Propaganda of the Deed Reloaded: The Future of Radicalism

Part 1: Luigi, Luigi and a Brief History of Failures

The assassination of the United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson made headlines back in December last year. The suspect was later identified as Luigi Mangione, a good looking bourgeois American man of Italian descent. As of writing this essay, he is still in custody in New York and his trial has yet to conclude. This whole ordeal reminded me of another man of Italian descent who advocated for propaganda of the deed in the US: Luigi Galleani, the famous Italian insurrectionary anarchist. Only Mangione was not an anarchist, nor was he insurrectionary: he had a personal experience regarding American healthcare that led to him attempting this very authentic propaganda of the deed effort. It was moderately successful in my opinion, at least relative to other historical attempts at propaganda of the deed, but this was because public opinion in the US is already not favorable to privatized healthcare (and for good reason).

Luigi Galleani had a loyal anarchist following in the last 19th to early 20th century who conducted assassinations and bomb throwing activities, but successful attempts were few and far between. Even when an assassination of a boss or king was successful in that the target was killed, the “propaganda” aspect of the deed was always negligible. That is the whole point of anarchist PotD: to inspire similar acts and act as a catalyst for revolution. Most prominent anarchists at the time adhered to this idea, including Errico Malatesta and Lucy Parsons. Alexander Berkman famously tried and failed to assassinate businessman Henry Frick in 1892. Although he claimed that the success of the actual deed was of secondary importance compared to the propaganda effect, it was in the end considered a failure as no revolution or any further assassinations were inspired by Berkman’s attempt, and Berkman was treated to 14 years in jail as a result. Of course, Mangione’s deed was not anarchist in nature, but if his goal was to sway public opinion enough to eventually spark widespread societal action and get rid of privatized healthcare in the US once and for all, he, too, failed.

Another Italian insurrectionary anarchist by the name of Alfredo Bonanno, active much later than Galleani in the 1960s, also advocated for a version of PotD but without propaganda as a direct necessary goal. Instead, insurrectionary actions were seen as a continued revolution-in-progress, a sustained force of “attack” on the powers that be. However, we all know the state of Italian anarchism today. A problem that has always plagued PotD as a revolutionary act is the fact that most people are not willing to risk certain death or life in jail for assassination attempts. Additionally, it is very easy for the state and capitalist presses to frame these attacks in a negative light and turn them into propaganda not against the state but rather for it. This is why traditional PotD can only work in very niche circumstances: if the target of the assassination or the bombing is very widely hated, or if public opinion already overwhelmingly favors violent solution to societal problems—in other words, when revolution is already brewing. There was much reason to believe that worldwide revolution was brewing in the late 19th century, but it seems much less likely nowadays in developed countries. As a result, propaganda of the deed has today fallen out of fashion among even the most militant anarchist circles. Leon Trotsky and Vladimir Lenin articulated these critiques against anarchist PotD already a century ago, and as much as I hate to agree with these people, they were right.

However, I would argue that in the postmodern condition of developed countries in the 21st century, a form of revitalized “propaganda of the deed” is the necessary condition for radical change. Note that I did not use the word “revolutionary,” for I have at this point lost my faith in the concept of revolution as a means for change. This new form of PotD that I am going to propose is based on the logic of affinity as proposed by Richard Day in his book Gramsci is Dead: Anarchist Currents in the Newest Social Movements, and is a completely decentralized and diverse form of radicalism based on tactical and not ideological unity.

Part 2: Postanarchism, Anti-Politics and the Radicalism to Come

Slavoj Žižek has continuously characterized Donald Trump as a quintessentially “postmodern character,” one whose success can be attributed to his ability to fully accept the contradictory nature of right-wing philosophy and tear down the grand narratives in which the general populace was starting to lose faith anyway. Constructing a grand narrative the way traditional left wing parties and movements have been doing for the past centuries is in my view counterproductive to mass scale change in 2025. The new radical politics has to be subversive in every way: an anti-politics that reject grand narratives and the Gramscian logic of hegemony entirely.

The most urgent task for radicals is to spread tactics of direct action and community organizing, and to make sure people are on the same page regarding what needs to be done immediately. Essentially, this strategy attempts to flip the orthodox rationale of tactics stemming from ideology entirely on its head: a diverse stream of ideas can flourish based on tactics shared by decentralized affinity groups. This is in line with the spirit of anarchism as a political ethic. Of course, decentralization means tactics can be changed by any group based on their needs, but core aspects of prefigurative politics such as horizontalism and affinity group organizing need to be retained across the board. There is no Post-Marxist “empty signifier” for movements to center around, so there will necessary be a variety of movements that seek to address a variety of concerns, but they should be organized along the same principles.

The only way to do this as a libertarian movement is to demonstrate sufficiently that these principles lead to better outcomes when applied to things like direct action and community organizing. This is the new propaganda of the deed: the urgent need for anarchist radicals today to prove that their methods can lead to a better life and a better future for those around them. Traditional PotD does the exact opposite: perpetrators are hung or sentenced to incredibly long stays in prison. The average politically uninformed citizen naturally has no interest in pursuing these goals. On the other hand, authoritarian left wing movements attempt to exert enough ideological influence on the masses to create a violent political uprising. This type of propaganda rings hollow for most people today, who are too preoccupied with their own lives and mental struggled imposed by society. The new PotD, on the other hand, strives to immediately demonstrate to people effectiveness of their principles. Allowing for ideological diversity makes this process easier and also resonates with the post-leftist rejection of dogma.

I have attempted here to lay down an outline of a new propaganda of the deed, something I see as the strategic continuation to Richard Day’s conception of postanarchism, although the label “postanarchist” might not be an appropriate description of any movement that arises out of these ideas associated with it due to its explicit rejection of labels. The building of a heterogeneous assortment of movements that have in common a tactical vision of horizontalism and prefiguration is what I see as the future of radical anti-politics.