There remains, even among the most extreme twenty-first-century communists, a strong taboo against targeting human beings for violence or negligently exposing them to harm. In my estimation, this is a product of a combination of factors that include, in addition to widespread moral humanism, a theoretical understanding that capital’s particular personnel aren’t the real problem or a source of much potential leverage in the shareholder age. Kidnapping an oil executive won’t change a lot except maybe get some of his subordinates promoted, the thinking goes. (Besides, he’ll probably insist on talking your ear off about his company’s “green” initiatives the whole time.) Communists have also tended to conclude that committing acts of violence isn’t worth the risk to themselves or to their movements and organizations, either in terms of attention from the authorities or backlash from the public. However, some have at least implied that they are reconsidering the extreme tactic of assassination. “Unlike the high Cold War when politburos, parliaments, presidential cabinets and general staffs to some extent countervailed megalomania at the top, there are few safety switches between today’s maximum leaders and Armageddon. Never has so much fused economic, mediatic and military power been put into so few hands,” wrote Mike Davis before his death, in 2022.58 Contemplating the threat posed by capricious individual leaders such as Donald Trump, Vladimir Putin, Viktor Orbán, and Jair Bolsonaro, Davis suggests that we “pay homage at the hero graves of Aleksandr Ilyich Ulyanov, Alexander Berkman and the incomparable Sholem Schwarzbard”—about as close as any living left-wing American intellectual is going to get to printing “Just shoot the bastards.”