So Richard, our first question comes from Callum, who says,

What might the assassination of United Healthcare 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 Hobsbom's concept of the social bandit, which I think

this is probably what the questioner is actually

getting at. So Hobbesbaum 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 Obtwan 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

capital society, should call into being this social type. It's

redolent of what Ernst Block 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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