Bonapartism and Fascism¶
Core Argument¶
In this July 1934 article, Trotsky mounts a rigorous theoretical polemic against the Stalinist theory of fascism, which he condemns as a catastrophic substitution of abstract, formal-logical categories for concrete dialectical analysis. The core argument is that the Stalinists, having correctly grasped that finance capital cannot permanently accommodate itself to parliamentary democracy, then mechanically apply this insight to every country and stage of development, labelling Primo de Rivera, Mussolini, Chiang Kai-Shek, Masaryk, Brüning, Dollfuss, Piłsudski, MacDonald and others indiscriminately as ‘fascist’. In doing so, they ignore that capitalism never fully accommodated itself to ‘pure’ democracy; that finance capital does not act in a void but must reckon with other bourgeois strata and working-class resistance; and that between parliamentary democracy and the fascist regime a series of transitional forms inevitably interposes itself.
Against this, Trotsky develops the concept of Bonapartism as a distinct transitional governmental form, first identified by the Bolshevik-Leninists on the basis of the German experience (the Brüning, Papen and Schleicher governments) and subsequently observed in Austria. The chapter’s central empirical focus is the Doumergue government in France, which emerged between the fascist rehearsal of civil war on 6 February 1934 and the proletarian general strike of 12 February. Trotsky argues that thanks to a relative equilibrium between the attacking counter-revolutionary camp and the defending revolutionary camp, the axis of power has been raised above classes and parliament. The government, headed by a figure from outside parliament and supported by two generals, acts not as an executive organ of the parliamentary majority but as a judge-arbiter between two camps in struggle. This is a military-police dictatorship barely concealed by parliamentary decoration — precisely what Bonapartism is.
Trotsky insists that fascism in power, like Bonapartism, can only be the government of finance capital; in this social sense it is indistinguishable from parliamentary democracy. But social questions resolve themselves in the political domain. Finance capital’s strength lies not in establishing any government at will, but in the fact that every non-proletarian government is forced to serve it. The passage from one system of domination to another, however, signifies a political crisis that may be transformed into a social danger to the bourgeoisie. Fascism is a specific means of mobilising and organising the petty bourgeoisie in the social interests of finance capital, resting upon directly opposite relations of oppressed classes compared to democracy. The political mobilisation of the petty bourgeoisie against the proletariat requires social demagogy that plays with fire for the big bourgeoisie, as confirmed by recent events in Germany.
The article concludes with a nuanced discussion of the Piłsudski regime in Poland, where differences among Polish comrades are acknowledged. Piłsudski came to power through an insurrection based on a petty-bourgeois mass movement — a fascist trait — but his regime shows greater oscillation between classes and less mass terror than Mussolini or Hitler, a Bonapartist element. Trotsky warns against opposing this real fascist regime to some ‘ideal’ fascism. He argues that Bonapartism of fascist origin (Mussolini, Hitler) is more stable than ‘preventive’ Bonapartism (Brüning-Schleicher, Doumergue), but that the regeneration of fascism into Bonapartism signifies the beginning of its end, opening new revolutionary possibilities. The revolutionary key to Europe and the world, he concludes, is now above all in France.