Marx's Eighteenth Brumaire : (post)modern interpretations

272 Pages·2002·1.275 MB·English, German

by  Emperor of the French Napoleon III, Martin, James, Cowling, Mark, Marx, Karl, Emperor of the French Napoleon III

Marx’s
Eighteenth Brumaire
(Post)modern Interpretations
Edited by
Mark Cowling and James Martin
P
Pluto Press
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First published 2002 by Pluto Press
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Copyright © Mark Cowling and James Martin 2002;
‘The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte’, in Karl Marx: Later Political
Writings, Cambridge University Press, 1996, edited and translated by
Terrell Carver. Reproduced by permission of the translator and publisher.
The right of the individual contributors to be identified as the authors of
this work has been asserted by them in accordance with the Copyright,
Designs and Patents Act 1988.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from
the British Library
ISBN 0 7453 1831 2 hardback
ISBN 0 7453 1830 4 paperback
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Marx, Karl, 1818-1883.
[Achtzehnte Brumaire des Louis Bonaparte. English]
Marx’s ‘Eighteenth Brumaire’ : (post)modern interpretations / edited
by Mark Cowling and James Martin.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0–7453–1831–2 (hardback) –– ISBN 0–7453–1830–4 (pbk.)
1. Napoleon III, Emperor of the French, 1808–1873. 2.
France––History––Coup d’état, 1851. 3. France––History––February
Revolution, 1848. 4. France––History––Second Republic, 1848–1852. I.
Title: Eighteenth Brumaire. II. Title: Marx’s ‘18th Brumaire’. III.
Cowling, Mark. IV. Martin, James, 1968– V. Carver, Terrell. VI. Title.
DC274 .M27 2002
944.07––dc21
2002008652
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
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Chase Publishing Services, Fortescue, Sidmouth EX10 9QG
Typeset from disk by Stanford DTP Services, Towcester
Printed in the European Union by Antony Rowe, Chippenham, England
Contents
Acknowledgements vii
1. Introduction 1
Mark Cowling and James Martin
Part 1 The Text
2. The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte
(Trans. Terrell Carver) 19
Karl Marx
Part 2 The Eighteenth Brumaireas Discourse
3. Imagery/Writing, Imagination/Politics: Reading Marx
through the Eighteenth Brumaire 113
Terrell Carver
4. Performing Politics: Class, Ideology and Discourse in
Marx’s Eighteenth Brumaire 129
James Martin
Part 3 The Eighteenth Brumaire as History
5. Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte: ‘Hero’ or ‘Grotesque
Mediocrity’? 145
Roger Price
6. The Appeal of Bonapartism 163
Geoff Watkins
Part 4 The Autonomy of the State?
7. The Political Scene and the Politics of Representation:
Periodising Class Struggle and the State in the
Eighteenth Brumaire 179
Bob Jessop
8. Making Sense of the ‘Relative Autonomy’ of the State 195
Paul Wetherly
vi Marx’s Eighteenth Brumaire
Part 5 The Eighteenth Brumaire, Classes and Class
Struggle, Then and Now
9. The Eighteenth Brumaireand Thatcherism 211
Paul Blackledge
10. Marx’s Lumpenproletariat and Murray’s Underclass:
Concepts Best Abandoned? 228
Mark Cowling
11. Here Content Transcends Phrase: The Eighteenth Brumaire
as the Key to Understanding Marx’s Critique of Utopian
Socialism 243
Darren Webb
Notes on the Contributors 258
Index 260
Acknowledgements
The editors would like to express their thanks to the following for
their assistance in the development of this book: members of the
Marxism Specialist Group of the Political Studies Association (UK)
for their offer of contributions; Anne Beech at Pluto Press for her
enthusiasm for the project; and the staff at the British Library and at
the University of London Library (Senate House) for their help in
providing materials.
All references to Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis
Bonaparteare to the translation by Terrell Carver contained in Part 1
of this volume. This text was first published in Terrell Carver (ed.
and trans.), Karl Marx: Later Political Writings(Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1996), pp. 31–127. We are grateful to Cambridge
University Press for permission to reprint it here.
Where possible, all other references to the works of Marx and
Engels are to the (so far) 47 volumes of Karl Marx–Frederick Engels.
Collected Works (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1975–). These are
referenced in the endnotes with the abbreviation C.W., followed by
volume and page numbers.
vii
1 Introduction
Mark Cowling and James Martin
On 2 December 1851, Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte – nephew of the
great Emperor Napoleon Bonaparte and, since late 1848, elected
President of the Second French Republic – announced the
dissolution of the Legislative Assembly and, with the backing of the
army, ordered the parliamentary chamber to be occupied by troops,
the leaders of the main parties arrested and placed himself in sole
charge of government. A year later he declared himself Emperor
Napoleon III, head of the Second French Empire. Bonaparte’s coup
d’étatbrought to an end not only the republican regime ushered in
after the revolution of 1848 but also the period of unstable, limited
‘bourgeois democratic’ government and experimentation with con-
stitutional monarchy since the defeat of his uncle in 1815. For those
radicals and socialists who in 1848 hoped to transform the wave of
democratic revolutions into a more substantial movement for
economic and social reform, Napoleon’s coup symbolised and
underscored a demoralising defeat at the hands of popular reaction.
Karl Marx’s The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte is a bitter,
richly entertaining account of these events by one of the radicals
who had observed events at first hand. A journalist, intellectual
and self-proclaimed communist, Marx, too, had participated as a
propagandist in the events of 1848 as co-founder of the
‘CommunistLeague’andinhisManifestooftheCommunistPartyof
that year, co-written with Frederick Engels, he had encouraged
socialist revolutionaries to participate in the revolution alongside
the republican bourgeoisie in order to bring to the fore the
demands of the proletariat. The Eighteenth Brumaire, written and
published in 1852, narrated the rise and decline of the revolution
in France from the proclamation of the ‘Second Republic’ to the
coup of 1851. By contrast with the Manifesto – characterised by its
(deliberately) optimistic reading of history as a series of class
struggles leading, ultimately, to communism – the Eighteenth
Brumairetellsamorecomplexandless‘progressive’story.Itisalso
one of Marx’s few lengthy analyses of political history and it is
widely regarded as one of his most colourful.1 Yet within Marxist
scholarshiptheEighteenthBrumaire’snoveltyisoftennotedbutthe
1
2 Marx’s Eighteenth Brumaire
text is rarely commented upon at any length. It is the purpose of
this volume, one hundred and fifty years after Marx’s publication,
to begin to fill that gap.
In the remainder of this Introduction we shall give a brief
summary of the content of the Eighteenth Brumaireand then discuss
its themes in relation to the concerns of later Marxists and the
Marxist tradition generally. Finally we offer a brief overview of the
content of the chapters that follow.
MARX’S EIGHTEENTH BRUMAIRE: THE TEXT
The text of the Eighteenth Brumaire(reprinted after this Introduction
in a new translation) is a challenge even for those familiar with
Marx’s work. Its focus is the transformation of a revolution against
a constitutional monarchy (the ‘July Monarchy’ of Louis XV),
through a series of internal disputes between the political groups
involved, until the dissolution of the Second Republic by Bonaparte’s
coup. In this respect, the distance between us and the characters and
events in question makes the Eighteenth Brumairean unfamiliar, and
consequently rather burdensome, read. Yet the text is more than a
description of events. It is also a reflection, amongst other things,
on the nature of revolutions, political leadership and class struggle.
In this respect, too, Marxists might find the text less instructive than
Marx’s more theoretical works since these political issues are
presented in the form of a concrete set of circumstances whose
‘universal’ relevance is at best uncertain. Finally, for those
accustomed to reading Marx’s philosophical studies or his critical
engagement with political economy, the Eighteenth Brumaire will
seem a curiously unscientific commentary, replete with undeclared
normative assumptions and personal invective, richly figurative
language and with no evident purpose other than of recounting the
events and ridiculing the characters under examination.
Yet if the Eighteenth Brumaire is a challenge to read, it is not
because it lacks substance as a work of political commentary. For all
its difficulties as a text, it remains fascinating and provocative for
Marxists and non-Marxists alike. Before we consider some of the
themes that can be said to ‘derive’ from the Eighteenth Brumairelet
us first consider its contents as a commentary on events.
Marx takes under examination the period from February 1848 to
December 1851. He divides this period into three separate phases,
in which different alliances of classes and groupings ruled.
Introduction 3
In the first phase (the February Period), King Louis Philippe, whose
rule Marx identifies with the finance aristocracy, was overthrown by
a broad coalition. It comprised:
• large landowners: these were Legitimists (supporters of a
restoration of the Bourbons) and not Orléanists, and had been
excluded from power under the July Monarchy
• republican bourgeoisie: this social category simply comprised
members of the bourgeoisie who were anti-monarchist
• manufacturing bourgeoisie: interested in cheap government
and thus endangered by the rule of the finance aristocracy
• democratic-republican petty bourgeoisie: horrified at the
corruption of the finance aristocracy
• peasantry: also horrified at the extravagance of the finance
aristocracy in stark contrast to its own poverty following crop
failure and potato blight in 1845–47
• the proletariat: revolted because it identified the rule of finance
aristocracy with that of capital.
This alliance was modified by the elimination of the proletariat as a
political force, first through their immediate diversion to the Hotel
de Ville, where they formed a parallel and impotent government,
and second through the manoeuvring of the proletariat into a badly
organised revolt in June 1848, the failure of which ensured they
would play little part in subsequent events. These manoeuvres were
carried out by the reigning social category, the republican
bourgeoisie.
The second phase was brought on by the decline of the republican
bourgeoisie, seen in the election of Bonaparte to the Presidency on
10 December 1848. This was achieved by an electoral alliance of:
• the peasantry, voting against the taxes the ‘proletarian’
republican government had lain on them
• the petty bourgeoisie, voting against the abolition of the
progressive tax, by which the bourgeois republicans had hoped
to gain the support of the big bourgeoisie; and also voting
against Cavaignac, who had put down the June revolt
• the big bourgeoisie, who were voting for a restoration of the
monarchy (the election of Bonaparte being seen as a step in
this direction)
• the army, a social category seeking money
• the proletariat, who were voting against Cavaignac.
4 Marx’s Eighteenth Brumaire
The result of this alliance was the rise of the Party of Order as the
ruling alliance: the Party of Order was the royalist parliamentary
partyrepresentingtheunityofthetwobourgeoisfactions,thelarge
landownerswhohadruledundertheRestorationandweretherefore
Legitimists, and the Orléanists, the finance aristocracy who had
ruled under the July monarchy. Their rule was paradoxically only
possible within the framework of the parliamentary republic and
against the background of indefinite postponement of the
Restoration.Whenparliamentwasrecessedin1850and1851,when
there seemed a real prospect of restoration, or when Bonaparte
dangledthepossibilityofaministryrepresentingonefactiononly,
thetwofactionssplitupagain.
The third phase was the one which brought Bonaparte to power.
Besides Bonaparte’s manoeuvrings to split the Party of Order into
fractions it disintegrated through the desertion of individual
members, through a fear of struggle and to safeguard their posts;
and, as a result of this, from the necessity of an alliance with the
pure republicans and the Montaigne against Bonaparte and the army
– which put the remnants of the Party of Order in worse odour with
their erstwhile supporters. This disintegration paved the way for the
coupwhich brought Bonaparte to power.
The alliance behind Bonaparte were:
• finance capital, because Bonaparte represented their interest in
state debt, and because he represented stability against the dis-
integration of the Party of Order
• the Legitimist landed aristocracy, which had effectively merged
its interests with the finance aristocracy
• the industrial bourgeoisie, concerned with public order to
secure good trading conditions, but not in a sufficiently
developed condition to make a bid for power on its own (par-
liamentary struggles were seen as a threat to good trading
conditions)
• the lumpenproletariat (bribed)
• the state officials and the army (interested in the expansion of
the state).
The tone of Marx’s analysis is set by the remarks he makes at the
start of the Eighteenth Brumaireconcerning bourgeois revolutions and
these remarks make the text more than simply a ‘neutral’ telling of
history. Marx suggests that revolutions inevitably are enacted in the
Introduction 5
guise of earlier, classic moments in history. The English Civil War
made reference to the Old Testament, the French Revolution of 1789
referenced the Roman Republic, and the 1848 revolution made
reference to the French Revolution. It is precisely these guises or
‘spirits of the past’ to which Marx is referring when he remarks that
‘Traditions from all the dead generations weigh like a nightmare on
the brain of the living.’ That is, agents in the present are compelled,
and yet simultaneously restricted, by the imagery and symbols of
the past when they come to fulfil some historic task. In this instance,
however, Marx claims the reference to tradition resembles ‘farce’.
Marx’s analysis then proceeds in this tenor, sarcastically deriding the
failure of the agents to live up to the fanciful imagery and phrases
deployed to justify their actions. Throughout the text Marx exposes
the limitations of bourgeois and royalist forces, alerting the reader,
on the one hand, to the class interests often (though not always) at
work behind the shifting alliances and petty intrigue of politics and,
on the other, the unrealistic or reactionary delusions motivating
others. Unlike earlier bourgeois revolutions, where the invocation
of the past served to undermine aspects of the feudal order and
promote a whole new conception of society, the 1848 revolution
simply couldn’t fulfil its promise. Bonaparte’s coupwas final evidence
of a bourgeoisie forced to backtrack on its political ambitions for fear
of its own success.
IftheEighteenthBrumaireiswrittenasanaccountofarevolution
thatdeclinedintofarce,neverthelessMarxmakesonereferencetoa
pointofprinciplethatcanbeunderstoodasclassically‘Marxist’–
namely,thedistinctionbetweenaneconomicbaseandanideological
andpoliticalsuperstructure.Towardsthestartofthethirdsectionof
the text Marx reminds the reader that ‘On the different forms of
property,thesocialconditionsofexistence,arisesanentiresuper-
structureofdifferentandpeculiarlyformedsentiments,delusions,
modes of thought and outlooks on life.’2 Classes build upon the
‘material foundations’ of these property relations but it is their
interestsatthatlevelthatultimatelymotivatethem.Weareadvised
not to be taken in by the ‘fine words and aspirations’ of political
forcesbuttolookto‘theirrealinterests’asanexplanationfortheir
behaviour.Thesamepointwillbemadeatslightlygreaterlengthin
Marx’s‘Preface’of1859toAContributiontotheCritiqueofPolitical
Economy.Here,however,thepointismadeinpassing,positioneda
goodwaythroughthetextratherthanatthestart.Yetitspresence
serves to remind us that Marx was not simply engaging in pure