Marv, Nothing in your second and third paragraphs bears on what I said. Policy congruence between an executive and the fractions it rests on is not evidence against Bonapartism. It is what Bonapartism looked like the first time.
The Second Empire was extraordinarily good for French capital. Crédit Mobilier, the Pereires, Haussmann's contracts, the railway concessions, and the 1860 treaty with Britain. If the test is whether the executive delivers for accumulation, Louis Bonaparte passes it more cleanly than the July Monarchy did. Marx knew this perfectly well, which is why he framed the outcome as an exchange rather than a defeat: the bourgeoisie forfeited the crown to keep the purse. Its social power was secured on condition that its political rule be dissolved. You are treating the purse as proof that the crown was never surrendered. So the disagreement is about what would count as evidence. You are testing outcomes. I am asking about the form of mediation, which is a question about mechanism, not about who benefits. The traditional governing party you describe does four things: it selects candidates, disciplines officeholders, aggregates the demands of rival fractions into a program, and can withhold all of that. That last capacity is what makes representation a two-way relation rather than acclamation. Carter faced Kennedy. Ford faced Reagan. Bush faced Buchanan. Your point that presidents have always provoked revolt inside their establishments proves my case rather than yours, because in each of those instances the fractions had an institutional channel through which the grumbling could become a threat. The question is not whether donors are unhappy. It is whether their unhappiness can reach the executive as anything other than a petition. Look at how access actually operates now. An exemption from a tariff schedule granted case by case to a firm that has made itself agreeable is not a legislated compromise between fractions. It is a benefit. That is where Weber earns his keep in the phrase, and why I keep the modifier: the administrative staff holds office by personal fidelity rather than by tenure in a rationalized apparatus, and the boundary between the ruler's household and the fisc becomes hard to locate. The high-tech and energy capital you mention did not win a party program. It won proximity. Those are different routes to the same policy, and the difference is the whole subject under discussion. You will notice I have not claimed Trump acts against the interests of the conservative bourgeoisie. I have never claimed it. I would be embarrassed to. Where I think you have a real objection, and where I do not have a settled answer, is on duration. Everything I have described is compatible with a personalist episode inside an otherwise intact party system, the kind of thing that leaves few traces once the individual is gone. Bonapism as a form outlived Louis Bonaparte's person; the Republican Party's current condition may not outlive Trump's. The apparatus could reconstitute itself in 2028, the primary electorate could revert to something a donor class can bargain with, and then my framework will have described a weather pattern in the language of climate. I do not think that is what is happening, but I cannot yet demonstrate that it isn't, and I would rather say so than pretend the concept has already earned more than it ha Tony -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- Groups.io Links: You receive all messages sent to this group. View/Reply Online (#43312): https://groups.io/g/marxmail/message/43312 Mute This Topic: https://groups.io/mt/120796980/21656 -=-=- POSTING RULES & NOTES #1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. #2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly & permanently archived. #3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern. #4 Do not exceed five posts a day. -=-=- Group Owner: [email protected] Unsubscribe: https://groups.io/g/marxmail/leave/13617172/21656/1316126222/xyzzy [[email protected]] -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
