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Unity is the path to our victory against the Zionist enemy and the United States Government and Ruling Classes!
Book Review: The 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte
--- Kevin Walsh, Editor of NACAZAI and EASPF
The 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte by Karl Marx is public domain and is in print online at:
The title originates from a calender introduced during the First French Revolution, in which 18 Brumaire was the equivalent of 9 November, the date in 1799 on which Napoleon Bonaparte overthrew the First French Republic. Napoleon's nephew, Louis Bonaparte, overthrew the National Assembly of the Second French Republic on 2 December 1851. The latter, Marx argues, was but a farcical imitation of the former, as the class character of France had radically changed. Between the revolutions, the industrial revolution had come to France.
At the time of the First Revolution, in the late 18th Century, the urban proletariat was a very small class in France, the industrial grand-bourgeoisie did not yet exist, and the commercial and finance grand-bourgeoisies were relatively small. The feudal nobility was the ruling class, and the revolution was supported by the petit-bourgeois tradesmen and the peasants.
By 1848 there was a large and rapidly growing urban proletariat, particularly in Paris. The nobility were gone, and the grand-bourgeoisie was the ruling class, split as it was into factions of the industrial, landlord, commercial, and finance subgroups. The peasants were largely small freeholders rather than renters, and the petit-bourgeois tradesmen in the cities were in a position between the proletariat and the grand-bourgeoisie. The two classes that had been revolutionary were now ambivalent and vascillating. The proletariat had become the revolutionary class. The revolutionary nature of the proletariat made the republic's institutions and ideas dangerous to the bourgeoisie, even though they were of bourgeois origin. Universal suffrage meant that workers could vote, so it was abolished. Secular education meant that workers and peasants might no longer obey church teachings about respect for property and law and order, so the Jesuits were put in
charge of French schools. Freedom of the press meant that social-democrats could print their criticisms of the government, so a heavy tax was imposed on the press to ensure that only the wealthy could publish.
All the classes were rallied against the proletarian uprising in Paris in June 1848. Then the bourgeoisie turned against the petit-bourgeois tradesmen. Finally the farce of a republic could no longer be maintained in the face of demands for the restoration of freedom of the press and universal suffrage, so the grand-bourgeoisie increasingly backed President Louis Bonaparte's ambitions and ultimately supported his coup d'etat.
Marx wrote about the role the lumpenproletariat played in both the suppression of the June 1848 worker's uprising and in organizing the coup d'etat. The role was clearly reactionary, and Marx clearly did not believe that the lumpenproletariat had revolutionary potential. Indeed, pointing to his career as a high-class vagabond going from country to country on adventures, he regarded Louis Bonaparte as the chief lumpenproletarian. Marx also wrote of the role of Jewish finance capital in supporting Bonaparte, "The d'Hautpoul ministry contained only one man of parliamentary standing, the Jewish moneylender Fould, one of the most notorious of the high financiers. The ministry of finance fell to his lot."
The most enigmatic and tragic role among the classes was that played by the French peasants, who were very poor and who were the vast majority of France's population. They had helped suppress the June 1848 worker's uprising, and they largely supported Bonaparte's coup d'etat. Marx suggests that they were influenced by the Catholic Church and were prejudiced in favor of a relative of Napoleon Bonaparte based on his uncle's more revolutionary role. Marx also suggests that their status as freeholders rather than tenant farmers gave them a sense of having a stake in bourgeois property relations and wanting to defend them. He does point out that being freeholders didn't keep them from being impoverished, only that the agent of their ruin was the urban usurer rather than the feudal lord.
http://www.marx2mao.com/M&E/EBLB52.html
18th Brumaire is not as famous or universal as The Communist Manifesto or Capital and is one of the lesser-known works of Karl Marx. On the surface the subject matter seems fairly narrow in scope, an analysis of the short-lived Second French Republic (1848 to 1851). It is useful to the modern reader in that it is an analysis of class struggle from a real historical example rather than as mere abstraction. It disabuses readers of some incorrect ideas about Marx often forwarded by modern "Marxists," particularly the idea that it's "Marxist" to call the lumpenproletariat revolutionary or that "Marxists" are Judaeophiles. It also has some parallels in modern times, such as how the bourgeois press label anything as "socialist" that threatens them, even when the institution or idea was in fact of bourgeois origin. For example, the press at the time attacked as "socialist" the ideas of universal suffrage, freedom of the press, and non-religious education,
all of which had their origins in the First French Revolution and were then forwarded by the bourgeoisie.
