Prognosis in the light of events¶
Core Argument¶
Prognosis in the light of events
This chapter mounts a sustained polemic against Pierre Frank’s analysis of post-war European regimes, arguing that his insistence on a unbroken line of Bonapartism from Pétain through de Gaulle to the post-liberation governments is a sectarian error with dangerous political consequences. The core claim is that Anglo-American imperialism, having abandoned any serious attempt to impose Bonapartist dictatorships in Western Europe (Greece excepted), instead swung towards bourgeois democratic regimes resting on a disarmed proletariat. The evidence cited is the post-war trajectory in France, Italy, Belgium and Holland: the establishment of democratic republics, trade unions, elections, and coalition cabinets in which Christian Democratic parties collaborated with workers’ organisations. The bourgeoisie, the chapter argues, is leaning not on fascist reaction but on Catholic and parliamentary parties to mobilise petty-bourgeois opposition to the mass swing towards socialism-communism, reflected in historically high votes for communist and socialist parties.
The historical parallel drawn is Weimar Germany. The coalition of Social Democracy and the Catholic Centre was not Bonapartist, but its policy paved the way for the Kapp Putsch of 1920, a Bonapartist-monarchist coup attempt defeated by a united front general strike. When the workers in the Ruhr then attempted to seize power, the reaction joined with the social democrats to crush them, producing an unstable bourgeois democracy. The lesson is that declaring every regime fascist or Bonapartist before the decisive battle has begun confuses the vanguard and disarms it.
The chapter directly refutes the International Secretariat’s 1940 claim that a de Gaulle regime would be indistinguishable from Pétain’s Bonapartism. This is denounced as sectarian stupidity akin to the Stalinists in Germany who could not distinguish between a capitalist regime leaning on workers’ organisations and one that had abolished them. Trotsky’s characterisation of Pétain as Bonapartist is accepted, but Frank is accused of misunderstanding it: Pétain lacked the petty-bourgeois mass base of Hitler or Mussolini, making his regime weaker and dependent on foreign bayonets. The 1943 British Trotskyist resolution is held up as the correct correction, predicting a period of Kerenskyism or Popular Frontism rather than immediate Bonapartist dictatorship.
The chapter’s central theoretical distinction is between a would-be Bonaparte and a real one. De Gaulle aspired to personal power but was forced to retire, measuring the relation of forces. The task is not to declare the enemy victorious prematurely, but to warn that Stalinist and socialist policies inevitably bring the danger of Bonapartism and counter-revolution, and to prepare the proletariat to disperse the Bonapartist nests of the general staff, police and bureaucracy. To repeat the error of the German communists who called every regime fascist until Hitler arrived would be fatal for the young Trotskyist cadres.