Meir A. | Red Phoenix correspondent | New York–
Mass shootings have become such a common fixture in our headlines and newscasts that the grieving process has become exceedingly short, and the national discussion surrounding each individual event is shallow. The July attack on a New York City office building is the third case in recent memory of a lone gunman acting out of apparent desperation in response to systemic failures. While mainstream media outlets center their narrative on the Park Ave NFL offices, they conveniently omit the fact that Blackstone, one of the nation’s largest investment firms and a corporate landlord which owns residential rental properties in the suspect’s hometown, is also housed in that building.
On July 28, Shane Tamura, 27, is said to have traveled from Las Vegas to New York City with the intention of assaulting the NFL offices at 345 Park Avenue, according ABC News. It has been alleged that Tamura was aiming to attack the NFL offices within the building due to resentment over his recently having been diagnosed with Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy (CTE), but had entered the wrong elevators accidentally. This assertion has been predicated on Tamura’s history as a football player, at the high-school level. A note, allegedly discovered in his wallet, “repeatedly said he was sorry and asked that his brain be studied for CTE,” according to the police department. To much of the American public, who have become jaded from the regularity of these events, these facts seem cut and dry.
However, Luigi Mangione has already shown us that alleged motivations of a given suspect do not determine the totality of an event’s sociopolitical content. In a country where medical bills can feasibly lead to impoverishment, a diagnosis can be leaden with stress and resentment for anybody. Of course, this does not justify indiscriminate and senseless violence, but it reminds us that these violent outbursts come from somewhere. To continue as a society in our mantric condemnations without sufficiently addressing the systemic failures that resulted in this outcome means obscuring reality in the interests of the capitalist class, it means participating in the scapegoating of individuals for sicknesses that capitalism engenders, which only capitalism could’ve created.
Coverage of the victims has remained suspiciously vague, centering upon a series of beatitudes that always accompany public tragedies. In much of the coverage, Blackstone executive Wesley Lepatner has been wrongfully described by MSNBC and AP News as an “employee” of the investment firm, conjuring an image of lowly secretaries who were caught in the crossfire. Simultaneously, building security officer Aland Etienne, and an unnamed employee who were killed during the shooting have received little coverage by comparison. Instead, the lions-share of the media attention has gone to Officer Didarul Islam, a Bangladeshi immigrant whose pregnant wife has now been widowed, in an attempt to preemptively control the narrative surrounding the shooting.
Traumatized by the public reaction to figures like Luigi Mangione and Rodney Hinton, the capitalist media outlets are reeling to curate reality according to bourgeois interests.
From day one, the focus of the media coverage centered upon the NFL. The shooting had occurred “in the building of the NFL offices” according to AP News, or otherwise “in a Midtown Manhattan office tower,” and one often needs to read carefully to find that the Blackstone office was involved at all.
Blackstone, one of the largest investment firms in the nation, is purposely excluded from the majority of coverage because financial capitalists have always taken great pains to insulate themselves from scrutiny and accountability. There is a world of specialized tax designations intended for the sole purpose of rendering financial relationships opaque, or shrouding funding sources behind bureaucratic red tape. In fact, despite having played an especially outsized role in the inflation of national housing costs, and possessing a virtual monopoly on rental properties in several cities on the Eastern seaboard, a person who isn’t putting concerted effort into staying informed about politics or economics probably hasn’t heard of Blackstone at all.
In fact, the nature of bourgeois media is obscurantist. It severs the connections between entities and events, displaying them in absence of the historical context that would enable a person to draw educated conclusions from them.
“In 2024, amid a crushing affordability crisis that shot homelessness up 18% to a record high, forcing more than 770,000 Americans to appear visibly homeless on one of the coldest nights of the year, and millions to endure homelessness annually, Blackstone moved to raise the rent by double.” (Invisible People)
Particularly notable for the purposes of this case, Blackstone possesses significant property holdings in Las Vegas, including the Bellagio and the Cosmopolitan, as well as a number of residential rental properties. The opacity of professional relationships in the world of finance-capitalism means plausible deniability, but it can be assumed that Lepatner played a pivotal role in these maneuvers. Officer Islam was another NYPD thug, guilty of the same crimes against the masses any law officer engages in: like stop-and-frisking impoverished residents of New York City and breaking up their picket lines, neither his death or immigrant status can change that. Confronted with the optics of these “victims,” they have chosen to mislead us instead with appeals to emotion, along with platitudes.
The first requirement for building a bolshevized party is rigorous, scientific examination of our historical situation.
Toward this end, it should be emphasized that the Urban Guerilla struggle of the 1960s-70s began with rudimentary, disjointed, and clandestine experimentation as well. Sam Melville, the Weather Underground Organization, the Symbionese Liberation Army, along with several individual police officer assassinations, carried out by AALA members – like Black Panther Field Marshal D. Cox – set a process in motion which would end with the BLA, the May 19th Communist Organisation, the FALN, and George Jackson Brigade. These clandestine actions demonstrated the weaknesses in imperialist anti-insurgency protocol, and subsequent guerilla actions build practically upon these possibilities. Regardless of their original intentions, figures like Mangione, Tamura, and Hinton have played a similar historical role to Sam Melville and his cohort. The alleged actions of these three men should not be considered revolutionary in isolation (in certain cases they cannot even be considered progressive in content) nor should the accused be lionized as such, but these violent outbursts will again demonstrate limited possibilities for underground, and illegal modes of struggle.
The left-wing political bias of early, clandestine illegal struggle in the 1960s USA was a unique consequence of the political environment throughout the nation, and the world as a whole, at the time. However, a more recent and organized attack, allegedly executed by a group of 10 people at the Alvarado, Texas I.C.E. Facility, in addition to Elias Rodriguez’s attack on Washington’s Israeli Embassy, demonstrate the qualitative change already taking place in this direction today.
We currently lack the information necessary to make final conclusions concerning the motivations of the shooter. News stories that address the event are universally sure to distance themselves from any hard claims using qualifying language, setting the stage for the official story to change. In the meanwhile, most of the column space is taken up by appeals to Lepatner’s children or Officer Islam’s immigrant status. This has been done purposely to tug at the heart-strings of working-class Americans. This story highlights, as clearly as possible, the need of the bourgeoisie to co-opt, to subvert, and to spin the most simple facts into a narrative that centers capitalist interests and property. They don’t want anybody with seditious intentions to get ideas.
The responsibility of proletarian media outlets, especially one that is operating under the dictatorship of an imperialist state which is descending into explicit fascist domination, is to expose the historical drivers behind our struggle. Capitalism can no longer provide the constant revolutionization of productive capacity, bourgeois culture has stagnated and continues to live by recycling its own history feats in the form of commodities, and in the absence of an ideological justification the forces of reaction have emerged to re-impose imperialist control through force alone.
Individualized assassinations and personal vendetta cannot ever seriously be transformed into a tool for liberation. However, we must learn from the increased radicality of the masses, demonstrated by the response to these events, and provide a meaningful alternative to reactive outbursts and consumerism. This means creating and providing communal infrastructures for collective problem solving, but it also means concretizing and preparing the capacity for underground work that stands outside of the approved, liberal-democratic possibilities of political struggle. A mock invincibility covers the ruling class like a protective shroud, but behind it hides a colossus made entirely of clay. Our foremost responsibility rests in demonstrating this to the masses.
The Red Phoenix 