Note: This piece was submitted to People’s World ahead of the ‘Justice for J6’ rally on September 18, 2021. It was rejected out-of-hand. You must decide whether it is threatening enough to deserve such the censor’s lash.
The January 6, 2021 rally was the closest ‘the people’ have come to toppling the capitalist government in half a century. Photo: Samuel Corum/Getty Images.
While few would have prepared ahead of time for the unexpected events of Wednesday, January 6, everyone seems to have learned the lesson ahead of Saturday, September 18. This is the date scheduled for the Justice for J6 Rally, organized by former Trump campaign staffer, Matt Braynard, to protest the treatment of the over 600 individuals charged for their participation in the rally at the Capitol building back in January. This weekend’s partygoers allege that their predecessors are being mistreated in custody and are the victims of an ongoing political saga over the legacy of Donald Trump’s presidency. While other rallies are planned across the U.S., the Department of Homeland Security—who has been preparing for this rally as if it were a terrorist attack—only expects about 700 to roll into Washington, D.C. Still, though, the emergency atmosphere blankets the capital like a thick fog.
Interestingly enough, Donald Trump himself is urging his followers to stay away, as he believes the event is a “setup.” Many, including Republican strategist John Feehery, know that the Democrats will turn this event and its predecessor into a vehicle for midterm success in a year’s time. Whether the setup is deliberate remains to be seen, but anyone at least a little suspicious of the Democrats must know that they won’t let such good optics go to waste.
And yet, the Left seems all-too-willing to follow the Democrats into battle against the ‘fascist’ J6-ers. The Left has been the loudest in condemning the original riot and anything that smells of Donald Trump. But we are no closer to revolution because of it. On the contrary, it appears that the Left has not taken advantage of the opportunity Trump represented, namely the chance to finally break with the Democrats and organize the working class independently. Thus, it appears that the Left will miss out on the opportunity that Justice for J6 represents too. Instead of stepping up to lead the working class, including those segments of it that voted for Trump, the Left will alienate itself all the more, severing the only link it has to both its revolutionary past and the future that all of humanity desperately needs.
But it need not be this way. Perhaps it is already too late to learn from January 6, but we still could learn from September 18. We might use this opportunity to build an independent working class party that peels the working class off from the two wings of the capitalist party that currently monopolizes its politicality. But to do so, we would first need to understand the contemporary Right and Left as two fragments of the original Left, the revolutionary bourgeois tradition of the Enlightenment, instead of as two existential enemies.
Dialectical dance partners
The Right may not be our friend, but it is made up in part of our class brethren. And no worker, regardless of how reactionary their current politics, is so deplorable as to be unorganizable. Everyone, even Donald Trump, deserves the chance at rehumanization that socialism promises. This is the true lesson to be learned from September 18.
Bayard Rustin, the great Civil Rights leader, once wrote in a small 1970 Harper’s Magazine article that, “Whatever there is of revolution today, in any meaningful sense of the term, is coming from the Right.” How could he make this claim in 1970 of all years? He was keenly aware of the fact that the revolutionary movement he helped build liquidated itself into the Democratic Party. It did so not by the idiosyncratic failures of its leaders but by the necessary failure of its political economy. In other words, because the Civil Rights and later Black Power movements reacted against the changing dynamics of capitalism as the postwar boom faded into neoliberalism, instead of dialectically grasping their potential, the Left was unable to be as revolutionary as capitalism is. Socialism is only possible on the basis of capitalism, lest we forget.
While the Right by no means embodies this spirit, it nevertheless preserves a revolutionary fragment of the same heritage as Marxism. Today we tend to obscure the fact that the contemporary Right is a far cry from the pre-Civil War Right. Before that war completed the liquidation of feudalism into capitalism, conservatism truly opposed the liberalism of the modern age. Conservatives sought to undo the French Revolution and preserve the divine rights of monarchs over and above the revolutionary demand to allow people to own their own labor. But once liberalism morphed into Bonapartism, and the capitalist class fell from revolutionary grace and became the sad worshippers of the status quo, conservatism too changed. Conservatism succumbed to the Enlightenment and aligned its virtue with the individual rights unleashed by the workers’ movement itself. Even more so after World War I, conservatism came to hold onto the civil-liberties half of the radical bourgeois heritage. Conservatism became defined by its devotion and no longer its opposition to the revolutionary tradition sparked by the American, Haitian, and French revolutions.
Now obviously the Left, expressed most lucidly in Marxism, also claims this heritage as its own. Or at least it used to. Marx, Lenin, and even Mao all understood themselves as furthering, not undoing, the project that the bourgeoisie began but were unable to finish. As such, the workers’ movement for socialism adopted positions and tactics that would blur the lines between Left and Right as we understand the terms today. Thus, in the 1920s for example, a person who defended the 2nd Amendment, opposed the welfare state, abhorred racism and actively fought against it in their private life, and read Marx on the weekends would be understood by everyone to be a socialist. Today, the same person would probably be described as a libertarian, not to mention off-limits for any erstwhile leftist organizer. This fact shows how far the Left has regressed from the high point of its world-historic potential.
Trumpism as the Left
What does any of that have to do with the J6-ers? Far from being fascists, they are simply workers whose desire for revolutionary change manifests as Trumpism. In other words, in the absence of a strong leftist party confident in its class analysis, the working class will express its revolutionary potential in reactionary ways. Trump’s regime, by the way, was so attractive because it represented the only segment of the ruling class that embraced the ongoing transition out of neoliberalism. Neoliberalism is falling apart all around us as we speak, yet the Republican and Democratic mainstream both tried to coerce their voting bases into denying this. Trump saw it and said it plainly, and for that he earned the enmity of the ruling class and the adoration of the working class, who at least has the good sense to deplore neoliberalism. The tragedy of Trump is not his individual repulsiveness but rather the fact that he promised so much change that he was structurally incapable of delivering.
But the fact remains: Trump only disappointed the working class because the Left disappointed it first. Bayard Rustin’s insight only applies in a world in which the Left has retreated from politics. The Right comes to appear revolutionary because it speaks a bastardized version of the language that the Left used to speak. It is a true shame that the Right opposes a concern for ‘freedom’ to the Left’s concern for ‘liberation,’ because the old Left used to embody a desire for both! The Left, and no one else, used to offer the only means of making sense of a world in which the collective appears hostile to the individual and vice versa. But since the old Left has shattered into a million pieces, those pieces have taken root and grown in deformed and strange ways. One of those is the Right. The Right is just the Left that doesn’t know how to become what it must. Conversely, today’s Left is also an inheritor of the old Left. But for its part, it disdains that which it nevertheless must become. The Right is ignorant, and the Left is contemptuous. But they each preserve the—dare I say it—Marxist legacy in their own limited ways.
Toward a September Eighteenth Movement?
Now, obviously this does not mean we should take up the J6-ers’ cause. Far from it. Rather, we should lend critical support that seeks to neither demonize nor fetishize but rather lead. The Left must come to lead society again. The Left must come to lead the Right again. It must steal its revolutionary thunder back from the Right. Seeking revolutionary change while supporting Trump is reactionary, about as reactionary as seeking revolutionary change while supporting Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez or the Progressive Caucus. Both tendencies, widespread among different but all-too-similar constituencies, need to be aggressively combated. But the only agent worthy of competing against either one would be an independent socialist party anchored in its revolutionary heritage, a heritage that reeks far more of defeat and selling-out than victory.
Facing up to this past is the only way to recover the future that the socialist movement once promised. The Justice for J6 rally gives us precisely this chance. Is the Left courageous enough to brave getting ‘canceled’ to speak a truth it has long-since forgotten, namely that no capitalist party can ever do anything worthwhile for the working class? Is the Left committed enough to its world-historic analysis to dare to denounce the evils of capitalism and yet proclaim the potential for a new world order sown among the murderous destruction? Is the Left, in other words, capable of leading the working class once more?
Ooh man was this a bracing and *immensely* thought-provoking read, with stellar writing to boot. It's a shame indeed this couldn't be published somewhere more prominent as I think these arguments could serve as a much needed corrective to the groupthink and lack of imagination inherent to a lot of left-leaning MSM that parrots the "Trump is bad" mantra while neglecting to offer a fully fledged, historically conscious vision that transcends class and party. As you effectively argue, the Left needs to think bigger and broader (myself included!). Would that we will in time--before climate change or our own internal contradictions get the better of us.
You've earned another subscriber and I look forward to you challenging my assumptions and intuitions as I make my way through your archives and sit with any future thoughts you care to share with us. We need more writing like yours in more places for it to sink into the popular consciousness and help revive and resculpt a mostly dormant and anodyne left. See you around.