On the case of Luigi Mangione: The real "crime" is "political and social opposition"

Federal prosecutors ....said that ... Mr. Mangione posed a “future danger because he expressed intent to target an entire industry, and rally political and social opposition to that industry, by engaging in an act of lethal violence.”

The government will prosecute anyone who "expresses intent to target an industry." It is defending the corporate state.

Luigi Mangione's crime is to want to "rally political and social opposition" to that industry and the system it is central to, an apparatus of exploitative enslavement.

What people should do in response its to be part of that opposition. For those of us on the left, unlike liberal Democrats, our opposition is not to the Trump administration. It is to what the Trump administration is defending. The Republican far right is the bad cops of the corporate state. The liberal Democrats are its good cops. Blatant thuggery replaces mystification, which “moderates” enjoy, as they take seriously the problems it poses, the policy alternatives within corporate governance, or the “national interest.”

Mangione is not guilty of "engaging in an act of lethal violence," because that is not what he is really being charged with. It makes little difference, except in what methods the government uses to go after you, whether you engage in violence, attend a sit-in or march at a demonstration, or publish an essay, teach at a university, or make a film. Or sit at home, chat with your friends, and be someone they might target in a preemptive strike. Then they will try to terrorize you to make you afraid, and isolate and if possible confuse you, or obstruct you with burdens that make it difficult to do anything. It doesn’t matter to them what you do; it matters only that they decide you’re an enemy. Many people have this status thrust upon them, otherwise were born with it. There is a liberal fascism which treats as an enemy of the people, or God or humanity, or whatever, anyone who finds themselves in this position or is ‘paranoid’ enough to have imagined this, as if such a malaise could only originate in their own interiority, an original sin which fits an empire’s war against the ‘crime’ it is prepared to see everywhere, arising at any time, in fact imputed to whoever is targeted. Once the language of this subjugation was the universality of sin; now it is psychological imputations and a ‘need’ for one’s life to be managed so that one can function properly. There are drugs, tools and methods, and devices that people eagerly seek and use for this, consuming what they need, as once everyone ‘needed’ spices, beverages, and luxury goods, which the austere might guilty renounce. You are enslaved, asked to desire and enjoy your subjection, and, above all, you, all of us, must pay.

The police do not stop people because they have committed a crime, though this happens; they stop people and treat them as criminals. The totalizing state regards everyone as possessing as an actual property the evil of a potentiality for disobedience to its command. While questions of morality and justice can find a place in this scheme, its essence is not justice but power, domination as its own reason for being and as expressed in policing and war. What is targeted and forbidden is never methods, always ends. It is forbidden to oppose the authorities who comprise the state, which has a monopoly on permitted claims to what is just or may be done. The new fascism only means it has dropped its pretenses, to constitutional or legal rules or limits to the will to power of the capital bosses it serves. They exist for the powerful when useful them to, and otherwise were an illusion, which is now being dropped. What our government is doing, like what Mangione did, is a symptom. We must read the symptoms clearly. They are clear on their surface; you only need to pay attention to what is actually done and said. The media reports and commentaries exist to obscure this. The capitalist state in peacetime, which fascism abrogates with a war on its people (one they are expected to affirm against some isolable enemy), uses its discourses, ‘ideology’, to obscure what is being done. When the gloves come off life is more dangerous, but you can at least see more clearly who are your enemies and your friends.

There is not only lethal violence, or harmful violence, the kind that kills or does great harm to persons, bodily or mentally. There is also symbolic violence. They punish people by attributing this to us. But we engage in a violence against ways of thinking every make or think about an artwork that makes a difference, because in making sense of our experience we are also criticizing the way things are. We are violating people's normal spiritual peace of mind, which is connected to their property interests and the ability to maintain them, and we should. Protesters engage in symbolic violence, which is militant without being military, as it is 'non-violent' in the usual sense. Since the invention of theater in democratic Athens real characters have been murdered in full view on a stage. One man, after having been exposed as an unwanted child and threatened by a tyrant he rashly struck back at like the young Moses, became filled with anguish when he discovered that he had become a tyrant himself and that he was bound to the state tyranny by ties of kinship suggesting murder and incest. He tore out his own eyes. On a screen you would see blood. Now these things happen as commercial advertisements, and for what? But there is a real art of symbolic violence. Though to be fair to theater, it stages oppositions and invites questioning thought. Staging conflict and provoking questioning thought is the non-violent ‘violence’ we need. For the record: I would prefer Luigi had used a cherry pie.

People have long debated and will continue to what means are appropriate and best to express and encourage "political and social opposition." But as the government acknowledges, that is a detail. Opponents of the system will be accused of "terrorism" anyway. Some people think it is "violent" to raise your voice. The most important thing is the opposition.