Marv, Thanks for sharing your thoughts. I actually think the passage you quoted, along with the Society of December 10, supports the opposite of your point. Consider what actually caused the repression in that list: a state of siege, military commissions, police surveillance of salons, the disbanding of the National Guard, and jailing without trial. The regular army carried out the shootings on the boulevards on December 4, which Marx called his "drunken army of law and order"—the state's own armed force, not a party militia. Each of these is a tool the bourgeoisie created within the state, only to have it turned against them. This is the Bonapartist mechanism: the executive becomes independent from the class it serves by taking over and personalizing the existing repressive system. This is different from the fascist mechanism, which needs something the Second Empire never had. You cite December 10 as a fighting force outside the state, and it is, but think about its composition and origins, which Marx discusses at length. It is recruited from the scum and refuse of all classes: vagabonds, discharged soldiers, jailbirds, mountebanks, and pickpockets. It is organized from above by the pretender as his personal force and financed as such. Marx tells us exactly what its path is: it stayed Bonaparte's private army until he could turn the public army into a Society of December 10. That is the key point for our disagreement. The movement goes from the gang into the state, so the state's own armed force becomes the ruler's personal retinue. The fascist movement works in the opposite direction and is made up of different people. Instead of the lumpenproletariat, it mobilizes a petty bourgeoisie in crisis, over many years, within civil society. It has its own leaders, press, program, and intellectuals, forming a mass party that can fight and destroy the workers' movement before taking state power. December 10 could unsettle a banquet and support a pretender, but it could not have done what the SA did to the KPD and SPD between 1930 and 1933. It never needed to, since the June Days had already accomplished that. This distinction is important. Trotsky needed both categories at the same time in 1932. He could not have analyzed Papen and Schleicher if Bonapartism was just an early term for what Hitler was planning. He later argued that fascism itself turns into Bonapartism once the mass movement that brought it to power is dissolved or becomes bureaucratic. "Bonapartism of fascist origin" is far more than a stand-in for a concept Marx never named. Engels still used the term for Bismarck in the 1870s and called it the real religion of the bourgeoisie because it describes a lasting structural possibility of the capitalist state, not merely a step toward something else. As for the claim that I have removed repression from Bonapartism and reduced it to just corruption, I have not done that. That reduction is your interpretation, not mine. According to Weber, patrimonialism is not just corruption. It is a form of rule defined by how the administrative staff is chosen and how office is held: the staff are the ruler's personal dependents, office is treated as the ruler's property, and there is no separation between the ruler and the office. The main issue is the structure of the state, not just the level of corruption. So, the real question about the current administration is not whether favors are done for donors—of course they are, and you are right that every bourgeois government does this. The real question is whether the system keeps its impersonal, rule-based nature that allows it to organize the general interest of capital over the interests of its parts. Loyalty oaths for civil servants, removing inspectors general, using prosecution and pardon as personal tools, and filling agencies with clients instead of professionals are not just more favoritism. They show a shift from one way of recruiting and commanding to another. This is a structural argument, and it can be tested in a way that "more extreme and public" cannot. Your argument is about quantity, while mine is about a qualitative difference: everyone does this, but he does it more openly. The key issue in Marxist state theory is when quantity turns into quality. Also, the idea of patrimonialism is already present in Marx, not something I added. The parasitic system with its half-million officeholders; the state treasury as a prize that must be constantly distributed to keep December 10 going; and Bonaparte's need to appear as a benefactor to all classes while taking from one to give to another—this is patrimonial logic described in those terms, forty years before Weber gave it a name. You make a strong point here, and this is where I would rather focus the discussion. The question of fascism in the United States is not settled by what I've said so far, and it depends on the specific criteria I've outlined. Is there a mobilized mass base forming as an independent fighting force and merging with the state? The pardoned January 6 defendants, the militia environment, and especially the rapid growth of an armed federal deportation force staffed by ideological recruits are important to watch. These developments may be closer to Marx's sequence than to Germany's: not a party militia taken over by the state, but the state's own repressive system being expanded and customized into something like a Society of December 10. This is the real danger we need to name clearly, and we risk losing the right concept if we call every reactionary consolidation "fascism" and fail to identify the one that is actually emerging. In Comradeship, -- Tony
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