The Second Time As Farce
“The problems that seem to keep the capitalist liberal order from making good on its claims can never be resolved, because it needs to create them in order to exist.”
There have been countless moments over the last few months, both leading up to and following the re-election of Donald Trump as U.S. President, for which the French phrase “déja vu” seemed a rather apt description.
In French, the phrase means “already seen,” and it’s often meant to refer to a quasi-mystical moment when we feel we’ve somehow already experienced the current moment. But there’s another meaning of the phrase that fits much better with our present situation. That one’s a kind of boredom, a complete absence of surprise for what’s put before you.
“Ah,” it says. “This again? I’ve seen this already.” And it’s certainly felt this way for me, even though the circumstances of this repetition are different in crucial ways.
It’s Trump again, except now with an even poorer and angrier majority much more willing to let a strong man shake things up for them. And we’re seeing the same things again from the “opposition,” the shallow calls to “#resist” and panicked blame for their failure upon every other possible source except their own positions. Except this time, they don’t even seem like they’re convincing themselves with these scripts.
Yes, we’ve seen this before, but it’s different this time.
Karl Marx, in his analysis of Bonapartism, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon, countered Hegel’s idealist philosophy of history with the following words:
Hegel remarks somewhere that all great world-historic facts and personages appear, so to speak, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce.
Marx was referring to how Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte — the nephew of the better known one, Napoleon Bonaparte — became emperor of France, just like his uncle had. But it wasn’t just that the two emperors seemed to repeat — the conditions that allowed each of them to gain power seemed to repeat, too.
Each rose to power in France during moments of societal breakdown, and the circumstances of those breakdowns followed a peculiar pattern. In both cases, France had experienced massive societal and political chaos as part of the process of capitalist transition.
The popular story goes the cause of that chaos was just the ancienne regime — the old order, the monarchs and lords and clergy — attempting to regain power, to stop the revolution and to re-instate the older system in which they held authority. Into that situation came Napolean Bonaparte, an authoritarian strongman willing to do their bidding.
But that’s not what happened at all. First of all, the aristocrats were hardly in favor of Napoleon, nor were the clergy. In fact, Napoleon didn’t get overwhelming support from any particular class except the land-owning peasants. Instead, his support came from parts of every class, and the social and political order he established was what we might call now a “populist” order.
In many ways, Napoleon was actually more “revolutionary” than the left had been. He was the first to decriminalize homosexuality in Europe, and to make divorce possible for women, and also to abolish centuries-old prohibitions on Jews.
Napoleon I was hardly a social democrat, though. None of those things were accomplished through “democratic means,” but rather through fiat with the imposition of the Napoleonic Code. And there were plenty of things he also did to please parts of the aristocracy, and also parts of the bourgeoisie (the capitalist class), and pretty much every other class, particularly through forcing social stability by any means necessary.
The second Napoleon (Napoleon III) entered France under very similar chaotic conditions, possessed a similar mix of conservative and progressive beliefs, and got support from a very broad swathe of every class. Also, he was probably the first truly “modern” leader in Europe, instituting the kinds of urban projects (grand boulevards, connected railways) that now define all capitalist nations.
Both Napoleons did remarkably similar things in remarkably similar conditions — even if the specifics were quite different. Even more important is how they both seemed almost to be summoned by the chaos that preceded them, filling a necessary role created by all the contradictions of the new capitalist/liberal order.
The best way to explain what I mean by this is to borrow the phrase my friend Alley Valkyrie is fond of using about every apparent “contradiction” within liberal democracy: “it’s not a bug, it’s a feature.” In other words, the problems that seem to keep the capitalist liberal order from making good on its claims can never be resolved because it needs them in order to exist.
Consider the way liberal/progressive sorts tend to think about issues like homelessness. From their perspective, there wouldn’t be homeless people if the system were working correctly, and therefore homelessness is a “bug” that just needs to be fixed in the system’s code. The problem, though, is that you cannot have a market for housing (the system we have now, “private property”) without creating artificial or actual scarcity. In other words, the system needs to create homelessness in order to exist.
It’s the same with jobs. Full employment would be a nightmare situation for capitalism. If everyone who wanted a job could get one, then owners would have to raise wages extremely high to entice people to switch jobs. But then, those escalating higher wages would destroy all potential profit that the owner might otherwise have derived and quickly put him out of business.
And yet another example: racial and gender inequality. Progressives, especially now, see racism and sexism as barriers to the full implementation of equality that democracy stands for. All the “woke” social justice identitarianism that plagues and cripples the left now is essentially an attempt to fix these inequalities so that capitalism and democracy function better. But this is an impossible goal, because capitalism will constantly generate these inequalities. Worse, it must create these separate and unequal social categories, otherwise it couldn’t sustain the exploitation of labor.
Again, all these things that progressives try to fix are features of capitalism, not bugs. Capitalism must create homelessness and unemployment and social inequality to actually function. Of course, this seems to go against what liberal democracy — with all its delusions about equality, human rights, and being a better system than every other possible one — appears and claims to be. And there’s no better example of a political party that represents this delusion than the Democratic Party in the United States.
That’s how to understand why we’re seeing exactly the same kind of ridiculous “#resist” porn now as we did the first time Trump was elected. Everyone’s trying to cash in on being the voice of democracy against the rise of “fascism,” as if no one remembers how fucking absurd they all acted last time.
Liberals and the left both use the word fascism as a label for any kind of authoritarianism they don’t like, but Trump is not a fascist. However, he’s absolutely a Bonapartist, arising to restore order to the chaos that both threatens and is created by capitalist democracy. He’s fulfilling the same role that each of the two Napoleons did, forcing a re-establishment of order to save liberal democracy from its own contradictions.
In other words, Trump is saving capitalism and democracy from itself.
And that’s both a threat and an opportunity. Trump’s reign this time might actually accomplish what he promised last time: making America “great again.” If he succeeds, the excesses of international finance capital — “globalization” — will be corrected, and this will bring more stability to capitalist nations everywhere. His tariff plans would very likely result in a national renewal of industrial manufacturing in the United States, and also have the likely result of forcing other countries to rebuild their own manufacturing base as well. That would mean less international trade, and more national self-sufficiency.
That’s a bad thing for the global finance capitalists, and also for the short-term stability of any national economy relying on outsourced labor and export markets. They’ll all need to transform their internal labor relations quite quickly, and that’s actually where the opportunity comes in.
Industrial labor hasn’t represented any kind of real threat to capitalism for decades, thanks especially to Reagan and Thatcher in the 80s and Clinton and Blair in the late 90s. Those four leaders managed to break the power of unions more efficiently than any Pinkerton thug could have dreamed of, and what remains of “the left” still hasn’t come to grips with this legacy.
Especially, the internationalization of the production chain is what made organized labor actions impossible. Previously, as I explain in Here Be Monsters:
“…the workers mining the raw materials, the workers transforming them into other materials in foundries, the workers finishing those materials into parts, and the workers assembling those parts into finished products — as well as the workers transporting those materials from one part of the manufacturing chain to another — all usually shared a national or geographic identity.
Just as importantly, so too did their bosses and the primary consumers of the products of their labor. This fact is what enabled organized labor in many nations — especially the United States, France, Germany, and the United Kingdom — to become such a powerful force. Unions not only could organize the specific workers they represented, they could also co-ordinate with unions of other workers to force capitalist concessions on wages and working conditions.”
Before, when all parts of a product were being created by workers in the same nation, it was possible to organize different union sectors together to damage the capitalists. This hasn’t been possible for at least two decades now, thanks to globalization. But Trump might also accidentally manage to “Make Unions Great Again” if he succeeds in his nationalist goals.
In other words, we might see a kind of return to the potential revolutionary power of the working class that once existed before capitalism figured out a way to suppress it.
But it won’t be an exact repetition of history, of course. Perhaps, as Marx said of the two Napoleons, it will probably repeat as farce this time. Still, a farce might just be a lot better than the tragic failures of labor movements the first time around.
If it does happen, then what would it actually look like to seize this opportunity? First of all, it wouldn’t look like any of the #resist delusions we’re seeing now, and it would have absolutely nothing to do with the Democrats.
Any anti-capitalist must fully understand that the Democratic Party and the liberal capitalist order they stand for both will benefit greatly from the Bonapartist moment of Trump. He’s righting the unbalanced ship of state for them, cleaning up capitalism’s excesses in exactly the “anti-democratic” way that democracy always requires.
Thus, any opposition to what Trump is doing that feeds back into the DNC’s power needs to be resisted just as much as anything Trump is doing. The Democrats are masters at the process of recuperation, taking any kind of radical movement or idea and re-packaging it in a way that feeds back into the system. Here, we need only think about how it was Barack Obama who siphoned off all the populist rage about banks and finance capital during the 2008-2009 housing crisis — as well as anger over racism — and then used that support as cover to bail out the banks, increase the growth of finance capital, and then to significantly militarize the police in US cities. The same process is exactly what has produced social justice identitarianism, creating a movement not against capitalism but only against capitalism’s aesthetic.
Seizing the likely opportunities Trump will create instead requires building a completely different form of resistance that cannot be co-opted back into capitalism. And that will mean speaking to the material conditions and desire for freedom of those who voted for Trump or for Harris better than either of them could.
That resistance would look a lot like the militant workerism of the 1920s, rather than the social justice identitarianism we’ve seen in the first part of the 2020s. This would mean organizing people not based on their allegiance to academic social justice doctrines, but rather on their shared basic material concerns — housing, food, health care, and security — and their shared exploitation by the capitalists. That’s the only way to build a “dual power” situation, in which the people are able to truly threaten the capitalist state.
And it would especially look like refusing to delude ourselves that capitalist democracy can ever be anything else than what it repeatedly shows itself to be. It will never stop creating inequality, or homelessness, or joblessness. It will never stop destroying the environment and ravaging the earth. And it will never, ever, let us vote for an alternative to its insanity — that’s something we have to create ourselves.
Rhyd Wildermuth
is a druid, author, theorist, and gym bro. His courses on anti-capitalism and on Paganism are both 30% off at Ritona, as is the all-course pass. Use code COURSE at checkout.