State and Revolution, Part 5c
Louis Bonaparte's balancing act
The 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte
In the following part of
Marx’s outline of the events from “The 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte” (see
the attached files, or click on the links below for downloads containing a
longer selection) it is clear that the proletariat suffered a disaster in Paris
in June of 1848, when it had no allies and was isolated and attacked by all the
other classes together, and massacred.
This is the isolation that
the proletariat must always avoid, and it is one reason why the working class
must always have allies. Here is the brief quotation:
“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 (known as the Montagne –
the “Mountain”), 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 accomplices, paid with “whisky and sausages”.
Juggling the different class
interests and playing the different classes against each other, as Louis
Bonaparte did for twenty years or so, is what has since then been called “Bonapartism”.
Thabo Mbeki managed his juggling act for only ten years. In Swaziland, the
trick has been sustained for more than four times as long as that. In all three
cases the main beneficiary of the interlude turned out to be the bourgeois
class.
Here are four more of the
most well-known paragraphs taken from our selection from the “18th
Brumaire”. They 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. [i.e.
when Louis Bonaparte made himself Emperor.]
“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.”
This is the dictatorship that
the peasantry, time and again, brings upon itself. The alternative to it is the
dictatorship of the proletariat. The working class must supply the organising framework
that the peasantry cannot produce for itself.
·
The above is to
introduce the original reading-text: The 18th Brumaire
of Louis Bonaparte, Chapter 1 and part of 6, and
Chapter 7, Marx.
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