Once More Unto the Breach
On January 6th, 2021, the petite bourgeoisie seized the stage of history by force. We all know what followed. As the capital police folded like a wet paper bag a rampaging mob of cops, troops, lawyers, right wing media operatives and small business owners stormed the capital building and sent the Senate and the House of Representatives fleeing for their lives. As representatives were hurried to undisclosed locations insurrectionists proceeded to trash offices, take selfies, and generally make off with whatever gaudy decorations or symbols of power they could find. After milling around for a while and taking some more selfies with capital police the mob eventually left the building and by nightfall the national guard’s crackdown would shatter what remained of the group and retake the capital in its entirety.
What are we to make of this posters putsch? This is, after all, not the first time right wing militants have attacked and occupied legislature buildings. The January 6th attack is arguably even the least overtly successful in terms of its immediate objective. After all the vote to certify the Electoral College results was held the next day and confirmed the victory of Joe Biden over Donald Trump. Militia attacks in Oregon, Michigan, and Wisconsin actually succeeded to some extent on a legislative level, often holding up the legislative agenda entirely and preventing votes on bills the militias opposed. 2020 also saw massive petite bourgeois anti-lockdown protests, which succeeded in ensuring that even the government’s utterly lackluster COVID response would be reduced to almost nothing (and killing at the time of writing 831,000 people in the process). The third similar mobilization was the march of the anti-Black counter-revolutionaries that launched a series of attacks on George Floyd uprising militants, most famously in Kenosha. This too was largely the work of the petite bourgeoisie: the most common kind of murder was store owners opening fire on looters. The more organized militia attacks were no different, as a friend in Michigan described “as soon as we saw the F150’s show up we knew things were going to get bad”.
The mob in the capital was essentially a fusion of these movements, the remains of the older fascist groups from Unite the Right, and the new QAnon fanatics. Much has been said about the role of social media in the spate of radicalizations that led to the posters putsch, particularly in the spread of neo-Nazism and the ascendance of QAnon as the US’s great conspiracy theory. I leave the specific analysis to those networks to those better equipped to make it, and certainly there is room for discussing how everything from Facebook to 8kun played a role in these events. But to focus too heavily on the specific communications technologies involved in the putsch obscures what’s really going on here. Like the focus on twitter and Facebook as the drivers of the 2011 revolutions, the myopic centering of online radicalization draws us away from the class and racial nature of the insurrection. The putsch is a product of the fracturing of global capitalism and the weakening hold of settler colonialism on the US in particular. Thus in order to understand the posters putsch we must explore the twofold nature of the small business tyrant.
Capitalism, as the old saying goes, is the democratization of dictatorship. The small business tyrant is the epitome of this democratization. In their own realm, their business, they are the undisputed master of an army of servants who must comport to their every desire or be tossed a pauper into the streets. This is the first aspect of the small business tyrant, the tyranny that gives the class its modern name. The absolute command of labor they possess and ruthlessly exploit for their own profit makes the small business tyrant a veritable king. It is a taste of absolute power and command offered to a wider portion of the population than at any time before, and it breeds a contempt for the laborer and desire for control that forge the great arsenal of reaction. But their direct command of labor is only one aspect of their power. Their exploitation of labor, after all, in service of a greater tyranny. The late Tang dynasty emperor Emperor Xuanzong wielded the enormous logistical might of the imperial state to have the fastest riders in the empire bring lychee from the far south to the capital at Chang’an before they could spoil. Today this power, the power to command the military logistic networks of capital’s world empire, is in the hands of anyone with enough money to make an order from Amazon. The small business tyrant is awash with this power to command the labor of far away people. It is both a key basis of their wealth and the object of their desire. Their whole world is one of command, of the pure power of ownership that invokes the power of empire itself to put the products of labor into the small business tyrants hands. But unlike the real bourgeoisie, who are broadly secure in their class position, the small business tyrant’s power is constantly in danger. Insofar as so called “economic anxiety” exists, it is the threat to this power. COVID-19 struck at one face of this power as lockdowns shuttered businesses and saw their profit margins eviscerated by the pandemic. This was true not only for store owners but for small business tyrants down the supply chain as well. This proved devastating in an economy increasingly composed of small scale producers contracted by large firms to do the actual work of production. While Amazon reaped record profits the small business tyrants lost money hand over fist, and with it lost the power of command they’d always enjoyed over commodities themselves.
And Then Came the Revolution
The summer uprisings posed an even greater threat to the small business tyrant than even the lockdowns, it threatened the basis of racial capitalism itself. Black people who had previously been viewed by petite bourgeois as pure objects of their power, commodities to be bought and discarded at their whim, set out to take their revenge. Stores that had mistreated their workers were looted and burned with the police stations in a single raging inferno that annihilated completely the basis of the petite bourgeois’ power. The labor they once commanded not only refused to obey them but seized back the commodities they had produced and drove the police, white supremacy’s first and last line of defense, from the streets. And with the police in retreat for a brief, shining moment abolitionism and the end of white supremacy really seemed to be on the table. This was the petite bourgeois’ worst nightmare. The basis of their racial and class power shattered, the streets filled with millions of people seemingly reveling in its destruction. The white petite bourgeois’ reaction was complete incomprehension. They could not understand the personhood of Black people, could not understand the exercise of their agency, could not understand why so many of the people around them rallied to the Black revolutionaries’ cause. They (like much of the Left is should be added, who were certainly not immune to the attribute the most radical actions of the uprising to the Feds) fell deeper and deeper into conspiracy, attributing the riots to elaborate schemes by antifa Democrats and their armies of outside agitators. As the months past and the street movement faded under the twin assault of police repression and liberal cooptation, the petite bourgeois began to conceive of the election as a continuation of the battle in the streets. Democratic victory would give Democratic sanctioned riots and looting and communism the power of the state. And so, by any means necessary, the Democrats needed to be stopped.
It’s worth recapitulating the actual events of the election and the days that followed, the memory of which has essentially been buried by the events that came later. Republicans were banking on a repeat of the 2000 election, where the Brooks Brothers riot (led in part by Trump administration insider Roger Stone) stopped a recount in Florida, forcing the election to the Republican controlled Supreme Court. The pandemic added a new wrinkle. Ballots cast in person dramatically favored Trump while mail-in votes favored Biden by wide margins. Trump’s strategy was to declare victory on the first night before the mail-in votes could be counted and then declare the mail-in votes illegitimate and claim the Democrats had stolen the election. It’s difficult to remember now how close this came to working. Stop The Steal rallies mobilized across the country, demanding vote counts be either stopped or continued or audited or ballots thrown out until the vote totals showed a Trump victory. Meanwhile Trump himself was attempting to convince the Supreme Court to throw out the mail-in votes. But this strategy relied on both speed and institutional cooperation and unlike 2000, the institutions weren’t cooperating. And so, as the plan collapsed and a Biden victory seemed increasingly inevitable, the petite bourgeoisie made one last desperate attempt to seize power.
The Posters Putsch
The desire to reestablish the racial hierarchy was the real content of the petite bourgeois revolt, encapsulated in the now infamous line “they're supposed to shoot BLM, but they're shooting the patriots”. This was no mere rhetorical threat. At the Stop the Steal rally in LA on the same day as the Posters Putsch, the mob nearly lynched a Black woman as she returned home from work. Had they caught up with any of the non-white Democratic lawmakers the same fate almost certain. But as the lawmakers fled and the would-be putschers milled around the capitol trying to figure out what to do next, it became increasingly obvious that they’d walked into a trap. It’s a trap that has ensnared revolutionaries of every political persuasion across the globe for the last decade, one that has successfully crushed almost every revolution in my time. That trap was the capitol itself. The capitol building is just a building. There is no power there, not really. It is at best an empty ritual site. The rituals that produce the state, however, can and have been performed elsewhere. The building itself, once emptied of the ritualists, means nothing. Seizing it, as revolutionaries from Hong Kong to Iraq have discovered, accomplishes nothing. Mostly it just pisses the state off. As The Invisible Committee put it back in 2014 in maybe the only good line they ever produced, “But when the insurgents manage to penetrate parliaments, presidential palaces, and other headquarters of institutions, as in Ukraine, in Libya or in Wisconsin, it’s only to discover empty places, that is, empty of power, and furnished without any taste.” Thus what the petite bourgeoisie found at the capitol building to their great despair was the great crisis of 21st century revolutionary theory.
The state has two aspects. One is ritual. In this aspect the state is produced by a series of actions and social relation. It exists because you believe it does, because you fill out the forms, because when a politician gives a speech on the Senate floor and calls a vote it actually does something. The second aspect of the state is violence. Insofar as the state exists as an entity in the real world at all, and not as a sort of collective figment of our imaginations we enact every day, it exists because it can kill you. This power is euphemistically referred to as the monopoly on the legitimate use of force. What it really means is that the state is no more and no less than a group of people with weapons who will use them on you if you disagree with them. But it’s the ritual aspect that allows the violence to function, particularly in the US, perhaps the most resolutely bureaucratic society the world has ever produced. This, in the end, is why the coup failed. Bush’s coup could succeed because he seized control of the ritual apparatus and used them to make the coup real. The would-be putschists at the capitol assumed that the mass of their physical presence could compel the ritual apparatus to change reality. It couldn’t.
What then are we to make of their failure? Much of the Right has in one way or another simply disavowed the putsch, arguing that the whole thing was a FBI entrapment operation designed to turn the War on Terror surveillance apparatus on the Right. Their paranoid fantasies disguise the reality of their disavowal: the GOP simply doesn’t need the petite bourgeois vanguard anymore, at least not operating semi-autonomously. Insofar as they were still to be used it would be in school board stormings that could be transferred into immediate electoral results. The reason is simple: the petite bourgeoisie won. We live in their world now. There will never be another COVID lockdown, no matter how many people die. The police continue to murder Black people with impunity. Even their white auxiliaries, Kyle Rittenhouse most famously, would be allowed to murder anyone who challenged the racial hierarchy. Biden’s war on immigrants has been as brutal as Trump’s, all of the apparatuses of state violence have continued unchecked. The counter-revolution simply donned a liberal face. This has done little to sate the rage of the petite bourgeois themselves, their rage is tied to Trump as a symbol and in restoring that symbol to power that they were defeated. But it explains in large part the almost total apathy most normal people feel towards the putsch. The Democrats insist on the sanctity of the ritual machine, they scream about norms and the Constitution and democracy and nobody gives a shit because the apparatus of violence they run, the counter-revolution they’ve engineered, is the same counter-revolution petite bourgeois are fighting for. It is difficult to get the same people you’re feeding to a plague, to the cops, to the violence of poverty and racism and imperialism, to care about “supporting democracy” to keep you in power. And so, a year after the posters putsch, the nation is in a hold pattern. The only way to break free is to shatter racial capitalism in its entirely. We saw the specter of that future 2 years ago. It’s time to see it again. Only then can we put the petite bourgeoisie in the dustbin of history