18 Brumaire of Bonaparte
On 9 November 1799 –which, according to the French republican calendar, was 18 Brumaire– Napoleon Bonaparte carried out the coup d’état that would culminate in his military dictatorship. Fifty-two years later, his nephew Louis Bonaparte, eager to emulate his uncle’s example, would again step onto the historical stage with a coup d’état of his own, on 2 December 1851. In truth, the second Bonaparte was little more than a caricature of the first. He had been elected President of the French Republic by referendum on 10 December 1848. His term, however, was due to expire in May 1852, and he was barred from seeking re-election. Exploiting the paralysis of bourgeois parliamentary politics, Louis Bonaparte set in motion a plan to secure for himself a prolonged tenure in power. He ultimately succeeded: like his uncle, he too had his own “18 Brumaire”.
Marx subjected to a comprehensive analysis the form of power that emerged from Louis Bonaparte’s coup d'état, together with its foundations and its significance. In his work The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, he bequeathed to political science a study that far surpasses, in both scope and depth, the historical stature of the nephew Bonaparte himself. This treatise, which is also unrivalled in its literary verve, examines the development of the French revolutionary process, the manifestations of class relations within that process, and the problem of Bonapartism in the context of the extraordinary political formations of bourgeois order. Prior to Marx’s study of what he termed Bonapartism, the extra-ordinary forms of dictatorship arising in the course of the structuring of bourgeois order had still been characterised in left-wing circles by the old concept of Caesarism, inherited from earlier epochs. Yet, given how completely the historical conditions had changed, the term should have been abandoned. Marx’s analysis of Bonapartism is therefore significant also insofar as it put an end to the characterisation of class struggles within modern bourgeois society by means of concepts applicable only to earlier periods of history.
As Sismondi famously put it, the Roman proletariat lived at the expense of society, while modern society lives at the expense of the proletariat. Taking this as his point of departure, Marx draws attention to the complete difference between the material economic conditions of class struggle in antiquity and those of class struggle in modern times. Nor can one establish a direct parallel between the political forms that arise from such different socio-economic conditions. Any historical analysis conducted within bourgeois society that still makes use of the term Caesarism entails a disregard for historical conditions that bear no resemblance to one another. In this respect, such designations are superficial and inappropriate. In ancient Rome, where the phenomenon of Caesarism originated, class struggle took place only within a privileged minority, between wealthy free citizens and poor free citizens.
Why, given that ancient Roman society and modern bourgeois society belong to entirely different historical epochs, was the bourgeois revolutionary process nonetheless explained through concepts drawn from ancient Rome? The answer, as Marx puts it, is that men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please, under conditions of their own choosing; rather, they make it under conditions directly encountered, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living. And even when they appear to be engaged in creating something entirely new, in moments of social transformation, they cannot initially free themselves from the influence of the past. Thus do the names, slogans and costumes of bygone epochs make their appearance on the stage of history. Yet once the new form of society has been established and has taken firm root, the influence of the past begins to recede, and the now-dominant new conditions acquire expressive forms proper to themselves. In France, too, during the early phases of the bourgeois revolutionary process, the spectres of ancient Rome’s political institutions, concepts and heroes hovered in the air; but in time, bourgeois society, on the basis of its own reality, set about creating its own interpreters and its own spokesmen.
Yet the general law whereby the past exerts its influence upon the present has not changed. In the revolutionary process of 1848-51, it was once again the ghost of the Great French Revolution that was summoned; the French could not free themselves from the memories associated with Napoleon. Even the emergent revolutionary workers’ movement of 1848, still in its infancy, found itself overshadowed by the bourgeois revolution of an earlier epoch. And this situation will repeat itself many times over in many countries, so long as the proletariat fails to organise itself on the basis of its own revolutionary world outlook and to stamp its mark upon the course of history as an independent force.
In terms of understanding the class struggles unfolding in the course of modern bourgeois society’s development, the French case indeed possesses a special significance. The Great French Revolution destroyed feudalism and imparted to the rule of the bourgeoisie a purity of classical form unattained by any other country in Europe. Likewise, the struggle of the revolutionary proletariat against the bourgeoisie assumed in France a sharpness of form unknown elsewhere. For this reason, Marx attached particular importance to French history and subjected to profound analysis the revolutionary process of 1848, in which the revolutionary workers' movement made its appearance on the historical stage. Even though France was the case Marx chose, his analyses nevertheless constitute an invaluable theoretical foundation for the understanding of class struggles in bourgeois society in general.
Marx draws highly significant conclusions from the French revolutionary process of 1848. For instance: what is won easily is lost easily! Owing to the historical conditions that prevented the proletariat from being sufficiently strong and organised, the February Revolution of 1848 was like a sudden coup de main that caught the old society off guard. The parliamentary republic, which was won not through a comprehensive and conscious struggle by the working class and the popular masses, but rather through their siding with one or another faction in the rivalries among the dominant power blocs, was subsequently eliminated by a coup d'état as a result of further conflicts among those same dominant forces. For this reason, the gains of the February Revolution could be so easily swept aside by a Bonaparte.
In the period leading up to Bonaparte’s coup d’état, much like in the case of military coups in Turkey, when it speaks out “I may come one morning, suddenly,” the bourgeois democrats, incapable of grasping the course of events, remained complacent. They consoled themselves with the illusion that the regime would continue its normal functioning and that presidential elections would be held on 2 May 1852. For this reason, they would react to Louis Bonaparte’s coup d’état of 2 December 1851 with astonishment – just as their counterparts in our own time have done in comparable instances.
In analysing the process that brought Louis Bonaparte to power, Marx shed light not only on the developments in France at the time, but also on the important characteristics of the structuring of the bourgeois regime in general. It is therefore worth recalling this process in some of its more striking aspects.
1848: The Parliamentary Republic in France
The establishment of the parliamentary republic in France was part of a tumultuous process that, beginning with the revolution of 1789, passed through various stages and proceeded through different forms of political power. Following the proclamation of the republic in September 1792, for instance, a reaction soon set in. Within the chain of developments that led to Napoleon’s Bonapartist rule, the Thermidorian reaction of 1794 occupies a significant place. This event was a counter-revolutionary political development that resulted in the exclusion from the revolution of the propertyless, barefoot popular strata who had participated in it and sought to advance it through popular demands. In its outcome, Thermidor introduced measures that would strengthen the development of bourgeois order; yet it also halted the revolutionary advance that had found expression in the popular demand for radical social transformation.
The factor that prepared the ground for crushing the barefoot masses, so as to prevent the revolution from overstepping the bourgeois framework, was the ambivalent class position of the Jacobins, who constituted the most advanced wing of the bourgeois revolutionaries.[1] Yet this very situation would also bring about the end of their own leaders, Danton and Robespierre, and would ultimately result in the purge of the Jacobins themselves from power. The day before Thermidor, Robespierre exclaimed before the Convention: “They are destroying the revolution; the Republic is slipping away!” And indeed it was so. In the wake of Thermidor, the road was paved for Napoleon’s Bonapartist empire.
With the coup d'état of 1799, Bonaparte elevated himself to the position of First Consul and proceeded to establish a highly centralised administrative system, governing through prefects directly answerable to him. He concentrated in his own hands extensive powers over legislation, executive affairs and appointments. During the war that Britain waged against France from 1803, he had himself proclaimed Emperor in 1804, on the pretext of preventing collaboration between royalist sympathisers and the British. Following a series of defeats in the wars he undertook to expand France’s sphere of dominance, Napoleon’s rule and the imperial era came to an end in 1814.
This time, France would undergo a period known as the Restoration, lasting from 1814 to 1830. This was a period in which the Bourbon dynasty ascended the throne for a second time and the royalist political regime was restored. The dominant section that ruled during the Restoration and was known as the Bourbonists consisted essentially of large landowners. Yet, as Marx observed, large landed property, for all its feudal swagger and aristocratic pride, had become bourgeoisified as a result of the development of modern society.
The reactionary regime of the Bourbon dynasty, which defended the interests of the nobility and the Church, was overthrown by the July Revolution of 1830, yet France was not yet able to free itself from the monarchical order. Representing the second major royal dynasty of France, the Duke of Orléans, Louis Philippe, now ascended the throne. Marx draws attention to the fact that the division of the royalist forces –which he also termed the Party of Order– into Bourbonists and Orléanists was the result not of any so-called political principles, but rather of the rivalry between capital and landed property. Furthermore, the leading figures within the bourgeoisie itself –the magnates, together with the prominent figures of the army, the university, the Church, the bar, the academy and the press– were themselves divided between these two factions.
The Orléanist period, which would last until the revolution of 1848, was the era of the financial aristocracy[2] and is also known as the July Monarchy. Compared with the absolutist royal period, the July Monarchy represented a progressive step in terms of bourgeois order. During this period, the Constitutional Charter, regarded as the fundamental law of society, was put into effect. This constitution, the product of the bourgeois revolution of 1830, proclaimed that sovereignty belonged to the nation and imposed certain limits on the power of the king. Throughout all these periods, the political dominance of the bourgeoisie, which continued to develop, thus assumed various forms in the period leading up to the revolution of 1848.[3] The July Monarchy was the political expression of a rule forcibly seized by new bourgeois wealthy elements, who had grown rich above all on the basis of large-scale commerce. At the time, it was primarily the commercial bourgeoisie that predominated in the political arena, while the industrial bourgeoisie sought to gain greater power. For this reason, the industrial bourgeoisie lent its support to the opposition of the parliamentary republicans.
The republican bourgeois opposition, however, was not a distinct section of the bourgeoisie united around homogeneous interests. In Marx’s words, the republican-minded were a set of hangers-on composed of bourgeois, writers, lawyers, officers and civil servants. They opposed the rule of bourgeois dominance under a monarchical form and aimed to establish the bourgeois order in the form of a parliamentary republic; they were also preoccupied with securing important positions for themselves within the new political system. Since they waged a struggle against the privileged political position of the commercial bourgeoisie, they received support both from the popular classes and from the industrial bourgeoisie. The real reason underlying the support of the industrial bourgeoisie was that the republican elements, guided by what they presented as the national interest, defended protective tariffs and similar objectives.
The revolutionary wind that swept across Europe in 1848 found its concrete expression in France in the February Revolution. The French February of 1848 was a political revolution that transformed the form of political power. With the overthrow of Louis Philippe on 24 February, the constitutional monarchy was abolished and the bourgeois parliamentary republic was established. Whereas under the monarchy only a certain section of the bourgeoisie had ruled in the name of the king, from now on the assembly of the bourgeoisie would rule in the name of the people.
The parliamentary republic was the political form that for the first time brought together the two different sections of property, namely landed property and capital, in a shared rule. It was also the most developed form of the political dominance of the bourgeoisie. Under the constitutional monarchy, the political rule of the commercial bourgeoisie had remained in the shadow of the throne, with the king appearing before the public as the real sovereign power. By contrast, the parliamentary republic would bring together all elements of the bourgeoisie under a single political roof, thereby freeing bourgeois political rule from the shadow of the king. Thus it would emerge in its own identity. From this point on, capitalist development would perfect both bourgeois parliamentary power and the executive, advancing the bourgeois order towards the point at which its overthrow would become necessary.
The February Revolution of 1848 drew different classes with different demands. Different sections of the bourgeoisie hoped to bring an end to the period of single-handed rule by the financial aristocracy and to secure broader privileges for themselves through an electoral reform. Yet the development of events has its own dialectic: once the revolutionary arrow has been loosed from the bow, it will fly as far as it can. Marx notes that when the popular masses took to the streets and erected barricades, the National Guard of the ruling class adopted a passive stance, the army showed no inclination to offer serious resistance, and the monarchy was compelled to flee. He emphasises that the republic imposed itself by force.
In truth, each party imbued the republic with a different meaning grounded in its own class interests. For the advanced, revolutionary elements of the proletariat, the goal was a republic that would transcend the bourgeois order – that is, a social republic. The democratic petty bourgeoisie, as always, pursued an illusion: a political order that would mean equal democracy for all classes within the bourgeois framework – that is, a democratic republic. What the republican bourgeoisie understood by the republic, however, was a parliamentary republic that would guarantee the absolute rule of its own class over all others. In the France of that period, during the process of the provisional government and the Constituent Assembly, in which the establishment of the bourgeois parliamentary republic was materialised, the various classes entered into a struggle to secure for themselves the largest possible share.
Marx takes this opportunity to assess the problem of the provisional government. This assessment is not limited to the historical episode in France; it reveals certain important features that are almost common to all processes aimed at establishing a bourgeois republic. The characteristic feature that gives such periods their official quality, for instance, is that the government, cobbled together in the midst of class conflicts, exists in a manner entirely befitting the provisional status attributed to it. Throughout this period in France, no one and no political circle considered themselves to possess a real existence or the right to engage in genuine action. As would be demonstrated once again years later in Russia, between February and October 1917! In Marx’s words, all the elements that prepared or carried out the revolution –the dynastic opposition, the republican bourgeoisie, the republican-democratic petty bourgeoisie, the social-democratic working class– all of these temporarily took their places in the February government.
Yet after proclaiming the republic under the pressure of class struggle in society, this Provisional Government did everything in its power to confine it within the limits acceptable to the bourgeoisie. Marx emphasises that the army, the courts and the administration remained, with few exceptions, in the hands of their former masters, and that no account was demanded from the great criminals of the July Monarchy. Having established its hegemony over the petty bourgeoisie and the proletariat in the struggle for power, the bourgeoisie contented itself with draping a republican cloak over bourgeois society as it had existed under the monarchy. For in the eyes of the bourgeoisie, the republic was nothing more than the logical consummation and consolidation of the political supremacy it had already begun to acquire under the monarchical form of government.
In describing that period, Marx observes that there were no forces “capable of galvanising its energies, accelerating the revolutionary process, pushing the Provisional Government forward, or casting it aside.” The Parisian proletariat regarded the Republic as its own creation and applauded every move of the Provisional Government, which had secured for it certain political rights compared with the monarchical period. Rather than seeing through the deceptions of the bourgeoisie and pursuing its own goal of a social republic, the proletariat –lacking as yet the conditions to do so– made it a matter of honour “to keep unstained, in the eyes of Europe, the bourgeois honour of the republic.” Yet the task of this republic was not to change the world in a revolutionary way, but merely to adapt it to the conditions of bourgeois society.[4]
Marx's criticisms of the Provisional Government can be extended so as to encompass the question of the Constituent Assembly. The task of the Constituent Assembly in France, which was installed through the votes of the nation, was to extinguish the revolutionary fire of the workers and labouring masses and hastily to blunt the results of the revolution. In the revolutionary processes that would unfold in other countries in subsequent years, the bourgeoisie would always raise the demand for a Constituent Assembly in opposition to the working class’s demand for a social republic. For the Constituent Assembly would establish the parliamentary republican form of bourgeois rule by drafting and putting into effect a republican constitution. Even when this constitutional change assumed its most comprehensive form, it would never alter the fundamental conditions of existence of bourgeois society.
Marx notes that in France, the Constituent Assembly put into practice, within this framework, the republican form of government, universal suffrage, and a single sovereign National Assembly in place of two constitutional chambers with limited powers. Thus, he writes, “it registered and regulated the fact of the dictatorship of Cavaignac by replacing the stationary, irresponsible hereditary monarchy with an ambulatory, responsible, elective monarchy, with a quadrennial presidency.”[5]
The question of the Constituent Assembly is such a crucial point of difference, by virtue of its very content, that the position adopted on this issue would, beginning above all with the Russian Revolution of 1917, serve as a touchstone distinguishing the revolutionary proletariat from the liberal bourgeoisie and the petty-bourgeois left elements. The interests of the working class demand that it not get bogged down in such a deception as the Constituent Assembly, but rather press the revolution forward and establish a soviet-type power; whereas the other class elements would seek to convene the Constituent Assembly in order to halt the revolution and thereby confine its results within the limits acceptable to the bourgeoisie.
The revolutionary action embodied in the struggle of Blanqui and his followers in France during the period of 1848 attempted to dissolve the Constituent Assembly, which stood in the way of the revolution, but did not succeed. Owing to the insufficient strength of the proletarian revolutionary camp, it was Blanqui and his partisans who were defeated and removed from the political scene by the bourgeoisie. The revolutionary proletariat, which had appeared to retreat after this defeat, made another attempt to spring to the fore with the June 1848 insurrection. With June, the workers’ earlier, bourgeois-tinged demands “gave way to the audacious slogan of revolutionary struggle: Overthrow of the bourgeoisie! Dictatorship of the working class!” [6]
Despite this most audacious insurrection of the proletariat witnessed up to that point in the history of Europe’s civil wars, the forces of bourgeois order prevailed. For on the side of bourgeois order stood a range of classes and strata: from the commercial bourgeoisie to the industrial bourgeoisie, from the petty bourgeoisie and intellectuals to the army, from the lumpenproletariat organised as the mobile guard to the priests and the entire rural population. The proletariat, by contrast, stood alone. Whenever the revolutionary movement appeared to be advancing once again, it would strive to come to the fore, yet each successive defeat diminished its strength and prevented it from achieving effective results. Unable as yet to reach the level of maturity required to present itself as an organised force capable of changing the world, the proletariat could not draw to its side the other oppressed and disadvantaged layers of society. This was the fundamental reason for its failure.
In the final analysis, the June offensive of the proletariat in 1848 served the interests of the bourgeois republicans. Although the proletariat's effort did not succeed in realising its own demands, it proved that the rule of the bourgeoisie could be maintained under a political form no longer involving the monarchy. The revolutionary proletariat, which had set out to achieve the social republic, was frustrated in its own goal, yet it prepared the political terrain for the establishment of the bourgeois republic. Following its defeat, the working class in France would retreat, and Marx would make the following important observation concerning the situation one year after the June insurrection: “In France, the petty bourgeois does what normally the industrial bourgeois would have to do; the worker does what normally would be the task of the petty bourgeois; and the task of the worker, who accomplishes that? No one. In France it is not accomplished; in France it is proclaimed.” [7]
With the defeat of the revolutionary movement of the workers, the political influence of the democratic-republican petty bourgeoisie also collapsed. For “the petty bourgeoisie can maintain a revolutionary stance against the bourgeoisie only insofar as it has the proletariat behind it.”[8] Despite these developments, however, it became clear that the parliamentary republic was nonetheless a state form that would carry society politically further forward than the monarchy. Even if this republic did not transcend the limits of being one of the forms of bourgeois rule, this constitutional form of sovereignty was nonetheless compelled to grant certain rights to the lower classes through universal suffrage. Marx notes that this reality constitutes the great contradiction of the parliamentary regime's constitution. For the classes upon whom bourgeois order could never cease to impose oppression and exploitation –the proletariat, the peasantry, the urban petty bourgeoisie– are endowed by this very constitution with political rights through universal suffrage.
In France, the June insurrection of the proletariat was suppressed in blood, but in the process an important reality was also demonstrated: in bourgeois order, comprehensive reforms can only be a by-product of the revolutionary struggle of the working class. On the other hand, those who suppressed the June insurrection in blood were none other than the republican bourgeois. The republican bourgeois also used the June insurrection as a pretext to rid themselves of their rivals in the assembly. The Executive Commission, which had been appointed in the original composition of the National Assembly and which included democratic republicans representing the petty bourgeoisie, was dissolved. The man who carried this out with dictatorial force was none other than the bourgeois republican General Cavaignac, the very same who had directed the June massacres.
These successive developments reveal how far the bourgeois republic differed from the social republic defended by the working class. The parliamentary republican form of bourgeois rule is, at its core, the same as under the monarchy: the domination and oppression of the working class and the labouring masses by the bourgeoisie. Bourgeois democracy is, in the final analysis, a form of bourgeois dictatorship. In whatever country it may be, when modern bourgeois order is shaped on the basis of the parliamentary republic, the further demands of the working class will always be regarded by the ruling powers as a source of anarchy. The bourgeois republicans, who had once unfurled the banner of struggle against the feudal and absolutist order, would now, in their concern to defend their own rule, appropriate the slogans of the old order –property, family, religion, order– and proclaim the revolutionary proletariat to be the enemy of order and of society itself.
The bourgeois democratic constitution that emerged from the revolutionary process of 1848 in France changed the electoral law of the monarchical order and introduced universal suffrage. Yet the essence of bourgeois democratic constitutions ultimately rests upon the rule of the bourgeoisie. The grounds of public security, established as the limit of democratic rights such as personal liberty, freedom of association, freedom of speech and the press, freedom of education and freedom of conscience, have always been interpreted in the interests of the bourgeoisie in all capitalist countries. The constitution in force under bourgeois rule is surrounded by such an aura of inviolability and sanctity that even the putschist forces that seize power to change it claim to base their illegal actions on the constitution. As we know all too well from the military coups in Turkey, in the case of Bonapartism in France as well, the extra-ordinary rule that put an end to parliamentary functioning and obstructed the exercise of democratic rights came to power claiming to defend the constitutional order.
The French Constitution of 1848 had extended the separation of powers to the point where distinct centres of power emerged. Under this constitution, the president, elected by popular vote, was in effect another centre of power vis-à-vis the legislative branch. This is precisely the significance of the presidential system, which is still a subject of frequent debate today and is based on the direct election of the president by the people. This system opens the way for the head of state to overshadow parliament and, when necessary, even to set aside the constitution in order to establish himself as the absolute sovereign. As Marx put it, under such a system the head of state enjoys a kind of divine right vis-à-vis the assembly. Indeed, it was this presidential system that paved the way for Louis Bonaparte to push parliament aside and entrench himself in power on 2 December 1851.
The Bourgeoisie Sacrifices Its Parliamentary Regime When Necessary
The bourgeois parliamentary regime generally encompasses various political parties and the endless strife and debates that go on between them. This process can continue so long as capital does not feel its rule to be under threat and can bear the tensions generated by the parliamentary system. In critical situations, however, the bourgeoisie's anxiety intensifies that parliamentary opposition may provoke disruptive actions in society on a serious scale. The parliamentary system may thus become unbearable for the bourgeoisie. When class struggle sharpens, the bourgeoisie will feel “order” to be in danger and will seek to rid itself of its own regime – the parliamentary regime. As Marx puts it, given that this political system submits everything to the decision of the parliamentary majority, will not the great majorities outside parliament also want to decide for themselves? “When the fiddle is played at the top of the state, how can you expect those below not to dance?”[9]
When the parliamentary form of bourgeois rule enters into crisis, the unity that had previously appeared to exist among the various bourgeois factions disintegrates. When the bourgeoisie begins to attack its own parliamentary order, it denounces as socialist what it had once sanctified as liberal. In the processes that give rise to Bonapartist coups, a significant rupture occurs between the bourgeois factions inside parliament and those outside it. While the sterile debates in parliament expose the bankruptcy of the existing order in the eyes of the revolutionary classes, the businessmen of the capitalist world are astonished at the short-sighted conduct of their political representatives in the assembly. How could they squander so much time on such vulgar squabbles, and how could they disturb the public peace with such wretched wrangling with the president? A further factor that greatly intensifies the anxiety of capitalist circles is that the country stands on the brink of a commercial and industrial crisis. In France, prior to Bonaparte’s coup, trade had begun to stagnate and unemployment had started to rise.
As always, the bourgeoisie, unwilling to recognise that the cause of stagnation lies in the internal laws of capitalism itself, attributes it instead to the existing political arrangements. Yet it is clear that the economic instability did not arise from the conflict between the executive and the legislature in France, and that, in reality, a capitalist crisis was unfolding which engulfed even the powerful nation of England at the time. In conditions where political crises are superimposed upon economic difficulties, a rift and rupture is bound to occur between the parliamentary bourgeoisie –whose profession is politics and who are admitted into bourgeois circles only by virtue of that fact– and the extra-parliamentary bourgeois factions, who, as large property owners, can think of nothing but securing their capitalist businesses. Indeed, in France, the latter section of the bourgeoisie had already written off parliament and was crying out: “We need a strong government!”
In Marx’s words, the spokesmen, writers, platform and press of the bourgeoisie –in short, the ideologists of the bourgeoisie– and the bourgeoisie itself, the representatives and the represented, had become alienated from one another. They no longer understood each other's language. Under these conditions, the industrial bourgeoisie feared that any attempt to defend its political power in parliament would damage its economic interests. The tension between the commercial bourgeoisie and the politicians who represented it had become far more acute. This section of the bourgeoisie openly reproached its own politicians, held the parliamentary struggle responsible for the economic stagnation, and now demanded an end to it so that trade might revive.
For this reason, the big commercial bourgeoisie –or, more broadly, the financial aristocracy– had turned Bonapartist. Moreover, this shift was not limited to France alone. According to the Economist magazine of the time, throughout the stock exchanges of Europe, President Bonaparte was now regarded as the guardian of order. Thus the National Assembly was driven to the point of bankruptcy. Its atomic elements could no longer be held together by any force of molecular attraction. The parliamentary regime had breathed its last and was dead.[10]
How Bonapartism was forged
An important development in the period extending from the June defeat of the proletariat to Bonaparte’s coup d’état was the declaration of a state of siege in Paris prior to the coup. In fact, while the parliamentary republicans in the assembly were occupied with the details of the constitution, General Cavaignac, the general of the republican party, was busy establishing a strict order in Paris. The state of siege, which Marx described as a “magnificent invention for the bourgeoisie” and noted was applied in every revolutionary crisis in France, is also a practice with which the working class in Turkey is all too familiar. Moreover, just as the state of siege in Paris was followed by Bonaparte’s coup d’état, so too in Turkey states of siege have always been the forerunners of a similar development – military coups. In France, the bourgeois republicans, in their anxiety to suppress any new revolutionary upsurge of the working class, declared a state of siege and thereby paved the way for Bonaparte’s coup with their own hands. The moustache and the uniform, whose path had thus been cleared by means of the state of siege, now proclaimed their own direct rule in order to put an end to the parliamentary republican form of society.
Yet such a transformation, of course, does not descend from the heavens overnight. As Marx puts it, a magician did not suddenly appear and transform the bourgeois republic, that “masterpiece,” into a monstrosity by means of an evil spell. At moments when the internal conflicts of the bourgeoisie sharpened and the forces of bourgeois order were locked in intense factional strife, it was none other than the parliamentary process itself that invested the Bonapartes with such sovereign state power that they could lay the constitutional foundations of that order low with a single stroke of the sword. In France, the National Assembly, amidst the clamour of the various bourgeois factions, was compelled to extend the presidential term, and Bonaparte, hard pressed for money, gladly accepted that extension. For this reason, Marx remarks that the Assembly, “by placing itself under the special protection of a general, decreed its own impotence and the infinite power of the army, and deprived itself of its own strength.”[11]
Thus the France that emerged after the coup had come into being out of the parliamentary republic itself. In Marx’s words, a single thrust of the bayonet sufficed to tear away the outer covering and expose the monstrosity within for all to see. This observation would be confirmed once again in the examples of Chile in 1973 and Turkey in 1980. In those countries, it was the very figures operating within the parliamentary process –the Allendes, the Demirels, the Ecevits– who seated the fascist generals –the Pinochets, the Evrens– in the highest offices as chiefs of the general staff, from which they would crush the parliamentary regime and the revolutionary movement of the workers and labouring masses.
Let us take a closer look at the developments in the process to which Marx refers. The bourgeois parties in parliament, by means of frequent parliamentary recesses, paved the way for the suspension of parliament as a whole. As has been borne out in other countries that have undergone similar processes, the bourgeois political forces themselves, through their own conduct, were undermining parliamentary functioning and dynamiting with their own hands any possibility of defending the parliamentary regime. In this way, the impotence of the legislature vis-à-vis the executive was laid bare, and the path to a coup d'état was further cleared. This demonstrates that the bourgeois parliamentary process in no way simplifies the task of governing the state. Since the parliamentary system does not afford civil society the opportunity to create its own self-organisations capable of defending themselves against the executive power, it can easily lose its own representative authority under conditions of deep crisis.
Even in the capitalist countries that claim to be the most “democratic,” the parliamentary regime has never guaranteed the democratic rights of the people. In the period leading up to Bonaparte’s coup in France, the forces of order set about enacting laws that, by denouncing all revolutions, abolished the right of association and made the state of siege a fundamental institution. The electoral law and the press law were rendered more reactionary. The socialist press was silenced. In September and October of 1850, rumours of a coup d'état multiplied. In Marx’s words, the shadow of the coup had by then become such a familiar spectre to the Parisians that when the real one, made of flesh and bone, finally appeared, they were unwilling to believe in it.
These developments also confirm a law of bourgeois order. Even if it may once have adopted a revolutionary stance against feudalism and absolutism, the bourgeoisie, having long since exhausted its revolutionary powder, later comes to regard revolution as a nightmare. When this fear takes hold of the bourgeois body, even ordinary democratic demands begin to appear to the forces of order as if they were the working class’s demand for socialism. Indeed, in France prior to Bonaparte’s coup, the forces of order were suffering from hallucinations; Marx observes that bourgeois liberalism itself, bourgeois culture itself, even bourgeois financial reform itself, were all declared to be socialist. In his words, even building a railway where a road had previously existed was socialism, and defending oneself with a stick when attacked by a sword was also socialism! (Should one call this a tragi-comic situation? Even after many years, these fears inscribed in the genetic code of the bourgeoisie would never subside. In Turkey in the 1980s, for instance, bourgeois politicians like Özal would declare railway transport to be a communist invention!) Despite the bourgeoisie’s fear of revolution and socialism, however, the working class in France at that time was, unfortunately, far from being in a position that could have justified such fears.
Situations in which the bourgeoisie, shaken by fear of revolution, loses confidence in the bourgeois parliamentary regime, while the working class is unable to overthrow the bourgeois system in order to establish its own democracy, are processes pregnant with the extra-ordinary political forms of bourgeois dictatorship. This extra-ordinary regime may take the form of a dictatorship of the Bonapartist or fascist type, depending on the concrete conditions. In truth, there are no absolute ruptures between the extra-ordinary political forms of bourgeois order. Between Bonapartism, which abolishes parliamentary functioning, and fascism, for instance, there are many similarities in terms of the process of formation of each. For this reason, Marx’s analysis of the conditions under which Bonapartism rises to power sheds considerable light on the process by which fascism comes to power as well.
While Bonaparte occupied the presidential seat, he distributed money obtained from the state treasury to the lumpenproletariat in the form of gifts and loans, thereby gaining considerable popular support among them. For this reason, Marx remarks that no aspirant to sovereign power had ever speculated more basely upon the ignorance of the masses. By means of this speculation, Bonaparte formed the sacred army of order[12] out of the scum of bourgeois society and, assuming the pose of a hero and saviour of society, installed himself upon the imperial throne. His counterparts in the twentieth century –in Italy, Germany or Spain– would follow Bonaparte’s example. In a capitalist society far more developed, and hence marked by far more intense class struggles, they would resort to speculation and violence that would overshadow the earlier historical examples.
In order to strengthen himself, Bonaparte resorted to a special organisation known as the Society of 10 December.[13] This society, under the pretext of establishing a philanthropic association in 1849, organised the Parisian lumpenproletariat into secret sections. At the head of each section were placed Bonapartist agents, and the society itself was directed by a Bonapartist general. All the members of the society, Bonaparte included, were in fact at one another’s disposal for the purpose of doing harm to the working people. For this reason, Marx describes Bonaparte as a man who appointed himself chief of the lumpenproletariat, who found his own interests –in their diversified forms– exclusively in the lumpenproletariat, and who regarded this scum of all classes of society as the only foundation upon which he could unconditionally rely. There is no reason why the same description should not apply to a Mussolini, a Hitler, a Türkeş, or others of their kind.
Bonaparte had gathered thousands of barefoot street ruffians into the Society of 10 December. These special units, composed of such ruffians, would pile into railway carriages and travel to the places Bonaparte was visiting, where they would quickly assemble a crowd of greeters and listeners, and make it appear as if the people were showing great affection for Bonaparte by having the crowd shout “Long live the Emperor!” (The military and civilian state forces that continued the role of Bonaparte’s special units would stage similar spectacles for General Evren during the period of the 12 September military-fascist dictatorship in Turkey.)
These units, operating under the protection of the official police, carried out attacks targeting republican writers and politicians in various regions. Upon their return to Paris, they were tasked with preventing or dispersing, by force, any demonstrations mounted against Bonaparte. As Marx observed, Bonaparte had attached to himself this society of secret swindlers and thieves, this society of disorder, chaos and prostitution, and in his speeches to the crowds he spoke of order, religion, the family and property.
Until Bonaparte succeeded in transforming the regular army into a vast Society of 10 December, this society remained his private army. (It is worth noting that the special units which assumed a role in the preparatory period of the extra-ordinary regime are replaced, in the period of extra-ordinary rule, by the regular army itself.) Like Hitler, he would in time become increasingly carried away by the legend he sought to create around his own person, and would come to believe that he possessed certain superior powers, particularly over the army. Of course, in order to lend this image a measure of material credibility, officers were received at the presidential palace with cigars and champagne. The bourgeoisie observed all these developments as if they were half-serious, half-comic, but in the end they would find themselves in need of Bonaparte and raise no objection to his installation in the seat of political power. Let us recall Hitler’s rise to power in Germany – how many common features it shares with Bonaparte’s ascent, is there not?
Louis Bonaparte exploited the conflict between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat, with the aid of the peasantry, the office of the presidency and the army, in order to become emperor. This second Napoleon, who thanks to the office he occupied became the idol of the European bourgeoisie, was in a sense the outward expression of bourgeois reality at the time. Bonaparte’s vulgar image, compared with statesmen from noble families, represented no surprising spectacle. For, in Engels’ words, “Like all other real bourgeois, he was an upstart, a parvenu.”[14] For this reason, the bourgeoisie saw in Bonaparte not merely a man who preserved their social rule, but a man made of their own flesh and bone – their first “great statesman.”
Once in power, Bonaparte dissolved parliament[15], but in order to deceive the masses, he proclaimed a new constitution which granted universal suffrage. Yet this “right” had no real meaning in practice under Bonaparte’s rule; it served only his own purposes. Thanks to the promise of universal suffrage, he won a new referendum held in November 1852 and was elevated to the imperial dignity by the Senate under the name of Napoleon III. Thus he had the satisfaction of repeating the example of his uncle, Napoleon I, and the Second Empire was inaugurated in France. As in all similar cases, the reign of this dictator, who came to power proclaiming that he would eliminate chaos and bring greater freedoms, was in reality a period in which repression and police-state practices were made predominant.
Bonaparte, who burnished his image as a saviour by making numerous promises to almost every section of society, accelerated investment in industrial development. The bourgeoisie and the conservative petty-bourgeois strata regarded him as the man who would protect them from the danger of socialism. In order to create illusions among the workers, Bonaparte resorted to measures such as keeping bread prices low and establishing health centres. At the same time, in a manner that would also inspire the military dictatorships of the future, he set up arbitration boards between workers and employers in order to bring wages under control. The Emperor Bonaparte, who, dreaming of proving France's supremacy, dragged his country into war with Prussia, would surrender after defeat and, on 4 September 1870, would be deposed, leading to the proclamation of the republic in France once again.
The Vacillating Stance of the Petty-Bourgeois Left
The peasantry, which in 1848 had with its votes installed Bonaparte in the presidential seat, was thereby expressing its hostility to the town. Interestingly, Bonaparte's election was welcomed by the army circles, who were angry with the republicans; by the financial oligarchy, who calculated that he would reopen the road to monarchy; and by the working class and the urban petty bourgeoisie, who thought that Bonaparte would punish the bourgeois General Cavaignac, the man of the state of siege. This general mood illustrates how, in situations where bourgeois parliamentary functioning has become blocked and the broad masses of labourers, lacking proper leadership, are unable to see a way forward, conditions become favourable for the rise of dictators of the Bonaparte type. Let us not forget that in Turkey, too, in periods when the parliamentary system has become deadlocked and political life has drifted into chaos, backward sections of the working class and large sections of the petty bourgeoisie have, for the same reasons, begun to look to the army as a saviour. And thus the path to military dictatorship has been paved with the passive support of the people themselves.
In France in 1848, despite the existence of mass socialist organisations, the danger of counter-revolution was growing. In general, these organisations were stamped not by a proletarian, but by a petty-bourgeois outlook. Instead of the proletariat taking the lead and drawing the petty bourgeoisie along behind it, it was the proletariat itself that was dragged along in the wake of the petty bourgeoisie. The “socialism” that appeared in the bourgeois assemblies was a petty-bourgeois socialism.
In this process, the petty-bourgeois democrats of the time, seeing the democratic rights they hoped to obtain as being in danger, formed an alliance with leaders who posed as socialists. A joint draft programme was prepared for the elections, joint election committees were established, and joint candidates were put forward. For the revolutionary proletariat, however, this development signified an unprincipled alliance. For, in order to reach an accommodation, the revolutionary sharpness of the proletariat's social demands was blunted, and they were given democratic formulations at a level acceptable to the petty-bourgeois democrats. The democratic demands of the petty bourgeoisie, on the other hand, were stripped of their purely political forms and given a slight coating of socialist oil.
It was on such a historical basis that the current of social democracy was born – a current that, in the following years, would play its sinister role in the rise of fascism in Italy and Germany. This reality finds striking expression in Marx’s words: “The specific character of social democracy is epitomised in the fact that it demands republican-democratic institutions as a means, not of abolishing the two extremes, capital and wage labour, but of alleviating the antagonism between them and transforming it into harmony. However varied the measures that may be proposed for this purpose, however revolutionary the views in which the aim may be clothed, the content remains always the same. It is the transformation of society by democratic means, but a transformation within the petty-bourgeois framework.”[16]
Marx’s words bring to mind the petty-bourgeois leftism in certain Latin American countries today, where revolutionary processes are toyed with and reforms are passed off to the masses as revolution. Let it not be forgotten that processes which reform the bourgeois order without abolishing it always appear to the petty bourgeoisie as revolution!
In capitalist society, fragmented by conflicting class interests, the petty bourgeoisie constitutes an intermediate class. Caught between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat, the petty bourgeoisie cannot have an independent class line. Owing to its objective position, it imagines itself to stand above the irreconcilable contradictions between classes. When petty-bourgeois politicians turn revolutionary, they generally believe that they represent the interests of the people as a whole. For this reason, they fall prey to highly dangerous illusions about the structure of the army –which is in fact a mainstay of bourgeois order– pinning their hopes on “progressive” elements within it and lending support to coups d’état. No social class or stratum is more prone to illusion about the political situation than the petty bourgeoisie. Marx therefore draws attention to the fact that even when the coup was at the door, the petty-bourgeois socialists failed to perceive the danger and pursued an extremely insipid and moderate policy, even as the forces of bourgeois order intensified their attacks.
In 1848 in Paris, and in later historical episodes in many other countries, the supposedly revolutionary bluster of petty-bourgeois politicians displayed telling examples of playing a dangerous game with revolution. The party of the petty-bourgeois democrats, the Montagne[17], declared that it would defend the parliamentary regime with arms if necessary. Yet what happened in the end? Paris began to suffer under the state of siege, and the bourgeoisie disbanded the petty-bourgeois National Guard on 13 June 1849. It turned out that the revolutionary threats of the petty bourgeois and their political representatives were nothing more than bombastic rhetoric...
Marx puts it succinctly: “If the Montagne wished to prevail in parliament, it should not have called to arms. If it called to arms in parliament, it should not have behaved in a parliamentary manner in the streets.”[18] How accurate Marx’s assessment was would be demonstrated time and again in the years that followed. The story of the socialist government of Allende, overthrown by General Pinochet’s bloody coup in Chile in 1973, for instance, reveals with crystal clarity the consequences of raising hopes among the labouring masses for a change of system while failing to fulfil the requirements of such a change.
In the period leading up to May 1850 in France, the petty-bourgeois democrats, on the one hand, deluded themselves with left-wing chatter, while on the other, they submitted to the enactment of reactionary laws in parliament. The bourgeois order, having defeated the proletariat on the streets, now proceeded to introduce one legal regulation after another designed to exclude it from political life. The electoral law of March 1850, for instance, restricted the democratic rights of the proletariat, and on 31 May 1850, universal suffrage was abolished. In this way, the forces of order were not merely crushing the struggle of the working class, but were paving the way to remove it altogether from the battlefield.
The bourgeoisie wanted to see the workers reduced once again to the status they had occupied before the February Revolution – that of pariahs. The working class, which had never been strong enough and had been thoroughly set back by the June defeat, responded to all these developments by allowing itself to be led by the petty-bourgeois democrats who posed as socialists. While the reactionary wave that swept away the parliamentary political order rose ever higher, the working class found consolation in the platitudes of petty-bourgeois socialism. A similar situation would recur in Germany before the rise of Nazism, and would be repeated again in Turkey and in other countries.
In cases such as France and Germany, the proletariat failed to keep its own class banner flying high, or to organise itself independently of bourgeois and petty-bourgeois left currents disguised in opportunist and reformist garb. The same was true in Turkey before 12 September: despite the revolutionary winds of the period and the existence of numerous left-wing organisations, the working class ultimately drowned in a sea of petty-bourgeois socialism. In all these examples, while the working class instilled fear of revolution in the hearts of the bourgeoisie, the leadership of the political struggle had in fact been placed in the hands of petty-bourgeois leaders. The working class consoled itself with the illusion that democracy and better days would come through their agency. Thus, as Marx put it, the proletariat went so far as to forget the revolutionary interests of its class in the hope of temporary favours and comforts. Without engaging in a fierce struggle, it renounced in advance the honour and glory of being a victorious class. Had the working class in France met Bonaparte's coup with arms in hand, even in defeat the outcome would have been entirely different. It is always said that armies that fight learn a great deal even from their defeats.
Whose Power Is Bonapartism?
In examining Bonaparte’s coup d’état, Marx notes that the French bourgeoisie had risen up against the proletariat, and that it had brought the lumpenproletariat to power, headed by the president of the Society of 10 December. But is Bonapartism truly the power of the lumpenproletariat? Certainly not. It is inconceivable that the lumpenproletariat, composed as it is of declassed elements of society, could establish its own power, even under the exceptional political regimes of the Bonapartist type.
What Marx seeks to convey is the depths to which the bourgeoisie is prepared to sink in its anxiety to preserve its order against the proletariat. The bourgeoisie, casting aside the distinguished politicians and ministers who had shone under the parliamentary regime, turned a blind eye to –indeed, cleared the way for– a man like Bonaparte, who marched to power at the head of a rabble of lumpenproletariat. Thus, although Bonaparte appeared to have usurped political power by leaning on a mob of lumpenproletariat, the extra-ordinary political regime he established signified the prevalence of bourgeois order. Fascism, another extra-ordinary form of rule that emerged in the later history of capitalism, bears a similar character. Although it too was carried to power on the backs of unemployed and desperate masses, it is in reality a form of bourgeois rule.
Marx observes that state power cannot float in the air, and that Bonaparte in fact represented the most numerous class in French society, namely the smallholding peasantry. Just as the Bourbons had been the dynasty of large landed property and the Orléanists the dynasty of money, so the Bonapartes were the dynasty of the small peasants – that is, of the mass of the French people. Does it follow from this that we may regard Bonapartism as in fact the power of the small peasantry? On the basis of Marx’s own inquiry, this question too must be answered in the negative. For the small peasants are incapable of defending their interests in their own name, whether in parliamentary form or in any other. The only bond between them is a local one, arising from where they live, and unless they create a political organisation on the basis of certain common interests, it is impossible for them to develop an independent class stance.
In Marx’s words, the small peasants cannot represent themselves; they must be represented. Their representative must appear to them as a superior authority, as an absolute governmental power, as the masters who protect them against the other classes and who send them rain and sunshine from above. The political influence of the smallholding peasants may therefore find its highest expression in their dependence upon the executive power of society. Indeed, in both of Bonaparte’s coups in France, the role of the small peasant amounted to no more than supporting the dissolution of the parliamentary regime and the installation of the Bonapartes, as though they were saviours, in the imperial seat. The notion that the Napoleons were saviours was, in that period, the fixed idea of the peasantry. Yet the Bonaparte “dynasty” represented not the revolutionary peasants, but the conservative peasant – the peasant who waits for himself and his plot of land to be saved and favoured by the Empire.
In supporting the younger Bonaparte after the elder, the small peasantry dreamed that it might thereby escape, at least in some measure, the burden of debt that had bowed its back since the feudal era. Yet this notion was in reality nothing but a profound delusion. Capitalist development had inevitably reduced the smallholder to a slave of capital. The small peasant no longer faced a bourgeoisie that would free him from feudal obligations, as had been the case in Napoleon’s time. Indeed, the second Napoleon imposed conditions that oppressed the peasant to the utmost. Alongside the scourge of mortgage debt, a heavy burden of taxation was laid upon the back of the smallholding peasant. For taxation, as Marx put it, is the lifeblood of the bureaucracy, the army, the Church, the courts – in short, of the entire apparatus of executive power. A strong government and heavy taxes ultimately mean the same thing. The small peasant, who lent his support to the Bonapartist regime –that is, to a regime that absolutised the power of the executive– in the hope that it would save him, paid a very heavy price for this delusion.
Even where historical conditions have differed in certain respects, the small peasantry has suffered the consequences of similar delusions in many countries, Turkey included. The single-party dictatorship of the CHP, which had the small peasant groaning under it while declaring that “the peasant is our master,” and the rule of the Democrat Party, which likewise won the hearts of the small peasantry and installed itself in power only to enrich the big merchants and large landowners –the conduct of the recent and present-day representatives of both political currents– are examples of this.
The masses of small peasants have each time been taken in by the empty or populist propaganda of the bourgeois parties, only to find themselves in the end plunged into a fresh mire of debt. For with the development of capitalism, the feudal lords of the West and the tax-farmers of our own country have been replaced by urban usurers; the old obligations attached to the land by the modern mortgage; and the old form of landed property by bourgeois capital. As capitalism develops, the peasant’s small patch of land ceases even to suffice for his subsistence. For this reason, the only true ally and guide of the small peasant can be the urban proletariat, which will overthrow the order of capital.
In the years that followed, capitalist development further dissolved the countryside: a large portion of the smallholding peasants of the past were proletarianised, while some were absorbed into the urban petty bourgeoisie or into the ranks of the lumpenproletariat. In parallel with this transformation, emperors too passed into history in many countries. Yet so long as the capitalist order remained standing, the bourgeoisie never ceased, when in difficulty, to summon extra-ordinary political regimes to its rescue and to push the Bonapartes of the new era onto the stage of history. The propaganda motifs by which capital sought to wash the brains of the labouring masses underwent modification in accordance with time and circumstance.
In Germany, for instance, fascism exploited the masses’ desire for social transformation and, whipping the petty bourgeoisie into a frenzy with nationalist agitation, swept them along in the wake of National Socialism. In the end, it dragged them all into an unbelievably cruel dictatorship. The military-fascist dictatorships that descended from above, as in Turkey, on the other hand, ruled partly with the support of masses paralysed by the chaos and anxiety that had previously been manufactured in society, and partly by making fear predominant. In short, so long as the petty bourgeoisie failed to find its ally and guide in the proletariat, and the proletariat failed to free itself from petty-bourgeois outlooks, they paid for their delusions many times over, and at a very, very high price.
Another question of great importance in the context of the class character of extra-ordinary bourgeois regimes is that of the bureaucracy. In every extra-ordinary regime, whatever the period or part of the world, the prominence of the executive brings the civilian and military state bureaucracy to great weight. Marx observes that the second Bonaparte’s ideal was to create a vast bureaucracy, bedecked with ribbons and well fed. Bonaparte therefore raised the salaries of officials, opening a fresh door to plunder for his own retinue. His most fundamental ideal, however, was to secure the supremacy of the army. But will the state bureaucracy –above all the military bureaucracy– which leaps to the forefront of the political stage through the absolutisation of executive power, become an independent class force resting on the power of the sword?
In a capitalist society founded on private property, it is impossible for the bureaucracy to evolve into a separate class force independent of the ruling class. Drawing on the French example, Marx shows that the bureaucracy was nothing more than an instrument for preparing the class rule of the bourgeoisie, whether under the absolute monarchy or during the First Revolution and the Napoleonic period. In the periods that followed, whatever its efforts to constitute itself as an independent power, the bureaucracy remained a tool of the ruling class. With the younger Bonaparte’s coup d’état, however, the state apparatus –that is, the senior civilian and military bureaucracy– grew so powerful in relation to bourgeois society that it appeared to have become autonomous.
This relative independence acquired by the state bureaucracy under extra-ordinary rule is, in the final analysis, no more than a temporary political ascendancy. Even if this bureaucracy appears to have risen to a politically dominant and independent position by virtue of the extra-ordinary regime, it in truth retains its position as the servant of the principal section of the bourgeois class. Once bourgeois order returns to its normal mode of operation, it loses its politically superior position. The period of extra-ordinary rule also brings significant changes in the political structure. With the elected bourgeois politicians, who had made politics their property under the parliamentary regime, pushed into the wings, the political stage is filled by numerous appointed bureaucrats who are not professional politicians.
In one sense, Bonapartism takes shape as the political power of the state bureaucracy. Yet this is precisely the most delicate point of the Bonapartist question. The condition that raises the Bonapartes to political power is their abolition of the bourgeoisie's normal mode of political rule. Under the Bonapartist regime, therefore, the state bureaucracy appears to have usurped political power as a force independent of the ruling class. In essence, however, the mission of Bonapartism is to secure the safety of bourgeois society.
Even when the Bonapartes put on a different face for the public, they remain perfectly aware of their essential task, and once installed in power they issue their decrees, which carry the force of law, in that spirit. Although the Bonapartist bureaucracy takes the political power of the bourgeoisie out of the hands of its principal representatives, it thereby recreates that political power, as Marx says of Bonaparte, by preserving the bourgeoisie's material strength.[19] In other words, the extra-ordinary regime, by shoring up bourgeois order, protects it from disintegration, while restoring to the bourgeoisie the political power it needs in another form. In doing so, it also offers the bourgeoisie the possibility of exercising its political power again in the normal manner once conditions return to normal.
The Bourgeoisie’s Political Dispossession
The extra-ordinary political forms of bourgeois dictatorship are explained as the bourgeoisie “sacrificing its own political interests” in order to preserve its social power. Referring to the change brought about by Bonapartist rule, Marx writes: “This bourgeoisie, which at every moment sacrifices its own general class interest, its own political interest, to the narrowest, dirtiest private interests, and demands the same sacrifice from its representatives.”[20] Marx is right: under extra-ordinary conditions, the bourgeoisie can go on enjoying exploitation and property, family, religion and order only “on condition that it be condemned to the same political nullity as the other classes.” To save its purse, he writes, the bourgeoisie had to lose its crown.[21] In other words, it tolerates its own political dispossession in order to remain economically propertied. This reality goes some way towards explaining the character of extra-ordinary bourgeois regimes, but the question needs further clarification.
The first point to bear in mind is that the state bureaucracy in capitalist society is not something external to the bourgeois class. Its class character is made clear in The German Ideology, where Marx and Engels draw attention to the division of labour within the ruling class: “The division of labour, which already made its appearance within the ruling class as the separation of mental from material labour, will accordingly produce two distinct categories of individuals within that same class.” As they go on to note in the same passage, “This division within the class may even give rise to a certain opposition and hostility between its two sections. But should a conflict arise in which the class as a whole is threatened, this opposition falls away of its own accord, and the illusion that the ruling ideas are not the ideas of the ruling class, that they possess a power separate from the power of that class, vanishes with it.”[22]
The bureaucracy in capitalist society can therefore have no ideology other than that of preserving bourgeois order. The truth behind the state bureaucracy’s seizure of political power and its apparent autonomy is this: in periods of profound upheaval that threaten the class as a whole, the bourgeois business world takes refuge under the wing of extra-ordinary rule, and in this way maintains its ruling ideas and its ruling order.
There are so-called Marxists who explain extra-ordinary regimes in such a way as to suggest a complete “autonomisation”, “independence” or “neutralisation” of state power. Falling outside Marxism with their theories, such people present fascism too –as in the case of Poulantzas, which we shall come to later– as in some sense the rule of the petty bourgeoisie. Yet the founders of Marxism, in examining the extra-ordinary regimes they witnessed in their own day, took great care that the “independence” acquired by the state bureaucracy in exceptional circumstances should not be misread. Engels, for instance, describes the balancing role attributed to Bonapartist regimes as “so-called mediation”. Extra-ordinary regimes do not neutralise the state bureaucracy, which concentrates executive power in its hands, in relation to the ruling class; nor does Bonapartism, for example, establish a regime of balance that means treating two opposing classes equally. On the contrary, by deceiving and pacifying the oppressed classes through the appearance of “balance”, it is far more partisan than otherwise – on the side of the ruling class.
A further point of importance is what exactly is meant by the concept of the state bureaucracy, which has been used frequently throughout this discussion. What is meant is not the ordinary body of officials entrusted with carrying out the routine business of the bourgeois state as a whole. Such state employees are simple workers with no say in the making and implementation of decisions, no matter which force exercises political power. Some may claim that the term bureaucracy generally refers to all state officials; yet those at the top who take and implement decisions in state affairs are in no way of the same class status as the junior and middle-ranking officials. Setting aside an intermediate bureaucratic stratum that may be counted within the petty bourgeoisie, it is plain that ordinary state officials are, in the scientific sense, workers. In short, the grand bureaucracy that seizes political power under extra-ordinary conditions has nothing whatever to do with them.
In this respect, too, describing the bureaucracy as the servant of the ruling bourgeois class calls for qualification. For there are servants and there are servants. The first are ordinary employees who carry out routine work, whoever may occupy the seats of power. The second are those who, whatever the circumstances, render service to the order at the highest level. To attain a privileged bureaucratic position is not the same as being a large property-owning bourgeois directly; such a position is won only by seizing status and office within the state organisation. Extra-ordinary social conditions are also open to certain surprises. Some who previously occupied the ordinary servant's stool, for instance, have been seen to rise to privileged status. But in the end, once they rise, they too belong to the upper bureaucracy, and so do not alter our rule. In conclusion, we must stress that it is this upper bureaucracy alone that forms part of the bourgeois class.
The distinction between politicians and bureaucrats offers another way into this question, since it is itself an extension of the division of labour within the bourgeoisie in capitalist society. Just as the political representatives of the bourgeoisie are part of the class, so are the senior civilian and military officials an extension of it. A class cannot hold power merely by owning land or capital, or through the activity of its propertied, materially productive members; the bourgeoisie therefore needs politicians and bureaucrats of various kinds. Those who take their seats as the political representatives of bourgeois order can be replaced by election, whereas bureaucrats are installed in office by appointment. Such politicians and senior bureaucrats need not, by class origin, come from large property-owning circles in order to be admitted into the bourgeoisie. But it should not be forgotten that, in this way, almost all of them come to acquire substantial material property and wealth.
Noting that the senior state bureaucracy is part of the bourgeois class, Marx writes that “the bourgeoisie places its surplus population in these posts and completes in the form of salaries what it could not pocket as profit, interest, rent and professional fees.”[23] The political interest of the bourgeoisie, moreover, drives it to make repression heavier by the day and to multiply the instruments and personnel of its power. The bureaucratic elite, which forms a caste within the bourgeois class, is under normal conditions bound to serve the principal section[24] of the bourgeoisie within the limits laid down for it. In short, the state secretary works under the authority of the political party that controls his ministry, and the army general carries out the military tasks assigned to him. But when the bourgeoisie sacrifices its parliamentary regime under the pressure of a major crisis that threatens the order, it is now senior bureaucrats and generals whose business is not directly politics –along with a train of upstarts at their heels– who are installed in political and administrative office.
We have noted that in class societies founded on private property, the bureaucracy’s seizure of political power for the purpose of preserving the given order never places it in the position of a separate ruling class. In modern capitalist society, too, the strings are ultimately held by the large property-owning section of the bourgeoisie. In this respect, even if the bureaucracy acquires a relatively independent position under extra-ordinary regimes, this does not mean that class rule has changed hands. At most, the upper bureaucracy appears to have slipped free, for a time, of its position as the privileged servant of the bourgeois class and to have been promoted to direct possession of political power.
The same truth can be put another way. The bourgeoisie temporarily loses the political section of itself that exercises power under normal conditions, and in this sense, it is as though it had been dispossessed of its political property. It is for this reason that Bonapartist regimes, and indeed all extra-ordinary bourgeois regimes, are described as the bourgeoisie’s political dispossession of itself in order to preserve its economic rule. But as the substance of the matter makes clear, this observation about political dispossession should not be read as meaning more than it does.
We know that the lumpenproletarian and petty-bourgeois masses, ready to embark on dangerous adventures out of desperation and hopelessness, played an important part in the processes that raised the Bonapartes and the Hitlers to power. Yet a careful examination of those processes shows that, in the final analysis, this role amounted to supporting the plans of those sections of the ruling class that wanted a change of political regime. Bourgeois who saw their order in danger and therefore wanted a shift to extra-ordinary political rule were able, with this support, to fling aside the professional politicians who had made politics their property, and to clear the way for the national leaders and generals thrust forward by the conditions of deep crisis. In France, before Bonaparte’s coup, the extra-parliamentary mass of the bourgeoisie –the large property owners who effectively held economic power– provoked Bonaparte precisely in order to eliminate their own politicians.[25]
Marx explains this in the following words. Just as “the parliamentary party of order, by its peaceful clamour, condemned itself to inactivity, declared bourgeois political rule to be incompatible with the existence and security of the bourgeoisie, and in its struggle against the other classes of society destroyed with its own hands all the conditions of its own peculiar regime, that is, of the parliamentary regime – so, conversely, the extra-parliamentary mass of the bourgeoisie, by its slavish submission to the president, its abuse of parliament, its crude treatment of its own press, urged Bonaparte to suppress and root out the bourgeoisie’s own speakers and writers, its politicians and men of letters, so that it might be free to pursue its private affairs in security under the protection of a strong and absolute government.”[26] By sacrificing its representatives in parliament, the principal section of the bourgeois class declared plainly that it was burning to be rid, for a time, of the anxieties and dangers of the parliamentary form of power.
To a bourgeoisie priding itself on the parliamentary form of the state it won in triumph over the old order, losing this “respectable,” “modern” system of representation and submitting to upstart Bonapartes may well look disagreeable. A bourgeoisie that could keep its politicians under fairly easy control under parliamentary rule may find that, once extra-ordinary rule is installed, it cannot control a general who conducts political activity without any electoral cares. It may even have to bow and scrape before bureaucrats who have declared themselves dictators.
The bourgeois business world, which wants to hold all the strings under normal conditions and, given the division of labour within the bourgeoisie, can tell its general easily enough to keep his nose out of anything beyond the tasks assigned to him, will under extra-ordinary conditions have to submit to the rule of generals who have established a monopoly over politics. Compared with how things work in normal times, this may cause the bourgeoisie some discomfort, but everything has its price. This disagreeable situation is simply the price the bourgeoisie pays for protecting its economic interests. It should not be forgotten that, in the final analysis, money is the bourgeoisie’s religion. And to renounce its parliamentary conscience in order to protect its purse is not at all contrary to the bourgeoisie’s sense of “morality.”
Once bourgeois order manages, one way or another, to return to its normal mode of operation, everyone must again submit to the place assigned to them in the general division of labour. In the meantime, however, the large property-owning bourgeoisie will have been able to put its affairs in order thanks to the order that was preserved. As many examples show, periods of extra-ordinary rule ultimately open the way for the propertied bourgeoisie. Marx notes that, although certain “unpleasant” things were experienced under Bonapartist rule, economic relations would forge ahead in the direction of large-scale capital accumulation. “To reassure the bourgeois,” he writes, “it should also be said that the scandal between Bonaparte and the party of order has the effect of ruining a host of small capitalists on the stock exchange and transferring their wealth into the pockets of the great stock-exchange wolves.”[27]
Engels, too, puts the character of the younger Bonaparte’s era succinctly: “Louis Bonaparte took political power out of the hands of the capitalists on the pretext of protecting the bourgeois against the workers, and the workers in turn against the bourgeois; but in exchange he made domination, speculation and industrial activity –in short, the rise and enrichment of the bourgeoisie as a whole– unprecedentedly easy.”[28]And indeed, in Louis Bonaparte’s France, the political dispossession of the bourgeoisie preserved bourgeois order as a whole, but it strengthened the industrial bourgeoisie above all, thanks to ever larger funds being concentrated in a few hands and channelled into industry. Fascism, another extra-ordinary form of rule over bourgeois order, would prove a similar outcome for finance capital – this time at a higher level of the capitalist spiral.
Extra-Ordinary Regimes Absolutise Executive Power
Parliamentary democracy essentially accepts the separation of powers and rests on the principle of the supremacy of the legislature over the executive. In the distribution of political power under the parliamentary regime, parliament comes before the head of state and the government. Under extra-ordinary regimes, by contrast, the supremacy and the will of parliament are trampled underfoot, and political power is centralised in the hands of a repressive executive. This difference between the normal and extra-ordinary modes of exercising political power can also be seen in the different ways the legislature and the executive are reflected in society.
As Marx points out, in the legislature the nation appears to have raised its general will, through its votes, to the level of law; political authority seems to spring from the nation's own autonomy. Yet even in the most democratic functioning conceivable in capitalist society, “the autonomy of the nation” means no more than the nation’s acceptance of the law of the ruling class. Parliamentary democracy may therefore be presented as though it were the sovereignty of the nation, but in reality it signifies the “voluntary” acceptance of the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie by the masses.
In the executive, by contrast, the nation appears to bow to the commands of an alien will. When it comes to the executive, the supremacy of the ruling class manifests itself more openly, in the nation’s submission to the impositions of an authority outside itself. Extra-ordinary governmental forms of bourgeois order are therefore political regimes that do not seek the nation's voluntary consent and impose themselves upon society.
The first tangible consequence of the overthrow of the parliamentary republic in France by a coup d’état was, in Marx’s words, the victory of Bonaparte over the Assembly – of the executive power over the legislative power, of naked force over the force of speech. Under Bonapartist regimes, we see parliament either outright dissolved, or reduced to a sham parliamentary form through cabinets appointed from outside parliament and through the head of state or the government being invested with extra-ordinary powers. Bonaparte, for instance, appointed ministers who were mere figureheads and openly concentrated all executive power in his own person. Political power thus took shape as a personal regime – that is, as a dictatorship of one man. France seemed to have escaped the tyranny of a class only to fall under the tyranny of an individual.
The struggle that had once convulsed society seemed to have subsided; all classes stood as though equally powerless, reduced to silence and brought to their knees before the butts of rifles. Yet this “common fate” was, of course, in the final analysis no more than an appearance. France had indeed fallen under the tyranny of an individual, but it had not escaped the tyranny of a class. The rifle butts of the extra-ordinary regime knew very well on whose necks they were meant to fall. Bonapartist power directed its attacks insidiously against the working class and its organisations. While this form of rule over bourgeois order enriched the property-owning bourgeois and produced new rich, the working class and the labouring strata were dragged into a vortex of deep poverty in the shadow of the swords. Change the country, the time and the name, and this is, in its broad outlines, the common story of all extra-ordinary bourgeois regimes!
Extra-Ordinary Regimes Are the Product of Extra-Ordinary Conditions
The parliamentary republic is the only form of state in which the different bourgeois sections, despite the conflicts of interest between them, can rule together politically. This reality, however, holds only under normal conditions. When extra-ordinary conditions arise, the bourgeois business world may want to be rid of the parliamentary system and of its own class's politicians and political parties, even at the cost of extinguishing political life. The extreme intensification of tension between classes in society is the harbinger of a civil war. The threat of civil war, as Trotsky put it, creates in the ruling class a need for an arbiter and a commander, for a Caesar – and the function of Bonapartism is to meet that need. “In peaceful periods, a democratic parliament appears as the best instrument for reconciling conflicting interests. But once the fundamental forces are set at 180 degrees against each other, the road to Bonapartist dictatorship is opened.”[29]
In modern bourgeois societies, although the normal mode of bourgeois rule is parliamentary democracy, this political regime has been damaged by the bourgeoisie’s own hand in many countries and at many times. When the bourgeoisie feels its rule endangered under the parliamentary system, the view that increasingly prevails in bourgeois ranks is that the regime should be dispensed with, at least until bourgeois order has been thoroughly consolidated. What chiefly convinces broad bourgeois sections of this change is that parliamentary democracy gives the oppressed sections of society –above all the working class– some measure of opportunity to organise and to propagandise, and the fear that in critical situations this will erode the social foundations of the order. The parliamentary form of rule also fails to prevent conflicts of interest between different bourgeois sections from inflaming political life, and this unsettles the bourgeois business world in delicate periods when it does not feel particularly secure.
In the past, when one section of the bourgeoisie settled accounts with another, the outcome often helped to bring a Bonapartist regime to power. In France, the industrial bourgeoisie was at odds with the big landowners and the commercial bourgeoisie, and it welcomed Bonaparte’s coup in the belief that its own political dominance would be strengthened later on. It was impatient to draw level with, and even to outstrip, those bourgeois sections that had established their weight in political life before it. But since it could not yet dominate the political arena, it suited the industrial bourgeoisie that no other section should dominate it outright in the meantime. Its aim was to gather strength and prepare for the future, so that when its moment came it could enter the economic and political arena from a position of greater strength. And so it proved: by the time extra-ordinary rule had run its course and bourgeois order had returned to its normal mode of operation, France possessed an industry, and an industrial bourgeoisie, stronger than before.
There is a deep connection between the extra-ordinary state forms of bourgeois order and periods of economic and political tension. It would be wrong, however, to conclude from this that every period of economic crisis or political upheaval will end in the establishment of an extra-ordinary regime. A detailed examination of the processes that produced both Bonapartist and fascist dictatorships shows that the conditions that make extra-ordinary rule unavoidable correspond not to ordinary periods of crisis, but to certain historical convulsions of transformation and structural crises that shake bourgeois society far more deeply. The character of these convulsions and structural crises depends on the concrete historical conditions and on the level of capitalist development. The differences between extra-ordinary regimes are, in the end, a product of the given conditions.
In the case of Bonapartism, which coincided with the expansionary phase of capitalism, the tension generated by the struggle for dominance between the big landowners and commercial bourgeoisie on the one hand and the industrial bourgeoisie on the other was compounded by the ruling forces' fear of the revolutionary awakening of the working class. In the classical fascism of the German and Italian cases, or in the military-fascist dictatorships of more recent times, we find instead that the foundations of the order were shaken by the insoluble structural crises of finance capital and by the threat of a revolutionary seizure of power by the working class. Capital will seek to escape such historical spasms by crushing the revolutionary movement at home and striving for a stronger position on the world market.
One important point must not be overlooked if we are to avoid mistaken assumptions about extra-ordinary regimes. The parliamentary framework of bourgeois order is not equally broad or comprehensive in every capitalist country. The quantity and quality of the democratic rights contained in the parliamentary system, and the balance between the legislative and executive powers, differ markedly from one capitalist country to another. The reasons for this lie in the differing historical backgrounds of the countries concerned, and equally in the uneven depth and breadth of working-class struggle.
Shallow assessments that ignore these considerations open the door to the mistaken view that extra-ordinary regimes are permanently in place in certain countries. To brand every political conjuncture in which the president's powers appear to expand as Bonapartism, in capitalist countries with a presidential system, for instance, has the effect of blurring the distinction between an ordinary tendency towards reaction in the political regime and extra-ordinary rule. The same error appears in theories which, by comparing the parliamentary arrangements of countries like Turkey with European examples, conclude that a permanent fascism prevails in such countries; this too is a mistaken political stance. Such stances betray an incapacity to analyse concrete reality and to determine correct tactics of struggle.
The extra-ordinary political forms of bourgeois dictatorship are, in the end, temporary in character. This does not mean, however, that Bonapartist or fascist dictatorships will simply take themselves off with ease. Just as the manner in which such regimes come into being, and the degree of violence they deploy, depend on the concrete conditions of the moment and on internal and external political balances, so too do similar factors govern the way they end. In modern bourgeois societies, the normal form of bourgeois dictatorship is, in the final analysis, the parliamentary regime. Extra-ordinary regimes may repair and rescue bourgeois rule in a period of upheaval, but there is a risk that these repressive regimes will, after a time, provoke a social reaction against bourgeois order itself, and seriously damage certain institutions of that order which are held sacred in the eyes of the working class and the labouring masses. This is why the bourgeoisie is reluctant to resort to extra-ordinary political regimes except where strictly necessary.
In a sense, extra-ordinary rule is like a dangerous instrument that repairs one part while damaging another. It comes in the name of restoring order, yet it may create a new source of “anarchy” that threatens that order. As both older and more recent examples show, if the period in which Bonapartist or similar regimes unravel is marked by organised working-class struggle and serious mass movements, it is not merely the bourgeoisie’s extra-ordinary form of state that will be in danger, but bourgeois order itself.
Assessing the fate of the Bonapartist regime, Marx observes that it tore away the “sacred” aura of the governmental mechanism, holding it in contempt and at once disgracing and ridiculing it, thereby creating anarchy in the name of order itself. And he adds: “the day the imperial cloak finally falls from Louis Bonaparte’s shoulders, the bronze statue of Napoleon will come crashing down from the top of the Vendôme column.”[30]
And indeed, what befell the column that had been erected in Paris in 1806 in memory of Napoleon I, and that bore his statue, confirmed Marx's prophecy. The Vendôme column was pulled down on 16 May 1871, on the orders of the Paris Commune, which meant to consign bourgeois order, together with its stone symbols, to the dustbin of history. The Paris uprising that broke out in the very process through which the Bonapartist order came to an end displayed the Communards’ courage in their resolve to bring bourgeois order down. Even if the working class did not achieve victory at that time, it taught future generations many lessons about what needed to be done.
Marx’s analysis of Bonapartism, while containing many important points that still shed light on the extra-ordinary political formations of the bourgeois state, naturally derived its characterisations of concrete conditions from the level of capitalist development reached in the nineteenth century. The fundamental reason why the younger Bonaparte was able to rise above bourgeois society, as it were in the role of a saviour standing above the classes, and to establish his dictatorship, lay in the need of a bourgeois order shaken by fear of the proletariat for a political balance that would also prevent it from being further weakened by the ceaseless conflicts between the various sections of the bourgeois class. The political clashes between the big landowners and commercial bourgeoisie, which had gained strength within the old society, and the newly burgeoning industrial bourgeoisie were amply reflected in the class struggles of the period.
Bonapartism, corresponding to this historical period and these conditions, is therefore an extra-ordinary form of rule that consolidates a bourgeois order which is losing strength through the power struggles between its various sections, at a historical moment when fear of working-class revolution has already entered the heart of the bourgeoisie. As Marx’s exposition makes clear, this Bonapartism is a regime of balance aimed at preventing the revolutionary awakening of the proletariat and at suppressing the conflicts between the various bourgeois sections. Although these features remain essentially unchanged, Bonapartism would appear in another guise in Bismarck's Germany.
Before closing this section, which has been devoted specifically to the examination of the question of Bonapartism, let us touch upon a secondary problem – one that does not appear directly related to the subject, but that may raise questions in the reader’s mind because of the concept of Bonapartism it contains: the problem of “proletarian Bonapartism.”
Why Can There Be No “Proletarian Bonapartism”?
As is well known, the concept of Bonapartism essentially corresponds to an extra-ordinary form of political rule that absolutises the executive power of bourgeois order. Yet the concept has sometimes been used in Marxist circles loosely and inappropriately, in ways that distort the essence of the matter, and this has given rise to a number of controversies. After Lenin’s death, for instance, the qualitative change that took place in the social system of the Soviet Union with the overthrow of workers’ power and the establishment of the Stalinist bureaucratic dictatorship was explained with the help of concepts such as Bonapartism. To invoke a concept that ought to be confined to bourgeois order in the context of the question of working-class power is a fundamentally mistaken approach.
The concept of proletarian Bonapartism is so patently wrong that no lengthy demonstration of the fact is really required. Yet for certain Trotskyist circles the concept is of central importance. These circles assessed the character of the regimes dominated by the bureaucracy in the Soviet Union and similar countries within this framework. They described the Stalinist bureaucracy and its imitations as “proletarian Bonapartist” powers, on the grounds that they preserved state property and rested upon the proletariat. In their view, despite the extraordinarily repressive power of the bureaucracy over the working class, the social foundations of the revolution had been left untouched, and the historic gains therefore survived. Unfortunately, these mistaken views were not revised even after the collapse of the modern despotic-bureaucratic dictatorships in those countries, and have been carried over into the present unchanged.
In In the Light of Marxism I examined in detail the class character of the Stalinist regimes. I also dealt there with Trotsky’s mistaken assessments on the question, and with the inquiry he left unfinished at his death. And I considered how the Trotskyists, instead of carrying that effort forward, turned his errors into dogma and so opened the door to even greater misconceptions. I shall not go over these problems a second time at the same length; a brief reminder here will suffice.
Bonapartism is one of the extra-ordinary forms of bourgeois rule. Extra-ordinary political regimes do not change the social foundations of bourgeois order or the ruling-class position of the bourgeoisie; they merely seek to protect a bourgeois rule that has been placed in danger. To try to prove, on this basis, that there can also be a Bonapartist form of proletarian rule is a vain effort, incompatible with the Marxist understanding. For there is a deep, historically grounded difference in scope between the conditions of a capitalist society founded on the private ownership of the means of production and conditions in which the means of production are generally under state ownership.
In seeking to grasp the class character of the Soviet state and the nature of the bureaucracy, Trotsky took societies based on private property as his starting point and reasoned by historical analogy. He therefore carried the Thermidor and Bonapartism of the French revolutionary process over into his analysis of the Soviet Union. In his view, a Soviet Thermidor and a Soviet Bonapartism had transferred political power from the proletariat into the hands of the bureaucracy, but this change had not destroyed the social foundations of the October Revolution of 1917. This approach is fundamentally wrong. The bureaucratic counter-revolution put an end to the power of the proletariat and in doing so destroyed the foundations of the social revolution entirely. It is therefore wholly incompatible with reality to suppose that the ruling bureaucracy, however politically reactionary, continued to preserve the social gains of the October Revolution.
Trotsky argued that every class develops its own distinctive form of property, but that the bureaucracy lacks this attribute altogether. He was thus led to the generalisation that the bureaucracy is inseparably bound to an economically dominant class, that it exists alongside that class and will be overthrown along with it. Yet the position of the bureaucracy in bourgeois society is quite different in character from that of the Stalinist bureaucracy. In capitalist society, even if the bureaucracy seizes political power –that is, even if the state becomes, in a sense, its private property– the bourgeoisie, which owns the means of production, remains the economically dominant class. But where the means of production have been nationalised and the working class does not hold power, a bureaucracy that takes possession of the state also takes possession of the source of economic dominance. Such a bureaucracy is no longer an element bound to another ruling class, for it has itself risen to the rank of ruling class.
The proletariat has no way of becoming economically dominant other than by conquering political power and transferring the principal means of production into the ownership of the workers’ state. Only if, and for as long as, it can hold on to the political dominance it has won through revolution –that is, only if it can preserve the workers’ state that the revolution produced, together with the workers’ democracy that constitutes its one essential substance– can it occupy the position of an economically dominant class. Where the working class has failed to seize power, or has lost it, the property relations erected on nationalised means of production have given rise to modern despotic-bureaucratic regimes resting on the rule of the bureaucracy, as in the case of Stalinism.
Wherever these regimes took hold, the working class was not dominant, whether politically or economically, but was reduced to a class living in subjection. In the countries where such regimes prevailed, the working class was therefore a class unable to control the surplus product it produced or to govern through decisions of its own – in other words, an exploited class. Since the ownership of the means of production belonged to the state, the class that dominated these societies, both politically and economically, was the bureaucracy, which held the state in its monopoly.
In conclusion, there can be no such thing as proletarian Bonapartism, and it is an entirely mistaken tendency to describe the Soviet Union under Stalinist rule, and similar historical cases, in such terms. Worse still is the practice of lowering the level of Trotsky’s analysis by inventing a general category of proletarian Bonapartism and using it as a label to be stuck on any number of situations in which nationalisations have occurred. It is no defensible stance to treat nationalisations of the means of production outside the Marxist understanding, to declare the character of a regime to be proletarian Bonapartism and then speak of social gains even in countries where no workers' revolution ever took place, or to insist on coupling two words, proletarian and Bonapartism, which are in reality incompatible.
The question of nationalisations is of key importance for distinguishing the revolutionary Marxist stance within the socialist movement from reformist or radical petty-bourgeois left outlooks. Nationalisations carried out under workers’ power, which constitute an initial step in the process by which the means of production are appropriated by society –that is, socialised– cannot be confused with state ownership and state management under a capitalist state. The care shown by the founders of Marxism on this question should not be forgotten.
In a letter to Bernstein in 1881, Engels writes: “It is simply a falsification perpetrated by the Manchester bourgeoisie in their own interests that they call «socialism» every interference by the state in free competition – protective tariffs, guilds, tobacco monopoly, nationalisation of certain branches of industry, the Overseas Trade Society, and the royal porcelain factory. We should criticise this but not believe it. If we do the latter and develop a theory on the basis of this belief our theory will collapse together with its premises upon simple proof that this alleged socialism is nothing but, on the one hand, feudal reaction and, on the other, a pretext for squeezing out money, with the secondary object of turning as many proletarians as possible into civil servants and pensioners dependent upon the state, thus organising alongside of the disciplined army of soldiers and civil servants an army of workers as well. Compulsory voting brought about by superiors in the state apparatus instead of by factory overseers – a fine sort of socialism! But that’s where people get if they believe the bourgeoisie what it does not believe itself but only pretends to believe: that the state means socialism...”[31]
Under present-day conditions, in which the Soviet Union and its copies –formed under the despotic dictatorship of the ruling bureaucracy– have for the most part now collapsed, discussion of these regimes may appear to have receded somewhat into the background. In reality, however, this is far from being the case. Those who fail to analyse recent history on a Marxist basis, and to grasp it correctly, can shed no light either on the present or on the future.
Some Trotskyists still apply the concept of proletarian Bonapartism to certain capitalist countries today. Regimes in which the state bureaucracy dominates the political structure and statism prevails in the economy –such as the Ba’ath regime in Syria– are commonly described as proletarian Bonapartism. It cannot be said that such approaches rest on a convincing or sound Marxist foundation. If one wishes to grasp the specificity of the situation in these countries, there is no need to look far. The period of capitalist statism in Turkey (1929-39) and its practices shed sufficient light on the problem. Alongside Turkey, such practices were also implemented in certain countries that won political independence and established nation-states, particularly after the Second World War. The statist model of economic development pursued by the “national revolutionary” regimes in these countries was essentially nothing other than state capitalism.
[1] The Jacobins were a group organised during the French Revolution of 1789 under the name of the Society of the Friends of the Constitution. The group held its meetings in a monastery known as Jacobins in Paris that had once belonged to the Dominicans and it thus came to be widely referred to by that name. Comprising prosperous bourgeois and men of letters, the group adopted the name Society of the Friends of Liberty and Equality, also known as the Jacobins, upon the proclamation of the republic in September 1792. With the admission of left-wing Montagnard deputies to the new assembly, the Jacobin clubs acquired a more democratic and populist character. Coming under the leadership of Robespierre, the group played a significant role in the elimination of the moderate and right-wing Girondins, and it maintained a dominant position in the French revolutionary process until Thermidor in 1794.
[2] In the age of imperialism, the concept of the financial aristocracy corresponds to finance capital, which encompasses all the major bourgeois sections. In Marx’s own time, however, the term was used rather to denote the big commercial bourgeoisie and the great money speculators. Marx adds the following clarification to make clear that he does not mean by the term only those bourgeois sections currently favourable to the government: “Under «aristocracy of finance» must not, however, be understood merely the large bond negotiators and speculators in government securities, of whom it may be readily understood that their interests and the interests of the Government coincide. The whole modern money trade, the whole banking industry, is most intimately interwoven with the public credit. Part of their business capital requires to be invested in interest-bearing government securities that are promptly convertible into money; their deposits, i.e., the capital placed at their disposal and by them distributed among merchants and industrial establishments, flow partly out of the dividends on government securities.” (Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte)
[3] Even where the forms and tempo differed, comparable processes, bound up with capitalist development, took place in other monarchical systems as well – that is, in systems of rule in which state power is concentrated in the hands of a king or an emperor, of a monarch, to use the term as it appears in the languages of Europe.
[4] Marx, Class Struggles in France
[5] Marx, ibid
[6] Marx, ibid
[7] Marx, ibid. Marx goes on to draw attention to the international dimension of this task, that is, of the proletarian revolution: “This task, which it cannot accomplish within national boundaries, is transformed within the French body social into a world war which all nations are to wage against one another. The solution begins only at the moment when, through the world war, the proletariat is pushed to the head of the nation that dominates the world market, to the head of England. The revolution, which here finds not its end but its organisational beginning, is no short-winded revolution.”
[8] Marx, ibid
[9] Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte
[10] Marx, ibid
[11] Marx, ibid
[12] This reactionary organisation, whose aim was to preserve order, was also known as a phalanx. Years later, the fascist forces in Spain would likewise call the party they founded the Falangist Party.
[13] The society took its name from the fact that L. Bonaparte was elected president on 10 December.
[14] Engels, The Role of Force in History
[15] Following Louis Bonaparte’s coup d’état, parliament was abolished. Bonaparte had the homes of parliamentary leaders he considered dangerous to his rule surrounded, and had prominent bourgeois politicians pulled from their beds at midnight and taken into custody. He had the principal squares of Paris, including the parliamentary square, occupied by military units.
[16] Marx, ibid
[17] The word Montagne means “mountain” in French. Montagnards (“mountaineers”), derived from it, was the name given to the left-wing elements of the assembly during the Great French Revolution, because they sat on the higher benches. By extension, the petty-bourgeois democrats who sat in the Constituent Assembly and the Legislative Assembly during the revolution of 1848 were known by the same name.
[18] Marx, ibid
[19] Marx, ibid
[20] Marx, ibid
[21] Marx, ibid
[22] Marx-Engels, German Ideology
[23] Marx, ibid
[24] It is clear that the bourgeois class does not consist solely of property-owning bourgeois and the owners of capitalist enterprises. Although the concept of the bourgeoisie primarily calls to mind this principal section of the class, the bourgeoisie as a whole also includes its other section – its politicians, ideologists and bureaucrats. In order to distinguish between these two sections, whose division corresponds to the division of labour between material and mental work within the bourgeois class, when speaking of the conflict between them, I have found it necessary to describe the first as the principal section of the bourgeoisie, the bourgeois business world, or the bourgeois proprietors. It is for reasons arising from the same need that concepts such as “the bourgeoisie itself” appear in Marx’s writings.
[25] Marx’s account of the conditions that thrust a man like Bonaparte onto the stage of history does not merely illuminate the case of Bonaparte himself; it also exposes the distortion in views that explain the rise of Hitler and his like in terms of the role of the individual. Marx criticises Victor Hugo’s approach, which treats Bonapartist power as the resort to force by a single man. In doing so, Hugo, far from diminishing Bonaparte, magnifies him by crediting him with an initiative unprecedented in history. In Proudhon’s hands, the historical character of the coup d’état turns into a defence of Bonaparte. Having noted that this amounts to the same error into which the supposedly objective historians fall, Marx continues: “I, by contrast, show how the class struggle in France created the circumstances and conditions that allowed an ordinary, vulgar man to play the hero.”
[26] Marx, ibid
[27] Marx, Class Struggles in France
[28] Engels, Introduction to Civil War in France
[29] Trotsky, Struggle Against Fascism
[30] Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte
[31] Marx-Engels, Selected Correspondence
link: Elif Çağlı, From Bonapartism to Fascism /1, August 2004, https://marksist.net/node/8867