In June, I re-read the Wretched of the Earth, a political manifesto by the revolutionary Franz Fanon arguing for the need to respond to colonial oppression with revolutionary violence. In it, Fanon explains that the path of Algerian revolutionary independence from French colonial rule requires the participation of the lumpenproletariat and the peasant classes, both because they are the most ready to fight, and because their volatility may be co-opted by the oppressor to fight on his side, and so they need to be educated and mobilized with urgency.
Though Fanon is mainly talking about African liberation – in whose context the lumpenproletariat is comprised of “landless peasants” who are despised by society, and separate from the working class of the proletariat – and does not comment fully on the role of the lumpenproletariat in America, it remains that the January 6th insurrectionists found it within themselves to attempt to violently overturn a system of power that seemed intolerable to them.
However, there are many complications: Most of the January 6th rioters aligned with imperialist right-wing and white-supremacist groups such as the Proud Boys and Oath keepers, and research on the 716 convicted felons and misdemeanants from the Capitol Riot shows that most were employed and working class (which would technically categorize them among the proletariat). However further research showed that out of the 716 individuals who were charged in crimes connected to the riot by the end of 2021, 140 were facing serious financial catastrophes such as bankruptcies, judgments/liens, and foreclosures/evictions.
Further, the level of violence enacted on Jan 6th by this sub-group with financial hardship is also significant. Of the 140, 59 of them allegedly engaged in violence (or 42.14%). Though not a proper “lumpenproletariat” in an academic sense, these people are similarly despised by society, and share the essential class characteristic of desperation. I suppose that I pitied them at some point.
But recently, having joined the ranks of the pitiful myself, I stood three inches from my own reflection, looking long enough to recognize misery and hostility in that beady animal eye belonging to my own face. I could fully identify myself inside of them, their anger at the systems of power, their feelings of worthlessness cured momentarily by the addictive rush of being a part of something larger than myself.
Their basic values had also been flagrantly controverted by the ontological language of legality, and the difference between crime and justice shrank trivial. They had been hijacked by the systems of power, so successfully hijacked that they believed to be their possession, this land which we were all inhabiting called North America. White millennia of force (Weil’s force) and empires of capital had continually rewarded brutal narratives of conflict, theft and possession with riches, prosperity, and comfort.
They had clearly been taught to succeed by imagining others as less than deserving of the same safety they now believed belonged to them in some nasty and deranged zero sum inheritance. Reality is too painful, and so the perception shifts again, not just to survive, not just to die, but to enact an actual (if abortive) revolution.
Fanon writes: “At the level of the individuals, violence is a cleansing force. It frees the natives from his inferiority complex and from his despair and inaction; it makes him fearless and restores his self-respect.”
The Capitol rioters are not the natives. These rioters are symptomatic of grave societal disease, but my disdain for them is secondary to my interest in their abortive revolt as a manifestation of revolutionary escapism. There is a difference between mine and their escapist fantasies: They did not seek just to die, they wanted to be martyred. Their personalized fantasy of persecution allowed them to imagine themselves as the natives. As a result, they acted out in a self-assured crusade fueled, no doubt, by fear of poverty, fear of outsiders, delusions of personal persecution, and could not see the state institution as the source of their powerlessness, instead out-sourcing their near-anarchist rage to Joe Biden as proxy, and not the structures of power represented by him.
By accepting the hypocritical blanket pardon – by accepting the brutal authority of the state, because for exactly one moment it superficially appeared to serve their distracted personal interest in animal tribalism– the Capitol rioters completely neutered any true revolutionary ideal which their nascent overture might have embodied. They willfully abdicated their own volatile power, directly to Trump, because he jerked them off just right, and thus the lumpenproletariat, castrated itself to complacency.
They thought “Trump should be the president,” not, “abolish the office of the president.” Really, they got pretty close. This flavor of self-betrayal always invokes immense heartbreak in me because Trump doesn’t give a shit about ordinary people. He doesn’t love you, not the way I do.