Marv, John, The FT article is the best empirical challenge to the Bonapartist interpretation that anyone has come up with, and it merits a stronger response than the one John delivers. The argument has a gap when you say the tycoons are now in the cabinet and then you add that a Bonapartist was never independent of the capitalist class in any case. If Bonapartism can coexist with Musk directing an agency and Sacks drafting the AI executive order, what is the category doing?
The answer is that a direct human presence in the state is not in contradiction with the Bonapartist argument. It is the Bonapartist form of rule under patrimonial conditions. Weber’s category here is the prebend, an office held as a personal grant from the monarch, bringing with it revenue and access, revocable at his pleasure, not held by right and not transmissible. That’s what a DOGE appointment is. That's what an AI and crypto tsardom is. The oligarch doesn’t have state power; he has a benefice. Musk is the test case. He does not back Marv; he refutes him. He was the biggest single fundraiser for the 2024 campaign, given an agency and a chainsaw and publicly humiliated within months. Sacks started the job in January 2025 and was gone by March. If the economic aristocracy had really taken over the political system as the FT claims, the biggest donor in US history wouldn’t be disposable. Property cannot be revoked. Are prebends? The FT reports a court and takes to a directorate. Marv’s five points then boil down two different kinds of regime to a single set of criteria. Marv is correct against Hari that the fascism classification is premature because the markers of fascism have not been met: abolition of the multi-party system, elimination of constitutional balances, and prohibition of independent unions. But those are not the signs of Bonapartism, and to regard them as such is to empty the category. Louis Bonaparte was elected by universal male suffrage, kept a legislature, and governed by plebiscite. The main point of the Eighteenth Brumaire is that the bourgeoisie gave up its political authority in an effort to preserve its social dominance and that it did so under constitutional forms of its own making. That "they have not yet gone beyond the confines of bourgeois democracy" is not an argument against Bonapartism. TThis passage isa description of how Bonapartism works. Marv’s point (a) is his best point, and I wish to relinquish it entirely. The power and property of the US bourgeoisie are secure from below. There is no mass workers' movement to be annihilated, and consequently, there is no need for the ruling class to pay for the extra-parliamentary organizations that fascists require. This data is a death knell to the idea of fascism. It is an argument supporting the Bonapartist thesis, indeed, too. The dictatorship of the Eighteenth Brumaire was not the product of a revolutionary threat. It was the child of the defeat of June 1848 and of the fatigue that followed. Bonapartism is the form of rule of a deadlock: a bourgeoisie that can no longer rule through its parties, a working class that cannot yet rule at all, and an executive that fills the void. Its lack is not its condition, but its demobilization. John’s “lumpenization of the capitalist class” is a factual observation with a moralizing label. Nor is he suggesting that individual capitalists have grown greedier and more nearsighted than their grandfathers. It is that the institutional forms by which capital formed itself as a class with a general interest, the parties with programs, the peak associations, and the regulatory bureaucracy staffed from and answerable to those associations have dissolved. This is what Poulantzas called authoritarian statism: the deterioration of representative channels, the transfer of decision to the executive summit, and the plebiscitary short-circuit between leader and mass. The impersonal machinery that until now aggregated the interests of capitalists no longer exists; they must lobby with their own hands. You fall back on personal access when class representation has broken down, not while it is working. The FT has the phenomenon, and it reverses causation. I would resist John's ladder as well. “Not entirely Bonapartist yet” and “a major stride in that direction,” a threshold to be crossed if the midterms are stolen. The shape of the regime is no distance to travel. It is a relation between the state machinery and the classes it organizes. This relation either exists or it does not. If we characterize risk as a future moment of rupture, we license a waiting politics and hold our own assessment hostage to whether Trump is theatrical enough to meet the criterion. That takes me to the phrase "oligarchy," which I think we should not adopt. It is a richness of kind, not of class relation. And it allows Khanna to rail against oligarchs from a party funded by Hoffman, Pritzker, and Powell Jobs. And it allows Biden to warn about a tech-industrial complex in a parting address without accounting for the two billion raised by his own vice president. Khanna’s pendulum expresses the category’s political role: antitrust, tax reform, direct democracy, and America’s exceptional ability to self-correct. That is a notion in which the state is a neutral tool, briefly seized by bad money and to be reclaimed by virtuous money. What the Democratic wing of the same class needs from us is anti-corruption populism. So on Marv’s point 1, I agree that opposition has to reach beyond the vote box, and I would add that the composition of the unified front is not a detail. In a broad sense a united left front is one thing. Another is a popular front based around defending institutions, which Pritzker and Khanna also protect, on their own terms and on their own timetable; the fascist framing has a way of producing the second while calling it the first. The task, whether or not Trump crosses anyone’s threshold, is autonomous working-class organization, formed now on its own account. Tony -- Tony -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- Groups.io Links: You receive all messages sent to this group. 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