Luigi Mangione, Bruce Springsteen, Eric Hobsbawm, and “social banditry”

Bruce Springsteen has a song on his Wrecking Ball album called “Jack of All Trades.” The entire album is a critique of big capitalism in the wake of the 2008 recession. The song has a lyric that came to my mind in light of Luigi Mangione’s alleged killing of UnitedHealthCare CEO Brian Thompson. It goes like this:

The banker man grows fatter, the working man grows thin
It’s all happened before and it’ll happen again
It’ll happen again, they’ll bet your life
I’m a Jack of all trades and, darling, we’ll be alright

Now sometimes tomorrow comes soaked in treasure and blood
Here we stood the drought, now we’ll stand the flood
There’s a new world coming, I can see the light
I’m a Jack of all trades, we’ll be alright

So you use what you’ve got, and you learn to make do
You take the old, you make it new
If I had me a gun, I’d find the bastards and shoot ’em on sight
I’m a Jack of all trades, we’ll be alright
I’m a Jack of all trades, we’ll be alright

Here is the entire song:

I don’t think there is any evidence to suggest that Mangione was a Springsteen fan. But “Jack of All Trades” and Mangione’s crime fit well with Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm idea of “social banditry.” Over at Politico, Joshua Zeitz makes the connection between “social banditry” Mangione. Here is a taste:

In the wake of the early morning killing of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson in New York last week, social media lit up not with shock and horror, but something more akin to joy. “This needs to be the new norm,” posted one X user, “EAT THE RICH.” “My only question is did the CEO of United Healthcare die quickly or over several months waiting to find out if his insurance would cover his treatment for the fatal gunshot wound?” posted another.

The glee with which so many people online responded to the news of the killing shocked the consciences of politicians and pundits alike. How are we to make sense of such a grim, ugly public sentiment?

History may offer an answer.

In 1959 the Marxist scholar Eric Hobsbawm introduced the concept of “social banditry” into the historical and sociological lexicon. Social bandits were sometimes fictional, sometimes real figures who operated outside of the law and were widely revered for their efforts to mete out justice in an unjust world — like Robin Hood, the legendary English outlaw who lived in Sherwood Forest and, with his band of Merry Men, “stole from the rich and gave to the poor.”

Hobsbawm’s theory, which historians continue to debate, rested on a fairly specific Marxian analysis of power and economic relationships in agrarian societies, with bandits (or the idea of bandits) providing a form of resistance in the face of rampant inequality. But such characters transcended different geographies and times, ranging from the fictional Robin Hood in 14th century England, to brutally violent, real-life outlaws like Jesse James and Billy the Kid in the post-Civil War era United States, to Pancho Villa in early 20th century Mexico.

What happened in New York was no folk tale; it was stone-cold murder. The shooter isn’t a hero; he’s a killer. But much about the killer’s performative flair is reminiscent of the social bandits of old: Thompson’s shooter left clues about his motive on bullet casings, concealed his face with a mask and dropped a backpack stuffed with Monopoly money before zipping away on a bicycle. And when police arrested 26-year-old Luigi Mangione in connection with the killing, he was allegedly carrying a manifesto. While law enforcement is still investigating his motives, it seems clear that he was trying to send some kind of social message through the attack.

Read the rest here.

I often wonder if Springsteen has second thoughts about his lyric in “Jack of All Trades.”

I recently saw a Springsteen cover singer at a local bookstore. He played a lot of Springsteen social justice songs, including “Jack of All Trades.” He performed the entire song as written, but when he was finished he told the audience that he rewrote the “shoot the bastards on site” line because he did not believe in violence. And then he sung that section of “Jack of All Trades” with the new verse. I wish I remember the words of the rewrite, but it was good.