moreover the idea that Marxists have never achieved change ignores the existence of the USSR, Cuba, PRC, Vietnam, Laos, and so forth.

The Westoid Brain is incapable of appreciating AES. Everything is either Not Real Communism or a book club that contemplates their own navels indefinitely.

When the SRs in pre-1917 Russia celebrated “an end to theory” as a unifying principle and claimed “assassinations transfer power,” they were wrong. Assassinations create temporary voids taken by those closest to the spot, always another bourgeois and never a transfer. What is required is organized effort to rise above the Bourgeoisie as a class so that Capital is controlled by humanity, and not the inverse. It was the dedication to theory and organizing the working class that proved the Bolsheviks, and not the SRs, correct.

Need that vanguard party to occupy the vacuum and initiate the reforms. It can't just be stochastic violence.

That said, guys like Luigi aren't operating in a vacuum either. They are the consequence of their material conditions (in this case, excruciating back pain in a country that refuses to deliver medical care in an efficient manner). So it seems trite to get mad at a man who was subjected to these horrifying economic forces. This stochastic violence is a consequence of the contradictions in the capitalist system, not a solution to it or an avoidable symptom of it.

You have to read guys like Luigi (and Thomas Matthew Crooks and Dylan Roof, etc, etc) the same way you'd read a cork going off a bottle you just shook up. Or the hurricane that slams into your coastline after decades of climate change. Praising/villanizing Luigi for offing a CEO makes about as much sense as praising/villanizing a tornado that levels a gas plant.