On December 31st, 2025, Keith Porter, a 43-year-old father of two in Los Angeles, was shot three times and ruthlessly murdered by an off-duty ICE agent. His “crime”? Being Black. Being alive. Owning a rifle. Celebrating the New Year.

A week later, on January 7th, nearly two thousand miles away in Minneapolis, where ICE had turned the streets into a war zone, Jonathan Ross, another ICE agent, fired three shots into the face of a 37-year-old mother of three Renee Good as she tried to flee an attempted ICE raid. Her “crime”? Defending her Black and Brown neighbors from ICE terror.

These executions, carried out by rabidly racist and sexist, Gestapo-like ICE agents, are becoming the norm under an increasingly fascist U.S. empire. They expose the violent core of capitalism, its state-sponsored terror, and the crisis of its sham democracy. After Renee’s killing, her grieving wife said it plainly: “We had whistles, but they had guns.” Her words reveal the lie that this system, built on violence, can be dismantled with non-violence, especially as fascism sharpens its claws.

Violence  and terror are not accidents, they are capitalism’s lifeblood. And as outrage spreads, workers feel the urge to strike back, to deliver vengeance against the state and the capitalists who uphold it. Vigilantism—the belief that individuals can balance the scales of justice with violence is no longer marginal; it is gaining mass appeal and provoking state repression.

Millions cheered when Luigi Mangione killed the United Healthcare CEO in late 2024, yet premiums soared, and Trump’s $30 billion “Big Beautiful” heist funneled funds from healthcare to finance ICE raids carried out by would-be Nazi assassins, like the one who murdered Good. Tyler Robinson murdered MAGA influencer Charlie Kirk live as Kirk was about to utter racist words about Black lives. In a copycat-style killing, Robinson, reportedly in a relationship with his transgender roommate, engraved Catch Fascist and Bella Ciao on the bullet casings.

Kirk’s death was weaponized by Trump and his fascist acolytes, rallying their racist and sexist base, labeling Antifa domestic terrorists, and threatening anyone who spoke out. These acts of violence only begot more violence and repression. The killings of Kirk and the healthcare CEO are not anomalies—they are the inevitable outcome of a system that promotes pacifism while normalizing horror, fetishizing individual heroes, and breeding cynicism about collective struggle, keeping us weak and divided.

The dead end of vigilantism in a failing system

As U.S. domination over global capitalist markets faces competition from Russian and Chinese bosses, workers feel the squeeze. Finance capital’s drive for profit inevitably rolls back the gains workers have fought and died for. Capitalism’s pathologies can only be solved by building a mass communist party; there are no quick fixes to the attacks on the working class.

From Superman to Batman to Paw Patrol, vigilante icons teach workers from infancy to valorize individualism over collective action. No matter the superhero, their role in capitalist propaganda is to “save the day” because the masses are supposedly too weak to save themselves. Many cheered Luigi Mangione’s assassination of the United Healthcare CEO a year ago, but killing one CEO did nothing to challenge the parasitic nature of health insurance—a finance capitalist system that extracts far more than it returns. Premiums have soared. Attacks on healthcare and social services have intensified globally, as bosses, under pressure from military buildup and capitalist competition, cut back gains workers have literally died to achieve.

John Brown set it off, but the masses abolished slavery

Much like the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution in China, the abolitionist movement and Civil War in the United States, including the militant actions of John Brown,  point to important lessons around the necessity for multiracial, collective action to secure long-term gains for the working class. The militant abolitionist John Brown, with a small band of fearless freedom fighters against slavery, orchestrated a raid on the U.S. military arsenal at Harper’s Ferry in 1859, undoubtedly escalating the decline of the racist system of chattel slavery in the country and triggering more quickly what would become the Civil War. But it took the concerted effort of an organized military force and the death of 600,000 soldiers, black and white, to bring about the end of that retrograde, backward mode of production. The main lesson about Nat Turner, John Brown, Harriet Tubman and the dozens of other brave souls who stood up militantly for the overthrow of slavery, is that their efforts could not be realized until the movement became fully mass in political scope and was backed by an army.  

Conclusion: Confidence in the working class is key

Progressive Labor Party (PLP) condemns vigilante violence in any form.  As one worker said astutely, “when many voices become one for political power in the right direction we can make change.”  Communists believe that the right direction is not voting, not adding more Black and brown or “left” politicians to office, and certainly not assassinations, bombings or other acts of adventurism.   We must eliminate production of resources for profit. Hundreds of students from Columbia University and beyond faced jail time and expulsion from college in the name of fighting imperialist genocide in 2023. They followed the lead of countless doctors and journalists across Gaza who worked in conditions of utter terror as bombs reigned down over them to save the lives of unarmed workers–mainly children–and reveal these atrocities to the world.  Millions of workers have turned out in Italy in the past few months in general strikes to protest the relentless cutbacks in wages and social services as bosses divert funds for military buildup and eventual war. And let’s not forget the hundreds of thousands of workers who poured into the streets all over the world during the Covid-19 outbreak against the George Floyd racist police assassination, as millions more were left at the peril of a deadly virus that the bosses chose not to contain for months and months. 

These masses are the heroes of our class. But in spite of all of these heroic deeds, the genocide against workers in Palestine rages, and workers across Italy and worldwide continue to face austerity cutbacks.  Each struggle teaches our class new lessons about the limits of reforming capitalism, but we need an organized party that is leading these struggles and fighting for more than just militant reforms.  Progressive Labor Party is not a savior to the working class. We do not call for workers to grab guns and shoot any boss they see–or their traitorous thugs in blue or camouflage. But we do understand that armed workers, backed by a revolutionary military of soldiers and officers, led by our party, is a fundamental ingredient for our class to free itself from the grips of this current system and establish something exponentially smarter, healthier and better for the human race.  And this collective process is the ultimate heroism.