Opinion | Farrukh Abadi
In an article titled “The Right Way to Politicize This,” Jacobin columnist Ben Burgis focuses on the Trump shooting as “the need for better gun laws” while condemning what he called a “shocking act of political violence.” He parrots the talking points the bourgeoisie have united around in calling for national unity while trying to give Democrats ammunition by relating it to their failed political agenda of gun control.
The Chickens Come Home to Roost
The condemnation across the imperialist class and their representatives of the shooting is intended to justify the electoral farce and pull more people into legitimizing their oppressors. It is yet another reminder of the class nature of this system—the differences among the bourgeoisie, which they spend so much money to exaggerate, are quickly packed up with pious words of national unity and democracy, making a plea for the other classes to line up behind them. Biden, who is now more than ever likely to lose, is diligently singing in the chorus of class unity. The Democrats have crumbled under the weight of the only argument that had propped them up: either Trump is the worst thing that has ever happened to the US and represents an existential threat to democracy, or we should condemn the violence against him and wish him a speedy recovery.
It is amidst this nauseating pitch of class collaborationism that Burgis emerges to play his loyal part as foot soldier to the capitalist class, heeding their call for unity.
Burgis begins with a requiem for the Democratic Party, writing: “While only time will tell, many despondent progressives concluded that the election was essentially over.”
Yes—in the lower depths of Jacobin, there are still those who consider themselves progressives while mourning the loss of Genocide Joe. For them, there are no principles that bound the “lesser of two evils”, and the Jacobin breed of “progressives” are willing to continue voting Blue no matter who they kill or how many.
With that meager attempt at bourgeois partisanship out of the way, Burgis goes on to call the shooting “a shocking act of political violence” that was “instantly and correctly condemned by figures like Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, just as it was by leading voices across the rest of the political spectrum.” While Burgis understands that there have been “tens of thousands of Palestinian civilians murdered in Gaza in the last nine months,” he argues that “it shouldn’t stop us from recognizing that these figures were correct to condemn the attempted assassination.”
The irony is not forgotten that this response of “shock” to political violence is published in a magazine that calls itself Jacobin.
Roughly two weeks before the shooting, Trump said that the US should fully support Israel in continuing its genocide and “let them finish the job.” In Burgis’s mind, either the US has no responsibility for the ongoing genocide of Palestinians, or those responsible should not face repercussions. His “all lives matter” rhetoric disconnects cause and effect and shields each with the sanctity of his morals. He does not see the connection between the US-backed genocide of Palestinians and the intensifying political and economic crises in the US; he does not see that cause has become effect.
It matters little who shot at Trump, why he shot at Trump, or even if the entire thing was staged—these things arise on the basis of the economic and ensuing political and social conditions of the US. The point is that there are crises, which cause extreme and widespread misery while a few people keep getting richer and more powerful. Just as economic crises are inevitable features of imperialism, so are political crises. Political crisis can take various forms, and had it not been the shooting of Trump, it was still bound to manifest in a definite way.
Presidential elections are a critical way in which political crisis is heightened. Because they represent the same class, the representatives must emphasize their differences before the American people to give them some sense of legitimacy, which requires exposing how each candidate has harmed the interests of the people. At the same time, they have to lie to the people about what they will do to help them. The same means by which the imperialists seek legitimacy ultimately serves to delegitimize them.
Nearly 60 years ago, Malcolm X said in response to JFK’s assassination that the chickens had come home to roost. The same can be said today—the violence inflicted upon the capitalist class and their representatives is their own doing, they have shaped the world in their decaying image and now it stares back.
The Morality of Violence
The ruling class is quick to condemn violence with the same voice that approves the delivery of bombs for genocide. While many do not fall for the pearl-clutching of bloodied hands, those that do provide the invaluable service of spreading their views without being responsible for violence, and therefore divorce the calls for nonviolence from the perpetrators of violence.
Part of the difficulty in combating the imperialist class, which is quite small and centralized, is that their interests are taken up and diffused across society by the millions upon millions of small proprietors and professionals of various stripes—the petty-bourgeoisie.
This is where Burgis comes along, defending the ruling class and their representatives, and abhorring political violence.
According to him, “Violence in general should require a high threshold of moral justification”. Apparently, neither the deaths of at least 186,000 Palestinians—who Trump certainly shares the responsibility for—nor any of his other countless crimes against the people meet Burgis’s threshold. Burgis himself has previously insinuated that Trump would carry out mass murder against migrants.
Burgis makes political violence a question of morality, but whose morality? It is one thing to say the attempted assassination should be condemned because it is an individualist tactic that does nothing to develop the position of the working class nor weaken the ruling class—this is true. But it is quite a different thing to oppose violence altogether, to buy into and propagate the sham of bourgeois democracy, and to pretend that Trump is anything other than a bloodied butcher. While Burgis seems to distance himself from being “an absolute pacifist, or anything like one,” his moral threshold for supporting violence is so high—or rather, so low—that even the top backers of genocide of our time do not meet his standards.
The basis of morality is found in economic conditions, which shape how one approaches and interacts with the world. For the petty-bourgeoisie, the legitimacy of violence is determined by what they see as a timeless, universal moral standard equally applied to all, be they oppressor or oppressed, a “neutrality” based in their class position between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat. For the working class, the legitimacy of violence is a question of scientifically understanding the progression of history, that the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie inevitably gives way to the dictatorship of the proletariat. Therefore, violence is legitimate when it serves this progression—today, the seizure and defense of power by the proletariat.
Pacifism—whether it is in the form of opposition to all violence or just violence that reaches a “high threshold” (i.e., that opposes violence toward those responsible for genocide)—is a petty-bourgeois malady that festers in the same sewage of individualism as the tactic of individual terror. The petty-bourgeoisie as a class have relatively small amounts of capital and so they are sandwiched between the bourgeoisie, who have nearly all the capital, and the proletariat, who have no capital. They see their interests as coinciding with both classes because they share aspects of both, and this dual character lends itself to vacillation between the two class outlooks. They view themselves as the neutral arbiters of morality, as standing above what they see as the petty class struggle and call upon each side to set aside their differences and resolve things peacefully. Among the nominal left, it is this perspective that encompasses the “big tent” position of organizations like DSA and their literary representatives like Jacobin—that those on the “left” should set aside their differences (in reality, should all adhere to their position) and unite, and all who don’t are labeled as “sectarian”. It is from this class basis that ignores class contradictions that Burgis’s towering moral standards emerge.
The bourgeoisie has a different perspective on violence: they need to use violence to protect and strengthen their class rule, while at the same time they need to oppose any form of violence that threatens them. To do this, the bourgeoisie relies on appealing to “law and order,” to property and democracy, and specifically appeal to the petty-bourgeoisie to safeguard what little they have. This is despite the fact that the crises produced by the bourgeoisie are what result in the mass ruin of the petty-bourgeoisie, which only serves to strengthen and further concentrate wealth and power in their hands.
With the violence used by the imperialists shrouded under “law and order,” the violence against the imperialists becomes the universally bad form of violence. The same president who has encouraged the violent crackdown on anti-genocide protesters in the US tells us now after the Trump shooting: “There is no place in America for this kind of violence—for any violence. Ever. Period. No exception.” We see then in the condemnation of “political violence” that Burgis praises from Sanders, AOC, and others, that it is in reality the condemnation of violence used against the imperialist class.
It is because of the blatant hypocrisy of the ruling class that they need to appeal to the petty-bourgeoisie, whose hands are clean(er), to play the role of foot soldier and disperse their views in their millions. This makes the pacifism of the petty-bourgeoisie particularly insidious: they are the saints of the bourgeoisie, among the front line against the working class who have nothing and whose means of winning their demands and seizing power is through the use of organized violence.
While the bourgeoisie propagates its views from a place of cynicism, the petty-bourgeoisie does so entirely genuinely, out of the horrors of all violence, which brings about instability and ruin to those with lesser capital. It is such people who play an important role in sanitizing the bourgeoisie, who are always ready to condemn “both sides”—whether in Palestine, whether in the antifascist struggle, the struggle in defense of Black rights, etc. America’s morality police is found in the indignation of the small proprietor. Although the petty-bourgeoisie vacillates between the leadership of the proletariat and the bourgeoisie, in a society dominated by the latter and in our current conditions where the former hardly exists, they will tend toward the bourgeoisie.
Gun Violence is a Disease of Class Society
Burgis concludes his piece with the answer to his title, that “the right way to politicize this” is “to focus on… America’s gun laws”.
It is obvious that gun control will not end political violence because political violence has existed long before guns. Burgis’s argument of limiting the number of guns to minimize violence is a clear example of how the literary representatives of the bourgeoisie propagate their viewpoint—they make what is secondary and tangential to be the main issue and conceal the root of the problem entirely, because the root problem is their class rule. People like Burgis likely believe that political violence has always existed and will always exist, and therefore all we can do is manage its intensity by reducing the number of weapons.
It is of note that he does not suggest gun control will resolve the problem, but that it will only diminish the problem: “If we’re serious about diminishing the incidence of lone-wolf political violence in the United States…. A more fruitful area to focus on is America’s gun laws…. If you want fewer political shootings, and fewer shootings in general, it’s long past time to do something about that.” The bourgeoisie and their representatives have no real solutions, they can only try to reduce the intensity of the problems that they create and justify.
Political violence is class violence. Politics is the social expression of economics, and violence is politics with bloodshed. Political violence is a feature of all class society regardless of what specific tools of violence are used, and will exist as long as there remains a contradiction in class interests. The problem arises from class contradictions and therefore can only be resolved by ending class existence.
Gun control is not the determining factor in the epidemic of shootings in the US, just as the opioid epidemic isn’t caused by not having enough fentanyl-detecting machines at the border, as Biden suggests. These social crises emerge because there is always a section of the imperialist class that profits immensely from them. Opposition to these crises also lies in the financial gain of imperialists. Biden’s touted fentanyl-detecting machines amount to hundreds of millions of dollars in government contracts. Rival imperialist politicians sit across the aisle but under the same roof. The pursuit of profit guides their investments and their morality, and as long as it guides our economy there will always be a spectrum of crises that plague our society at any given moment.
Of course, the massive prevalence of firearms is not unimportant. Guns flood the US, and US guns flood the rest of the world. They destabilize, facilitate proxy wars, and are part of subjugation, tied to the immense wealth of the arms manufacturers.
Even still, the mass production of guns, drugs, etc. is only one part of it, it does not explain how or why people use them. The imperialists not only manufacture commodities, but they manufacture markets for them as well; the very conditions of their production of such commodities—the conditions of the concentration of wealth and power in a few hands along with widespread misery and poverty—find many hands begging for cheap relief.
The imperialists have cultivated an impoverished society that it feeds drugs and guns so that they can live a day longer. When people become sick and outraged, imperialist representatives take to the stage and declare war on this or that commodity or social sickness, only to end up being just another way to make a profit and keep the system running.
