Ben has raised the only question in this thread that goes past tactics, and he's right that it's the prior question: why did our ruling class tolerate this in the first place? I want to press on the definition he uses to answer it, because I think it costs him the conclusion he wants.
Ben defines Bonapartism as a period in which the normal ruling institutions become incapable of serving the bourgeoisie and an unusual amount of power is delegated to a dictator. On that definition Bismarck qualifies, Mussolini qualifies, and Roosevelt qualifies. A category that holds the New Deal and the March on Rome is not wrong so much as idle. It cannot tell us what to look for in September. The trouble is the verb. "Delegated" makes the bourgeoisie the acting subject: a class that surveys its situation, finds its institutions wanting, and hands power to a strongman. That is not the argument of the Eighteenth Brumaire. Marx's point is that the bourgeoisie was politically incapable, that its parliamentary representatives had discredited every form through which the class could rule as a class, and that the executive acquired autonomy in the vacuum this left. Bonaparte is not a card played. He is what remains when the deck no longer functions. Draper is good on this in the first volume of Karl Marx's Theory of Revolution, and the Bismarck material Ben mentions makes the same point: the bourgeoisie surrenders political rule to preserve social rule, and the surrender is a symptom of its incapacity, not an exercise of it. Which brings me to the German analogy, because it is doing more work in Ben's post than it can bear. The claim that the German ruling class put Hitler in power once the movement had peaked is a familiar formulation and mostly a bad one. Turner went through the business records in German Big Business and the Rise of Hitler and found no such decision, because there was no unified subject in a position to make one. What there was: a camarilla around Hindenburg, Papen's private calculation that he could box Hitler in, and a set of conservative elites who agreed on nothing except that they could not govern through the Reichstag. Ben's "use it or lose it" needs a class that can decide. The historiography gives him a court that could not. I think Ben's conclusion survives, but only if it is re-derived from something smaller and more specific than a class-level decision. Here is the version I would defend. What distinguishes this regime is not the quantity of power concentrated in the executive but the form of the offices. Positions are held as personal grants and staffed from a retinue rather than a civil service, and the retinue has no social base of its own. That is the patrimonial element, and it changes the incentive structure completely. A bourgeois faction that loses an election loses an election. A retinue that loses the office loses everything at once: rents, immunity, standing, and, in several cases, liberty. So Ben's asymmetry is real. Weakening does raise the danger. Not because a section of capital reaches a now-or-never judgment, though Thiel and others have certainly said out loud what they want, but because the household around the office cannot survive its loss and will therefore do to the franchise whatever administration permits. And administration permits a great deal, which is why the form is the Portal rather than a decree. Nothing gets suspended. A verification standard is published, a batch fails on a zero-percent match threshold, the batch goes back to the state, and the failure distributes itself across fifty jurisdictions and one rushed IT project. If we go in expecting the suspension of democratic rights, we will be looking for a signature that no one has to write. On the joint letter. I don't object to it, and I'll sign a good one. My only amendment is the addressee. A letter to left journals reaches the people already in this conversation, and Ben is honest that his aim is clarification rather than action, which is fair enough. But the same letter costs nothing to point somewhere it might land: APWU and NALC locals, and the county and state election officials currently being asked to hand over voter lists. Something addressed to people who will physically handle the discrepancies in the next six weeks, asking for one concrete thing, is not a larger effort than a manifesto. It is the same effort with a recipient. Where I can't help is Ben's last point, and I'd rather say so than pretend. If nobody in this thread has a line into a postal local, then everything above is a description of what should be done by somebody we haven't named. I don't have that line. I would like to know whether anyone here does. -- Tony -- Tony -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- Groups.io Links: You receive all messages sent to this group. View/Reply Online (#43327): https://groups.io/g/marxmail/message/43327 Mute This Topic: https://groups.io/mt/121053097/21656 -=-=- 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]] -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
