Conference: 150th Anniversary of the Publication of The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte
An International Conference to celebrate the 150th Anniversary of the publication of The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, was held at the Murphy Institute of Political Economy, Tulane University, Louisiana, USA in April 2002. The academic organisers were Terrell Carver, University of Bristol; Paul Thomas, University of California, Berkeley; and Martyn P. Thompson, Tulane University. The conference was held under the auspices of the CSPT, the Murphy Institute of Political Economy (Tulane University), the Center for Scholars (Tulane) and the Political Science Department at Tulane.
Abstracts for presented papers follow: click on title for access to full text (available to CSPT members). Full texts are not available on this server for titles without hyperlinks.
| Panel
1: The Eighteenth Brumaire and the Politics of Representation |
Chair:
Jacqueline Berman, Tulane University |
| Author Paul Thomas, University of California, Berkeley |
| Title Louis Bonaparte’s Two Bodies |
| Abstract To examine one persona ficta, Louis Bonaparte as presented by Marx in The Eighteenth Brumaire, in the light of another persona ficta, the monarch as presented in Ernst Kanterowicz's The King's Two Bodies, is to notice that Marx's derisive language, the language of farce, fraud, and parody, is even more apt and resonant to his subject-matter than commentators have supposed. To map Marx's persona ficta on to Kanterowicz's is to open up avenues of investigation, which pre-date and post-date the Second Empire and can lead us beyond so unseemly a political form. |
| Author Jason Myers, California State University |
| Title From Stage-ist Theories to a Theory of the Stage: ideology in the Eighteenth Brumaire |
| Abstract In the same way that Marx’s Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte offers a nuanced and flexible model of historical materialism as an approach to the social sciences, it also suggests an approach to questions of ideology that moves far beyond the usual notions of ‘false consciousness’ and ‘ruling ideas’. This paper will explore the concept of ideology as found in the Brumaire, ultimately comparing its vision of costuming and concealment with contemporary theories of discourse and reality. |
| Author Daniel Conway, Pennsylvania State University |
| Title A Government of hommes entretenus? tragedy and farce in the Eighteenth Brumaire |
| Abstract In this essay, I undertake an investigation of the
rhetorical strategy employed by Marx to establish the coup d’etat
of Louis Bonaparte as a counterfeit substitute for the coup d’etat
of Napoleon I. Toward this end, I explicate the three dominant figures
that sustain Marx’s appeal to the logic of substitution: decay,
spectrality, and impotence/effeminacy. Marx’s aim in relying
on these three figures is to demonstrate the merely relative value
and meaning of the 1848 revolution in France. The events of 1848-1851,
leading up to the coup d’etat of Louis Bonaparte, are best understood
not on their own terms, as a historically unique sequence of events,
but on the terms of the predecessor revolution. Marx not only presents
the coup d’etat of Louis Bonaparte as a derivative
reprise of Napoleon’s 18th Brumaire, but also identifies this
reprise as the enactment of a farce. The 1848 revolution in France,
Marx thus suggests, was the revolution that was not. While extremely effective as a rhetorical and stylistic exercise, Marx’s 18th Brumaire is less successful as an example of materialist social criticism. If, as Marx suggests, the rise to power of Louis Bonaparte is an expression of cultural decay, then the onset and subsequent spread of this decay certainly merit more serious consideration. In particular, as Marx himself allows, the material conditions of cultural decay need to be analyzed in painstaking detail. Rather than conduct the needed analysis, however, Marx repeatedly delivers the rhetorical punch conveyed by the title of his 18th Brumaire. In doing so, moreover, he squanders the opportunity to offer a materialist treatment of the prospects for (and impediments to) revolution in a decadent age. In short, I contend, there is no reason to assume that cultural decay need partake of the form of either tragedy or farce. But Marx’s larger rhetorical aims prevent him from exploring any third model of historical substitution. |
| Author Asma Abbas, Pennsylvania State University |
| Title The Tragic Art of the Historical Materialist: the memory of injury in Marx, Nietzsche and Benjamin |
| Abstract This paper looks to the Brumaire in order to suggest
that the historical materialist has more than accidental affinities
with an aesthetic inspired by Nietzsche’s tragic artist. Focussing
on Marx’s own praxis as manifest in the Brumaire, I try to investigate
this labour primarily in the light of his relationship to memory and
suffering, and via both of those, to a radical aesthetic imperative.
The very fact that Marx, Nietzsche, Benjamin and Brecht each (in their
own way) confess (or proclaim) the impossibility of tragedy [sic],
endorses the necessity that tragic art itself does not elude transformation—whether
in the force-field of a revaluation of all values, or an enabled passage
of outmoded forms of (production of) thought, memory, subjectivity
and hence agency (ideology?!). Further, once the labour of the historical
materialist rooted in conditions of alienation is understood as an
essentially aesthetic one (in the tradition of Baumgarten), it stands
to become a practice, a performance—rather than a method or
a discipline—in the materialising of history, thus allowing
us to think of suffering, memory, destruction, construction, as important
transitive elements in this labour. Centring Marx’s representation/s of history, and in gleaning from them the role of memory (and of forgetting as itself a problematic of memory), I suggest that a plausible representation (of Marx’s own representations) is of history as a dialectic between memory and forgetting. Of particular interest in this regard is Marx’s account of the representing and materialising of bourgeois and proletarian revolutions—his intriguing use of “tragedy” and farce forces the question: Can memory, for Marx, engender anything but farce? This paper attempts an answer (and tries to be honest about its cul-de-sacs in face of the very seductive “how”). |
| Panel 2:
The Eighteenth Brumaire and ‘Making History’
|
Chair:
Paul Thomas, University of California at Berkeley |
| Author Alan Carling,University of Bradford |
| Title Egalitarian Materialism |
| Abstract The premise of this paper is that explanatory social
theory must be both consistent with and analogous to Darwinian biological
theory. Social forms have cultural content rather than genetic content,
and their distribution is explained by processes of social selection
rather than natural selection. If the adaptation of the individual member of the species to its physical environment is the key to the process of natural selection, social selection involves something else besides: persons make history, as Marx reminded us in the 18th. Brumaire, but ‘under circumstances directly encountered, given and transmitted from the past’. These circumstances include both the physical environment (as modified by prior human activity) and the cultural environment, which may ‘weigh[ ] like a nightmare on the brain of the living’. The political dialectic established by Marx concerns the conditions under which intentional political action – the use of reason - can transcend the nightmares of the past, and create something new and shining in their place. The paper will explore the tension between circumstance and reason, aspiration and constraint, in the context of recent developments in the Marxist theory of history. |
| Author Tom Hickey, University of Brighton |
| Title 'Hic Rhodus, hic salta!' The Poetry of the Future: methodological motifs in Marx's politics |
| Abstract If references to the 18th Brumaire constitute the
sharpest mechanism for the refutation of early critical refrains on
Marxism as a determinism and an economic reductionism, it is often
claimed that they do little to rescue it from key elements of contemporary
critique of Historical Materialism. Three sources of such critique
come to mind. Post-structuralist readings abjure the promise of theory's
capacity to illuminate an extra-textual, or to access an extra-narrative,
reality. Post-Marxist readings proclaim not merely the specificity
of the political moment but, with a sub-Maoist spontaneism, proclaim
politics to be 'in command'. Then there are doubts raised concerning
the coherence and cogency of central concepts in the research programme
raised by those strongly influence by Marx's work, and sympathetic
to his project. In their various ways, such views are based on a claimed incoherence of concepts central to Historical Materialism, or, at least, an incompatibility between the theoretical theses offered, inter alia, by the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts, the Manifesto, and The German Ideology, on the one hand, and the political analyses generated most signally in the Civil War in France, and in the 18th Brumaire. The incisiveness and critical power of the latter are then treated as evidence of the misconceived nature of the former. The 18th Brumaire, in particular, is then held to be faithful to Historical Materialism only in the breach, as a performative contradiction of the latter's explanatory structures. Engels is held to be a flawed witness in Marx's defence. With a myopic if understandable fielty, it is argued, he offered us an anodyne assessment of the text as Historical Materialism in practice. Concepts subjected to this sceptical assault include the proletariat, ideology and communism. In the first case, the vicissitudes of real political processes are claimed not only to undermine the cogency of the class schemas offered by Marx's theory of history but also that Marx himself acknowledges this, de facto, in his political analyses of concrete conjunctures. There is, moreover, according to some critics, not simply a decomposition of class effected by the erruption of intra-class divisions of interest, and by inter-class coalitions or coalescences of political projects between fragments or sub-divisions of 'classes', but also the dissolution of class itself precisely at the moment of its true nativity. If classes only come into a 'real', i.e. a political as opposed to a (mere) objective or sociological, existence at the moment of generalised class consciousness (as classes 'for themselves') at times of social crisis and cultural disintegration then this is also the moment that they dissolve as they transform themselves (or are absorbed) into a political movement with a programme, and one which can aspire to political hegemony. The 'proletariat' then is, it is argued, a political construction, an organising concept imposed on an often recalcitrant but potentially malleable reality. The concept is itself a political intervention at the level of consciousness. Thus is the concept of ideology, its sources and character and characterization, problematised. Not the least of the frustrations, or embarassments, or offences associated with the idea of the proletariat, for its critics, is Marx's proposition of it as a 'universal class', whose historic mission as the subject-object of history is the attainment of a society beyond class, beyond ideology, and beyond politics. For Marx's critics, this communist vision is doubly flawed, premised as it is on a progressivist philosophy of history, and dependent as it must be on a utopianism that then grounds a teleological accounting that masquerades as a science of society and a theory of history. Expressive of this critical position, whether as supplementary guest, or as arriviste Postmodernist, or as late apostate, is Etienne Balibar in some of his recent essays, collected in English under the title Masses, Classes, Ideas , and in his The Philosophy of Marx . Here, represented and extended, is the analysis of the rupture, the conceptual resources and innovations of Capital constituting a definitive break with the metaphysical, humanist utopianism of the 'early Marx'. And here is a version of the critique that does not traduce the meaning of the original texts, or confect tendential interpretations of them in straw as a prelude to their deconstruction. Here then is doubt and scepticism as interlocution, if not precisely being, or any being any longer, intra-muros. This paper offers some theses in response. It argues that the sources of doubt, the apparent incompatibilities of Marx's works, arise from a mistaken reading of them, and in particular of his distinctive social and historical method, a method also to be found in the 18th Brumaire. So, some theses ... |
| Author Geoffrey Harpham, Tulane University |
| Title Ideology and Prognostication in Marx's Eighteenth Brumaire |
| Abstract My thesis here is that the theory of ideology has
from the very beginning encountered insuperable problems of the most
fundamental kind. It could not account for the origin of social ideas
or the way in which they circulated through society, nor could it
explain how one might resist ideas that did not serve one's own interests.
In an effort to solve these and other problems, theorists of ideology
have turned to language as the bearer, medium, or enforcement mechanism
of ideology. We can see signs of such a linguistic turn even in Marx's
attempts to define ideology in terms of material interests. And since
Marx, theorists who have had the benefit of the modern discipline
of linguistics have continued to turn to language as a way of making
theoretical progress, on the presumption that language is a known
entity with certain features, properties, and characteristics. The
fact that these supposedly objective and determined features of language
are not endorsed by contemporary linguistics has not proven to be
a problem. |
| Author Chad Lavin |
| Title Brother, Can You Change a Spare? the agency of theorist in the Eighteenth Brumaire |
| Abstract This paper discusses how Marx's ontology informs
his theory of the agency of intellectuals, and how that theory is
both articulated and performed through his journalism. Marx's use
of irony, metonymy, and dramaturgy in the Brumaire demonstrate a conflation
of the material and the discursive realms in such a way as to suggest
his theory of the role of intellectual workers and the historical
effectivity of discourse/practice. With activist journalism, Marx
demonstrates how structural forces which tend to co-opt or inhibit
agency (such as economic security and relative freedom from the everyday
metabolic demands of labor) are the very same that allow the possibility
of it emerging. In the end, the Brumaire serves as a call to intellectuals
to recognize the political importance of their labor and the possibilities
of producing theory that becomes a material force. |
| Panel 3:
The Eighteenth Brumaire, Class and State |
Chair:
Lyman Tower Sargent, University of Missouri, St. Louis; Commentator:
Manfred Steger, Illinois State University |
| Author Bob Jessop, University of Lancaster |
| Title Class, State, and Political Representation in the Eighteenth Brumaire: reflections on class and state formation and the dynamics of political class struggle |
| Abstract The 18th Brumaire has played a key role in debates over the Marxist theory of the state as well as over the political representation of class interests. For some commentators, the 18th Brumaire proves the inconsistency of Marx's account of the state, since it allows for a state that is autonomous from the dominant class(es) -- taken even further in his comments on the so-called praetorian state; for others, the same text illustrates the generic tendency of the capitalist state to acquire relative autonomy in order to organize the interests of the dominant class(es). Likewise, for some commentators, the 18th Brumaire illustrates the inconsistency of Marx's account of class struggle, since it reveals a radical disjunction between the economic and the political with few, if any, meaningful mediations between them to ensure that politics reflects in some way or other economic class interests; for others, the 18th Brumaire illustrates the extent to which Marx anticipated subsequent discourse-theoretical insights into the discursive constitution of identities and interests and their role in shaping the forms and terms of political struggle. Jessop's contribution to the conference will provide an original reading of Marx's text from a strategic-relational viewpoint, demonstrating both how the text is quite consistent with Marx's real theory of the state and class struggle and how this theory has often been misunderstood through misreadings of the 18th Brumaire. |
| Author Lawrence Wilde, Nottingham Trent University |
| Title The Solidarity of Property versus the Solidarity of the Workers: reflections on class in Marx's Eighteenth Brumaire |
| Abstract The workers have a spectral presence in the Brumaire. They are heroic but their cause is doomed, and once defeated in the uprising of June 1848 they move into the background of the revolutionary drama. We are not told who the workers are, what they do, how they organise, what they aspire to, or how their leaders emerge. Yet the threat posed by the rebellious workers is the only power capable of soldering the solidarity of the otherwise hopelessly divided bourgeoisie. Although Marx has designated the working class to be the subject of the overthrow of the old world, here the workers are confined to obscurity and denied their subjectivity. Their solidarity is assumed; it will develop as the proletariat grows in size and its strength will ensure the victory of communism. Somehow it will not be deflected by dubious social-democratic alliances with the petty bourgeoisie, or utopian escapism, or dreams of gold. Its objective interests must propel it to fulfil its historical mission. If the brilliance of the Brumaire lies in the way which Marx exposes the crippling divisions within the bourgeoisie, the invisibility of the workers is a significant lacuna. |
| Author Amy Wendling, Pennsylvania State University |
| Title Are All Revolutions Bourgeois?: a reading of section four from The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte |
| Abstract This essay explores the similarities and differences
that obtain between the models of revolution that Marx attributes,
respectively, to the bourgeoisie and the proletariat. In particular,
this essay speculates that the differences outlined by Marx may not
be tenable, by the criteria of his own historical and material analysis.
If they are not, it poses serious problems for his prescriptive project
of a Revolution to end all revolutions. Marx addresses these models
of revolution most explicitly in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis
Bonaparte, in the context of mid-19th century French politics. Focusing
especially on Section IV of the Brumaire, I outline the structure
of the problematic. I then connect this problematic with the recurring
tension in the text between the ideals of the French Revolution and
the upsurge of tyranny, between the “enjoyment of unrestricted
liberties” and the “future organic laws” that “regulate
their enjoyment”(Section II). I conclude this essay with a consideration
of George Bataille’s thesis that the very idea and practice
of Revolution is itself bourgeois, that Revolution is a bourgeois
concept and practice that cannot escape the logic of its origins (The
Accursed Share 1993 II & III, 279; Oeuvres Complètes 1976
VIII, 321). |
| Plenary
Session |
| Author Frances Fox Piven, CUNY (City University of New York) Graduate Center |
| Title: The Eighteenth Brumaire of George W. Bush |
| Panel 4:
The Eighteenth Brumaire and Marxism |
Chair
Martyn Thompson, Tulane University |
| Author Jonathan Wolff, University College, London |
| Title The Eighteenth Brumaire and the 1859 Preface |
| Abstract There has been relatively little discussion, or even mention, of the 18th Brumaire among writers who have tried to reconstruct a theory of history based on the 1859 Preface. This paper explores the question of whether any particular reading of Marx's account of history can gain support from the text of the 18th Brumaire |
| Author Gareth Stedman Jones, King's College, Cambridge |
| Title Marx on Ancient and Modern Republicanism |
| Abstract In Marx's political thought, the democratic programme created by the late 18th century revolutions was anomalous. If the modern state was the creature of civil society and this had triumphed over the Ancien Regime in 1789, the subsequent political instability of France was mysterious. If civil society produced conflicting political forms, what determined the conflict between them? The pressure towards the creation of democratic political forms was peculiarly anomalous since it was difficult to align with any particular faction of the bourgeoisie. Its plebiscitary use as a political form by Louis Napoleon also went unremarked. I argue that the literary brilliance of The Eighteenth Brumaire concealed Marx's inability to come to terms with the centrality of the struggle over democracy and led him to abandon his materialist approach in favour of an ironising and moralistic denunciation of Louis Napoleon and the bourgeoisie of the Second Empire. |
| Author Fred Schrader, University of Paris VIII |
| Title From Political Representation to Bonapartism: Marx's Readings, Notebooks and Correspondence on France in the 1850s |
| Abstract The editors of the 18th Brumaire in MEGA² have
shown how Marx used French and English periodicals and newspapers
for his text. This is also true for his correspondence, especially
with Richard Reinhardt in Paris, the secretary of Heine. All this
concentrates on the political analysis of the Second Republic and
her political representation, of the coup d'Etat, and of what already
in the second half of the 19th century has been described and discussed
as "bonapartism". There still exist another context for
the Brumaire, well documented in the notebooks of Marx: saint-simonism
and proudhonism as political concurrence, the new socialist economical
projects of Prouhon - "the false brother of socialism" (Marx)
- which he adapted to bonapartism, and to the political economy of
the new régime. This not only gives a new elan to Marx's criticism
of political economy - it is no accident that the Grundrisse of 1857/58
begin with a criticism of the proudhonist and later bonapartist Alfred
Darimon - but also block Marx's analysis and understanding of the
particular French way to capitalism in the Second Empire. |
| Author William Roberts, Pennsylvania State University |
| Title Considerations of Strategy: Marx's critique of democrats and 'the party of order' |
| Abstract The Brumaire can be read as a dramatic accusation
of two tendencies in political theory that have come to dominate the
contemporary left. In the Brumaire, this accusation is addressed to
the democrats of "the montagne" on the one hand, and "the
party of order" on the other. The montagne, by refusing to take
up the strategic means to its end, divests itself of any political
efficacy, delivering the revolution to the party of order. The party
of order, in turn, capitulates to Bonaparte by insisting on stability
in the face of a decaying situation. Thus, the reaction's victory
was assured by these two parties' failures to address the political
situation properly. Read in a contemporary context, Marx's accusation
of the montagne can be seen to apply to Habermasian democratic theorists,
while his diagnosis of the party of order attaches to Rawlsian liberals.
Thus, the Brumaire serves to warn us against political stances that,
in practice, serve the interests of reactionary forces. |
| Panel 5:
The Eighteenth Brumaire and Postmodern Revisitations
|
Chair
Lyman Tower Sargent, University of Missouri; Panel Commentator
John Seery, Pomona College |
| Author Terrell Carver, University of Bristol |
| Title Imagery/Writing, Imagination/Politics: Reading Marx through the Eighteenth Brumaire |
| Abstract Of all Marx's writings the Eighteenth Brumaire has arguably the most extravagant imagery, withering scorn and scathing satire. It was also arguably the victim of the worst translation into English of any of his works, something I have attempted to rectify in a new translation. Marx's arguments are advanced in the Eighteenth Brumaire (and elsewhere) through writing that uses metaphor on a sliding scale from the literal to the burlesque. In this paper I will argue that reading Marx in this way through the Eighteenth Brumaire alters the significance and meaning of other 'classic' texts, because it runs counter to 'scientific' formulations of a theory of history. |
| Author Vincent Geoghegan, Queen’s University, Belfast |
| Title ‘Let the Dead Bury their Dead’: Marx, Derrida and Bloch |
| Abstract The starting point of the paper is the crisis, which has beset modern secularism. Mindful of the threat from religious fundamentalism, it is committed to a postsecular reconfiguration of the relationship between the secular and the religious, where the strengths and weaknesses of both elements are acknowledged. It seeks to do this by an examination of Marx’s critique of religion, and the response to the Marxist project exemplified by Derrida and Bloch. It argues that Marx’s approach to the dead, as developed in the Eighteenth Brumaire, provides a context for his hostility towards religion, and that Derrida and Bloch in their greater openness to the claims of the past, generate both a critique of Marx’s strictures on religion, and a recognisably postsecular re-working of positive elements in Marx’s project. |
| Author Bradley MacDonald, Colorado State University |
| Title Inaugurating Heterodoxy: Marx's Eighteenth Brumaire as Postmodern Text |
| Abstract Marx’s Eighteenth Brumaire has raised
interesting interpretive questions for Marx scholars. On the one hand,
it has been seen as a clear example of the “critical Marx,”
one who shunned easy materialist reductionisms, who argued for the
relative (if not absolute) autonomy of state forms, and who emphasized
the role of human agency in determining social and political practices.
On the other hand, many argue that this text, though wonderful in
its rhetoric and imagery, is at most a topical piece, and therefore
not as important as the philosophical dialectics of the Economic and
Philosophic Manuscripts or the economic analytics of Capital. What
each of these positions share is an attempt to anchor the true Marx
either positively or negatively within this great text. But, what
about postmodern thinkers who are at the very least “a-Marxist”?
In a very interesting way, contemporary postmodern thinkers like Jacques
Derrida and Michel Foucault, when they have looked to Marx, have always
found something of use within this text. In this paper, I want to
use their interest in this text to open a “heterodox”
interpretation of Marx, one which I hope will help to bridge the theoretical
and political chasm that has all too often divided Marxism and postmodern
theory in contemporary theoretical discourse. |
| Panel 6:
The Eighteenth Brumaire and Revolutionary Politics |
Chair:
Tony Pereira, Tulane University |
| Author Mark Cowling, Teeside University |
| Title Marx's Lumpenproletariat and Murray's Underclass: concepts best abandoned? |
| Abstract The Eighteenth Brumaire features Marx's most extended discussion of the lumpenproletariat. In this paper I shall give a brief account of his analysis of the lumpenproletariat and their political role. I shall then challenge the coherence of this account and argue that Marx uses the concept as a way of vilifying the part of the proletariat which supported Louis Napoleon Bonaparte on the one hand and vilifying and trivialising Bonaparte himself on the other. Finally I shall point out that there is a considerable similarity in both definition and function between Marx's view of the lumpenproletariat and Charles Murray's contemporary theory of the underclass. |
| Author Mark Devenney, University of Brighton |
| Title The Ghost of Prejudice: tradition and revolution in Marx's Eighteenth Brumaire |
| Author Michael Krätke, University of Amsterdam |
| Title The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte: a half-forgotten chapter in Marx's critique of politics |
| Abstract Marx came to the critique of political economy not
by chance - it was his earlier work on the “critique of politics”
that led him towards his life-long occupation with political economy
as early as 1843/44. He never finished the book already planned in
1844 - focussing on “the genesis of the modern state”
and the ensuing development of forms of government from the constitutional
to the democratic form of representative government -, yet he never
gave up working on his “critique of politics”. In fact,
he came back to it again and again, until his very last years when
he resumed the study of European state history in connection with
the rise of modern capitalism while still working on book / volume
II and III of Capital. The “rise and fall of the modern state”,
its involvement with the development of capitalism, its structural
interdependence with the fabrics and even the most elementary forms
of capitalist economy (starting with “money” - both a
product of the exchange process and a state monopoly), stayed central
on the agenda of Marx’s critique of political economy. The 18. Brumaire, being one of the very few works that Marx could publish and edit twice during his lifetime, belongs to this ongoing, life long project of a double critique of politics and of political economy, although it comes in the guise of a piece of contemporary history and a polemic. It is more than pure analogy that in his rather scarce methodical statements he tells the difference between what is going on the “surface” of political events and the “real thing”, the larger shifts and changes in the “inner” fabrics of society underneath the “political cloud layer”, dominated by deceptive appearances and illusionary forms. Accordingly, he repeatedly makes and uses the distinction between political “forms” and their “contents”, referring to the “underlying” forces, tendencies and, in the end, societal relations. This is exactly what he does in much detail in his critique of political economy, starting with an analysis of elementary forms at one part of the “surface” of any capitalist economy and coming back to it in his concluding analysis of the elementary illusionary forms (of thought and of action) that, bound together in diverse “formula’s”, constitute the “totality” or the “total process” (Gesamtprozeß) of a capitalist economy. At closer look and second glance, the topics of Marx’ early critique of politics (from 1843 to 1847) are still present in the text of the 18. Brumaire. In this text, Marx does not only deal with the “split” between civil society and the state (a hardly translatable “Verdopplung” in Hegelian parlance), he describes and criticizes the “world of politics” as a world of false pretensions, of illusions and deceptive appearances, fooling politicians and ordinary citizens as well. The peculiar “sphere of politics” as separated from and opposed to everyday social life forms an essential part of the structure of “alienation” in modern, bourgeois society, as Marx puts it in the German Ideology (in order to be comprehensible to the philosophers, as he remarks). Together with some related writings from 1850 and 1851 and afterwards, the 18. Brumaire provides one of the best pieces of evidence for Marx’s ongoing concern with political theory. A political theory that is, all Marxist and anti-Marxist legends notwithstanding, not only, not even in the first place concerned with the great societal actors or with the world historical grand perspectives of a revolution to come, but with the details and intricacies of political institutions as well. To some extent, the 18. Brumaire comprises a detailed critique of parliamentarism, an outline of a critique of bureaucracy, even a shorthand critique of a democratic constitution and its intrinsic contradictions, and a critique of universal suffrage and the emerging form of political parties and “party politics” as well. There are at least three puzzles to be solved in the 18. Brumaire, puzzles that Marx is tackling in this text as in related writings in the years to come. Of course, there is the immediate puzzle of the coup d’état: How is it possible that a mediocre and ridiculous individual occupies a central place and becomes the decisive player in the political game? The explanation given by Marx in the 18. Brumaire is much more complicated or sophisticated as is normally noticed. It is not only to be found in a “balance of class forces” or a “political vacuum” but in the political structure (the constitution, the suffrage, the party-system, the established forms of public life) enabling and / or creating such stalemates as well. Second, the new regime challenges and reaffirms as well Marx’ central ideas about the illusionary, deceptive world of modern politics. Due to the rise of the democratic republic and because of the change of the form of government, the deceptive appearance of an “independent” state power disappears. Now, with Louis Napoleon seizing power, state power again seems to have become totally independent, the basic political untruth of bourgeois society apparently coming true as the state power is falling back into its most pristine guise of “sabre and habit”. Marx’ explanation for this “independence” of state power in the new regime which more than just appearance is a tricky one: He refers to the pillars of the regime comprising not only the petty peasantry, the urban mob, and the civil servants plus military - all of them not very fit to rule - but also the ideology of bonapartism (the “idées napoleoniennes”) holding together this disparate elements in a precarious compound. But there is, third, also the larger and salient question for Marx as for any political theorist worth talking about: Who governs? Unfettered by the tenets of later “Marxist” wisdom, Marx knew perfectly well, that the “ruling class”, more often than not, does not rule and rather seldom governs. Central in the 18. Brumaire is a “secret” or a “riddle” to solve: Why is it that the “ruling class” cannot govern in its own right? Why is it or becomes it unfit for political governance, although it is still a “ruling class”? Why is it that the “bonapartist regime”, some variety of a dictatorship in mass democratic guise and with a certain appeal to a majority of the peasant and working class population can be maintained and even becomes the “normal form” of government - at least on the European continent? Even in the most developed capitalist country of the time, in Great Britain, some curious form of “oligarchic” regime persists. Marx’ explanation, not included in the 18. Brumaire, is complicated but illuminating: Bonapartist regimes are “normal” in “developmental states”, as long as capitalism is still being “made by the state” - with the one and large exception of the United States. So, Marx’ criticizes himself: A democratic republic is not the most perfected form and the inevitable outcome of the development of the modern state. Only under rather specific preconditions will it become a “conservative” form of political life of highly developed political societies. Preconditions that are rather seldom to find in the era of ascendant capitalism in which Marx is writing. The influence of Hegelian notions about the logic of “world history” is undeniably still present. But, as he does in his later work, most explicitly in the manuscripts of 1857/58 and 1859, Marx fights and resists more often than not the temptation of Hegelian conceptual constructions a priori. In 1852 already, certainly after writing the Holy Family and the German Ideology in 1845 / 1846, he knew better. His experience of the European revolutions in 1848/49 and their aftermath has told him the lesson that revolutions are long term events, comprising several cycles with ups and downs, and the issues involved may not be settled during the lifetime of one generation. Still, he expects the new regime to perish soon due to the inner contradictions, which it is bound to face. So the 18. Brumaire is also another example of his lifelong struggle with philosophy and of his (rather successful) attempt to leave Hegelian philosophy behind. The ironic tone, so typical for the historical Marx (not the holy figure of “Marxism”), prevails in this text that is great fun to read (at least for anyone familiar with the original German text). I will take issue with the two main tenets of the standard (Anglo-Saxon, German and French) literature on Marx’ political theory: That the 18. Brumaire provides clear evidence of a thorough revision of his alleged “pristine” state theory and that in this text he expounds and tries to reconcile, although in vain, two opposing state theories (the so called “class theory” and the so called “parasite theory”). Both alleged “theories” are of course part and parcel of the intellectual package of classical political economy, a school of thought that Marx set out to criticize, not to repeat, as some might still remember. |
| Author Paul Reynolds, Edgehill College |
| Title Reading the Eighteenth Brumaire as Contemporary Critique |
| Abstract The Communist Manifesto, Theses on Feuerbach, The
German Ideology, the 1859 Preface to a Contribution to the Critique
of Political Economy and Capital stand as Marx’s major achievements
in sketching out the Materialist Conception of History as an alternative
framework of theorising social change and political struggle. The
Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, however, has a special place
in Marx’s writings in political readings of Marx and of contemporary
social change. The Brumaire is the most extensive application of Marx’s theory and politics to a contemporaneous political struggle. It theorises and analyses political struggle within the instability of mid-19th century France and directly applies Marxist class analysis to class politics in capitalist societies. It is also an explicitly political writing, when much of Marx’s work was principally philosophical or political economy. Marx’s political writings are more journalistic, and this is perhaps the most theoretically developed and substantial piece of Marx’s political writing. As such, the political tactics and manoeuvres of class politics in capitalist societies are more fully explored. More specifically, the Brumaire engages political discourse, tied to a class analysis yet sketched within the terms of bourgeois political struggle. As such, it speaks to the intricacies and idiosyncrasies of bourgeois politics within a broader critique of its redundancy. At a time when Marxist theory is widely challenged by identity politics, post-Marxist theory and the post-modern and liberal rejections, the Brumaire provides the basis for a reading of contemporary politics, with its focus on new social movements, the post-Marxist politics of identity and diversity, the power of corporate interests and the resilience of the liberal state. This paper will sketch the context to seeing the Brumaire as a critical document in Marx’s work, in particular drawing out a political reading of the Brumaire. It will then extend that reading to contemporary political struggle and social change and show how the Brumaire provides the basis for a critical engagement with post-Marxist radicals, identity politics and the resurgence of an entrenched liberalism based on a more sophisticated but nevertheless class-based and politically limited power. Such an analysis provides the basis for a reading of the contemporary politics late capitalism, of Thatcher and Reagan to Blair and Clinton/Bush. |
| Closing
Session |
| 1. Brief Talk & Introduction to Mini-Roundtable Sessions by Terrell Carver, University of Bristol |
| 2. ‘MEGA2 and the Eighteenth Brumaire’ by Terrell Carver, University of Bristol |
| 3. Mini-Roundtable Sessions: Why the Brumaire is a great text |
| 4: Rapporteur Reportback |