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Marxism Vs. Bonapartism

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Marxism Vs. Bonapartism Internationalist Group League for the F·ourth International Marxism vs. Bonapartism .....,,,.. _. '\':... ~/..:~··'- ·~ -. ... -..::.... - : ... ":::..~,....... -.... - On the barricades in Paris, fighting against Louis Napoleon's coup d'etat of 2 December 1851. Internationalist Group Class Readings September 2004 $1.50 ® ~ ~1162-M Introduction The Internationalist No. 19 (Summer 2004) includes an article titled "American Gestapo" dealing with the repressive measures pointing in the direction of a police state, above all since the attack of 11 September 2001. However, as the article points out, these are not "reprisals" nor a response to indiscriminate terror, but rather a long-range program planned some years ago, designed by "bipartisan" commissions - i.e., by both bourgeois parties, Republicans and Democrats. They accompany a change in the social structure of the United States, marked by a growing concentration of wealth in the capitalist higher echelons and the expansion of the sector of impoverished workers (many of them immigrants) who barely receive the minimum wage, if that. As the country that ever since De Tocqueville boasted of its middle class now becomes more like Latin American capitalist countries, its repressive apparatus changes as well. The tendency toward a "strong state" also corresponds to the "New World Order'' proclaimed by Washington at the time of the counterrevolutionary destruction of the Soviet Union and the first war on Iraq (1990-91), and to the present terrorist "war on terror'' launched by U.S. imperialism in its entirety. It seeks to firm up the "home front" by regimenting the population for this "war without end." In general terms, the tendency toward what we have called "institutional Bonapartism" in the U.S. goes hand in hand with the increasing world domination and hegemony of Yankee imperialism (the FBI was formed out of the "red hunts" after the First World War, the CIA is born with the anti-Soviet "Cold War"). As noted in the article in The Internationalist, new U.S. laws such as the ''U.S.A. PATRIOT Act" which authorize a host of measures such as "preventive" detention (the counterpart of "preventive war") have been imitated by countries as diverse as Britain, Mexico and India. The tendency toward police state type measures and regimes is nothing new. Bonapartism was an important theme in the writings of Leon Trotsky during the 1930s, a prewar period leading up to the second imperialist world war, a period marked by a severe capitalist economic crisis (the Great Depression) and the consequent growth both of "official" (Stalinist) Communist parties and of fascism, as a civil war measure aimed at heading off the "revolutionary danger." Trotsky generalized the term coined by Karl Marx in his essay, The 18th Brumaire of Louis-Napoleon, referring to the French emperor (the nephew of Napoleon Bonaparte) who governed France from 1848to1871. Bonapartism refers to a regime resting on the state apparatus (military and police) that seeks to raise itself above the different classes to act as an arbiter, sweeping away "democratic" norms in order to defend the "higher'' interests of the whole of the ruling class in periods of acute danger (war, potentially revolutionary crisis, etc.) Consequently, bonapartist regimes can have different political signs. As Trotsky wrote, the sword by itself does not have a policy. Thus, Trotsky pointed out that both the Nazi-fascist Hitler regime in capitalist Germany and the Stalinist regime in the Soviet Union, a bureaucratically deformed workers state, had a bonapartist character, although they were separated by an abysm by their class character. He also referred to the regime of General Lazaro Cardenas in Mexico as a kind of "Bonapartism sui generis" (of a unique sort) that sought to balance between the weight of imperialism and the pressure of the proletariat. The Stalinists, on the other hand, place an equal sign between fascism (a movement marked by the mobilization of an enraged petty bourgeoisie) and military dictatorships such as that of Pinochet in Chile and the Videla junta in Argentina. They respond to the bonapartist danger by trimming their own program to the measure of the supposedly "democratic" bourgeoisie, embodied in the "anti-fascist" popular front which chains the proletariat to bourgeois forces. Following the popular-front model of the Stalinists, various pseudo-Trotskyist tendencies have responded to Bonapartism with a purely (bourgeois) "democratic" program. However, historical experience, from the failed Revolution of 1848 to the Spanish Civil War of 1936-39 to the experience of the Chilean Unidad Popular of 1970- 73 demonstrate that capitalist Bonapartism comes about with the support of virtually all bourgeois forces. Thus popular-frontism and fascism are the ultimate measures of the ruling class to prevent a proletarian revolution. As shown in the materials reprinted here, both Marx and Trotsky answered Bonapartism with a program, not for a mythical democratic bourgeoisie but for international workers revolution. The Paris Commune, arising on the ashes of the collapsed Empire of Louis Napoleon Bonaparte, is the archetype of the proletarian answer to Bonapartism. -League for the Fourth International, 21 September 2004 2 Karl Marx The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon (December 1851-March 1852) (Excerpts) Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all dead generations weighs like an nightmare on the brains of the living. And just as they seem to be occupied with revolutionizing themselves and things, creating something that did not exist before, precisely in such epochs of revolutionary crisis they anxiously conjure up the spirits of the past to their service, borrowing from them names, battle slogans, and costumes in order to present this new scene in world history in time-honored disguise and borrowed language. Thus Luther put on the mask of the Apostle Paul, the Revolution of 1789-1814 draped itself alternately in the guise of the Roman Republic and the Roman Empire, and the Revolution of 1848 knew nothing better to do than to parody, now 1789, now the revolutionary tradition of 1793-95. In like manner, the beginner who has learned a new language always translates it back into his mother tongue, but he assimilates the spirit of the new language and expresses himself freely in it only when he moves in it without recalling the old and when he forgets his native tongue .... The French, so long as they were engaged in revolution, could not get rid of the memory of Napoleon, as the election of December 10 [1848, when Louis Bonaparte was elected President of the French Republic by plebiscite] was proved. They longed to return from the perils of revolution to the fleshpots of Egypt, and December 2, 1851 [the date of the coup d'etat by Louis Bonaparte], was the answer. Now they have not only a caricature of the old Napoleon, but the old Napoleon himself, caricatured as he would have to be in the middle of the nineteenth century. The social revolution of the nineteenth century cannot take its poetry from the past but only from the future. It cannot begin with itself before it has stripped away all superstition about the past. The former revolutions required recollections of past world history in order to smother their own content. The revolution of the nineteenth century must let the dead bury their dead in order to arrive at its own content. There the phrase went beyond the content - here the content goes beyond the phrase. The February Revolution was a surprise attack, a seizing of the old society unaware, and the people proclaimed this unexpected stroke a deed of world importance, ushering in a new epoch. On December 2 the February Revolution is conjured away as a cardsharp's trick, and what seems overthrown is no longer the monarchy but the liberal concessions that had been wrung from it through centuries of struggle .... Bourgeois revolutions, like those of the eighteenth century, storm more swiftly from success to success, their dramatic effects outdo each other, men and things seem set in sparkling diamonds, ecstasy is the order of the day - but they are short-lived, soon they have reached their zenith, and a long Katzenjammer [hangover] takes hold of society before it learns to assimilate the results of its storm-and-stress period soberly. On the other hand, proletarian revolutions, like those of the nineteenth century, constantly criticize themselves, constantly interrupt themselves in their own course, return to the apparently accomplished, in order to begin anew; they deride with cruel thoroughness the half-measures, weaknesses, and paltriness of their first attempts, seem to throw down their opponents only so the latter may draw new strength from the earth and rise before them again more gigantic than ever, recoil constantly from the indefinite colossalness of their own goals - until a situation is created which makes all turning back impossible, and the conditions themselves call out:' 3 Hie Rhodus, hie salta! [Here is the rose, dance here!] 1 2 Legitimists and Orleanists, as we have said, formed the two great factions of the party of Order . Was what held these factions fast to their pretenders and kept them apart from each other nothing but fleur-de-lis3 and tricolor, the House of Bourbon [the "legitimists"] and House of Orleans, different shades of royalism - was it at all the confession of faith of royalism? Under the Bourbons, big landed property had governed, with its priests and lackeys; under Orleans, high finance, large-scale industry, large-scale trade, that is, capital, with its retinue of lawyers, professors, and smooth-tongued orators. The Legitimate Monarchy was merely the political expression of the hereditary rule of the lords of the soil, as the July Monarchy4 was only the political expression of the usurped rule of the bourgeois parvenus.
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