words:
what is to be done considering John Brown
Sodden by Sudan, Ukraine and Palestine
muddled with ICE, Epstein and Maduro
the execution of one Khamenei and another gulf war
during a historiographical period: the long WWIII
from the heartland, imperial core of an increasingly rogue state
where the superstructure detaches from its economic base
space is visible through unmeshing metropolitan coggery
we from the periphery (with the animals) listen for machines.
[removed stanza #1]
As the post-modern, neo-liberal contradictions resolve; considering precedents
attend the presses and chase the politics of national letters [1]
recognize direct action "belittles the role of the masses" [2]
one alone, stained by ink and armed like Hunter S. Thompson, is only crackling static: momentum-less
an aside during a comrade's lecture on Shirley Graham Du Bois [3]
considering the beatified American patriot Ossawatomie John Brown;
in Mississippi the name evokes two shades: liberator and thief
one violent man: angel or wraith
who talks to god--direct line like Joan of Arc or Jim Jones
an adventurist--too chaotic for Lenin but not Johann Most. [4]
He inspired those that raised us: the black seed and red flag
everybody considers the man:
conflicted Yankee settlers of manifest destiny,
the confused constitutions of bleeding Kansas and Appalachia,
a conspiracy of abolitionists--the secret six [5]
Harper's Ferry and evolving national mythos. [6] Some claim he catalyzed
more than verse, a transcendental Christ
an "old man, tall, with white hair" on a scaffold [7]
with "two instruments...the Golden Rule and the Declaration of Independence" [8]
reincarnated, "he is an angel of light" [9]
also reborn, our union reveres a moldering corpse [10];
"God-like...unconquerable soul...perfectly sublime!...exaltation supreme" [11]
"the cost of liberty is less than the price of repression, even though that cost be blood" [12]
whose body personified historical inflection: "[b]ury the South together with him" [13]
"I should forfeit my life for...justice...in this slave country" [14]
a romantic and Utopian credo; not scientific socialism via historical material of Lenin and Trotsky
instead, consider a democratic lexicon born after the Enlightenment and but before socialism:
voluntary association, "Monkey Warfare," autonomous zone, "direct action" and "the use of explosives" [15]
[removed stanza #2]
Unlike the lecturing comrade, the John Brown of my childhood was a northern consideration
lilac scented liberator and radical populist prodding Lincoln's burgeoning republicanism
outlaw and terrorist; unwavering and correct; spontaneous and impolitic [16]
á la Goldman, Berkman, Czolgosz or Princip [17]--the excommunicated terrorists.
One version of American consciousness realized during a different gulf war abroad
paralleled by Kaczynski, McVeigh, anthrax envelopes and insidious sleeper cells at home
the dialectics of terror: state, secular and lonesome wolves; Manson metastasized, MKULTRA run amok
eclipsed communism during "two minutes hate" late 2001; genuflecting before the same flag in public spaces
in this paradigm there isn't much room to consider real-life home-grown iconoclasts:
for every revolutionary there is a mass shooter, informant patsy and two lunatic whack-a-dos
reality is scrubbed of insurgency from deep within the core: Revelation harbinger,
outlaws birthed of immutable righteousness and self-evident truths, consider John Brown Et al.
the dear comrade's anecdote added a new piece to my consideration of Ossawatomie
of a white southern child, terrorized but never in danger
by a boogeyman stalking the figurative heirs of plantations
reparations for original sin. Ghosts watch us all.
We from the periphery (with the animals), John Ross, Black Hawk, Pocatello
inside with Nat Turner a colony turned empire that reveres American Cincinnatus
a slave owner himself of whom Victor Hugo proclaimed is second to John Brown [18]
everybody considers the man.
[1] VI Lenin. "The 'Plan' for an All-Russian Political Newspaper" What is to be Done Conn: Martino Publishing, 2013. 143-65.
Lenin's desires a national local language movement paper. He predicted the decentralized modern left-wing media environment of substacks and podcasts. The scattershot and disorganized messaging does not promote a national movement. In today's post-literate society there is limited coherent messaging by anybody. Lenin's critique of media applies to the social democratic movement writ large. Without coordination the vanguard social revolutionaries become tailing pragmatic liberals.
Reading Lenin with Brown in mind and the former's critique of the latter is not explicit but probably: spontaneous terrorist, a vanguard revolutionary without a partisan base, ideologically steadfast but theoretically vapid. One purpose of communists like Lenin is to activate terrorists like Brown through politics and class consciousness to yield political revolutionaries useful to social democracy.
[removed stanza #1]:
Lenin wouldn't like the state of our newspapers [*]
a country for decades run by neoliberals, televangelists, venture capitalists,
private equity, pharma, silicon and defense [*]
everybody's armed like Hunter S. Thompson but there's no decent daily.
[*] These are different parts of the ruling class alliance: neoliberals offshore industry and global trade is used to transfer unfair labor to developing nations; televangelists trade on unscientific explanations for class like colonialism, gender discrimination and economic inequality; venture capitalists privatize public infrastructure, increase prices and sell of unprofitable piecemeal; private equity are the hubristic concentrations of too big to fail capital still emboldened by the repeal of Glass-Steagall; and the defense industry is a public-private mix of gendarmerie, soldiers and spies funded by more than half the American federal budget.
[2] Leon Trotsky "Why Marxists Oppose Individual Terrorism" Der Kampf (November 1911).
Not only is mass action undermined by an individual act of terror, the unsettling event will not affect the long term social order:
"The recipe for explosives is accessible to all, and a Browning can be obtained anywhere. In the first case, there is a social struggle, whose methods and means flow necessarily from the nature of the prevailing social order; and in the second, a purely mechanical reaction identical anywhere—in China as in France—very striking in its outward form (murder, explosions and so forth) but absolutely harmless as far as the social system goes."
[3] tonya thames-taylor "Black & Red: We Stand on the Shoulders of Giants. Pt. 1" Black History Month Freedom School (24 February 2026) Online: CPUSA.
John Brown was mentioned five times in a five minute section of this lecture (50:45-54:40). In this narrative, the antebellum segue to abolitionism partially came from proto-black nationalist and abolitionist David Walker, author of "Walker's Appeal" (1829) who inspired Brown. (50:45). Through generations after the Civil War "Oh I'd be John Brown" (52:12) remained a phrase coded to "two southern experiences...southern black and southern white perspective"(52:35).
[4] Lenin What is to be Done? Conn: Martino Publishing, 2013 162-3.
Lenin avoids "miserable political adventurers" by long term planning and preparing to act quickly in case "the march of events is accelerated..." Brown assembled a posse but didn't build political momentum. Brown did have allies in the abolitionist press and politics that he didn't successfully capitalize. The revolutionary power of his legend was fully realized by artists postmortem. Using Lenin's language, these are "primitive" tactics. This seems dismissive of Brown who is portrayed by the transcendentalists and historians as a primary catalyst toward the Civil War whose actions had real world political, economic and social impact.
Most is an anarchist who espoused attentat which combined propaganda and revolutionary action in an attempt to spur socio-political or economic change. Compared to Most, Leninists prepare for opportune moments in history. Followers of Most try to create the opportune moments. The best case scenario is these two leftist ideologies serve the movement in tandem (if not coordinated).
[5] Lenin wasn't in favor of conspiracy. He organized in the open and tried to survive the Gendarmerie.
[6] This legend was constructed in newspapers, pamphlets and poems during "Bleeding Kansas" through his insurrection, imprisonment, trial, execution and resurrection into myth. There are biographies and quotations but he isn't known for running a press (unlike Lenin, August Spies or Lucy Parsons). Abolitionist journalist James Redpath was Brown's press agent and later biographer. Brown authored a provisional constitution for a new Appalachian state and his last speech (2 November 1859) is an often cited primary source. He was also in communication with north eastern editors like William Lloyd Garrison who also crafted his persona. Layers of embellishment and abstraction compounded after Brown died. One insignificant example is the apocryphal courtroom kiss at his execution described by John Greenleaf Whittier "Brown of Ossawatomie" New York Independent 22 December 1859; Thomas S. Noble "John Brown's Blessing" (1867); Thomas Hovenden "Last Moments of John Brown" (1884); and "The Last Days of John Brown" by HD Thoreau.
[7] Walt Whitman "Year of Meteors (1859-60)" Leaves of Grass ebook: waltwhitman.com. pg. 179.
[8] Ralph Waldo Emerson "John Brown--Speech at Boston" Boston: Tremont Temple, 18 November 1859.
Emerson gave a bunch of speeches for Brown's legal defense fund.
[9] Henry David Thoreau "A Plea for Captain John Brown" 30 October 1859.
"I am here to plead his cause with you. I plead not for his life, but for his character, — his immortal life; and so it becomes your cause wholly, and is not his in the least. Some eighteen hundred years ago Christ was crucified; this morning, perchance, Captain Brown was hung. These are the two ends of a chain which is not without its links. He is not Old Brown any longer; he is an angel of light."
[10] James E. Greenleaf, C.S. Hall (lyrics) "John Brown Song" 1861.
[11] EV Debs "John Brown: History's Greatest Hero" Appeal to Reason 23 November 1907.
[12] W.E.B. Du Bois John Brown American Crisis Biographies. George W. Jacobs and Co, 1909. 395.
[13] Stephen Vincent Benet "John Brown's Body" New York: Rinehart & Company, INC, 1927-8. 333. (This version was performed on stage by Tyrone Power, Judith Anderson and Raymond Massey directed by Charles Laughton in 1953.)
[14] John Brown "Last Speech" Charlestown, VA Courthouse, 2 November 1859.
The whole quote: "if it is deemed necessary that I should forfeit my life for the furtherance of the ends of justice, and mingle my blood further with the blood of my children and with the blood of millions in this slave country whose rights are disregarded by wicked, cruel, and unjust enactments, I submit; so let it be done!"
The speech is only five paragraphs and some filler. He first describes an earlier raid in Missouri that was without intent to "murder...treason...[destroy] property, or to excite or incite slaves to rebellion, or to make insurrection." Then he questions the justice of his "penalty." That he fought for slaves was his only mistake. If he served "the rich...powerful...intelligent...so-called great...it would have been alright" and he would have been "rewarded." His third point is an appeal to "the law of God" which commands universal justice to all men which he fights against the "slave country" to achieve. He felt the trial was fair but didn't admit guilt to insurrection because slavery was unjust. The final statement was about his raiding party allies.
[15] Abbie Hoffman Steal This Book New York City: Grove Press, 1971; LA Kauffman Direct Action London: Verso, 2017; Lucy Parsons "A Word to Tramps" The Alarm [Chicago] vol 1, no. 1. (Oct 4, 1884) pg. 1.
[removed stanza #2]:
biographers--Oates, or Ray Ginger are HUAC-ed like Parenti and Finkelstein
their fate is "Tragic Prelude"[*] to reactionary fascism
shock of fleeting tenure, powerlessness and fealty
unforeseen the hubris of hope splatting against the institution.
[*] John Steuart Curry "Tragic Prelude" Topeka, KS: Kansas State Capitol, 1942; Stephen B. Oates To Purge This Land With Blood Harper and Row, 1970.
[16] Lincoln and Brown evoke different histories North and South, rural and urban areas. Brown's political terror detached from insurrection and Lincoln's reconquest of the south were both agents for expanding the franchise. They were righteous even if they were violent and illegal and this sentiment is shaded based on who you ask. The three early conceptions of version's of John Brown: liberator without caveat, justified political terrorist, unjustified political terrorist (and thief) come from different Americas. Add to that a Leninist conception of political terror as untrained, primitive and spontaneous and Trotsky's conception of individual terror as distracting from mass momentum and this tactic is dismissed by communists. On the other hand, the anarcho-communist Most likely (ha-ha), sees well aimed and timely attentat as crucial to disrupting entrenched systems. Those civil rights lunch counter sit ins, tree protectors and climate changers glued to paintings prove attentat is not inherently violent. The nonviolence of Gandhi and MLK was effective. Trotsky dismisses nonviolence as well as individual terrorism and instead promotes well-organized, united action against the capitalist system.
[17] These are anarcho-terrorists and followers of Most: Emma Goldman, Alexander Berkman, Leon Czolgosz and Gavrilo Princip. Their violence was not without a premeditated goal. Political terror was an expedient way for them to communicate beyond organizing or voting. The obvious twenty-first century manifestation of attentat was bin Laden's 9/11. Terrorism is not a long term organizing tactic, it's result is unpredictable and adherents are often disdained by liberals, communists and even other anarchists. If the goal of 9/11 was to bankrupt America in middle east forever wars (like the western backed Mujahideen against the Soviets in Afghanistan) then this tactic have led to strategic success.
[18] Hugo quoted by Debs in (1907), "John Brown is grander than George Washington!"