WORLD WORLDWIDE EUROPE - Uk uk United Kingdom - news journal UPDATE - (en) Uk, ACG: Charlie Kirk's Death and the Violence of Capitalism (ca, de, it, pt, tr)[machine translation]

 Below we re-publish an article from the Slow Burning Fuse website which

makes some good points. The only disagreement we have with the article
is its description of Tyler Robinson of having anti-fascist sympathies,
when it increasingly appears that he himself had far-right ideas. ----
Charlie Kirk is dead - the founder of Turning Point USA, the man who
spent a decade railing against "cultural Marxism," against students,
against queer people, against striking workers, was shot in the neck
while speaking on stage in Utah. He bled out in front of a live
audience. His supporters rushed to frame him as a martyr to the cause of
"free speech." His enemies were split. Some openly celebrated, others
worried about what this would mean for the left. The state, predictably,
moved fast, hunting down the shooter, promising "justice," and, quietly,
beginning to roll out the familiar rhetoric of law and order.

 From an anarcho-communist perspective, this moment is not simply about
one man's death. It is about the world that produced both Charlie Kirk
and the man who killed him. It is about capitalism's ever-present
violence, about the state's monopoly on force, about the way political
antagonisms are escalating into open bloodshed. It is about what happens
when a society soaks every interaction in hierarchy, coercion,
alienation, and humiliation, and then acts shocked when someone pulls a
trigger.

Liberal commentators talk about this shooting as if it were some
grotesque rupture, an alien act intruding on an otherwise peaceful
democracy. But anarchists have always understood that violence is not
the exception, but it is the norm. It is the background noise of class
society. Wage labour itself is enforced by violence. If you refuse to
work, you starve, or you are policed, or imprisoned. The entire edifice
of private property rests on threat and force.

What happened in Utah was not some unthinkable aberration. It was simply
a more direct expression of the same violence that Kirk himself defended
whenever he sneered at striking teachers, whenever he called for police
crackdowns, whenever he praised ICE raids or US imperial wars. This is
not to say that his murder should be celebrated but we cannot ignore
that Kirk was an architect of ideological violence, a man who used his
vast platform to normalise oppression, to harden hearts against the
poor, the racialised, the queer, the working class.

The young man who pulled the trigger, Tyler James Robinson, was not some
cartoon villain but a product of this same society. He reportedly etched
anti-fascist slogans onto his bullets - "Hey fascist! Catch!" and
referenced the song "Bella Ciao". This was not a random act of chaos but
a consciously political one, shaped by internet culture, meme wars, the
long churn of ideological conflict in the US.

The question is not whether Robinson was "mad" or "evil." The question
is why so many people are pushed to a point where death seems like the
only answer - death of their enemies, or their own. The United States is
a pressure cooker, inequality at historic highs, unionisation at
historic lows, workers wrung out by debt and precariousness, housing
unaffordable, healthcare out of reach, the climate collapsing around
them. Add to that the steady drumbeat of reactionary politics telling
them that everything progressive is a threat, that every trans person is
a predator, that every migrant is an invader. Add the liberal insistence
that the system is basically sound, that incremental reform will save
us, and you get a generation primed for despair and rupture.

Make no mistake: the state will use Kirk's death as fuel for repression.
The calls for "unity" and "peace" will quickly be translated into
expanded surveillance, more police powers, harsher penalties for
protest. Every left-wing student meeting, every antifascist march, every
union rally will be painted as a potential terror cell. Liberal
centrists will join hands with the far right to demand calm, civility,
and security, meaning in reality docility, silence, and obedience.

This is why anarchists must be clear. We do not call for individual acts
of assassination, not because the powerful do not deserve to be
challenged, but because such acts almost always strengthen the very
machinery we are trying to dismantle. "Propaganda of the deed" has a
long history in anarchism, and it has taught us its lesson that isolated
acts of violence are easily co-opted by the state, turned into excuses
to round up organisers, to close down radical spaces, and to criminalise
dissent.

It is easy, in moments like this, to slip into the language of
vengeance, to say that Kirk "had it coming," that this was karmic
justice. But anarcho-communism must offer something deeper than revenge.
Our task is to imagine a world where even our enemies would no longer
need to be our enemies, a world where Charlie Kirk would never have been
turned into a mouthpiece for billionaire culture warriors, where Tyler
Robinson would never have been left alienated and furious enough to
kill. It means to understand the forces that shaped these two men and to
work to abolish those forces. It means building a society where no one
is driven to the point where they believe the only way to change the
world is with a sniper rifle.

The task now is to organise. Not to retreat into moralising, not to
throw up our hands and declare the whole thing a tragedy beyond
comprehension, and certainly not to let the state monopolise the
narrative. We must build the structures that make violence less likely
not through pacifist sermons but through concrete mutual aid, through
tenant unions, workplace committees, solidarity funds, free clinics,
radical education.

The energy that drives someone like Robinson must be redirected into
collective struggle, into mass direct action, into building a world that
makes the Charlie Kirks of the future irrelevant. A single bullet cannot
abolish capitalism. But a general strike might. A wave of rent strikes
might. A mass refusal to fight the state's wars, to pay its debts, to
obey its bosses, might.

Charlie Kirk's death is a symptom, not a solution. The solution is what
we build together in our workplaces, our neighbourhoods, our movements.
The solution is solidarity. The solution is collective power. The
solution is a world where life is worth living for everyone, not just
the wealthy, not just the loudest reactionaries with a stage. That means
ending the economic order that requires poverty, ending the state that
enforces it, ending the ideologies that keep us divided. It means
dismantling the apparatus of violence so thoroughly that no one ever
again thinks they need to pick up a gun to be heard.

If we are serious about ending political violence, we must be serious
about ending capitalism. Anything less is just managing the symptoms.

theslowburningfuse@riseup.net

https://www.anarchistcommunism.org/2025/09/14/charlie-kirks-death-and-the-violence-of-capitalism/
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