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 or click on the link
below for a download 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 four
times as long. 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 de 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.
