Murderers, All
Still from footage of ICE Officer Jonathan Ross, 37, killing Renee Good
This week, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) killed another person. Renee Good was attempting to observe and document the crimes of this occupying force before she was brutally murdered, only a few blocks from where George Floyd was executed. Her death was not a private tragedy: it was recorded and disseminated as a gruesome spectacle. It was a public execution designed to terrorize the American population. She is not an isolated statistic. In 2025 alone, 31 people died in ICE custody. Thousands more were imprisoned and violently severed from their families.
The President has declared all immigration to be against American interests. He openly mocks members of the LGBT community, and takes pride in his vile history of sexual harassment and assault of women. He, and Congress, are proudly dismantling our already meager welfare state. Millions will descend into homelessness; millions more will be interred in the living tomb of medical debt. As the safety net is shredded, hope for an escape from poverty becomes a relic of the past, and another generation of children is relegated to the slow violence of hunger.
America has become the herald of the Four Horsemen. Most visibly, we have brought war. The state violence at home follows state violence abroad–the "special military operation" authorized by Donald Trump in Venezuela, which claimed the lives of over 80 Venezuelan and Cuban civilians and soldiers. Under the current regime, the American military machine has exported death across at least three continents.
Yet even this is dwarfed by the industrial-scale slaughterhouse that Gaza has become. No moral depravity has been deemed too great to obstruct American geopolitical goals. It is American munitions that Israel utilizes to liquidate a nation, and it is American diplomatic "cover" that shields the genocide from international consequence. Behind the brutal architecture of this genocide lies the cold world of American intelligence assets, who coolly let pass all types of horrors in the name of geopolitical interest.
The horseman of Plague finds its champion in Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and the "MAHA" (Make America Healthy Again) movement. For millennia, diseases like measles claimed the lives of millions of children until human labor and scientific inquiry mastered these pathogens through vaccination. Now, these people drag us back toward a past of needless misery. They are healthy, fit, and convinced of their own invulnerability, possessing a callous indifference for those too weak to survive their "natural" order. This is the "survival of the fittest" elevated to a state religion.
Hunger, too, is a policy choice. Beyond those starving in Gaza and those whose food stamps have been revoked domestically, Elon Musk and the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) have eviscerated USAID. USAID has been criticized in the past as a front for American intelligence and an instrument of soft power used to bribe puppets and put pressure on–and even overthrow–recalcitrant governments. But the only difference today is that the imperialism will continue unabated, escalating its violence, while the facade–and the aid–vanishes completely. The "spooks" will remain on the payroll; only the 14 million people reliant on food and medicine will perish.
These are 14 million individuals with unique hopes and dreams, snuffed out by a billionaire who treats governance like a game of digital sabotage. The leaders of the American state could easily preserve these lives, yet they choose the scythe.
They are death on a pale horse.
They are murderers, all.
A classical Marxist critique might initially dismiss this framing as "moralizing." By cataloging this parade of horrors, I am seemingly ascribing to individual actors (the Trumps, the Musks, the RFKs) a personal responsibility to act "ethically" and judging them for their failure to do so. A rigid materialist analysis might argue that these figures are merely the inevitable outgrowths of the system they manage. To analyze American imperialism through this lens is to see a machine constructed over a century to rule the globe. We have built a massive military-industrial base that is structurally incentivized to seek conflict. We possess a vast inventory of planes, guns, and bombs; if they are not utilized, the realization of surplus value is halted. If Raytheon or Boeing ceases to be profitable, the entire economic apparatus shudders. How can one blame a CEO for "doing their job" when that job is simply the maintenance of an abstract structure called capital? In this view, mass death is not a failure of the system, but a sign of its optimal functioning. To avoid wasting "taxpayer money," the bombs must be dropped; they must kill to justify the next contract.
The general thesis of the Marxist critique of moralism is that when a system produces cruelty as a primary output, it is myopic to fixate on individual depravity rather than the incentive structures of the system. Objective class struggle must be the foundation of our organization. The ruling class will always synthesize a morality to justify its predations—whether it is the "Protestant work ethic" or the claim that wealth is a divine blessing. If they must steal oil or liquidate a population, they will find a God or a "natural law" to sanctify the theft. As Marx and Engels articulated, the dominant ideas of any epoch are simply the ideal expression of the dominant material relationships. If accumulation necessitates the destruction of the welfare state and the abandonment of the "unproductive" poor to disease, a philosophy of "Malthusian efficiency" will emerge to validate it. We must show the proletariat that they are being crushed by the weight of capital and its worshippers. They will kill you—via an insurance algorithm, a withheld ration, or a drone strike. We must break capital before it finishes the work of cutting us all up.
While I accept this materialist logic, I find it humanly and strategically unsatisfactory. Consider the hellish Caribbean slave plantations owned by the notoriously violent–even for the standards of the time– Thomas Thistlewood. The brutality he inflicted, rape, murder, and industrial-scale torture, was nothing short of demonic. The bodies of the enslaved were commodified in the most literal sense, measured and discarded like livestock. The enslaved were abused without end. A hypothetical "supermoralist" would focus on Thistlewood’s specific sadistic inventions. The Marxist explanation, on the other hand, would instead claim that his actions were perfectly aligned with and merely the logical outgrowth of chattel slavery. If a planter is to avoid bankruptcy in a competitive global sugar market, they must extract maximum labor through any means necessary. This creates an incentive structure where cruelty is the only rational business strategy. There is no "good" slave owner, we will confidently hear, there are only those who successfully extract profit and those who fail.
Yet, this truth does not negate the role of agency. The international proletariat is not the only group which has a determined consciousness: it is recognized that they may carry out their international revolution–or that they may allow themselves to be exploited, abandoned, and pitted against one another until society collapses. They have agency. So, too, does the bourgeoisie, in fact, to a much more significant degree. They may, have, and will choose to do what they please. Thistlewood chose his methods. He spent his leisure time inventing new forms of degradation. No one forced the mid-level bureaucrats of the Third Reich to streamline the Holocaust. No one forces a contemporary executive at UnitedHealth to implement an AI program designed to deny life-saving coverage to the elderly. These are choices made by individuals who have accepted the role of executioner.
We require a more sophisticated understanding of the "relative autonomy" of the individual within the system. As Louis Althusser noted, while the economic base is "determinant in the last instance," the political and ideological superstructures possess their own internal logic and "effectivity." The individuals running ICE or the boardrooms of the military-industrial complex are not mere automatons. They are active participants who often find a perverse identity (and even pleasure) in the execution of their class role. To ignore the individual is to ignore the psychological reality of contemporary capitalism. When Musk cuts aid to 14 million people, he is not just balancing a ledger; he is a believer in a specific ideology, of White nationalism and right-wing extremism, that guides his actions and turns the abstract structural necessity of exploitation into a garish celebration of violence and deprivation.He is committing an act of terror, intended to demoralize the global working class. No one is forcing him to do this. This violence is both a structural necessity and a chosen psychological imposition. By naming the murderers, we give a face to a system that would otherwise remain an abstract, untouchable ghost.
The dehumanization required to operate an ICE facility or a drone program is a process of alienation so profound it severs the perpetrator from their own shared humanity. The bureaucrat who signs off on starvation has become a biological machine for capital. But this alienation is a daily choice. Every day they walk into work, they choose to separate themselves again from the human collective: they gleefully go down the elevator. Every day, they choose to be a murderer.
But what about the ICE agents’ rent? What about their medical bills? Their family? Capitalism is indeed a prison, and we are all but prisoners, even the wardens, administrators, and guards. All of us are stuck on this planet alone. And yet, that doesn’t erase that there are wardens and there are prisoners. It does not change that the warden lords over the prisoner, confines him to solitary confinement, strips him of his humanity–and that he almost invariably enjoys doing so. And nothing shows this more than the simple fact that, at any point, the option to surrender the position of dominance and throw in your lot with the rest of us inmates is always available. They do not take that option of their own volition.
Further, as a matter of strategy, the purely structural argument abandons the field of human emotion. If you were to speak to a slave, would you tell them not to blame the master or the foreman? Would you suggest they save their anger only for the "socio-economic system of slavery" because their tormentors' hands were forced by the abstract pressures of the market? Even if they agreed with the theory, would it drive them towards revolt?--could it drive anyone to revolt? Is it the abstract knowledge of the system, or the visceral memory of being separated from their children and whipped by a specific man? This is the core of agitation. The acts of cruelty must not be sanitized as mere "symptoms." They are the fruit and function of the system, and they must be the centers of gravity around which we organize. To name names is not to abandon systemic analysis; it is to acknowledge that emotional intervention requires a human target.
So, let us name names: in the first place, the ICE officer who shot and killed Renee Good must be arrested immediately and prosecuted. Despite the theatrics of the conservatives–and the blatant lie by the President that the officer was injured–it is clear that he was not in any imminent danger, was not harmed, and had no justification to fire multiple times into the side window of a mother’s SUV. The stock of ICE is drawn exclusively from the far-right; it is a legally-sanctioned, modern equivalent to organizations like the Proud Boys. These people are not trained. More importantly, they have deep hate in their hearts. Giving these people masks and guns is State support for Right-wing militia violence, not law enforcement.
His name is Jonathan Ross. He is 37 years old. This is not his first legal troubles as an ICE agent: he is “the same officer who was dragged and injured by a fleeing driver in a separate incident last year,” according to the Star Tribune. He must be arrested.
There is Todd Lyons, the acting director of ICE who has devoted his entire career to deportation. There is the deputy director and long-time associate of Kristi Noem, Madison Sheahan. There is the head of ICE’s deportation branch, Marcos Charles. And there are many more. They must be arrested.
It is difficult to imagine any solution to the current predicament other than complete dismantling of ICE and Nuremberg-esque trials for each of its directors and agents. And it would be remiss to not mention further that Donald Trump, J. D. Vance, Stephen Miller, and the rest of our modern Fascists should similarly be prosecuted and persecuted and driven out of national life.
Murderers must be dealt with as murderers, even when they are elected to high office.
Our communist movement must be capable of reacting to every manifestation of capitalist murder, no matter where it appears. We must take all these manifestations and produce a true picture of capitalism, in all its strange gratuity. We do not name the murderers to exonerate the system; we name them to make the system's crimes felt in the gut of every worker. The Four Horsemen are not supernatural: they are the logistical outcomes of private property and the nation-state. War is the competition for markets; Plague is the commodification of health; Hunger is the artificial scarcity of price; Death is the final enforcement of the border.
When we call them murderers, we are not engaging in liberal moralizing, we are issuing a radical indictment of a class that has forfeited its right to exist. Behind every "market correction" is a homeless family. Behind every "security measure" is a dead Renee Good. We must recognize the system that made the axe, but we must never forget who chose to swing it, and who it felled. The former are the guardians of a dying world; the latter, martyrs of a world yet to come. The names of those killed by the systemic, ceaseless grind of capitalism and imperialism deserve to be remembered—while those at the highest rungs have become the enemies of life itself.
They are, in the most objective and subjective sense possible, murderers, all.
