“These parasites had it coming.”
These are the words of Luigi Mangione, the 26-year-old American who has become an underground cult hero of the poor and the oppressed, after his alleged killing of United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson.
This corporate assassination has tapped into a raw class anger, in the USA and beyond, illustrating the intense hatred that exists towards the billionaire bloodsuckers who are raking in super-profits from our suffering.
Thompson headed a £433-billion healthcare insurance company. He personally ‘earned’ $10 million annually – all whilst daily denying insurance claims, causing untold pain and misery, including the premature deaths of working-class Americans.
The gulf between the downtrodden majority and our parasitic overlords is hidden in plain sight. We live in two different worlds.
In Britain, by midday on Monday 6 January, the third working day of the year, FTSE 100 bosses had already registered an income equivalent to an average full-time worker’s entire annual salary.
The average yearly pay for these CEOs is now £4.22 million – a historic, all-time high. By comparison, the average UK worker earns £37,430 a year, 113 times less.
To put it another way: the national minimum wage is £11.44 per hour; for the humble captain of industry, the average pay is £22 a minute.
These scroungers ‘earn’ more sitting on the toilet during a typical bathroom break than a minimum-wage employee does for an entire back-breaking workday.
These grotesque facts put paid to the idea that capitalism offers ‘an honest day’s pay for an honest day’s work’.
Adding insult to injury, workers in Britain are being squeezed from all sides, stretching our measly earnings thinner and thinner every year.
This month, the energy price cap was raised again by Ofgem, meaning the typical household will now pay £1,738 per year – 50 percent above pre-pandemic levels.
As a result of these relentless year-on-year price rises, the total debt owed to vampiric energy suppliers has increased to £3.8 billion. The average arrears per household are £1,500 for electricity and £1,300 for gas.
All the while, public services continue to crumble. The NHS, for example, is once again experiencing its now-annual winter crisis, with a triple-whammy surge of flu, covid, and norovirus cases pushing decrepit hospitals and overworked health staff to breaking point.
This is on top of a whole host of other soaring prices: rents, groceries, leisure activities – you name it.
With the capitalists lining their pockets at our expense, it is no surprise that Luigi Mangione has garnered so much support and attention internationally: from his name being graffitied on top of a building in South London; to his depiction as Superman in posters plastered on British bus stops.
Luigi Mangione Poster
📍Weymouth, England#FreeLuigi #LuigiMangione pic.twitter.com/qglhNqQIp3— risa cuntyveros 👀 (@spacedooog) January 6, 2025
It is also no wonder that billionaires like Elon Musk – and their lackeys like Nigel Farage – have been busy trying to whip up a culture war about immigrants, in order to distract from the real criminals on the loose: the bankers and fat-cat bosses.
These vultures might spread confusion for a time. But sooner or later, they will get their just deserts.
The only reason they haven’t been driven out with pitchforks already is the abject failure of the official ‘left’ to give a revolutionary expression to the powerful class anger that bubbles away beneath the surface in society – unconscious, uncoordinated, and unutilised.
To end the relentless rule of the super-rich once and for all, we need to get organised to seize the wealth of all of these leeches, and overthrow the rotten capitalist system in which they reside and thrive.
We need more than one modern-day Robin Hood. We need an army of workers and youth, mobilised in the fight for communist revolution.
So if you share Luigi’s burning rage towards the billionaire class, join us in the struggle to topple their parasitic profit system. Join the revolutionary communists of the RCP.
