Anthony B. ends by saying the Trump administration is not Bonapartist, at least not yet. On the classical type I agree, and I said so in the piece. That is why there is an adjective. His reading treats "patrimonial Bonapartism" as classical Bonapartism with a decorative modifier attached, so that the three terms have to be satisfied in their 1851 form or the category collapses. If the modifier does analytical work, it changes what satisfaction looks like. So we are not as far apart as the post suggests, and the disagreement is about whether the modification is legitimate rather than about whether Louis Bonaparte and Donald Trump are the same object.
He is right that I gave three terms and no definition in a form he could hold up against mine. Here is one. Patrimonial Bonapartism: a form of rule in which the executive acquires autonomy from the fractions of capital not through their fear of a revolutionary threat from below but through the exhaustion of the mechanisms by which those fractions had composed their differences and bound the executive; and in which the administrative apparatus is reorganized on the principle that office is held at the ruler's pleasure and distributed as a prebend rather than occupied under rules. Now compare his: a transitory, authoritarian type of government in capitalist states in which the relative autonomy of the state becomes intensified. This makes autonomy the definiens, which is precisely what I said was the symptom. It also fails to sort. Lincoln under the suspension of habeas corpus qualifies. So does Wilson in 1917, so does the Roosevelt of the internment order, so does any wartime executive anywhere. A definition that admits Lincoln cannot then be used to argue that Trump is only quantitatively distinguishable from Lincoln. The comparison is generated by the definition rather than found by it. On the first term he lands a real blow, and I want to concede it before answering. The money does still move. Donor networks funded primary challenges against Trump-aligned candidates, Democratic attorneys general have litigated continuously and won, and the courts have reversed the administration repeatedly. Nobody has dissolved anything. A bourgeoisie that had surrendered political rule in the December 1851 sense would not be doing these things. What I want to contest is the identification of surrender with the disappearance of conflict. In the Brumaire the mark of surrender is not that the fractions stop having interests. It is that they lose the institutional mechanism through which those interests are composed into a policy and imposed on the executive. Look at the tariffs. They were imposed against the near-unanimous stated preference of organized business, and the response was not an institutional counteroffensive but an exemption queue: firm by firm, sector by sector, petitioning for relief at the discretion of the man who imposed the burden. That is not a class exercising political rule over its state. It is a class of supplicants with good lawyers. The same shape appears in the law firm agreements, in the university settlements, and in the broadcast license leverage. Capital is not being crushed. It is being individuated, and it is complying in advance, which is a different thing from confidence. His third objection, I think, is a misreading, though a natural one. He takes Marx's swollen apparatus to mean that the executive rests on the bureaucracy as a social base and observes correctly that Trump ran against the deep state and sent Musk to take an axe to it. But Marx's third term is not about support. It is about an apparatus that has acquired a material interest of its own and a stock of offices to be distributed. Destroying tenure-protected employment while expanding loyalty-vetted appointments does not remove that term. It converts it. The apparatus's material interest ceases to be attached to the corps and becomes attached to the ruler personally, which is the whole content of Weber's patrimonialism. Administration by personal dependents is still administration. The question to ask about DOGE is not how many positions were cut but what replaced the criterion by which the remaining ones are filled. This also answers the FDR comparison more precisely than volume of executive action can. Lincoln and Roosevelt expanded executive power through statutory delegation and built a rule-bound apparatus in the doing of it: the War Department, the Alphabet Agencies, and the civil service they inherited and enlarged. The present expansion proceeds by hollowing the rule-bound form. Different criteria of appointment and different modes of distributing the resources of the office. That is a qualitative difference, or the word has no use. The second term is where he is strongest, and I am not going to pretend otherwise. There is no peasantry. His numbers are right, and the trend is right, and the family farm cannot carry the weight. Marx's structural claim is about a mass whose conditions of life isolate its members so that they generate no national bond and must therefore be represented from above. Whatever occupies that position in the United States now is not a class in Marx's sense. Dispersed and deunionized workforces, an information environment that individuates, and a politics that arrives as identification with a person rather than through any intermediate body—these produce something like the representational deficit Marx describes without producing the social formation he describes. I do not yet have a satisfactory account of that gap, and the piece did not supply one. It is the thing I would most want to be argued out of. To Marv, since this is the same disagreement in another register. Your criterion, that the defining feature is abdication under a revolutionary threat from below, is Trotsky on fascism more than Marx on Bonapartism, and running the two together is doing most of the work. In December 1851 the June days were three years dead and crushed. What made parliamentary rule unusable to the bourgeoisie was that its own two royalist fractions could not govern jointly and that universal suffrage kept returning results it could not live with. The red specter was invoked constantly and faced not at all. If the mechanism of abdication has only one possible cause, then the category applies exactly once, and we should retire it. If it has more than one, then the absence of a revolutionary threat tells us which variant we are in, not whether we are in one. Tony -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- Groups.io Links: You receive all messages sent to this group. View/Reply Online (#43325): https://groups.io/g/marxmail/message/43325 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]] -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
