The Classics, French
Trilogy, Part 3a
Louis Bonaparte's balancing act
The 18th
Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte
In the following cut from “The 18th Brumaire of Louis
Bonaparte” (click on the link below for a download containing a longer
selection) it is clear that the proletariat suffered a disaster when it had no
allies and was isolated and attacked by all the other classes together and
massacred in June of 1848 in Paris.
This is the situation that the proletariat must always
avoid, and it is one reason why the working class must always have allies. Here
is part of Marx’s outline of the events:
“a. May 4 to June 25, 1848. Struggle of all classes
against the proletariat. Defeat of the proletariat in the June days.
“b. June 25 to December 10, 1848. Dictatorship of the
pure bourgeois republicans. Drafting of the constitution. Proclamation of a
state of siege in Paris. The bourgeois dictatorship set aside on December
10 by the election of Bonaparte as President.”
In the “18th Brumaire” the contenders of the Great French
Revolution reappear, namely the Aristocracy, the Peasantry (nicknamed the “Montagne”), the Bourgeoisie and the
working Proletariat. Also described are the serous contradictions within the
bourgeois class; the classless, manipulative Bonaparte, who played the four
main classes off against each other for more than two decades until he lost the
plot; and the “lumpen proletariat” of
idle adventurers who were Bonaparte’s willing, and paid (with “whisky and
sausages”) accomplices.
Juggling the different class interests and playing the
different classes against each other is what is now called “Bonapartism”. Louis
Bonaparte did it for twenty years. Thabo Mbeki managed for only ten. In both
cases the main beneficiary turned out to be the bourgeois class.
Here are four more of the most well-known paragraphs taken
from page 11 of our 16-page selection from the “18th Brumaire” that
reveal a lot of the class dynamics that Marx describes in this classic work:
“Only under the second Bonaparte does the state seem to
have made itself completely independent. The state machinery has so
strengthened itself vis-a-vis civil society that the Chief of the Society of
December 10 [Louis Bonaparte] suffices for its head — an adventurer
dropped in from abroad, raised on the shoulders of a drunken soldiery which he
bought with whisky and sausages and to which he has to keep throwing more
sausages. Hence the low-spirited despair, the feeling of monstrous humiliation
and degradation that oppresses the breast of France and makes her gasp. She
feels dishonored.
“And yet the state power is not suspended in the air.
Bonaparte represented a class, and the most numerous class of French society at
that, the small-holding peasants.
“Just as the Bourbons were the dynasty of the big landed
property and the Orleans the dynasty of money, so the Bonapartes are the
dynasty of the peasants, that is, the French masses. The chosen of the
peasantry is not the Bonaparte who submitted to the bourgeois parliament but
the Bonaparte who dismissed the bourgeois parliament. For three years the towns
had succeeded in falsifying the meaning of the December 10 election and in
cheating the peasants out of the restoration of the Empire. The election of
December 10, 1848, has been consummated only by the coup d'etat of December 2,
1851.
“The small-holding peasants form an enormous mass whose
members live in similar conditions but without entering into manifold relations
with each other. Their mode of production isolates them from one another
instead of bringing them into mutual intercourse. The isolation is furthered by
France's poor means of communication and the poverty of the peasants. Their
field of production, the small holding, permits no division of labor in its
cultivation, no application of science, and therefore no multifariousness of
development, no diversity of talent, no wealth of social relationships. Each
individual peasant family is almost self-sufficient, directly produces most of
its consumer needs, and thus acquires its means of life more through an
exchange with nature than in intercourse with society. A small holding, the
peasant and his family; beside it another small holding, another peasant and
another family. A few score of these constitute a village, and a few score
villages constitute a department. Thus the great mass of the French nation is
formed by the simple addition of homonymous magnitudes, much as potatoes in a
sack form a sack of potatoes. Insofar as millions of families live under
conditions of existence that separate their mode of life, their interests, and
their culture from those of the other classes, and put them in hostile
opposition to the latter, they form a class. Insofar as there is merely a local
interconnection among these small-holding peasants, and the identity of their
interests forms no community, no national bond, and no political organization
among them, they do not constitute a class. They are therefore incapable of
asserting their class interest in their own name, whether through a parliament
or a convention. They cannot represent themselves, they must be represented.
Their representative must at the same time appear as their master, as an
authority over them, an unlimited governmental power which protects them from
the other classes and sends them rain and sunshine from above. The political
influence of the small-holding peasants, therefore, finds its final expression
in the executive power which subordinates society to itself.”
In 2010 does the ANC “subordinate society to itself”? You be
the judge.
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