Assassinations Can’t Change The World - Only People Power Can

At some point everyone has pondered the questions: if you could go back in time and kill Hitler would you do it? Would it matter?

The Russian revolutionary Lenin once said that lone assassins were “liberals with bombs”. The people who assassinated Tsar Alexander II in 1881 did not remove Tsarism; they merely removed the person of the Tsar. Meet the new Tsar, same as the old Tsar. The system remained the same.

Similarly, liberals who think voting for one leader rather than another can change capitalism differ only from the assassins in their chosen method - ballots rather than bombs. What was needed for systemic change was a revolutionary movement; the leaders of Narodnaya Volya (The People’s Will) who had assassinated Alexander, were not that movement. Within weeks they had nearly all been rounded up and hanged.

Individual acts of terror hope to persuade the ruling class to offer concessions. They are “liberals with bombs!” Revolution though must transform the whole system.

It would take another two generations before a Russian revolutionary movement would grow to the point where Tsar Nicholas discovered he was powerless to command his armies to repress the masses demanding “bread and peace" on the streets in 1917.

It was not assassination that brought down tsarism. It was a revolutionary mass working class movement - led by socialists. Nicholas’ eventual assassination during the civil war that followed the 1917 revolution was nothing more than a piece of grisly theatre; a sideshow that had no bearing on real events.

Speaking of grisly theatre: at the time of writing (September 2024) Donald Trump has just survived a second and a third assassination attempt. Would it have made any difference had either been successful?

The simple truth is that replacing Biden with Harris, or for that matter, replacing the shell of Biden with Trump (presuming he survives until the election) would not have made any difference.

It is plain to see that the conditions for mass working class revolutionary struggle do not exist in the USA at this time. In the future they will. But assassination or no assassination, the United States in 2024 is an empire far more violent and destructive than was the Russian one in 1881.

Their corporations span the world, dodging tax, setting monopolies for products and services that poison our bodies, minds and environment and imposing terms of trade and debt-linked economic “reforms” that ruin poorer countries.

When market persuasion fails to persuade, war propaganda, sanctions, covert and overt mass murder by the largest military ever to have existed follow on with horrific predictability. The US and its gang of bullies and sycophants like Israel and the UK have murdered tens of millions of people in recent decades.

If you are reading this and thinking, if only I could go back in time and assassinate Hitler, or for that matter, Trump, know that it would make absolutely no difference. The establishment would use it to make the wheels of oppression turn more violently.

Which is not to say that we cannot change the world. It’s just that we can’t change it by assassinating or electing one man or one woman to play the role of US “president”. RTE and the Irish Times write as if the US elections matter. They matter solely as theatre.

A theatre where the candidates talk about golf handicaps, immigrants eating their pets or Taylor Swift; anything rather than actual policy. Neither of them differs on the policies that matter: they both support the imperialist, proto-nuclear war in Ukraine, they both support the genocide in Palestine, neither of them will lift a finger to provide healthcare for their own people or to check the greed of their capitalist class.

Global and Irish capitalism can and will be overcome but if you’re looking to the US elections for change, you’re looking in the wrong place. Look to the workers.