The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte

This book takes in some matters of great current relevance in its broad conceptual sweep, but--from a current perspective--too often douses them in the minutiae of the moment. Marx the political junkie certainly conveys to us his brilliance and his scorn--the tagline here is "history happens first

as tragedy, then again as farce, after all"--and he is not gentle in his treatment of the conservative "Party of Order," the liberal grandees, the social-democrat Montagnards, or the social revolutionaries like Louis Blanc. The men of 1848 were not the men of 1789. Unfortunately, all things fade, and our latter-day selves may not appreciate the exquisiteness of some of the finer barbs here.

Nevertheless, the central question is echoic of Hitler, who we have kept aliver in the intellectual folk-memory: how does a mediocrity like Louis Bonaparte (seen by his contemporaries largely as a clown after two embarrassing coup attempts, though to be fair also a daring escape from prison) become Napoleon III of France? The basic argument is that each of the competing power blocks thought they were using him as a front to tear down their opponents--a proxy and patsy president to keep their own hands clean--but then he himself was the last man standing who he hadn't been used to tear down, and who in fact had been built up by being the dude to hand out all the bread and sausages. Marx's fear of the lumpenproletariat, which he couches as caution about their counterrevolutionary potential, comes out in a major way here. And in general his class analysis is more sophisticated and more modern than in say the manifesto--our petty bourgeoisie, our magnates of industry and finance and agriculture and the tension between them, our deeply complicit intellectuals/gelded pantomime opposition, all are here. Interesting to me too is how this is certainly still the early Marx, historicist and Hegelian and without a complex economic theory (represented; I dunno to what degree it had been worked out), though with a keen sense of the role of economic crises in causing political crises; but then, compared to Engels's preface to the third edition written thirty years later that talks about things in terms of the historical law and the inevitable victory of socialism, what we have here is Marx the deeply ironical, fascinated and amused by the way a perfectly reasonable, unjust, workaday bourgeois polity can spin off into absurdity, with only a faint tang of social-justice rage bound up in the reminder that all class interests not rooted in the relations of production are illusory (so if you're on a daily wage, for fuck's sake don't think that the dictator is serving you and not the man with the millions, though of course in both cases ultimately serving only himself if the buffoon can get away with it, and again like Hitler Louis-N. B. did). I like this Marx and I'd read his inside-the-Beltway blog and I only wish that the political junkie stacks-of-newspapers-in-the-cafes stuff was easier to unpack after getting on for two centuries.

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