Re: notes to Marx, The 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte -P.S.
Christopher Cutrone
On the simultaneous *impossibility* and *necessity* of the bourgeois-democratic revolution:
Marx thought that the mid-19th century, post-Industrial Revolution phenomenon of Bonapartism was the result of the simultaneous continued necessity and emergent impossibility of the bourgeois-democratic revolution.
The crisis of capital was simultaneously progressive and regressive: The development of modern society in capital meant the potential overcoming of the necessity of mediating society through labor, but it also meant the impossibility of mediating society through labor.
Marx understood the abstract right of the political citizen of bourgeois society as a phenomenon of the commodity form of labor. As the combined homo faber and homo economicus (the human that produces efficiently), humanity was not the zoon politkon (political animal, according to Aristotle) of the polis of Classical Antiquity. Modern society was not either Athens (or Sparta), or Rome, despite the ways Classical Antiquity gripped the bourgeois imagination.
As homo faber/economicus, humanity in capital had, by the mid-19th century, potentially transcended the categories of bourgeois society, but had not yet developed beyond them in conscious political practice. Humanity proceeded as if it remained perpetually in the 18th century classical liberal era of manufacturing capital, despite the transformation and undermining of socially necessary labor time as a measure of social value after the Industrial Revolution and the concomitant rise of the socialist workers' movement. A crisis of not only the economics but also the politics of modern society was the result.
Bonapartism was the signal phenomenon of this crisis. Marx asked, what does it mean that universal suffrage had resulted in a dictatorial police state? That the 2nd Republic, potentially much more democratic than the 1st Republic that issued from the 1789 French Revolution, had quickly collapsed into the 2nd Empire of Louis Bonaparte? What did it mean that people had clamored, democratically, for their own domination by the state? For not only the capitalists, in fear of the workers, but also a great portion of the working class, and the majority of the peasants -- as semi-proletarianized, would-be workers, had elected Bonaparte as their master. As Marx put it, they cannot represent themselves, they will be represented.
What this meant was that the inadequacy of bourgeois politics to meet the challenges of modern society resulted in the Bonapartist state. This was due to the abdication, not only of the capitalist bourgeoisie, but also of the proletarian workers, who appeared in the guise of the so-called lumpen-proletariat, the proletariat that existed merely in itself and not for itself.
The crisis of capital by the mid-19th century thus gave a new lease on life to the (unfulfilled) demands of the bourgeois-democratic revolution while simultaneously revealing its inadequacy as a form of emancipation.
The problem with vulgar Marxism was that it misinterpreted Marx according to a linear view of history in which the bourgeoisie had simply run out of steam and been superseded by the proletariat, that liberalism had been historically transcended by socialism. We now know how gravely mistaken this view has been -- how socialism participated in the illiberalism of the crisis of modern politics. The point is that the workers were still bourgeois. This was expressed in their susceptibility, along with the capitalists, to authoritarian politics. The workers needed to overcome their own authoritarianism, thus becoming at once fully bourgeois, and overcoming their bourgeois character, which could only be expressed in authoritarian ways since the crisis of bourgeois society of the mid-19th century.
This was what was behind the failure of the Revolution of 1848. -- And behind the failure of the Revolutions of 1917-19. It is what has lied behind the failure of *politics* in general ever since 1848.
-- Chris
* * *
I am writing with some brief notes on our reading for this week, Marx's 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte.
In many ways, this is the central reading on the summer syllabus. It forms the middle of the triptych of readings on French politics 1848-71, from the 2nd Republic ushered in by the Revolution of 1848, through the 2nd Empire and its collapse in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-71, with its denouement in the Paris Commune.
The collapse of the 2nd Republic, in Louis Bonaparte's coup of 1851, was, for Marx, the signal event of the crisis of bourgeois society that demonstrated, negatively, the impossibility of its continuing in the old mold of the 18th to early 19th centuries' "classical" era, of the bourgeois-democratic revolutions and the rise of modern politics.
Positively, this crisis manifested in the rise of the modern socialist workers' movement in the period leading up to the revolutions of 1848 (the "hungry '40s" of the first world commercial crisis, after the Industrial Revolution), and the demand for the "social republic" in the Revolution of 1848 in France (which was prefigured by Chartism in Britain also in this period).
Previously, I wrote with some recommended background reading on the history of events in France and beyond in this period, which Marx took for granted in this largely journalistic writing (narrating current events). Additionally, the text of the 18th Brumaire itself contains a summary time-line of events (in Chapter VI, which is not included in the selections in the Tucker, ed., Marx-Engels Reader, while is comprised only of the 1st and last [7th] chapters):
http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1852/18th-brumaire/ch06.htm#summary
The typical, traditional (better known as *vulgar*) "Marxist" understanding of Marx's writings on the tumultuous politics of his time (indicated unfortunately by Engels's own phraseology in his introductions to Marx's writings) interprets Marx's analysis as tracing the ultimate basis of political phenomena in the socioeconomic class struggle of the workers against the capitalists. But, as we have been reading, Marx understood and sought to critically grasp, rather, how socioeconomic as well as political phenomena were projections of the self-contradiction of the commodity form of labor in capital. This manifested as a crisis of the politics of (and among) the bourgeoisie or capitalist class and not only or even primarily between the capitalists and the workers. The class struggle was thus, for Marx, an effect rather than a cause of the crisis of capital. This means, in this instance, that even after the definitive defeat of the workers in the June days
of Paris (and beyond) in France in 1848, the crisis took the form of the internecine struggles among the capitalists. For Marx, the phenomenon of the rise of Louis Bonaparte was the result.
One of the principle themes of Marx's writing on Louis Bonaparte's coup is the question of the historical status of the bourgeois-democratic revolution in the Revolution of 1848. The traditional Marxist interpretation of Marx on this score is that, whereas in the 18th and early 19th centuries the bourgeoisie played a "progressive" political role, by 1848, this was no longer the case, because of the rise of the workers' movement and the demand for socialism, in the meantime.
But Marx's understanding is rather the reverse of this kind of historical explanation of the obsolescence of the bourgeois-democratic revolution. For Marx was interested in the rise of the socialist workers' movement, for example, in the demand for the "social republic" in the Revolution of 1848, as the effect of the ripening crisis of capital by the mid-19th century. Marx's injunction that the revolution of the 19th century cannot take its "poetry" from the past, bourgeois-democratic revolutions, but from the "future" was not a call for the working class to distinguish itself from the capitalists and bourgeois political leadership, but rather a call for the socialist workers' movement to attain greater historical consciousness of the crisis of capital after the Industrial Revolution, and the political necessities for such consciousness.
The exhaustion of the "content" of the political "forms" of the bourgeois-democratic revolution that Marx describes itself required explanation. This is especially the case since with the Louis Bonaparte's coup, the norms of bourgeois democracy were themselves violated. The demands for bourgeois democracy, therefore, were hardly spent. The question for Marx was why they would be vain. For Marx, the key was the failure of bourgeois society to be able to politically manage its affairs through the parliamentary republic, which is not only what made possible but indeed necessitated the collapse of bourgeois democracy into Bonapartist authoritarianism.
This was not due to the social-democratic pressure of the rising workers' movement, as Marxists may have traditionally liked to have depicted. Rather, Marx perceived the necessity now weighing on the workers, with the crisis of capital that undermined the "classical" (18th century) forms of bourgeois society, to both fulfill and surpass the demands of bourgeois democracy.
But Marx understood the workers' "socialist" demands as being themselves "bourgeois" in nature. The question for Marx was why they could not be met. This was not because of the venality of the bourgeoisie, but for deeper reasons of the inadequacy of post-Industrial Revolution capital to be mediated by the commodity form of labor, on which the bourgeois-democratic demands of "one person, one vote" and equal rights of citizens in politics and as contractual parties in civil society was based. The further development of bourgeois society to include the demands of the workers, for political and even social equality, was made, in Marx's perspective, on the basis of the commodity form of classical bourgeois political economy, lagging behind the development of capital after the Industrial Revolution, which made the basis of commensurability, in socially necessary labor time, obsolete.
Many prominent socialists in Marx's time, Proudhon and Lassalle among them, rejected labor unionism and socioeconomic demands for equality, precisely as being complicit in and buttressing of capitalism, wedding workers to the system. Marx thought that this was true but that such demands exacerbated the crisis of capital and thus pointed beyond it. The crisis of capital pointed to the self-transformation and ultimately the self-abolition of the working class in and through the advancing of capital itself. This was because of Marx's dialectical approach to the commodity form, in which Marx grounded his understanding of politics as well as economics, where other socialists addressed the workers as political subjects struggling against their economic objectification, thus falling prey to the antinomy of politics and economics that Marx thought was symptomatic of capital in crisis. Where Proudhon and Lassalle, et al., castigated the workers for a one-sided
economic struggle for their mere material improvement, Marx critiqued the socialists for a one-sided emphasis on politics, as if it were an arena in which emancipation could be addressed as a matter of political forms, i.e., as a matter of "democracy," which Marx found to be just as antiquated as the economic aspects of the commodity form.
The question for Marx was, how were the workers' struggles against exploitation able to manifest the contradiction of capital and thus point beyond themselves.
Marx's analysis of Bonapartist authoritarianism was the obsolescence of bourgeois-democratic forms, such as the parliamentary republic, to be able to adequately address the problems of bourgeois society by the mid-19th century. This is how Marx understands the need for the state/governmental authority to come to stand "above" society. The limitations of "bourgeois politics" for Marx were not simply those of the political wheeling and dealing among the capitalists, but rather for society as a whole, including among the capitalists.
As we have read previously (in "The coming upheaval," the selection from Marx's 1847 critique of Proudhon, The Poverty of Philosophy), while capitalism rendered the mass of society into workers, only the class struggle of the working class made the capitalists into a class as such. Otherwise, their interests were pitted against each other as the crisis of the commodity form of labor to adequately mediate the liberal development of society through competition in civil society (understood, importantly, as cosmopolitan in nature), as the classical bourgeois political economists such as Adam Smith had imagined would be the case.
From a mediating role, competition among commodity owners in civil society became an atomizing, disintegrating force in modern society. This necessitated the rise of another, seemingly independent, political force, in the form of the state, to "mediate" among and between the contradictory forces of "civil" society, among and between capitalists, and between the capitalists and the workers (and the rest of the "mass" of society, such as the peasants, as would-be workers, or people exploited by the dynamics of capitalism, which Marx understood to be driven by the pressures of demands of -- and for -- wage labor).
Rather than, as others perceived, through the lens of the norms of bourgeois democracy, blaming the authoritarianism of modern society on its authoritarian actors, such as Louis Bonaparte, Marx sought to describe and grasp the deeper crisis of capital that made such authoritarianism possible and even necessary, short of the proletarian socialist struggle to overcome capital.
For even "socialists" (including almost all "Marxists") have characterized the problem of capitalism in relatively naive political terms that would appear to be satisfiable fully within (historically "bourgeois") democratic forms.
But Marx's critique of "bourgeois" democracy goes far deeper than the obvious disenfranchisements of the workers, the "hidden" exploitation behind the "equality" of the labor contract in the capitalists' "property rights" in the means of production, and the distortions of even universal suffrage to the socioeconomic hegemony of the capitalists.
The full character of the inadequacy of even "social" democracy to meet the crisis of capital was made manifest in the near simultaneous (or quick succession of) realization and denial of such demands in the Revolution of 1848 in France, between the February toppling of the (constitutional) monarchy, the sanguinary suppression of the workers in the June days, the election of Louis Napoleon as President at the end of 1848, and his coup against the parliament and then the 2nd Republic itself in 1851-52, with the declaration of the 2nd Empire. Marx saw this as a necessary, if vain outcome of the failure of the Revolution of 1848.
As Marx wrote in our prior reading, The Class Struggles in France 1848-50, the depth (or lack thereof) of the revolution was to be measured in its reverberation, beyond France, in Britain, which Marx described as the "demiurge" of the capitalist world. The failure of the revolution was in the political immaturity of the working class, internationally, to advance beyond the bourgeois-democratic struggle. But this failure also had repercussions for the capitalists, for they also failed to render bourgeois democracy effective, even for themselves. Bonaparte was the instrument of the penalty society as a whole paid for this failure.
It was indicative for Marx that the form of Bonapartism was nationalist. This was an index of its retrograde -- reactionary -- character. Nationalism would be characteristic form of authoritarianism ever since then. Marx found the basis for this in the dynamics of capitalism, as capital entrenched itself in national labor markets in crisis. The workers were won to bourgeois politics in nationalism, but this represented the decadence of bourgeois politics, which in its best, classical (and liberal) moment, had understood itself as inherently cosmopolitan. The contradiction between liberalism and nationalism has been the self-contradiction of democracy ever since.
Bonapartism, that is, the authoritarian hollowing out of bourgeois democracy, the vulgarization of bourgeois politics, and the irresistible concomitant rise of illiberal politics (such as nationalism), is the phenomenon the world has had to contend with ever since 1848.
Starting with figures such as Louis Bonaparte and his contemporary Bismarck, not only fascists like Mussolini and Hitler, and populists like Peron, and "socialist" authoritarians like Stalin and Mao, but also "strong" executive governmental leaders like FDR (and what people wanted Obama to be), have exhibited such Bonapartism, in the Marxian sense, for Marx found it not in the political personalities but the forms of the modern state itself, and its pathological necessity in the unresolved and unsurpassed crisis of capital -- the crisis of bourgeois society in all its forms.
-- Chris
Christopher Cutrone
On the bourgeois revolution, "first time as tragedy, second as farce:"
It is important that, for Marx, the bourgeois revolution was a tragedy the first time around, and in its late, futile character in the mid-19th century, a farce. -- It is important that it was only ever a tragedy for Marx.
We in Platypus may be tempted, in the advanced decadence of (post-)modernity, to try to rekindle the fires of heroism of the bourgeois revolutions. Especially since, with post-1960s New Left postmodernism, the bourgeois revolution has been turned into a non-event, to be historically effaced as much as possible. What has been desired is bourgeois society without revolution. Marx had already diagnosed this in 1848, in which the ruling interests, while celebrating the revolution (in the February 1848 overthrow of the monarchy) sought to be done with it and proclaim it accomplished as quickly as possible.
Marx discussed the contrast between 1789 and 1848 in terms of, in the first instance, the phrase going beyond the content, that the bourgeois revolutions had to dress themselves up as either Biblical (in the English case) or as Classical Antiquity (in the French case) to hide from itself its more prosaic realities. This continued to be the case in 1848, but in a farcical manner. For Marx, with the possibility of overcoming the bourgeois society of capital, after the Industrial Revolution, the content of the revolution (potentially) went beyond the phrase.
The farce (of 1848) was a tragedy (like 1789-1814), but in which insult was added to injury.
For Marx it was 1789 and not 1848 that was the revolution that was *late* as a bourgeois revolution and *premature* as a proletarian revolution (pointing beyond capital). Moreover, the bourgeois revolutions had brought forth the bourgeois society of capital, according to Marx, "dripping filth and blood from every pore." The bourgeois revolutions were only to be celebrated as paving the way to the proletarian socialist revolution and thus opening the way beyond capital. The degree to which they merely constituted capital they remained not heroic but tragic.
It was indicative for Marx that whereas it took many years and epic struggles to expose the limitations of the bourgeois revolution after 1789, this was revealed in mere weeks in 1848. Marx makes two important statements regarding this limitation, that Louis Bonaparte was in fact Napoleon resurrected, but caricatured as Napoleon I must have necessarily appeared in the mid-19th century. It is important to Marx that the first Napoleon had been a Jacobin general, whereas his nephew was a mere lumpen gangster. This was the historical fate of bourgeois radicalism: 1848 had revealed 1789 in a new and unflattering light. But while even Napoleon I had had a progressive role to play (according to Hegel, et al.) in the Napoleonic Wars that spread the bourgeois effects of the 1789 Revolution far beyond France, for Marx there was a way in which already the February Revolution in 1848 displayed a conservative-reactionary character. The bourgeois revolution was no
longer in itself progressive but only potentially so. On its own, unsurpassed, it was reactionary: Bonapartism was its inevitable, necessary result.
The other cryptic phrase that is extremely important from a Platypus perspective is when Marx states that Louis Bonaparte rise as a political phenomenon "contained the secret of the proletarian socialist revolution." What did Marx mean by this? It should recall, for participants in the primary Platypus reading group during the academic year, Wilhelm Reich's point about the "progressive" character of fascism, that fascism was not simply the antithesis but actually the perverted expression of socialism (not least why Nazism described itself as national socialism). This was already manifested by Bonapartism in 1848.
-- Chris
P.S.
On the simultaneous *impossibility* and *necessity* of the bourgeois-democratic revolution:
Marx thought that the mid-19th century, post-Industrial Revolution phenomenon of Bonapartism was the result of the simultaneous continued necessity and emergent impossibility of the bourgeois-democratic revolution.
The crisis of capital was simultaneously progressive and regressive: The development of modern society in capital meant the potential overcoming of the necessity of mediating society through labor, but it also meant the impossibility of mediating society through labor.
Marx understood the abstract right of the political citizen of bourgeois society as a phenomenon of the commodity form of labor. As the combined homo faber and homo economicus (the human that produces efficiently), humanity was not the zoon politkon (political animal, according to Aristotle) of the polis of Classical Antiquity. Modern society was not either Athens (or Sparta), or Rome, despite the ways Classical Antiquity gripped the bourgeois imagination.
As homo faber/economicus, humanity in capital had, by the mid-19th century, potentially transcended the categories of bourgeois society, but had not yet developed beyond them in conscious political practice. Humanity proceeded as if it remained perpetually in the 18th century classical liberal era of manufacturing capital, despite the transformation and undermining of socially necessary labor time as a measure of social value after the Industrial Revolution and the concomitant rise of the socialist workers' movement. A crisis of not only the economics but also the politics of modern society was the result.
Bonapartism was the signal phenomenon of this crisis. Marx asked, what does it mean that universal suffrage had resulted in a dictatorial police state? That the 2nd Republic, potentially much more democratic than the 1st Republic that issued from the 1789 French Revolution, had quickly collapsed into the 2nd Empire of Louis Bonaparte? What did it mean that people had clamored, democratically, for their own domination by the state? For not only the capitalists, in fear of the workers, but also a great portion of the working class, and the majority of the peasants -- as semi-proletarianized, would-be workers, had elected Bonaparte as their master. As Marx put it, they cannot represent themselves, they will be represented.
What this meant was that the inadequacy of bourgeois politics to meet the challenges of modern society resulted in the Bonapartist state. This was due to the abdication, not only of the capitalist bourgeoisie, but also of the proletarian workers, who appeared in the guise of the so-called lumpen-proletariat, the proletariat that existed merely in itself and not for itself.
The crisis of capital by the mid-19th century thus gave a new lease on life to the (unfulfilled) demands of the bourgeois-democratic revolution while simultaneously revealing its inadequacy as a form of emancipation.
The problem with vulgar Marxism was that it misinterpreted Marx according to a linear view of history in which the bourgeoisie had simply run out of steam and been superseded by the proletariat, that liberalism had been historically transcended by socialism. We now know how gravely mistaken this view has been -- how socialism participated in the illiberalism of the crisis of modern politics. The point is that the workers were still bourgeois. This was expressed in their susceptibility, along with the capitalists, to authoritarian politics. The workers needed to overcome their own authoritarianism, thus becoming at once fully bourgeois, and overcoming their bourgeois character, which could only be expressed in authoritarian ways since the crisis of bourgeois society of the mid-19th century.
This was what was behind the failure of the Revolution of 1848. -- And behind the failure of the Revolutions of 1917-19. It is what has lied behind the failure of *politics* in general ever since 1848.
-- Chris
* * *
I am writing with some brief notes on our reading for this week, Marx's 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte.
In many ways, this is the central reading on the summer syllabus. It forms the middle of the triptych of readings on French politics 1848-71, from the 2nd Republic ushered in by the Revolution of 1848, through the 2nd Empire and its collapse in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-71, with its denouement in the Paris Commune.
The collapse of the 2nd Republic, in Louis Bonaparte's coup of 1851, was, for Marx, the signal event of the crisis of bourgeois society that demonstrated, negatively, the impossibility of its continuing in the old mold of the 18th to early 19th centuries' "classical" era, of the bourgeois-democratic revolutions and the rise of modern politics.
Positively, this crisis manifested in the rise of the modern socialist workers' movement in the period leading up to the revolutions of 1848 (the "hungry '40s" of the first world commercial crisis, after the Industrial Revolution), and the demand for the "social republic" in the Revolution of 1848 in France (which was prefigured by Chartism in Britain also in this period).
Previously, I wrote with some recommended background reading on the history of events in France and beyond in this period, which Marx took for granted in this largely journalistic writing (narrating current events). Additionally, the text of the 18th Brumaire itself contains a summary time-line of events (in Chapter VI, not included in the selections in the Tucker, ed., Marx-Engels Reader, which is comprised only of the 1st and last [7th] chapters):
http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1852/18th-brumaire/ch06.htm#summary
The typical, traditional (better known as *vulgar*) "Marxist" understanding of Marx's writings on the tumultuous politics of his time (indicated unfortunately by Engels's own phraseology in his introductions to Marx's writings) interprets Marx's analysis as tracing the ultimate basis of political phenomena in the socioeconomic class struggle of the workers against the capitalists. But, as we have been reading, Marx understood and sought to critically grasp, rather, how socioeconomic as well as political phenomena were projections of the self-contradiction of the commodity form of labor in capital. This manifested as a crisis of the politics of (and among) the bourgeoisie or capitalist class and not only or even primarily between the capitalists and the workers. The class struggle was thus, for Marx, an effect rather than a cause of the crisis of capital. This means, in this instance, that even after the definitive defeat of the workers in the June days
of Paris (and beyond) in France in 1848, the crisis took the form of the internecine struggles among the capitalists. For Marx, the phenomenon of the rise of Louis Bonaparte was the result.
One of the principal themes of Marx's writing on Louis Bonaparte's coup is the question of the historical status of the bourgeois-democratic revolution in the Revolution of 1848. The traditional Marxist interpretation of Marx on this score is that, whereas in the 18th and early 19th centuries the bourgeoisie played a "progressive" political role, by 1848, this was no longer the case, because of the rise of the workers' movement and the demand for socialism, in the meantime.
But Marx's understanding is rather the reverse of this kind of historical explanation of the obsolescence of the bourgeois-democratic revolution. For Marx was interested in the rise of the socialist workers' movement, for example, in the demand for the "social republic" in the Revolution of 1848, as the effect of the ripening crisis of capital by the mid-19th century. Marx's injunction that the revolution of the 19th century cannot take its "poetry" from the past, bourgeois-democratic revolutions, but from the "future," was not a call for the working class to distinguish itself from the capitalists and bourgeois political leadership, but rather a call for the socialist workers' movement to attain greater historical consciousness of the crisis of capital after the Industrial Revolution, and the political necessities for such consciousness.
The exhaustion of the "content" of the political "forms" of the bourgeois-democratic revolution that Marx describes itself required explanation. This is especially the case since with Louis Bonaparte's coup, the norms of bourgeois democracy were themselves violated. The demands for bourgeois democracy, therefore, were hardly spent. The question for Marx was why they would be vain. For Marx, the key was the failure of bourgeois society to be able to politically manage its affairs through the parliamentary republic, which is not only what made possible but indeed necessitated the collapse of bourgeois democracy into Bonapartist authoritarianism.
This was not due to the social-democratic pressure of the rising workers' movement, as Marxists may have traditionally liked to have depicted. Rather, Marx perceived the necessity now weighing on the workers, with the crisis of capital that undermined the "classical" (18th century) forms of bourgeois society, to both fulfill and surpass the demands of bourgeois democracy.
But Marx understood the workers' "socialist" demands as being themselves "bourgeois" in nature. The question for Marx was why they could not be met. This was not because of the venality of the bourgeoisie, but for deeper reasons of the inadequacy of post-Industrial Revolution capital to be mediated by the commodity form of labor, on which the bourgeois-democratic demands of "one person, one vote" and equal rights of citizens in politics and as contractual parties in civil society was based. The further development of bourgeois society to include the demands of the workers, for political and even social equality, was made, in Marx's perspective, on the basis of the commodity form of classical bourgeois political economy, lagging behind the development of capital after the Industrial Revolution, which made the basis of commensurability, in socially necessary labor time, obsolete.
Many prominent socialists in Marx's time, Proudhon and Lassalle among them, rejected labor unionism and socioeconomic demands for equality, precisely as being complicit in and buttressing of capitalism, wedding workers to the system. Marx thought that this was true but that such demands exacerbated the crisis of capital and thus pointed beyond it. The crisis of capital pointed to the self-transformation and ultimately the self-abolition of the working class in and through the advancement of capital itself. This was because of Marx's dialectical approach to the commodity form, in which Marx grounded his understanding of politics as well as economics, where other socialists addressed the workers as political subjects struggling against their economic objectification, thus falling prey to the antinomy of politics and economics that Marx thought was symptomatic of capital in crisis. Where Proudhon and Lassalle, et al., castigated the workers for a one-sided
economic struggle for their mere material improvement, Marx critiqued the socialists for a one-sided emphasis on politics, as if it were an arena in which emancipation could be addressed as a matter of better political forms, i.e., as a matter of "democracy," i.e., universal suffrage, which Marx found to be just as antiquated as the economic aspects of the commodity form.
The question for Marx was, how were the workers' struggles against exploitation able to manifest the contradiction of capital and thus point beyond themselves?
Marx's analysis of Bonapartist authoritarianism was the obsolescence of bourgeois-democratic forms, such as the parliamentary republic, to be able to adequately address the problems of bourgeois society by the mid-19th century. This is how Marx understands the need for the state/governmental authority to come to stand "above" society. The limitations of "bourgeois politics," for Marx, were not simply those of the political wheeling and dealing among the capitalists, but rather for society as a whole, including among the capitalists.
As we have read previously (in "The coming upheaval," the selection from Marx's 1847 critique of Proudhon, The Poverty of Philosophy), while capitalism rendered the mass of society into workers, only the class struggle of the working class made the capitalists into a class as such. Otherwise, their interests were pitted against each other as the crisis of the commodity form of labor to adequately mediate the liberal development of society through competition in civil society (understood, importantly, as cosmopolitan in nature), as the classical bourgeois political economists such as Adam Smith had imagined would be the case.
From a mediating role, competition among commodity owners in civil society became an atomizing, disintegrating force in modern society. This necessitated the rise of another, seemingly independent, political force, in the form of the state, to "mediate" among and between the contradictory forces of "civil" society, among and between capitalists, and between the capitalists and the workers (and the rest of the "mass" of society, such as the peasants, as would-be workers, or people exploited by the dynamics of capitalism, which Marx understood to be driven by the pressures of demands of -- and for -- wage labor).
Rather than, as others perceived, through the lens of the norms of bourgeois democracy, blaming the authoritarianism of modern society on its authoritarian actors, such as Louis Bonaparte, Marx sought to describe and grasp the deeper crisis of capital that made such authoritarianism possible and even necessary, short of the proletarian socialist struggle to overcome capital.
For even "socialists" (including almost all "Marxists") have characterized the problem of capitalism in relatively naive political terms that would appear to be satisfiable fully within (historically "bourgeois") democratic forms.
But Marx's critique of "bourgeois" democracy goes far deeper than the obvious disenfranchisements of the workers, the "hidden" exploitation behind the "equality" of the labor contract in the capitalists' "property rights" in the means of production, and the distortions of even universal suffrage to the socioeconomic hegemony of the capitalists.
The full character of the inadequacy of even "social" democracy to meet the crisis of capital was made manifest in the near simultaneous (or quick succession of) realization and denial of such demands in the Revolution of 1848 in France, between the February toppling of the (constitutional) monarchy, the sanguinary suppression of the workers in the June days, the election of Louis Napoleon as President at the end of 1848, and his coup against the parliament and then the 2nd Republic itself, in 1851-52, culminating with the declaration of the 2nd Empire. Marx saw this as a necessary, if vain outcome of the failure of the Revolution of 1848. Both democracy and nationalism proved futile.
As Marx wrote in our prior reading, The Class Struggles in France 1848-50, the depth (or lack thereof) of the revolution was to be measured in its reverberation, beyond France, in Britain, which Marx described as the "demiurge" of the capitalist world. The failure of the revolution was in the political immaturity of the working class, internationally, to advance beyond the bourgeois-democratic struggle. But this failure also had repercussions for the capitalists, for they also failed to render bourgeois democracy effective, even for themselves. Bonaparte was the instrument of the penalty society as a whole paid for this failure.
It was indicative for Marx that the form of Bonapartism was nationalist. This was an index of its retrograde -- reactionary -- character. Nationalism would be characteristic form of authoritarianism ever since then. Marx found the basis for this in the dynamics of capitalism, as capital entrenched itself in national labor markets in crisis. The workers were won to bourgeois politics in nationalism, but this represented the decadence of bourgeois politics, which in its best, classical (and liberal) moment, had understood itself as inherently cosmopolitan. The contradiction between liberalism and nationalism has been the self-contradiction of democracy ever since.
Bonapartism, that is, the authoritarian hollowing out of bourgeois democracy, the vulgarization of bourgeois politics, and the irresistible concomitant rise of illiberal politics (such as nationalism), is the phenomenon the world has had to contend with ever since 1848.
Starting with figures such as Louis Bonaparte and his contemporary Bismarck, not only fascists like Mussolini and Hitler, and populists like Peron, and "socialist" authoritarians like Stalin and Mao, but also "strong" executive governmental leaders like FDR (and what people wanted Obama to be!) in the U.S. "imperial" Presidency, have exhibited such Bonapartism, in the Marxian sense, for Marx found it not in the political personalities but the forms of the modern state itself, and its pathological necessity in the unresolved and unsurpassed crisis of capital -- the crisis of bourgeois society in all its forms.
-- Chris