his life bouncing from institution to institution. By the time I fell in love with him he had been violently assaulted more times than he could count and he had violently assaulted others more times than he could count. He went to jail over and over again and was severely traumatized from being inside. I bailed him out early in our relationship and said on the stand that I loved him and believed in him. He later physically assaulted me over and over, raped me, degraded me, stalked me. I ended up reporting and then I went on the stand and said that he did these things to me. He spent time in jail for what he did to me.

There is a type of feminism, a tenet within social justice orthodoxy, which not only encourages, but expects and even demands of me to hate Ashton. So many people feel such hatred for rapists and abusers that they wish they would die, and even die in suffering. Few of them have the actual experience of their rapist or abuser dying a horrible death, but I do. And my honest experience of this is that it was not liberating. It was not celebratory. It did not provide relief. Instead, it was devastating. I know that Ashton was not just a rapist and an abuser, he was a survivor of child abuse, and a human being. He was someone I loved. He was someone who was horribly traumatized and abandoned by the world. He was someone the world decided was not worth saving. His death does not end the cycle of violence. His death is an expression of the cycle of violence. I take no joy from this endless cycle of perpetual pain.

Despite my history of surviving so much physical and sexual violence, and despite my writing being a beacon for so many survivors, and despite my steadfast commitment to finding real ways to end the cycle of violence, I am repeatedly called an “abuse apologist.” This is one of the more common accusations leveraged against me by my detractors. I am repeatedly called an “abuse apologist” for arguing that accusations of abuse are serious and therefore should be specific, because abuse is not a word that should be used to describe things that are not abuse. I am repeatedly called an “abuse apologist” because I point out that it is common for people to start campaigns of harassment, exile, and dehumanization using the language of “abuse,” when the behaviours they are describing are actually normative conflict, mismatched needs and desires in a relationship, disagreement, the anxious/avoidant cycle, hurt feelings, and other nonabusive situations.

I am repeatedly called an “abuse apologist” because I point out that the sexual possessiveness and stalking common to many cancellation campaigns is itself a form of domestic violence that mirrors the If I can’t have you, no one can attitude of traditional domestic violence, often carried out covertly by women who disavow their own capacity for abuse and therefore wrap their own abusive behaviour in the language of victimization and righteous calls for justice. Even though I am a survivor who explains explicitly and clearly that my critiques of cancel culture are rooted in my experience as a survivor, and in particular, my anger at people appropriating the experience of surviving abuse in order to justify and evade responsibility for their own abusive behaviours, I am repeatedly called an “abuse apologist” by people who refuse to seriously engage with my ideas.

I am also called an “abuse apologist” because I don’t believe we should “kill all rapists” or use violence and dehumanization against those who have committed abuse. I am a pacifist with a deep commitment to nonviolence, except in cases of self defence or intervening on violence against others. Even then, I believe we should minimize violence as much as possible. I have been called “naive” for this stance by people who have never had their body put through a wall, never loved a violent criminal and child abuse survivor, never had to live with the fact that their first love and rapist died alone in jail. My beliefs about violence can’t accurately be called naive because I know violence intimately.

What I know about violence is that it is a cycle, and that many perpetrators were once victims feeling the overwhelming helplessness that I know so well. I can’t hate Ashton. I am angry at him and I do hold him responsible and I loved him more than I can say and I wish he wasn’t dead. Who I hold far more responsible than Ashton are all the people who treated a traumatized young man like he was garbage and did absolutely nothing to help him heal from the severe repetitive violence he was subjected to. Who I hold responsible is the ruling class who ensured he would not have a safe place to live, who ensured he would not have access to free trauma therapy, who ensured he, and his family before him, would never have the time and space and safety they needed to rest and heal. I know that sending him to jail over and over again made him more violent, not less. It put people in more danger, not less. Traumatizing and exiling abusers does not solve abuse. It never has and it never will.

When those who call me an “abuse apologist” also fancy themselves anarchists, they sometimes feel justified in using violence against me, because in their eyes, me writing my opinions constitutes violence serious enough to be intervened upon with force. I have been threatened many times. I’ve had my tires slashed and shit poured in the air vents of my car. I’ve had coffee poured all over my writing at a zine fair. I’ve written about how these intimidation tactics are similar to behaviours Ashton would use against me: property destruction and even the use of shit as a tool of degradation and humiliation were common behaviours of his. I am a tiny woman with extensive trauma expressing my sincere political convictions based on my lived experience with violence and some people feel justified in using intimidation and force to silence me.

This kind of thing is common in cancel culture. I’m not the only cancelled person I know who has had their tires slashed, their property destroyed, or their physical safety threatened. I even know of a case where a cancelled person was murdered and the cancellers jeered about it online, mocking his widow and saying he deserved it. Cancel culture is a process of scapegoating. When people feel helpless and powerless, they look for places where they can feel powerful. The left has been toothless for a very long time and we’ve watched capitalism grow scarier and scarier without any effective means of fighting back. We sooth our sense of distress by coming for targets we can reach. Destroying the life of a regular person who you’ve heard rumours about can feel cathartic and effective and can make you believe you have power you don’t have. The right scapegoats trans people and immigrants. The left scapegoats each other. We choose people, almost at random, and offer them up as sacrifices to feel like we have any power at all.

I have always been wary about the celebration of vigilante justice. As someone who has been victimized by those who fancy themselves vigilantes, I see how this framework can be misused as a process of cathartic scapegoating and a cover for abusive behaviours people don’t want to face. I find the idea of a “left” where ideogical conformity is enforced through violence terrifying and dystopian. People on the so-called left have sincerely asked me what the difference is between anarchists slashing my tires or destroying my writing to intimidate me and drive me out of a community space, and burning cop cars or blowing up pipelines. They sincerely do not seem to be able to tell the difference between a writer they disagree with and the power of capital or the state. They can’t tell the difference between their scapegoats, the cancelled people in their communities or on the internet who it is easy for them to attack, and the real forces of power that dominate them but remain out of reach.

I don’t like violence. I don’t think violence is an effective means of ending the cycle of interpersonal violence because more trauma always leads to more violence. I don’t trust most people to be discerning and honest enough to differentiate between their chosen scapegoats and real forces of power. I believe that violence can be justified in cases of self-defence and intervention in order to protect someone else, but I am very wary of the way people dishonestly pretend they are acting in self-defence or intervening on violence when in fact they are being abusive and controlling. People use dehumanization and even violence to manage their own feelings, access catharsis, do away with people they don’t like, control their ex’s personal life, punish scapegoats, and silence political disagreement, and we do this across the political spectrum.

I also find fantasies of violent insurrection by anarchists who don’t even have a gun let alone the means to overthrow the Canadian or American military boring and a waste of time. There are a lot of anarchists and socialists who nurse a fantasy of violent revolution and don’t think about how we would realistically get from here to there. I call these people larpers because they are more interested in living inside a fantasy of power than finding actual, material ways to enact power, such as, for example, labour organizing. Overall, I find most of the so-called left to be dishonest in their discussions of violence and their use of violence. I see them using fantasies of violence as an escape, and enacting violence against scapegoats for their own personal reasons, pretending that it’s politics. I see very few of them grappling with the cycle of interpersonal violence and the way that trauma creates more violence. Even the ones who consider themselves abolitionists live in a fantasy world where abusers are a special kind of bad person, not the grown up child abuse survivors that they often actually are.

Despite all this talk of revolutionary and righteous violence, I have only ever received or witnessed violence as a destructive force. I have never experienced violence as protective. All the many times that I have been brutally assaulted in public, no one has ever intervened. I have been screaming and struggling in front of large groups of people many times. No one ever used force to stop my assailants. No one ever tried nonviolent deescalation either. The one exception to this is when a boyfriend (not the really abusive one, another one) lifted his hand to strike me on a subway platform. Two young women in high heals and club outfits yelled at him to stop. He did. That is the only intervention I have ever experienced, in all the many experiences of violence that have happened to me in public.

When I learned about the assassination of the UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson, I was surprised by my embodied reaction to it. I abhor violence and have been steadfast in my pacifism for years. I am a Canadian who has always felt entitled to my access to socialized healthcare and has never had the misfortune of having to understand what an insurance claim even is. I have had many health issues in my life, as is common for child sexual abuse survivors, and I can’t imagine what it would be like to try to argue with health insurance companies about my inherent right to access healthcare. Public healthcare is being intentionally underfunded and eroded in Canada to justify increasingly privatized healthcare, which is terrifying, and another win for the murderous power of capitalism. But I definitely do not experience the overwhelming dehumanization of health insurance companies, and I pray that I never have to.

Yet something about the assassination rang like a bell in my subconscious and a feeling of relief and safety registered in my body. I watched the entire internet celebrate like it was the first good news we had heard in a long, long time. I watched people across the political spectrum openly celebrate a murder, expressing a sense of relief and hope, a feeling of being defended, protected. Like the assassination was for all of us. I had to admit that I felt the same, in a deep embodied way, and I struggled with this feeling. I have been such a staunch pacifist for so long and my commitment to nonviolence is so important to me. I know how severely and how often violence is misused. I know that Brian Thompson was a human being and I know that all life is sacred. I believe that violence and murder should be avoided except in the most serious situations of self-defence and intervention, and Brian Thompson was gunned down from behind in the street. How do I make sense of the fact that, despite my pacifism, I feel relief?

Kelsey Zazanis wrote on her instagram stories “legitimately — when I let the sheer weight of what he [the United Healthcare CEO assassin] did sink into my body, I thought to myself, “this is what protection feels like.” I felt protected. I have never felt truly protected before in my life. he is what a modern day hero looks like and I pray he never gets locked up. crazy how soldiers can kill in the name of imperialist violence all the time and we don't pathologize it as sickness in the head but when a vigilante working class warrior kills for the people, there's gotta be something wrong with him. can't we view this as the heroic act it is, intervening in violence far worse that his intervention?” Kelsey, like me, knows what violence is. She is a survivor of repetitive, incestuous child rape. She, like me, lives with serious chronic illness as the result of being an incest survivor. Her words rang like a bell: this is what protection feels like. I felt protected. I have never felt truly protected before in my life.

I have only ever encountered violence as domination. I have never encountered violence as protection. Like Kelsey, I have not felt truly protected. I have not felt the sensation of someone being willing to take a personal risk to protect me from violence. I feel protected by Luigi Mangione’s (alleged) actions. But why do I feel protected if I am not an American subjected to the horrors of health insurace? Because I am a regular person living under the rule of a murderous capitalist class that takes everything necessary for survival (food, housing, healthcare, education, the literal biosphere, even human life itself) and destroys it for profit.

Because I have watched as Benjamin Netanyahu receives standing ovations and endless backing and financial support for his genocide of the Palestinians while anti-genocide activists are incarcerated and the capitalists greedily profit off the drones and bombs. I have watched the mass slaughter of children and the use of sexual violence as an instrument of genocide and I have been expected to continue on and accept this. Because I am terrified about climate change and increasing environmental disasters which is not a future scenario but is happening right now, and the ruling class and its puppet governments keep investing in oil and gas while it is way, way too late for that. Because I am witnessing nonviolent climate activists who peacefully demonstrate to protect the future of life on earth be incarcerated with absurdly long jail sentences while the climate criminals fly around in their private jets, laughing at us.

Because landlords don’t create housing, they bar access to housing and housing security and get rich off it. Because health insurance companies don’t provide access to healthcare, they bar access to healthcare and get rich off it. Because the police surround Amazon Union members on strike, but certainly don’t come for Jeff Bezos and his wealth which only exists due to mass exploitation. Because even though I live in Canada and have always taken healthcare for granted, it is becoming increasingly difficult to access public healthcare as more and more private clinics steal resources from the public system. Because the ruling class are mass murders and we all know this, and they own our governments, and their police forces, and their militaries. Because all the brave and principled nonviolent activists keep ending up behind bars.

Luigi Mangione taught me the meaning of class war. I’m not being hyperbolic when I say that. I’ve seen the phrase “class war” on many a backpatch but I never really understood what it meant. For all our posturing about class war what we’ve really been fighting is a culture war. We haven’t been coming for the ruling class because we haven’t been able to reach them. Instead, we’ve been coming for each other, other members of the working class, other people with very little power. We have been scapegoating each other to feel a sense of power that we don’t really have and this scapegoating both distracts us from our real work and creates more suffering and trauma for regular working people. This scapegoating fractures the working class, causing us to undermine our only real strength: our numbers, by constantly turning on each other and attacking each other. “No war but class war” is in alignment with a pacifist stance. We should resist violence whenever possible but we are justified in using violence against mass murderers who won’t stop despite all our organizing, peaceful protesting, and voting in fake democracies owned by the ruling class.

Roger Peet wrote on his instagram stories “After a year of protest, action, occupation, desperation with nothing to show for it but memories of butchery and the imagined screams of dying children; after a political process where nobody showed up because it had been repeatedly demonstrated that there was nothing to show up for and that you were selfish to imagine otherwise; after all this we see a lone figure stepping into the lamplight to demonstrate that it is in fact possible to do something and have it matter, to find and identify an enemy, strike, and be victorious over them. What we are all feeling is not that political murder is the only way forward or even a likely way. What we are feeling is that the spell is broken, that something is coming up over the horizon even if not necessarily the sun.”

Roger’s beautiful prose sums up something I also feel: the spell is broken. I have written a lot about the spell of unreality in the context of incest: in sexually abusive families abuse is facilitated and maintained through a constant denial of reality. We are told over and over that what is happening is not happening, that the violence is not actually violence, it’s just business as usual, it’s normal. We are told that our naming of violence, our resistance to violence, is the real problem, not the violence itself. Capitalism has also created a spell of unreality: despite its obvious extreme violence, we are taught to see it as normal, and our anger and despair and resistance to it is framed as abnormal, even criminal. The ruling class seems to have convinced themselves that they have convinced us — that we really are as docile as they need us to be. Luigi Mangione’s (alleged) actions and the overwhelmingly positive, celebratory response from the working class proves that we are not, and this scares the ruling class.

They tried to make an example out of Luigi by perp walking him in the most spectacular way possible but instead they made a martyr, and a hero, out of him, because all we could see in those iconic photographs are the visual similarities to Jesus Christ being taken to the cross. Ben Shapiro tried to say the left was being crazy for idolizing a murderer and his right wing audience assured him that it’s not just the left, they want healthcare too. Luigi has broken the spell of unreality, and the spell of the culture war, directing our attention away from all the distractions and all the scapegoats toward the real architects of our suffering: the ruling class. We won’t win through assassination (alone) but we do need to see clearly who our enemies are in order to win. We do need to believe we can reach our enemies, that they are mortals too, that despite their disgusting hoarding of wealth and power, they are not unstoppable. They can be made afraid. After a year of so much struggle and very little results, Luigi gave us hope that we too can have power.

Brian Thompson was not a scapegoat. That is what differentiates him from the various relatively powerless people that the left and the right target and attack to appease our overwhelming helpless rage. Brian Thompson was a member of the ruling class and a man responsible for the death and suffering of a great many people. His power was enormous and his violence was institutionalized and protected. While my ex partner Ashton was also violent, his power was not enormous and his violence was not institutionalized or protected. No one cared that Ashton died (except for those that loved him, many of whom were also his victims). But the state made it very clear that Brian Thompson is not an acceptable victim. They pulled out all the stops to find his murderer and then created a parade to announce their victory. As much as I also abhor the violence of abusive men, their murders (which are common in impoverished and crime-dependent communities) are rarely solved because no one fucking cares.

Luigi’s (alleged) violence was not an escape into fantasy like the larpers. His violence was not misdirected like the self-styled vigilantes who attack tiny women writers whose ideas they don’t like. His violence was not careless and gratuitous; there was no collateral damage, no unnecessary cruelty. His violence was targeted, planned, careful, and actualized. His violence was self-defence and intervention on behalf of all of us who are tired of feeling terrified and helpless in the face of the overwhelming, dehumanizing power of the ruling class and their unimaginable cruelty. Luigi didn’t start the class war; he struck back. In all of these ways, his violence was ethical and just. This is why, despite my pacifism and my many reservations around vigilante violence, I stand with Luigi. He makes me feel protected and defended. He broke the spell of unreality and brought class consciousness to those trapped in the culture war.

I have always said that I am humble enough to adjust my politics when I am presented with a compelling reason to do so. This is one of those moments. I cannot be dishonest about my true feelings about Luigi’s (alleged) actions, even though it felt scary and challenging to unpack and face those feelings. I am not okay with unnecessary violence. I am not okay with scapegoating. I am not okay with us attacking each other. I am not okay with perpetuating the cycle of interpersonal violence. All of this is different from class war. I hope our collective excitement about Luigi can strengthen our solidarity building, labour organizing, and the union renaissance we are seeing right now. I hope we find many creative ways to fight back against the ruling class. I hope we feel emboldened and that we use that energy to drive us forward. I hope we see clearly that the enemy is not among us and never was. I hope we put down the culture war once and for all and finally start fighting the war we are really in: the class war.

I’ll close with the reflection I shared about Luigi on instagram:

Luigi Mangione taught me the meaning of class war. While I am against violence and would prefer if no one is ever murdered, the mass violence of health insurance companies getting rich on blocking peoples access to their fundamental human rights has killed more people than Luigi Mangione has. The mass support of Luigi across political divides is sparking class consciousness, terrifying the ruling class, and directing people away from the culture war (fighting each other) toward the class war (fighting back against the ruling class who produce and profit from our suffering). Nonviolent climate activists are increasingly locked up with absurdly long sentences and the criminals who keep investing in oil and gas run free. People who work all day can’t afford their basic needs like food, healthcare, and housing, and a parasitical class sits back and hoards wealth while we suffer and die, have no free time and can’t dream of the future. We watch genocide livestreamed on our smartphones and the activists who resist this violence are incarcerated and those who profit from it walk free. We are offered up each other as scapegoats to vent our frustrated rage at while the ruling class laughs at us and pours our future down the drain. We are already in a class war. The ruling class would prefer we never acknowledge that we are or act like we are. They want us to be silent victims thanking them for scraps while they kill and dehumanize people en masse. My pacifism holds exceptions for self defence and intervention on behalf of someone else (violence can be justified to stop violence when there are no other options available) and in a joke democracy run by the ruling class and enforced by a police state, where the ruling class is free to kill with impunity, Luigi’s actions are self defence and intervention. I hope this spark blazes into a fire of class consciousness and that people take this energy to labour organizing, join unions, and create a worker’s party based in union organizing that can organize and direct the power of the working people. I hope we are inspired to find creative and persistent ways to fight back. I hope our courage and resolve increases. I hope we win

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Announcements

I updated the Body of Work section of this website. It’s for paying subscribers and includes access to digital versions of all my zines, including many out of print zines you can’t get anywhere else, several recorded workshops and two recorded live events, as well as a bunch of translations of my work. It’s a huge archive and you can access it here.

There’s a new episode of Fucking Cancelled where I discuss my underworld journey of the past year, and Jay and I discuss Luigi Mangione and class war. You can listen to that here.

I am doing another event at Breitenbush Hot Springs in March 2025 called Writing is a Lightning Strike. Last year’s workshop was incredible and I am even more excited for this one because it is about writing. You can register here.

This workshop is an invitation to take yourself seriously as a writer, regardless of how much experience you have with writing or publishing. If you feel the call to write, this workshop will help you answer that call. If you already have a writing practice, this workshop will help you deepen it. Hosted at Breitenbush Hot Springs, you will have the opportunity to soak, relax, and recharge between sessions. As we will discuss in the workshop, your writing practice continues to happen underground in uninterrupted moments such as these.

The energy of forcing, proving, and seeking legitimacy is not the energy that will help you crack open your writing practice. This workshop will go against a lot of conventional advice to simply and consistently show up to the page and will instead highlight how much of the writing happens when we are not at the page. Rigorously anti-shame and rooted in the wisdom of the body and the depths of the unconscious, this workshop will create the conditions you need to approach your writing with curiosity rather than with demands.

Drawing on the work of various underground and outsider writers, as well as our own wild intuition, we will read, write, move, breathe, share, and talk about our writing. Clementine, a longtime independent writer, will share her knowledge and wisdom on how to trust your process and your voice.

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Clementine Morrigan is an independent writer, cultural change maker, truth teller, and moral philosopher. She writes essays and literary nonfiction about ethics, politics, relationships, sexuality, violence, trauma, and unconditional compassion. Her cult classic zine, Love Without Emergency, has sold more than 11,000 copies (that’s a lot of stapling). Her podcast, Fucking Cancelled, independently toured the United States. Her readers have created and disseminated amateur translations of her work in several languages. If you have spent time in a punk house or queer collective house in the last 20 years, you have probably flipped through one of her zines in the bathroom.

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