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