In times like these, it’s hard not to listen to the ghost of John Brown, the original American terrorist, calling on us to slaughter the partisans of the new Slave Power, those citizens of MAGA Nation who would protect capitalism—and its faithful attendant, white male supremacy—at all cost, even at the expense of democracy, even unto the incineration of the planet.
Despair will do that. And what’s not to despair over? Having dodged a bullet, and had a conversion experience (translated by Melania), Trump now looks like he’ll win in a landslide. The courts have enabled him, of course, and they continue to do his bidding: Aileen Cannon just dismissed the government documents case, on “constitutional” grounds, and the recent SCOTUS ruling in Trump v. United States will make him the dictator he always wanted to be. [1]
You may balk at my characterization of John Brown, the Captain, so-called because he led a Free State regiment in “Bloody Kansas,” 1855-56, in what became a murderous rehearsal for the American Civil War. Wasn’t he one of the very few abolitionists who welcomed unconditional equality between white and black men, who “felt, as few white Americans have felt, the bitter tragedy of their lot”? That’s the admiring voice of W.E.B. Du Bois, from his1909 biography of our original terrorist. He went on: wasn’t John Brown “the man who of all Americans has perhaps come nearest to touching the souls of black folk”? Didn’t he refuse any compromise with the slaveholders, and hold anyone who did compromise, including minor territorial officials, accountable for the massive sin of slavery—demonstrating his resolve by executing five of them in silence, by the sword, on the night of May 24, 1856? Wasn’t John Brown the prophet who planned the raid on the arsenal at Harper’s Ferry of October 16, 1859, and went to his death by hanging on December 2 knowing that he had failed to start a slave insurrection but had nonetheless lit the fuse on Civil War? [2]
Well, yes. But the Old Man wasn’t a visionary (he admitted as much while awaiting execution), and he was definitely not a revolutionary. He was of course a radical, if by that we mean someone who can’t see how his ethical principles—in Brown’s case the Declaration’s crucial clause, “all men are created equal”—reside in and flow from the historically determined circumstances he must confront in explaining how to change the world. If by a radical we mean someone who believes that entanglement in the corruptions and compromises of politics puts his soul at risk. If by a radical we mean someone for whom the past “weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living,” and so must be exorcised, escaped, and/or repudiated. If by a radical we mean someone who believes that small cadres of like-minded individuals can “heighten the contradictions” and engage the masses by laying bare the atrocities inherent in, intrinsic to, their way of life. [3]
We all know the type. A lot of us leftists just are the type, and the Right is now run by radicals who believe that their anti-democratic cause is righteous, even God-given—like many an abolitionist or pro-slavery firebrand, they’re out to purge the nation of sin, no matter what the majority might think of their mission.
The revolutionary is a different type. She thinks her ethical principles are legible in actually existing, historically determined circumstances. So she agrees with John Dewey in assuming that “an ‘ought’ which does not root in and flower from the ‘is,’ which is not the fuller realization of the actual state of social relationships, is a mere pious wish that things should be better.” The revolutionary thinks that the time is out of joint, but that she was born to put it right—that since there’s a usable past she can put to work in the present, there’s no need to escape or repudiate it. The revolutionary knows that public opinion is the practical embodiment of consent, so she wants to risk her soul in shaping that opinion by persuasion, by political means and for democratic ends. She thinks, accordingly, that small cadres of radicals are necessary but not sufficient to the cause of revolution. [4]
By and large, the comrades on the Left are still captives of the idea that revolution is a strictly radical event—a sudden break or abrupt departure from the past, carried out by people who know better than the rest of us what the future holds. This captivity is wholly in keeping with the sensibility of our time, which subsists on a volatile emotional mix of spastic anger and infantile inertia, equal parts of strident rhetoric or strenuous action and helpless, hopeless passivity. It certainly comports with John Brown’s persona as Du Bois depicted it, as the novelists Russell Banks and James McBride have rendered it (Truman Nelson’s fictionalized chronicle of the Kansas jihadist would seem an exception to this rule), and as the literary historian John Stauffer has portrayed it. [5]
The Captain had good reason to feel helpless except when he was armed and dangerous. The Slave Power carried the day in the 1850s, from (1) the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850, which enabled federal slave catchers to coerce assistance from free-state citizens in hunting escapees from bondage; through (2) the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854, which abrogated the Missouri Compromise of 1821 and opened the entire Louisiana Purchase to slavery; to (3) the Dred Scott decision of 1857, in which the Supreme Court announced that neither Congress nor territorial legislatures had the Constitutional right to exclude slavery from the federal lands, as per the Northwest Ordinance, and that persons of African descent could never be citizens of the US. The Lecompton Constitution, the extremely pro-slavery document submitted to Congress in 1858 as the Kansas Territory’s bid for statehood, was (4) the last straw—it was a total fraud, and everyone knew it because correspondents from newspapers around the world covered the election in which 4,908 illegal votes were cast by “border ruffians’ from the slave state of Missouri. No wonder the Old Man turned to terrorism.
No wonder we now ask if that’s the answer: must we inaugurate our very own Time of Troubles, and turn to the weapon of the weak? After all, we, too, have good reason to despair, to feel helplessly enraged, as the new Slave Power forthrightly declares and realizes its radical intentions—to curtail if not adjourn women’s rights, constitutional and otherwise, and thereby restore patriarchal (state) control of women’s sexuality; to restrict the right to vote, and thereby maintain rule by dark money and its lackeys; to ignore the impending catastrophes caused by global warming, a.k.a. climate change, and thereby to subsidize its source in the consumption of fossil fuels; to make the President of the United States a parody of the royal brute the nation was founded to repudiate; above all, to uphold the rights of property against the rights of persons in all cases, in direct violation of the Founders’ stated intentions, and thus to silence the death rattle of capitalism.
But despair and rage lead to radicalism, and from there to hatred, violence, stalemate—not to the revolution we need. Revolutions have never been merely or only radical cataclysms; they have always been more complicated, more centrifugal than that, particularly when grasped as ideological formations. Antonio Gramsci was right, they are seemingly “passive,” which is to say gradual, events, typically preceded by a cultural revolution that was long in the making, in the minds of the people. He was thinking of the Reformation, of how the cultural and legal authority of the Church was already a joke by the early 16th century, having been undermined by vernacular approaches to the production and distribution of knowledge (see: Chaucer, Rabelais, Boccaccio, Dante), and would soon suffer irreparable blows from Copernican sources.
If we follow his example, we can avoid the radicalism of despair and its terrorist implications. For the revolution we need is already underway. The Left—broadly defined, encompassing liberals as well as socialists, anarchists, whatever—has won what Gramsci called the “war of position,” that is, the ideological struggle over civil rights, women’s rights, gay rights, workers’ rights, voting rights, human rights, in each case claiming that the rights of persons should or must supersede the rights of property. The Right knows this, which is why it seeks legal refuge in the courts and political sanctuary in the destruction of majority rule. [6]
The Left has meanwhile won the debate on inequality (for which thank you, Occupy Wall Street, David Graeber, Claudia Goldin, Bernie Sanders, Thomas Piketty, et al.), again claiming that the rights of persons—and with them the health of the economy and the body politic—must contain or countermand the rights of property. The redistribution of income and wealth via the tax code and/or government spending is now the majority’s stated preference; so is Medicare For All. The Right knows this, too, which is why it has lavishly funded a jurisprudential counter-revolution (see: the Federalist Society) to fight a rear-guard action against the theoretical and practical consequences of the Left’s (fragile, tentative) triumph.
Framed in these terms, the overthrow of the state—the “war of maneuver,” as Gramsci called the Leninist alternative (or sequel) to the “passive revolution” that the war of position accomplished—becomes an afterthought, a remote possibility rather than the final, inevitable stage of revolution. Heroic armed struggle accordingly becomes the preoccupation of true believers who, like John Brown, assume that continued ideological struggle and political deliberation are wastes of their precious, dwindling time. “Less talk, more action!,” as the Captain himself exclaimed in anticipation of his “irrevocable acts” in Kansas, then in Virginia.
The so-called insurrection of January 6th, 2021 has a similarly desperate feel, because it too was fueled by an inchoate, unspeakable fear and thus anger. But it has detonated nothing—there is no civil war on the horizon. And the revolution in the minds of the people goes on, no matter what the Supreme Court has to say about enumerated Constitutional rights.
The socialism—the future—that is upon us has no party or program or recognized leadership to shape and enunciate it, and that’s an endorsement, not a criticism. It’s more a matter of actually existing social relations, which are, at least in part, a function of expectations or, in other words, the things we carry in our heads. For example, we know that the people “own” the banks because the FDIC, which is funded through our tax dollars, stands as the guarantor of deposits, and that we have thoroughly socialized the risks of lending by means of the Federal Reserve and its fiscal arm in the US Treasury. To “nationalize” the banking system, to make it a public utility subject to democratic scrutiny and management, is to acknowledge practices that are already in place and to codify them at the law. At any rate we don’t have to expropriate any property that is not yet within our proletarian grasp, as per communist manifestos of the past.
We also know that the job market can’t allocate labor time efficiently or even adequately, so that talent, skills, effort, and reward get aligned proportionately and productively. In fact the relation between income and work has begun to seem so arbitrary that we can not only imagine but also observe the detachment of one from the other. Meanwhile, Covid-determined changes in the workplace, including abstention from business as usual in the factory, the warehouse and the office, have amplified trends that were underway before the Great Recession—trends such as job displacement by cybernation, including AI—to the point where the future of work is anybody’s guess. The only thing that seems certain is that the labor market is broken, and with it the prospects of capitalism, which is of course predicated on just this, the allocation of resources through the purchase of labor time and the exploitation of labor power. The future is upon us. [7]
John Brown’s terrorist itinerary is understandable, in sum, but it’s simply insufficient to the task at hand, which is to acknowledge that the choice before us is, finally, socialism or barbarism.
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[1] White male supremacy now bears the same vexed relation to capitalism as the divine right of kings bore to feudalism. Charles I didn’t need the claim to defend royal prerogatives, but he used it, so that a critique of it could be read as a rejection of monarchy and all it represented, including feudal bonds and hierarchies. The assertion of a white male supremacy is not necessarily or intrinsically a defense of capitalism, but the association of the two now established by the defenders of both makes the critique of one a rejection of the other. On Trump v. United, see my previous Substack column.
[2] W.E.B. Du Bois, John Brown (1909), pp. 7-8, 338-74.
[3] The classic statement is V.I. Lenin, “What Is To Be Done?” (1903), a polemic aimed at Eduard Bernstein’s “revisionist” ideas in Evolutionary Socialism (1899). More recent renditions of the same radical sensibility are Eli Zaretsky, Why America Needs the Left (2014) and Michael Kazin, American Dreamers (2013).
[4] John Dewey, Outlines of a Theory of Ethics (1891; reprint 1969), p. 131. The best explanation of the differences between the radical and the revolutionary is found in an unlikely place, in a book by Martin J. Sklar (my mercurial mentor, occasional friend, and bitter enemy) called The Corporate Reconstruction of American Capitalism (1988), pp. 362-63: “The John Browns and Wendell Phillipses, the populists and the Bryanites, the radicals and the fantastic visionaries, have their role to play in preparing the events and the public opinion for the elevation of the Lincolns, and the Roosevelts [see also: Cromwell, Lenin, Castro, Mao, Washington, Madison, and in a different key, Grimke, Addams, Eastman, . . .], to leadership of potentially transformative moments. The great secret divulged by American history is not that America is a conservative country, for all peoples are conservative, according to their prevailing beliefs and customs, most of the time; rather, it is that those revolutions that expand human rights against property rights or other traditional usage, need not, and probably cannot, be simply or mainly radical events. Such revolutions are, in effect, if not in intent, synthesizers of radical, liberal, and conservative trends, heretofore seemingly at loggerheads. They are great synthesizers of change and order, tradition and innovation, resulting in a transformative rendering, a transcendence, or revolution. If revolutions are this reordering of [ethical] principles and [historically determined] traditions, and the establishment and fulfillment of this reordering in institutions, then they are made by a [cross-class] coalition embodying the interplay of radical, liberal, and conservative principles and values, and the true revolutionaries are those most suited to synthetic thought. All great revolutions await their appropriate ‘moderate’ leaders who are neither wholly radical, nor liberal, nor conservative, but who are synthetic in their thought snd appeal. Revolutions need radicals, no less than the other persuasions, but are seldom if ever made by radicals.”
[5]. Russell Banks, Cloudsplitter (1998); James McBride, The Good Lord Bird (2013), and the 2020 Showtime mini-series of that title starring Ethan Hawke; Truman Nelson, The Surveyor (1960) as per Willis McCumber, “The Irrevocable Act,” The Baffler #63 (May 2022); John Stauffer, The Black Hearts of Men (2002).
[6] Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks (trans. 1971), pp. 52-120, 210-76.
[7]. James Livingston, “What Now, After Work?” in 3 Parts, here at Substack.