*Variations of the capitalist state: Part 4* In a previous post, I wrote that there does not seem to be any commonly agreed upon definition of Bonapartism. To understand why I wrote this, Anthony Teso’s article, “ Patrimonial Bonapartism: Origins, comparisons, and the American conjuncture ( https://tempestmag.org/2026/07/patrimonial-bonapartism/ ) ” is very useful, especially the brief history of the idea of Bonapartism near the beginning.
In this conversation on Marxmail, I offered this as a possible definition. Bonapartism is a transitory, authoritarian, type of government in capitalist states in which the relative autonomy of the state becomes intensified. In Anthony T’s article, he wrote, “ To say that the United States today is undergoing a patrimonial-Bonapartist transformation is to say two things simultaneously: that the executive has acquired real autonomy from the established class-fractional coalitions of the neoliberal order and that the administrative apparatus is being remade on patrimonial principles, with personal loyalty replacing rule-bound office-holding as the central administrative criterion.” In other words, he seems to define Bonapartism as simply the executive branch acquiring “ real autonomy from the established class-fractional coalitions of the neoliberal order.” However, in this discussion, Anthony T. verified the absence of a commonly agreed definition by debating my provisional definition without providing any coherent definition of his own. The closest he got was this paragraph, “In the Eighteenth Brumaire, it has three terms. A bourgeoisie that surrenders political rule in order to preserve social rule, having found that its own parliamentary regime endangers its property. A mass of atomized producers who must be represented because they cannot represent themselves. And a state apparatus swollen enough to acquire a material interest of its own, which is why Marx spends so long on the half million officials and on the executive as a body that feeds. Take any of the three away, and the category stops sorting.” He reiterated this later, “Bonapartism in the Eighteenth Brumaire is not a quantum of executive power inscribed in a founding document. It is a determinate relation among classes: a bourgeoisie that surrenders political rule to preserve social rule, a mass of atomized producers who must be represented because they cannot represent themselves, and a swollen apparatus that acquires a material interest of its own. Executive autonomy is the symptom, not the definition.” So, let’s discuss these criteria. I think we can all agree that Bonapartism is a relation among classes, since every type of state, state regime, and government is a relation among classes. Anthony T. appears to say that executive autonomy is a symptom of a determinate relation among classes in which 1. A bourgeoisie surrenders political rule to preserve social rule. 2. A mass of atomized producers must be represented because they cannot represent themselves. 3. A swollen apparatus acquires a material interest of its own. This is drawn from Marx’s 18 th Brumaire, but are there any other examples of a regime, government, or administration that qualify? Certainly, the Trump administration does not. The bourgeoisie in the USA has loosened its political rule, but it has not surrendered political rule. Trump and his minions have established more autonomy from the established class fractions of the bourgeoisie than other recent presidential administrations, his autonomy is clearly limited and remains within the bounds of the constitutional order. Up until now, Trump’s autonomy is completely dependent on GOP control of both houses of Congress and the Supreme Court, and Trump has had many minor reversals and some major reversals in both of those branches of government. In other words, Trump’s autonomy is perhaps quantitatively greater than FDR’s or even Lincoln’s, but not qualitatively. Congress has not voted to dissolve itself, and Trump has not dissolved it (as Louis Napolean did in France.) The Supreme Court still retains its constitutional independence from the Presidency and occasionally overrules him, despite the fact that the current majority there licks Trump’s boots and ass on demand. The bourgeoisie still pours hundreds of millions of dollars into the coffers of Republicans who run against Trump’s candidates in Republican primaries, and hundreds of millions more into the campaigns of the Democrats, and the Democratic Party controlled states have attorneys general who have banded together to fight Trump’s efforts to steal the elections. The mass of atomized producers Marx was referring to was the French peasantry, small landowners producing with family labor. Where is the peasantry in the 21 st century USA? The number of small family farms in the USA have been progressively reduced from a high of 6.8 million in 1935 to about 1.8 million today. Even at their height as a percentage of the population around 1880 when almost half of all employed people in the United States worked in farming, and the population of the USA was only 50 million, there were only 4 million farms in total. It is true that the mass of the petty bourgeoisie of the United States, including the small minority within it that consists of family farmers, constitutes the base of the Republican Party, but that has been true for more than a century so indicates Trump is a continuation of politics as usual rather than something different. And rather than somehow resting on the base of the vast sea of government bureaucrats, Trump views himself as the enemy of the “deep state” and even brought in Elon Musk to chastise and smote it in the days of DOGE. In other words, on the face of it, what exists in the USA today is not Bonapartism according to the three necessary terms of Marx cited by Anthony T. While I think he has failed to define Bonapartism, I also think he is right in a way: the Trump administration is not Bonapartist, at least not yet. Nevertheless, Anthony T. says the Trump administration is Bonapartist, just not classical Bonapartist. According to him, there is a new variation, Patrimonial Bonapartism that defines Trump and other recent authoritarian governments. In my next contribution, I want to look at that adjective Patrimonial that Anthony T. has appended to Bonapartism because that is his main innovation to the legacy idea of Bonapartism. -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- Groups.io Links: You receive all messages sent to this group. View/Reply Online (#43323): https://groups.io/g/marxmail/message/43323 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]] -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
