Subject: Re: Trump organizing a legal January 6th—the premise Reimann and Gandall share Some time ago, Michael Kowalski asked John Reimann what he thinks we should do, but John never responded. The way the debate is structured makes it hard to reach an answer. John and Marv are debating numbers, but numbers alone can't resolve a strategic question. Marv has mentioned in other conversations with me and others that he has thought a lot about Bonapartism. I want to get right to where I think the discussion has gone off track, and it's not just one person's responsibility. Both John and Marv treat government independence as something you can measure, as if either the capitalist class or the Bonapartes control it. John says that "under Bonapartism, the capitalist class loses its control over the Bonapartist," that we aren't "all the way there yet," and that overturning November would be a big step in that direction. Marv responds that the Supreme Court "remains firmly under the control of the capitalist class" and points to its rulings against DEI hiring, the NLRB and OSHA, dues check-off, workplace access, and its approval of DOGE's mass firings and union liability for strike damage. Marv’s evidence is strong and well organized. However, it doesn't really prove his point, because it answers a question John shouldn't have asked in the first place. Relative autonomy is not about how much capital has lost. It is a structural feature of the capitalist state, which lets the state serve capital as a whole by not answering to specific capitalists. A state that is fully controlled by one group is actually a weaker tool for class rule, not a stronger one. So, the fact that the Court's decisions benefit employers does not tell us anything about the type of rule behind those decisions. Marx's Bonaparte protected bourgeois property while taking political power from the bourgeoisie; that was the point of the Eighteenth Brumaire, not a flaw in it. Marx's examples fit with Bonapartist consolidation. Counting who benefits cannot tell us whether a state serves capital through parliament or by decree. John's mistake is similar, and for this discussion, it matters even more. He bases his argument on a single future event. If Bonapartism is a way of ruling, not just a line to cross, then November is not what would make it happen. Rule by executive order, replacing legal rules with personal loyalty in the officer corps and the DOJ, and turning pardons and prosecutions into tools for favors and punishment are already happening. John has been gathering the right facts but putting them under a label that delays their meaning until election night. That delay is a kind of passivity, which is strange in a post that criticizes others for being passive. Here is what both sides miss. John points out "the tens of millions of dollars the capitalist class has been forced to pay Trump—pure extortion" and sees it as proof that capital has lost control. Marv dismisses it as business within the class, already covered by the press. Both miss the real issue. Tribute is not simply a scandal or a symptom; it denotes a change in how the system works. The office becomes personal property, bureaucracy starts to look like household staff, and appointments and prosecutions are handed out as personal favors instead of official duties. This is a Weberian idea that is separate from the autonomy question, and it shows why asking "how much control does capital retain" cannot answer everything. The system can be more useful to capital in what it does, but less bourgeois in its structure. The extortion works because the office has become something a person can sell. Marv’s strongest point is that we still use the term "Bonapartism" only because Marx did not live long enough to describe modern fascism. But that idea needs a real argument, not just a mention. What makes fascism different is not just its extremism, but how it creates a fighting force outside the state—a mobilized petty-bourgeois group that is organized separately and then brought into the state, destroying the workers’ movement first. Trumpism is focused on winning votes, but it does not do that. It works through the current government and a party it controls, not by building a separate force. This is not meant to be reassuring. It is an important difference that determines strategy, which is the main reason to discuss it: a regime that rules through the state and elections is vulnerable in different ways than one that has already destroyed our organizations in the streets. The DSA could be important if it gets past the ultra-left and union leaders. Marv ends by supporting Democrats unless there’s a better left option and sees socialists as part of the DSA. So the pessimist and the skeptic both land in the same spot. Joseph Green’s claim of "complacency to the hilt" is about their analysis, not what they actually do, because their actions are basically the same. That’s why six posts arguing about chances haven’t answered Kowalski’s question. The real issue in this debate is how Marv frames it: either you support the Democrats, or you are basically not involved in politics. Charles cites the KKE as an example, but it does not really fit—a party with five percent that refuses to join a united front is not a great model. Still, Marv’s framing is wrong, and not because of whether we run candidates. Independent working-class politics is not the same as abstaining. It means building organizations that can act no matter who is in charge: workplace groups that can stop production, tenant and immigrant groups that can block enforcement, and a political voice that answers to these groups, not just to a ballot line borrowed from another class. This is also the answer to Kowalski, and it shows why the diagnosis matters. If stopping authoritarianism depends on the court, the officer corps, or a democratic House, then all we can do is hope, vote, and talk about the odds. But none of those will actually stop it. Lawsuits will not stop the ICE presence at polling places that John mentions; it will only be stopped, if at all, by people who are organized in their communities and ready to act. That work does not depend on what happens in November, which is exactly why we should not wait. Comrades
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