Moving forward from the UHC Situation

First off, the assassin was lucky that he chose who he chose. While "terrorist" is a subjective word, and he should not be labeled as such, "individual acts of terror" rarely unite people the way that the assassination did, and the fact that it united left and right is an anomaly, not a formula. What the response to his assassination tells us, through the positive reactions to the emergence of the phrase "it's not left vs. right, it's up vs. down" is that people are becoming more and more fed up with the current state of things, and are becoming, to some level, more class conscious. While it is enticing to just go around and target more CEOs, these individual acts tend to alienate more people as they become more prevalent, and under the current system, there will always be another CEO to replace the ones that are taken out (which already is happening with UHC).

What should be done, then? The best course of action is to relate this singular event, and connect it to the broader system. A point of agreement between left and right was created, so it should be utilized to mobilize people towards a system that will remove the conditions for the position of CEO to exist in its entirety. In China, the last emperor of the Qing Dynasty was ordered to be rehabilitated as a normal citizen by the Maoist government, and he was eventually admitted back into society as a normal person because the conditions no longer existed for him to become emperor again. While offing CEOs sends a message, and can rally people against the system (to an extent), a much greater achievement would be to be able to make them work a normal job once the position of CEO can never exist again.

One thing that communists really need to work on is the fact that you can't just tell working people to read theory. Most don't have the time or will to take what little free time they have to read, which also means that we can't fill every post or speech we write with jargon and tough concepts. Not every person in the USSR was a theory-reading communist, and many who supported the revolution hadn't read a word of theory, rather they supported the actions and promises the party was making. If you're going to use the UHC assassination to make a point, talk like a normal person, use normal words. I'm guilty of being full of jargon sometimes as well, but it's something I've been working on. People won't be convinced of wanting to make change if you're talking about the labor aristocracy or something; they want to hear how their life will change for the better if they support a given movement. 

The Soviets won support with slogans like "peace, land, bread!" amongst the majority of people, because that was what was needed most. We need a proper analysis of what is needed amongst the majority of people, and not to be so elitist and sectarian when we know the goals and means of our movement. Spontaneous acts like this have united people in the past, but the failure to follow the masses has been the downfall of many a communist movement, but I guess it's a lot to ask the western left to do something other than throw books at people and argue.