Bonapartism, Fascism and War¶
Core Argument¶
In his polemic against Dwight Macdonald, Trotsky refutes any suggestion that he equates fascism with a simple repetition of Bonapartism. He argues that fascism contains a Bonapartist element—the elevation of state power above society born of extreme class struggle—but this is a Bonapartism of imperialist decline, qualitatively distinct from that of the bourgeoisie’s revolutionary ascent. Pure Bonapartism, exemplified by Brüning, Schleicher, or Pétain, is inherently unstable and inadequate for the needs of modern imperialism. Imperialism must mobilise the petty bourgeoisie to crush the proletariat when the latter fails to seize power. The sharpness of the social crisis stems from the monopoly of trusts, which has rendered the law of value and the market incapable of regulating the economy, making state intervention an objective necessity.
The Second World War deepens the dynamics of the first. Unlike 1914, when revolutionaries were caught unawares and Lenin relegated socialist revolution to the distant future, the Bolsheviks’ success came not from opposing the defence of the bourgeois fatherland but from the slogan “All Power to the Soviets!”. Fascism succeeds as the final link of a cycle: capitalist crisis, working-class radicalisation, petty-bourgeois despair, proletarian exhaustion, and collective neurosis. In the United States, radicalisation has only just begun; war may interrupt it, but the problem of power will soon be posed. The Stalinists may ride a revolutionary wave, as the Mensheviks and Socialist Revolutionaries did, but fascism is not an alternative to socialism. It is capitalism’s desperate attempt to perpetuate itself because the proletariat, paralysed by opportunist parties, failed to make the socialist revolution in time.
In Germany, two revolutionary situations occurred: 1918-19 and 1923-24. As late as 1929, a direct struggle for proletarian power remained possible. In each case, the Social Democracy and the Comintern criminally and viciously disrupted the conquest of power, thereby placing society in an impasse. Only under these conditions and in this situation did the stormy rise of fascism and its seizure of power prove possible.