Following every one of the recent political assassinations in the United States, or attempts, there has been much speculation as to the motives of assailants — whether Tyler Robinson, Thomas Crooks who attempted to assassinate Donald Trump, Vance Boelter who murdered Democratic legislators in Minnesota, or others. These include rapid-fire claims on social media that try to label the assassins as Left or Right. While we may never fully understand a shooter’s motives, we have learned that most recent acts of violence are committed by people with a confused or incoherent ideology, if the term “ideology” can even be used.

Socialists in the United States today are faced with the challenge of how to respond to such targeted political assassinations. It may take months or years before all the facts are known — if ever. In the case of the murder of Charlie Kirk, which the Trump regime has exploited to accelerate its all-out war on political dissent, there have so far been no indications that the accused shooter had any connections to any part of the Left, or the Right for that matter.

Among the targets of recent assassinations some, like Kirk, are indubitably unsavory. The truth about their views and actions must be told. To be sure, callous and cruel responses to this killing — even from a tiny minority — are inappropriate. But this does not mean that we should erase Kirk’s actual record.

Moreover, the accelerating phenomenon of such killings requires some general reflection; this is especially necessary considering the pervasive misconceptions that exist about the relationship of socialism and violence among the U.S. public. False ideas about the aims and methods of the revolutionary Left are due not only to misinformation but also to the long and disturbing record of Stalinist regimes and numerous dictatorships masquerading as “Marxist.”

To be sure, socialists are not pacifists; we believe in the right of self-defense, and defense of others, from impending violence, especially military threats. We shed no tears for the demise of slave masters, torturers, members of lynch mobs, anti-union gun thugs, pogromists, mercenaries, and so on.

On the other hand, as an overall policy, socialists should clearly stand against the use of murder to settle political differences, even with those holding sickening and dangerous ideas.

This is not only for the traditional Marxist reasons, frequently stated over the last hundred years, that such acts are politically counter-productive, provoking repression and creating martyrdom for the Right, and a substitute for the self-activity of the working class. It is also because, unlike the profiteers running the United States, socialists do not devalue human life and instrumentalize people.

We do not gamble with the living, as sacrificial collateral damage, en route to some hoped-for goal — such as imagining that a dramatic violent act will actually stop the advance of the Right or is even a step toward socialism.

We should also regard targeted assassination of people on grounds of their differing ideas as incompatible with the kind of socialist ethics necessary to the kind of society we wish to see. That means ethics not as ahistorical, individualistic, and moralistic, but as the realization of socialist-humanist values that are rooted in the real conditions of humanity in class society and their potential for liberation through socialism.

The Against the Current Editors