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NEWS & LETTERS, December 2002
Philosophic Dialogue
Marx's EIGHTEENTH BRUMAIRE today
by Kevin Anderson Author of LENIN, HEGEL, AND WESTERN MARXISM Karl Marx published THE EIGHTEENTH BRUMAIRE OF LOUIS
BONAPARTE in 1852 in the aftermath of the Dec. 2, 1851 Bonapartist coup in
France that brought to an end the whole period of ferment that had begun with
the 1848 revolutions. In France it ushered in nearly two decades of
authoritarian rule, as the Bonapartist state became a precursor of twentieth
century fascism, setting up the first modern police state. All the while the
regime also claimed to oppose slavery and to be acting in the name of the masses
against the various monarchies of Europe. Among Bonaparte's most reactionary
adventures was the attempt to install a puppet ruler, Maximilian, in Mexico. REORGANIZATION AND RETROGRESSION The 1851 coup came suddenly, like a "bolt from the
blue," Marx wrote (MECW 11, p. 107--I am referencing the version in Marx
and Engels, COLLECTED WORKS, but here and elsewhere, sometimes altered in
consultation with Terrell Carver in the 1996 Cambridge edition of Marx, LATER
POLITICAL WRITINGS). One indication of the defensive posture that
revolutionaries across Europe had been forced into was shown in how the
Eighteenth Brumaire was published. No European publisher was able to print it
and the pamphlet came out in the U.S. in a very small printing, under the
auspices of the German immigrant Marxist and future Union Army officer Joseph
Weydemeyer. In this work, Marx predicted correctly that a long wave of reaction
would now blanket Europe. The EIGHTEENTH BRUMAIRE was one place where Marx
developed his theory of the state, something he had planned to complete in a
major work that was to follow CAPITAL. In the EIGHTEENTH BRUMAIRE, Marx showed how the road to
the Bonapartist coup of December 1851 had been paved by the deep contradictions
that had emerged in 1848, on the one hand, between the bourgeois democrats and
the proletariat, and on the other, among the bourgeois democrats themselves. The
result was a deeply retrogressive situation, wherein, "it seems that the
state only returned to its oldest form, to the shamelessly simple domination of
the sword and the cross" (MECW 11, p. 106). However, Marx insisted, this was not a return to the
premodern era, but a form of dictatorship that was very new. Up through 1852,
Marx noted, "all revolutions perfected the state machine instead of
breaking it," helping to create a "huge state edifice" (MECW 11,
p. 186). He also dealt with the class basis of the new state--its roots in parts
of the disunited French peasantry and its connection to the army. At the same time, he wished to disabuse the proletariat
and all those in the revolutionary camp of the notion that any immediate
turnabout lay on the horizon. There were simply too many objective obstacles:
"Human beings make their own history," he wrote. "But," he
warned, "they do not make it just as they please, in circumstances chosen
by themselves, but under present circumstances, given and inherited from the
past" (MECW 11, p. 103). At the same time, Marx sketched the positive motion that
he saw in the trajectory of the movement, even in defeat. Despite setbacks,
there had been a lot of learning and the growth of proletarian
self-consciousness. In language that evoked Hegel's "labor, patience, and
suffering of the negative," Marx wrote of how, as against bourgeois
revolutions and their strengthening of the state, proletarian revolutions
"engage in perpetual self-criticism" and "deride with savage
brutality the inadequacies, weak points, and pitiful aspects of their first
attempts" (MECW 11, p. 106). This self-critical attitude was not due to weakness,
Marx wrote, but to the "prodigious" scope of their aims, which, as he
was to write later, include not just the overthrow of a particular ruler or
system, but the "abolition" of "class-rule itself" (in 1871
in THE CIVIL WAR IN FRANCE). However, to get there, constant self-critique and
self-reorganization on the part of the revolutionary movement was an absolute
necessity. ALLEGED DISMISSAL OF THE PEASANTRY Some critics of Marx have seen the EIGHTEENTH BRUMAIRE
as a flawed work because of a supposedly elitist dismissal of the peasantry.
They hang their argument on the passages where Marx wrote that, in a way, the
Bonapartist regime represented the French peasantry, a class that he considered
to be an unformed mass, "much as potatoes in a sack form a sack of
potatoes." He added that "they do not form a class" and since
"they cannot represent themselves, they need to be represented," and
in this case that vacuum had been unfortunately filled by Bonaparte (MECW 11, p.
187). If in fact Marx dismissed the revolutionary potential of
the peasantry, here or more generally, that would indeed constitute a serious
flaw in his thinking, especially given the history of 20th century revolutionary
movements, from China to the Zapatistas. Instead, however, what Marx was saying was that at that
particular juncture, 1851-52, the French peasantry lacked cohesion and therefore
fell into the trap of Bonapartism, as had the liberal democrats as well. What
Marx was talking about was the emergence of different tendencies among the
French peasants, based on their specific class position and the uneven
development of their revolutionary consciousness: "But let there be no misunderstanding. The
Bonaparte dynasty represents not the revolutionary, but the conservative
peasant; not the peasant that strikes out beyond the condition of his social
existence, the smallholding, but rather the peasant who wants to consolidate
this holding; not the country folk who, linked up with the towns, want to
overthrow the old order through their own energies in conjunction with the
towns….It represents not the enlightenment, but the superstition of the
peasant; not his judgment, but his prejudice; not his future, but his
past…" (MECW 11, p. 188). The above passage is in keeping with many others by
Marx, where he vehemently opposed those who argued that the proletariat alone
was revolutionary, such as in the CRITIQUE OF THE GOTHA PROGRAM (1875), where he
polemicized against the Lassallean view of the backwardness of the peasantry. Marx expressed this point more affirmatively in his
letter to Engels of April 11, 1856, where he wrote of the dialectical
relationship between peasant and proletarian struggles, going back to the 16th
century peasant uprising in German on which Engels had written one of his best
books, THE PEASANT WAR IN GERMANY (published only two years before the
EIGHTEENTH BRUMAIRE). Marx wrote: "The whole thing in Germany will depend
upon the possibility of backing the proletarian revolution by some second
edition of the Peasant War. Then the affair will be splendid…" The EIGHTEENTH BRUMAIRE has relevance today on its 150th anniversary for many reasons. One of them lies in how, as against Marx's anarchist critics, it shows his preoccupation with, and opposition not only to capital, but also to the modern state, and gives some flavor of the never-written book on the state that was to have followed CAPITAL. A second point to ponder for today is how the Bonapartist coup of 1851, while not an exact parallel to what happened after September 11, showed the drive for total domination by the modern bourgeois state, one that reached its fullest development in the twentieth century with state-capitalist totalitarianism. Today, that is a danger that lurks more than ever under the surface of bourgeois democracy. |
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