Help+with+the+18th+Brumaire

Dear Comrades,

You now have chapters 1 and 7 of the "18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte". It is a great piece of writing. Any reader can get a lot from it. But the reader will get more if some of the background is explained.

The last time the Johannesburg Communist University covered the "18th Brumaire" was in 2003. At that time we found it helpful to use the three attached documents (which are in Excel format).

At the bottom of the one called "History of Class Struggle" you will find a short re-cap of the main dates of the French revolutions of 1789-1814 and 1848-1852.

In the one called "Class Struggles in France" may help you to separate the main players from each other.

The one called "Class Struggle Simplified" is an attempt to set up the differences between Feudalism, Capitalism and Proletarian Socialism in the form of a diagram.

At the bottom of that sheet you will see that it says: "Class Struggle is Never Simple".

The "18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte" (and his previous book "Class Struggles in France") shows Karl Marx illuminating and demonstrating the twists and turns of class struggle as it happened (the "18th Brumaire" was written as reports for a magazine in New York).

A great deal of the intrigue and conflict took place between different fractions of the French bourgeois class, just as in South Africa today. Also as in South Africa today, the proletariat is obliged to study the conflicts between the bourgeois fractions so as to avoid facing all of them united, as the French proletariat found itself doing in 1849 (and got massacred).

Marx's "Communist Manifesto" came out in January 1848, a few days before the "February Revolution" which started the whole series of events that resulted in the rise (and later, fall) of Louis Bonaparte. The passage below predicts very well, in general terms, what Marx was able to report four years later as actual history, in the "18th Brumaire".

From the "Communist Manifesto":

The bourgeoisie, historically, has played a most revolutionary part.

The bourgeoisie, wherever it has got the upper hand, has put an end to all feudal, patriarchal, idyllic relations. It has pitilessly torn asunder the motley feudal ties that bound man to his "natural superiors", and has left no other nexus between man and man than naked self-interest, than callous "cash payment". It has drowned out the most heavenly ecstasies of religious fervour, of chivalrous enthusiasm, of philistine sentimentalism, in the icy water of egotistical calculation. It has resolved personal worth into exchange value, and in place of the numberless indefeasible chartered freedoms, has set up that single, unconscionable freedom -- Free Trade. In one word, for exploitation, veiled by religious and political illusions, it has substituted naked, shameless, direct, brutal exploitation.

The bourgeoisie has stripped of its halo every occupation hitherto honored and looked up to with reverent awe. It has converted the physician, the lawyer, the priest, the poet, the man of science, into its paid wage laborers.

The bourgeoisie has torn away from the family its sentimental veil, and has reduced the family relation into a mere money relation.

The bourgeoisie has disclosed how it came to pass that the brutal display of vigour in the Middle Ages, which reactionaries so much admire, found its fitting complement in the most slothful indolence. It has been the first to show what man's activity can bring about. It has accomplished wonders far surpassing Egyptian pyramids, Roman aqueducts, and Gothic cathedrals; it has conducted expeditions that put in the shade all former exoduses of nations and crusades.

The bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionizing the instruments of production, and thereby the relations of production, and with them the whole relations of society. Conservation of the old modes of production in unaltered form, was, on the contrary, the first condition of existence for all earlier industrial classes. Constant revolutionizing of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones. All fixed, fast frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real condition of life and his relations with his kind.

The need of a constantly expanding market for its products chases the bourgeoisie over the entire surface of the globe. It must nestle everywhere, settle everywhere, establish connections everywhere.

(end of quote from the "Communist Manifesto")

I will try to write a little more about Chapters 1 and 7 in a later e-mail.

Don't forget to come next Friday, April 22nd, 17h00, COSATU House Canteen.

Help with the "18th Brumaire" (2)

You have a compilation that mainly consist of Chapters 1 and 7 of the "18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte" (if not please let me know). It may help if some of the highlights of these chapters are pulled out and looked at. So here (Hic Rhodus! Hic Salta!) goes, starting from page 3 of my compilation.

Chapter 1

The whole book starts with one of the most famous of Karl Marx's sayings usually rendered as "History repeats itself, the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce". Note that what Marx actually wrote was a good deal more subtle.

The very next paragraph starts with another of Marx's most-quoted sentences, usually rendered as : "Human beings make history but not in circumstances of their own choosing", which is a good working definition of humanism, and is related to the definiton of freedom as the "recognition of necessity" (Spinoza, Engels).

In the third paragraph Marx raises a topic that South Africa knows well. Before 1994 the vocabulary of the liberation movement was revolutionary. Now our ruling class speaks from the mouth of Tito Mboweni and others, in mundane, banal, born-again-bourgeois terms. This phenomenon is described again at the bottom of page 4 (of my compilation) as "Katzenjammer" or "crapulence", and contrasted with the momentum of the proletarian revolution, whose models sit in the future, not the past. Hic Rhodus, Hic Salta! The proletariannrevolution can go into labour at any time and the birth must occur whether the organised communists think they are ready, or not.

At this stage (page 5 of my compilation) we have a problem. The chapter is supposed to go up to December 1851 and the whole book was finished in March 1852, but the MIA version starts talking about May 1852! I am not able to check this right now, I don't have it in hard copy. If anybody can help out, please do! (Andy?)

What we can say is that the rest of the chapter is a revisiting of the revolutionary events from February 1848 up to and including the slaughter of the proletarians in June, 1849, and the subsequent reversal of the "Party of Order" and the installation of the "hero Crapulinski" (Louis Bonaparte) as the "savour of society" (he becomes "Emperor" later on).

Chapter 7

Here, in eight pages, is a short summarised history of 1848-1852 as it affected France (for an account of what was happening in Germany you may wish to go to "Revolution and Counter-Revolution in Germany", Engels, 1852, on MIA, or on our CD).

Louis Bonaparte's coup d'etat took place on December 2, 1851. So what is the "Society of December 10"? The MIA Encyclopedia explains: "A secret Bonapartist society organized mainly from among lumpens, opportunists, military leaders, etc. The society helped progress Louis Bonaparte's election as president of the Republic of France on December 10, 1848".

In other words Bonaparte was elected President first, and later overthrew Parliament to become what we would nowadays call a dictator, before finally declaring himself Emperor in December 1852.

Marx regarded Louis Bonaparte as a nobody. He thought that precisely because Bonaparte was nothing in himself, he was able to play any part, and play one class or fraction off against another class or fraction. He would bring one fraction to the top by suppressing another; and immediately start encouraging the suppressed fraction again, so as to undermine those now in power. This kind of politics is consequently known as "Bonapartism". Some people think that South Africa in 2005 is an example of "Bonapartism" – a good point to discuss.

On page 10 of my compilation, in the second last paragraph, Marx writes of the "terrifying parasitic body" of the French state power. Is a "big state" a better state? Not necessarily.

The next paragraph describes the centralization of the bourgeois state under the original Napoleon Bonaparte. Centralization is a necessary condition for socialism. In another famous remark Marx further on in the paragraph notes that the result of the (failed) assaults of the proletariat was to increase this centralization. "All revolutions perfected this machine instead of breaking it", he writes.

Then he comes to the nature of the state, and the source of Bonaparte's support.

"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 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...

"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."

So it turns out that the "adventurer" is not an accidental figure, and the state only seems to be independent, but in fact is not. Bonaparte's appearance corresponds to the state of the French peasantry, and their condition of resembling a "sack of potatoes" (next paragraph).

The great paragraph about "the small-holding peasants" on page 11 of my compilation deserves to be read again and again, and compared to South Africa as it is today.

The following paragraphs describe the contradictory nature of peasant politics, which has a revolutionary and also a conservative side. The bourgeoisie struck at the former and built up the latter. (The communists ally their proletarian hammer with the peasant sickle so as to do the opposite).

At the bottom of my page 12 Marx states: "…what is now ruining the French peasant is his small holding itself...", and argues that what had once been revolutionary (land distribution) had now become a prison for the peasant. Will land distribution imprison the South African peasant? Certainly, and so will small business ownership imprison the urban petty-bourgeoisie. As much as land distribution and self-reliance may be correct tactics at the present moment, they are traps unless they are revolutionised again in the near future.

In the next two pages (13 and 14), Marx explains why this will be so, in practical and in ideological terms.

Finally, on pages 15 and 16 of my compilation, Marx shows how Bonaparte played games with this situation, juggling one interest against another. He was able to do so for the next twenty years before he ran out of tricks. What followed was the Paris Commune - the first dictatorship of the proletariat, and the model for the Great October Revolution in Russia.

The attached file ("Class Alliance Simplified", Excel format) is an attempt to show in diagram form and following the same kind of thinking that Karl Marx used in the "18th Brumaire", what are the possible permutations of the existing class forces in South Africa in the present time.