Above: Jimmy “Barbecue” Cherizier, the face of Haiti’s mass revolutionary movement.
The extent to which the United States is becoming lumpenized will make its workers revolution come to resemble Haiti’s present popular revolt, which was born out of a society with a massive proportion of lumpen. This is apparent from looking at the historical trends in the USA, and in the many other places throughout the hemisphere where the capitalists are on the advance; as the workers in these countries become de-classed, they’ll be put into the same position that Haiti’s were when the present upheaval began.
To realize our own version of Haiti’s “Barbecue” movement, we must account for how 1) the lumpen are only going to be organized by others within their own class, as it wouldn’t make sense for those outside the lumpen communities to preach towards them, and 2) many of those outside this de-classed strata will oppose the revolution on the basis of bourgeois moralism. Such an opposition to progress has appeared within Haitian society, where many hate Barbecue for personal reasons; and though I don’t expect the USA’s revolution to divide our society to the same extent, we’ll certainly be met with the same kinds of hostile attitudes about collective struggle.
I’m not just talking about the hypocritical liberal opposition towards using force to fight back against oppression. I’m talking about the individualist mindset that views all anti-systemic politics as a threat towards one’s personal aspirations, or simply towards their “right” to hedonistic libidinal pleasures. It’s this mindset that forms the basis for today’s rising American fascist movement, which nihilistically accepts everything that our ruling class does. It’s the embrace of degeneracy that’s behind today’s main far-right trend, whose anti-communism is about defending the pornographied lifestyles of its subjects. They don’t want the communists to take away their “right” to be pedophilic Epstein sympathizers.
The liberal and right-wing factions within the pro-regime elements will come together to collaborate with our government in crushing dissent. There is a growing coalition that supports government repression, and this creates a clearer line between the pro-imperialist and anti-imperialist camps within our society. This growing polarization means that as we face the ever-more heavy decisions of the class war, we will need to choose to fully reject the bourgeois sensibilities that hold us back from doing what Haiti’s declassed masses have done. Which is how those who seek to become part of this revolution, but who aren’t part of the lumpen, can find their role within the fight our civilization is going to need to wage.
Like all revolutions in our historical stage, the USA’s revolution can only be a workers revolution; we cannot act like the lumpen are synonymous with the workers, or like they can replace the unique economic function of the working class. The lumpen is increasingly who the masses are, though, and any workers revolution will have to grasp what their needs are. Which means rejecting the logic of the dogmatic, liberal “Marxism” that dismisses Haiti’s movement or any other popular struggle. The sensibilities of this “Marxism” are irrelevant to the practical realities of Haiti’s conditions, and our own conditions by extension.
These liberal sensibilities are the same ones that lead even many “pro-Palestine” individuals to abhor October 7, and to see Palestine’s anti-colonial war as a matter where neither side should be supported. It comes from not wanting to make the critical choices within a struggle for liberation, where the struggle’s participants will need to either make the necessary sacrifices or side with the enemy. This is extreme language, but the place where I’m coming from is not an adventuristic one, as it comes from the same position Lenin took regarding what class war should cost.
Lenin utterly opposed “revolutionary” terrorism, yet he did not concede to the bourgeois moralizers the idea that overthrowing a system makes one a terrorist. This is because to overthrow a system, you will have to transgress against the moral fantasies that the system has constructed. In his letter to the American workers, Lenin pointed out how the bourgeoisie recognize their own revolutionary wars as having been just, yet they condemn revolutionary wars against capital.
He said that a civil war for the sake of victory by the workers would be justified on the same basis as past revolutions; which is an even more radical stance than the one I’m taking here, because the desire of the American communist movement is not a civil war. Civil war wouldn’t be necessary for the American masses to defeat their banking dictatorship, since these masses have as a rule become ready for revolution and are unified enough to overcome the regime through popular struggle. This makes civil war avoidable where we are. But that it evidently couldn’t be avoided in Haiti, and there needed to be a revolutionary leadership to unite the gangs against the neo-colonial forces, is a reality we still must grasp—both for solidarity with Haiti, and for our own practice.
If we let our class enemies demonize the Barbecue movement, the Palestinian resistance, or any other revolutionary struggle for waging war, then we’ll have conceded our own fight by extension. This is the lesson to take from Lenin’s repudiation of the bourgeois view on revolutionary wars, where he observed how
The representatives of the bourgeoisie understand that for the sake of overthrowing Negro slavery, of overthrowing the rule of the slaveowners, it was worth letting the country go through long years of civil war, through the abysmal ruin, destruction and terror that accompany every war. But now, when we are confronted with the vastly greater task of overthrowing capitalist wage-slavery, of overthrowing the rule of the bourgeoisie—now, the representatives and defenders of the bourgeoisie, and also the reformist socialists who have been frightened by the bourgeoisie and are shunning the revolution, cannot and do not want to understand that civil war is necessary and legitimate.
The American workers will not follow the bourgeoisie. They will be with us, for civil war against the bourgeoisie. The whole history of the world and of the American labour movement strengthens my conviction that this is so. I also recall the words of one of the most beloved leaders of the American proletariat, Eugene Debs, who wrote in the Appeal to Reason, I believe towards the end of 1915, in the article “What Shall I Fight For” (I quoted this article at the beginning of 1916 at a public meeting of workers in Berne, Switzerland)—that he, Debs, would rather be shot than vote credits for the present criminal and reactionary war; that he, Debs, knows of only one holy and, from the proletarian standpoint, legitimate war, namely: the war against the capitalists, the war to liberate mankind from wage-slavery.
Our class enemies are trying to bring about a civil war that makes the polarization be over which bourgeois faction to support. As the different wings of capital come into ever-greater conflict, exemplified by our looming constitutional crisis, their goal will be to recruit Americans into both sides of these fights so that the past culture war divide gets brought back. We can avoid this by unifying the masses behind anti-systemic politics, which will make America’s collapse have an effect that actually brings about unprecedented national cohesion. By uniting the people against the banking regime, this regime’s internal battles will only weaken the system, and put us in place to defeat it. The liberal-far right coalition would never be able to overcome a coalition that makes it miniscule in comparison; if we bring together the anti-systemic elements, we’ll be able to do the equivalent of what Haiti’s popular revolution has done.
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