Appendix: Caesarism, Bonapartism and the State
Historical materialism explains that, in the last analysis, the movement of history is determined by the development of the productive forces and the changes in class relations that result from it. These constitute the solid ground upon which rises the superstructure of legal forms, constitutions, governments and the state, morality and religion, philosophical schools and so on.
However, the relation between all these elements is complex and contradictory, and not at all easy to determine. Under Caesar and Augustus, the Roman Republic had been transformed into the rule of one man, far more powerful than any of the ancient kings. To understand this dramatic metamorphosis, it is essential to analyse the nature of the state itself. And in order to understand this, it will be necessary to examine the Marxist theory of the state in greater detail.
Marxism explains that the state is an instrument for the oppression of one class by another. In the last analysis, it consists of special bodies of armed men: the army, police and the bureaucracy that sustains them. However, this general definition by no means exhausts the question.
Engels explains:
The central link in civilised society is the state, which in all typical periods is without exception the state of the ruling class, and in all cases continues to be essentially a machine for holding down the oppressed, exploited class.[1]
Note that Engels uses very careful and precise language. In typical periods, the state is normally the state of the ruling class. But there can be periods that are abnormal and atypical, in which this does not apply.
Engels points out that the state arose to prevent the contending classes from consuming society in “fruitless struggle”. The state ‘regulates’ the struggle between the classes, and, once having arisen, and within limits, it develops a certain independence and a logic of its own. Elsewhere, he writes:
Exceptional periods, however, occur when the warring classes are so nearly equal in forces that the state power, as apparent mediator, acquires for the moment a certain independence in relation to both.[2]
The period that we have been describing here, the last period of the Roman Republic, was just such a period. The struggle between the classes had exceeded all normal bounds and the contending classes had fought each other to a standstill. At the head of this power there arises the ‘strongman’, or dictator.
Trotsky, writing in 1932, put it as follows:
Two mighty camps are locked in irreconcilable conflict. Neither side can win by parliamentary means. Neither would willingly accept a decision unfavourable to it. Such a split in society foreshadows a civil war. The threat of civil war creates a need in the ruling class for an arbiter and commander, for a Caesar. That precisely is the function of Bonapartism.[3]
Relative independence
In essence, Caesarism (and its modern equivalent Bonapartism) is rule by the sword. It emerges in certain periods, when the class struggle reaches a point of deadlock, and the state power (in particular, the army) raises itself above society and acquires a relative independence from all classes, including the ruling class. We are therefore faced with a seeming paradox.
An analogy can be drawn with the enormous variety of political forms that have been observed over the history of capitalism. What, for instance, was the ruling class under the Second French Empire of Louis Bonaparte, or Napoleon III as he styled himself? The answer is: the bourgeoisie. Yet in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte Marx described how Bonaparte’s drunken soldiery shot down the bourgeoisie.
This would appear to be a contradiction, and so it is: not an absurd contradiction but a dialectical contradiction. The state of Napoleon III, like that of Caesar, was composed of gangsters and adventurers who were defending their own interests, plundering the nation and also the very class they represented – the bourgeoisie.
This complex question was dealt with masterfully by Ted Grant in his reply to Tony Cliff on the question of so-called state capitalism:
Let us take as a case extremely rich in examples the history of France. The bourgeois revolution took place in 1789. In 1793 the Jacobins seized complete power. As Marx and Engels pointed out, they went beyond the framework of bourgeois relations and performed a salutary historical task because of that, accomplishing in a few months what would have taken the bourgeoisie decades or generations to accomplish; the complete cleansing from France of all traces of feudalism. Yet this regime remained rooted in the basis of bourgeois forms of property. It was followed by the French Thermidor and the rule of the Directory, to be followed by the classic dictatorship of Napoleon Bonaparte. Napoleon re-introduced many feudal forms, had himself crowned Emperor and concentrated the supreme power in his hands. But we still call this regime bourgeois. With the restoration of Louis XVIII the regime still remained capitalist… and then we had not one but two revolutions – 1830 and 1848. These revolutions had important social consequences. They resulted in significant changes even in the personnel of the state itself. Yet we characterise them both as bourgeois revolutions in which there was no change in the class which held power. […]
Take, similarly, the diversity of regimes in more modern times to see the extreme differences in super-structures which are on the same economic base. For instance, compare the regime of Nazi Germany with that of British social democracy. They are so fundamentally different in super-structure that many theorists of the non-Marxist or ex-Marxist school have found new class structure and a new system of society entirely. Why do we say that they represent the same class and the same regime? Despite the difference in super-structure, the economic base of the given societies remained the same.[4]
The state balances between the classes
There are many other cases in history in which one section of the ruling class has attacked other sections and the state has risen above society. In the Wars of the Roses of the fifteenth century, the two most powerful factions of the English barons (the Houses of Lancaster and York) virtually exterminated one another.
At one time or another a big section of the ruling class were either in prison or were executed, and the throne occupied by adventurers of one gang or another. Finally, a new dynasty emerged, the Tudors, which balanced between the bourgeoisie in the City of London and different factions of the barons to establish an absolutist regime, which would persist for more than a hundred years. Similar processes occurred in other countries.
These absolute monarchs, in an attempt to consolidate themselves as a power standing above society, and increasingly alienating themselves from it, leaned on the nascent bourgeoisie to strike blows against the feudal nobility. Yet the class nature of the regime remained feudal. It was determined by existing property relations, not by the political configuration of the government.
Engels wrote the following on the Bismarck regime in Germany, which he regarded as a variant of Bonapartism:
Bonapartism is the necessary form of state in a country where the working class, at a high level of its development in the towns but numerically inferior to the small peasants in rural areas, has been defeated in a great revolutionary struggle by the capitalist class, the petty bourgeoisie and the army. When the Parisian workers were defeated in the titanic struggle of June 1848 in France, the bourgeoisie had at the same time totally exhausted itself in this victory. It was aware it could not afford a second such victory. It continued to rule in name, but it was too weak to govern. Control was assumed by the army, the real victor, basing itself on the class from which it preferred to draw its recruits, the small peasants, who wanted peace from the rioters in the towns. The form this rule took was of course military despotism, its natural leader the hereditary heir to the latter, Louis Bonaparte.
As far as both workers and capitalists are concerned, Bonapartism is characterised by the fact that it prevents them coming to blows with each other. In other words, it protects the bourgeoisie from any violent attacks by the workers, encourages a little gentle skirmishing between the two classes and furthermore deprives both alike of the faintest trace of political power. No freedom of association, no freedom of assembly, no freedom of the press; universal suffrage under such bureaucratic pressure that election of the opposition is almost impossible; police-control of a kind that had previously been unknown even in police-ridden France. Besides which, sections of the bourgeoisie and of the workers are simply bought; the former by colossal credit-swindles, by which the money of the small capitalists is attracted into the pockets of the big ones; the latter by colossal state construction-schemes which concentrate an artificial, imperial proletariat dependent on the government in the big towns alongside the natural, independent proletariat. Finally, national pride is flattered by apparently heroic wars, which are however always conducted with the approval of the high authorities of Europe against the general scapegoat of the day and only on such conditions as ensure victory from the outset.[5]
Caesarism and Bonapartism
Leon Trotsky drew an explicit parallel between Caesarism and Bonapartism, explaining:
Caesarism, or its bourgeois form, Bonapartism, enters the scene in those moments of history when the sharp struggle of two camps raises the state power, so to speak, above the nation, and guarantees it, in appearance, a complete independence of classes – in reality, only the freedom necessary for a defence of the privileged.[6]
But this is not to say that all Caesarist and Bonapartist regimes are identical. Far from it. The term Bonapartism itself is very elastic and covers many different variants. In 1932, Trotsky explained:
Such terms as liberalism, Bonapartism, fascism have the character of generalisations. Historical phenomena never repeat themselves completely. It would not have been difficult to prove that even the government of Napoleon III, compared with the regime of Napoleon I, was not ‘Bonapartist’ – not only because Napoleon himself was a doubtful Bonaparte by blood, but also because his relations to the classes, especially to the peasantry and to the lumpenproletariat, were not at all the same as those of Napoleon I. Moreover, classical Bonapartism grew out of the epoch of gigantic war victories, which the Second Empire did not know at all. But if we should look for the repetition of all the traits of Bonapartism, we will find that Bonapartism is a one-time, unique occurrence, i.e., that Bonapartism in general does not exist but that there once was a general named Bonaparte born in Corsica. The case is no different with liberalism and with all other generalised terms of history. When one speaks by analogy of Bonapartism, it is necessary to state precisely which of its traits found their fullest expression under present historical conditions.[7]
What distinguishes these phenomena of Caesarism, Absolutism and Bonapartism is their class basis, which is fundamentally different in each case. What unites all three is the process by which the state, and in particular the individual ruler, raises itself further and further above the rest of society as a result of the mutual exhaustion of the contending classes.
The Roman emperors rose above society and viciously oppressed the ruling class, the slave-owners, who found themselves looted by taxation, arrested, tortured and even murdered by the state. Yet this fact did not change one iota the class nature of the Roman state as a slave state. As Trotsky explained:
The sabre by itself has no independent program. It is the instrument of ‘order’. It is summoned to safeguard what exists. Raising itself politically above the classes, Bonapartism, like its predecessor Caesarism, for that matter, represents in the social sense, always and at all epochs, the government of the strongest and firmest part of the exploiters…[8]
Learn from history!
After the overthrow of the Republic, the same slave-owning aristocracy remained the ruling class and continued to hold economic power just as before. But it lost control of the state apparatus, and was compelled reluctantly to hand power to a military strong man.
Trotsky compared Bonapartist and fascist regimes to the legend of the Old Man of the Sea, who sits on the shoulders of the ruling class and guides it to safety, but at the same time digs his heels into its side and spits on its bald patch. But such a regime creates new dangers for the ruling class.
When the German bourgeoisie handed power to Hitler, as a means of preventing revolution, it lost control of the state, and was unable to regain it, even though this meant the total defeat and destruction of Germany by the end of the Second World War.
This lesson has not been lost on the bourgeoisie today, which will only resort to such a desperate measure in the very last moment, when all other avenues are closed to it. To hand the power to unstable adventurers who they cannot control is a very risky option. Apart from this, the class balance of forces today is infinitely less favourable for a Bonapartist solution.
Today, at least in the advanced capitalist countries, their preferred method of rule remains bourgeois democracy. It is far less risky and more cost-effective than the alternative. But this is a very fragile system and will be tested to the limits in the stormy period of class struggle that lies ahead.
Therefore, the lessons of the class struggles in the Roman Republic still hold great importance for the revolutionary workers and youth of today. In the words of the American philosopher George Santayana: “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”[9]
Endnotes
[1] Engels, The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State, p. 162, emphasis added.
[2] Ibid., pp. 157-8.
[3] Trotsky, ‘The German Puzzle’, August 1932, The Struggle Against Fascism in Germany, p. 349.
[4] Grant, ‘Against the Theory of State Capitalism’, 1949, The Unbroken Thread, pp. 323-3, emphasis in original.
[5] Engels, The Prussian Military Question and the German Workers’ Party, MECW, Vol. 20, pp. 72-3, emphasis in original.
[6] Trotsky, The Revolution Betrayed, p. 199.
[7] Trotsky, ‘German Bonapartism’, 30 October 1932, The Struggle Against Fascism in Germany, p. 432, emphasis in original.
[8] Trotsky, ‘Bonapartism and Fascism’, 15 July 1934, The Struggle Against Fascism in Germany, p. 577, emphasis in original.
[9] Santayana, The Life of Reason, p. 82.