Chris Cutrone

Just as every cop is a criminal
And all the sinners saints
As heads is tails, just call me Lucifer
‘Cause I’m in need of some restraint
— Rolling Stones, “Sympathy for the Devil” (1968)

Two theories

THERE ARE TWO DISTINCT THEORIES of “Bonapartism”: one liberal; the other Marxist. The liberal theory of Bonapartism is about “strong-man rule” and focused on the character of the political leader; the Marxist theory is with respect to the role of the state in capitalism. Liberalism takes Napoleon Bonaparte or Julius Caesar as exemplary; Marxism developed its theory on the occasion and figure of Louis Bonaparte particularly, but also other contemporary phenomena more generally, such as Palmerston, Gladstone and Disraeli in the UK, and Bismarck in Prussian Empire Germany. Bonapartism for Marxism is not Napoleon but Louis. For what happened historically between them is capitalism — the necessity and possibility of socialism.

Louis Bonaparte was for Marx a Bonapartist figure from his very election as President of the Second Republic in 1848, and not merely after his “18^th Brumaire” coup d’état in 1851 or in his Second Empire of 1852–70. Moreover, the Marxist theory addressed Bonapartism as an expression of the crisis of bourgeois society and the state in capitalism, linked to its dialectical opposite: the historical necessity of the dictatorship of the proletariat. Needless to say, liberalism does not concur with this latter conclusion.

Napoleon Bonaparte, who famously blamed “ideologists” for the travails of the Revolution, later prognosed from prison in exile on St. Helena that in “50 years Europe will be either Cossack or republican.” That meant that if the democratic republic — the revolution — did not prevail, it would be the police-state instead. He didn’t reckon with capitalism for this outcome. Marx concluded that the necessity of the dictatorship of the proletariat was the condition for achieving the democratic republic — but on the way to the “withering away of the state,” in overcoming capitalism and achieving socialism and communism. The achievement of the proletarian socialist revolution will be the final battle of democracy. But the result of the frustrated 1848 revolutions was what Marx called the “Cossack republic” — Bonapartism: the state as its own special caste ruling over society.

Louis Bonaparte was a repetition of Napoleon insofar as there are still political figures trying simultaneously to revolutionize and preserve the state. But in the era of capitalism it is not the squabbling of political factions driving the need for a strong leader to master them, but the subordination of politics to bureaucratic imperatives necessitated by capitalism, in which the apparent political leader is actually just a figurehead of a process of rule that constrains the very choices available from which politicians can possibly choose. The Marxist view of capitalism is that the needs of capital overrule all other considerations. But this can appear as a function of the mere failure of politics; whereas in actuality it is the self-contradiction of society in capitalism that drives antinomical values and irresolvable conflicts, presenting impossible choices among bad alternatives. Such choices can be deferred and avoided, or done in hidden and unaccountable ways.

One way that the state mediates society is through political parties that vet and select viable political characters who can serve the role of making bureaucracy something to which the public can assent: a convincing rationalization for what must be done anyway. This means that political parties will be present only as necessary to perform this mediation. Insofar as they are unnecessary for bureaucracy to function, they will wither in their ability to win the popular consent of the governed. Discontents will provoke crises of political parties and their renovation, or the emergence of new parties to take their place.

In this respect, Bonapartism is a tendency of the state and politics in capitalism, endemic but expressed more or less prominently at different moments in its history.

Bonapartism in the 20^th century

20^th-century Marxism regarded the new phenomenon of fascism as a species of Bonapartism — Leon Trotsky considered Stalinism in the USSR, which was not personal but bureaucratic rule, as a phenomenon of Bonapartism. (Liberals called Stalinism “red fascism”; many 20^th-century Marxists agreed.) How did Marx and Marxism define Bonapartism? It was a situation in which the “bourgeoisie can no longer, and the proletariat not yet rule.” This increasingly took the form of either the exacerbation of class struggle or the submerging of class in the Marxist sense into the mass of society, seen in the indistinct separation of, yet still opposition between society and the state. This was for Marxism not a contingent circumstance but a permanent condition of capitalism after 1848. As Walter Benjamin put it, the “state of emergency” is not momentary but constant: it is not the exception but the rule.^[1] What characterized Bonapartism for Marxism? The state rising above society and becoming a power in itself — indeed as an end in itself. This is increasingly the case as capitalism develops — as the contradiction and crisis of capitalism grows.

What was the “contradiction and crisis of capitalism,” according to Marxism? The contradiction of “bourgeois social relations of labor” and “industrial forces of production.” In capitalism; this was a crisis of “socialism or barbarism”: capitalism was barbarized bourgeois society, necessitating socialism — workers were reduced from humanistic free artisans in society to wage-slave “appendages of the machine.” The state in capitalism is the key phenomenon of this: not Hobbes’s majestic Leviathan of the bourgeois social contract but a monstrous abomination, the Behemoth of damnation in the Devil’s bargain of capitalism.

Bonapartism is characterized for Marxism by precisely the inability of leading political figures to render society and the state tractable: Louis Bonaparte is the “farce,” compared to Napoleon’s (and Caesar’s) “tragedy,” because of his futility; he is not a cunning hero but a comedic villain. Where celestial forces swirl around a protagonist of Divine Fate, instead, we have the folly and error of someone who is merely “human, all-too human” (Nietzsche): not punished but merely scorned by the gods. While the conquering Napoleon summoned Goethe to insist that “there is no Destiny, only politics,” he was for Hegel nonetheless the “World Soul” of eternal History^[2] when he rode his horse into town at the young professor’s first academic appointment. Louis Bonaparte is not the substantial character of political action, but a holographic projection of greater forces that neither he nor anyone else can master: “Bonapartism” is Marx/ism’s term for the self-alienation of politics in capitalism. As Marx summed it up about the plebeian masses in capitalism (petite bourgeoisie, lumpenproletariat, et al. — including workers, insofar as they are not self-organized into a social and political force of their own): they cannot represent themselves; they must be represented; they will be represented.^[3] Bonapartism means the state represents everyone and no one. The state is universal but also its own particular interest.

Police and military are “citizens in uniform” — as are bureaucrats — and hence playing a role that anyone could; and yet in capitalism they become their own specific caste apart from everyone. This is not merely a function of specialized knowledge but of role: the peculiar political role of the state in capitalism. Bureaucracy is considered by Marxism to be endemic in capitalism differently from its role in traditional civilization, which was of course a caste system that bourgeois society is not or at least is not supposed to be. Bureaucracy is a function of reification of social and political activity in an alienated society.

For liberalism, by contrast, Bonapartism is a historical accident and mistake to be avoided; like all crime, it is the responsibility of a bad actor. For Marxism, however, it is not an error or moral infraction of wrong choice but inevitable, because it expresses a necessity in capitalism: if the historical necessity of the dictatorship of the proletariat leading to socialism is not met, then the inexorable result is Bonapartism. What is this necessity? For the state to manage the crisis of capitalism.

Liberalism treats Bonapartism as the cause; whereas for Marxism it is only the effect. This feature of the capitalist state is more or less prominent; but it is not an acute but a chronic condition: it is not a bug of the political system but its very origin. “Out, damned spot!” is the guilty conscience of political action: “To be, or not to be, that is the question.” But this is not a question of the supposed violent founding of the political state.

Marxism agreed with liberal political thought that society should subordinate the state; and politics would be of minimal importance in the life and course of mankind. What raised politics to its primacy in the 19^th century was the “social question” that drove the popular demand for “democracy”: the need for the state to ameliorate the condition of the proletariat. Emergency measures were meant only to return bourgeois society to its normal life of peaceful commerce, without coercive force or violence. But the capitalist state established new institutions of police and prisons and a permanent standing army. The police are Bonapartist, not the politicians trying to control them; Bonapartism is the police-state, not the elected civilian authorities mandated by democracy. The police are meant to be the instruments of politics; but politics becomes the instrument of the state.

With the police-state also comes lawfare, which is no less Bonapartist, in that it reduces the law to a weapon and the judiciary to a competing executive authority. The law becomes mere power-play of casuistic manipulation. It is, as Edmund Burke warned about what the Jacobins represented, the rule of sophistry in service of venality. Shakespeare might have been critical of the motives for characters uttering “first, we kill all the lawyers,” but they appear justified today.

How did such a counterrevolution against the original bourgeois revolution and modern liberal-democratic republic come about? Through the need to control the proletariat: the more or less chronically unemployed masses constantly produced by capitalism out of the petite bourgeoisie; those thrown in and out of wage-labor in the continuously revolutionized industrial society. This called for extraordinary powers of the state, clamored for not only by the capitalist haute bourgeoisie but by the workers themselves: the social security and welfare programs demanded to counteract the displacements of capitalist upheaval — no one can count on the wages earned either by themselves or members of their family — and the forces required to contain the pathologies of the increasing numbers of broken and breaking members of the disintegrating social contract. There is no social-welfare-state without the police-state. The state is inseparable from the spreading cancer in the organic metabolism of society, in the end for which the cure proves to be worse than the disease; but there are no other available treatments for the inescapable condition. There is only political wrangling to try to control it, which in the end proves futile. It is much easier for the police to get rid of politicians than the reverse.

Marxism disagreed with liberalism that a strong constitution would stave off and prevent the malady; what happened instead was the constant abrogation of the law in order to preserve the law: “bourgeois fanatics for order are shot down on their balconies in the name of order”^[4] — by workers armed by the state. Worse still, the state itself becomes inseparable from crime: the powerful are merely the stronger criminals; the police are merely the most powerful gang, observing an honor code for protecting its own colors. And “politics” became indistinguishable from racketeering: as Foucault wryly commented, the “path of power leads to either politics or prison” — often both. To fall from the grace of political favor means being charged with a criminal offense. Politics becomes the court intrigue of clannish dynastic struggles; more prosaically, it means bureaucratic in-fighting among craven careerists, reduced to mere profiteering off the public misery once they realize the limited good they can do. In capitalism, bureaucratic “experts” are competent not in their fields of specialization so much as in gaming the system, in which public benefit is only a by-product of their private vice (the reverse of Mandeville’s “private vice leading to public benefit”^[5] in competition that proves to be cooperation). This potential abuse was supposed to be curtailed by limiting power; but society in its capitalist deformations and pathologies requires greater scope of action than can ever be admitted in principle. Everyone does what they can get away with, clothed in the justification of exigency — until they find themselves caught out and exposed, if and when their actions fail to serve adequately the interests of other powerful people.

Superficially, this picture resembles Ancient Athens or Rome, or perhaps the Italian Renaissance of the Medicis and Borgias. But, no, this is a specifically modern problem of capitalism.

Trump: Bonaparte contra Bonapartism?

Donald Trump arrived as a tribune of the people to vanquish “Crooked Hillary and Joe,” who seemed to symbolize everything that had seemingly gone wrong in the prior two (or three) Presidencies: the bankrupt frauds of neoliberalism and neoconservatism under (Clinton,) Bush and Obama; but he ended up confronting the Deep State instead. The drama that has unfolded on the political stage of the Age of Trump has been “phantasmagorical” indeed: it is a shadow-play of smoke-and-mirrors in the lurid lantern show at the apparent twilight of the American Empire.

“Conspiracy theories” are the essence of Bonapartism as a political phenomenon. The opening act of “Who killed Vince Foster?,” and the “vast Right-wing conspiracy” of “bimbo explosions” detonating around Monica Lewinsky’s blue dress, was shuffled off the stage, in favor of 9/11 “Truth,” and finally replaced by Pizzagate Washington pedophile rings revealed by QAnon; the Dirty Dossier and “Pee Tape” speculated by MI6 and Hillary Clinton; Mossad’s Kompromat factory on Epstein Island; and Hunter Biden’s Laptop from Hell — loudly attested by top intelligence officers to have “all the hallmarks of a Russian disinformation campaign.” Who’s the actual Manchurian Candidate, and who are they working for? Russia? Israel? China? Ukraine? Various kingdoms of the Arabian Peninsula? The KGB surviving the demise of the USSR? The Illuminati? Davos? Bohemian Grove? Reptilians of the Hollow Earth? UFOs/UAPs? — There is more than enough evidence to “prove” them all.

The opacity is the point — the paranoia of misapprehension: the seeming impossibility of ever getting to the bottom of things in politics. The point is that with bureaucratic rule in the administrative state, the left hand doesn’t know what the right hand is doing. Did Anthony Fauci expose us to COVID or save us from it? Perhaps both. Trump’s crusade against the Deep State and its elusive, apparently “secret” ruling class is either insincere, part of the ruse pulling the wool over our eyes; or, if sincere, quixotic. In any case it’s a wild gamble, by either Trump himself or the public that voted for him. Trump is “keeping all his promises,” and has been (painfully) transparent in all his actions. Elon Musk joined Trump on stage for the variety act as either point-man or fall-guy: he’s actually running the government as the power behind the throne; or perhaps he’s a court-jester as celebrity volunteer from the audience for performing a magic trick — the richest dupe of the powers-that-be the world has even seen, whose wealth is just that much liability when his wild goose chase comes up empty — in either deuces or snake-eyes. DOGE’s slashing the Deep State turned out to be a fool’s errand. At the same time, there are such lingering questions from recent political history as: who couped Joe Biden; why was his Afghanistan withdrawal — prepared politically by Trump — so botched; how was Kamala picked to begin with; and even “What is a woman?” (Why are we even asking such questions?)

How did all this happen? — Where did it go so completely wrong? But wasn’t it happening all the time? Trump’s election besets the “Left” with problems going back at least a couple of generations now. Like the New Left, culminating not in “revolution” but Nixon in 1968 and Reagan in 1980, all the talk of “socialism” for the last couple of decades resulted in: Trump. Does this mean that he is Hitler stopping Communism? Of course not.

The Nixonite true believers in the “Unitary Executive” are not seized by the ghost of Carl Schmitt, formulating Constitutional justifications for a “fascist” seizure of power, albeit in American terms. No. The problem goes back to the height of the American Century itself: Eisenhower’s specter of the “Military-Industrial Complex™.” If the Deep State killed (both) Kennedy(s and Malcolm and MLK) and ousted Nixon, then perhaps the same struggle is being fought out today. If the American Republic became an Empire in Vietnam and the War on Terror, then the silver-spooned draft-dodger has come to stop it. Can it be done? Liberalism will claim to try; but Marxism says: no.

Unlike the Bonaparte of Bonapartism, as either hero or villain, Trump is coming not at the beginning but the end of a history — or the dawn of a new one. He repeats the history of either the liberal or Marxist story of Bonapartism: both and neither. We are always in capitalism simultaneously in 1776/1789 and 1848/1876: in bourgeois revolution and capitalist counterrevolution. The infamous John Eastman Memo, seeking to justify Trump’s disputing the electoral outcome of 2020, pointed as precedence to two very different events: the Jeffersonian Revolution of 1800; and the counterrevolution against Reconstruction in 1876 — the former defending and extending the spirit of the American Revolution; the latter bringing about an “18^th Brumaire” coup against the intentions of Lincoln and U.S. Grant and the results of the revolutionary Civil War and its abolition of slavery, to “restore order” and consolidate a Bonapartist capitalist state in America.

We have been told not to “normalize” Trump; we are asked what we are currently doing when “first they come for . . .” and during an “actual genocide.” How will history judge Trump? How will posterity judge us? But this is indeed the “normal” state of affairs during the history of capitalism — even given Benjamin’s warning against treating “fascism as the norm.” History is not coming to an end; its bloody saga will continue.

Deportations

For instance, Trump’s unjust deportations are clearly political in character: he promised to deport the “Palestine solidarity” protesters (“useful idiots” and the rest) and all the immigrants Biden let in when he opened the border — especially and starting with the gangsters. — Indeed, it’s very easy to find links for the Palestine protests to actual gangsters through Hamas, since terrorism necessarily operates in the criminal netherworld, as does of course capitalist politics more generally; and anyway, not only the politicians but the universities and their “good works” are funded and founded by the more or less dirty, laundered money of ill-gotten gains — organized crime. But the Palestinians’ only hope is Trump; and Trump is deporting people now at a slower pace than Biden or Obama.

It’s not as if there weren’t unjust detentions and deportations before Trump: it’s just that he is proudly demagoguing and photo op-ing them in broad daylight; whereas previously it went on in the dark of night — it is the latter not the former which is characteristic of the Bonapartist state for Marxism. While Trump could be challenged in the public sphere and voted upon, Biden and Obama could not; it’s hard to say exactly that Trump was elected to institute injustice, that his voters wanted to strengthen the state — one could argue that it was quite the opposite. The outcome of a plebiscite is always ambiguous, but especially in capitalist politics. Are the voters saints or sinners? No matter: the bureaucratic machine, once set in motion, as a function more or less of popular will, is necessarily and not accidentally — inevitably — a juggernaut rolling over all questions of justice. It’s all apparently very “democratic.”

Everyone hates the cops until they need them; and aren’t our taxes paying for the police salaries, so shouldn’t they serve the public better — serve and not abuse us? But: police cannot exist without wrongful arrests and unjustified use of force; prosecutors cannot exist without wrongful convictions; prisons cannot exist without innocent people languishing and dying in them. But focusing on the brutality of deportations leaves aside the violence of migration itself, for instance and not least, the rank exploitation and profiteering and even enslavement of “human trafficking” that is inseparable from it — against which Trump loudly proclaims to be fighting, and indeed as his priority concern.

Trump’s opponents don’t have the monopoly on compassion. Far from it. From the very moment he descended the golden escalator of Trump Tower, he called out by name the “rapists and murderers” of the cartels controlling the Mexican border. Who are their primary victims? The migrants themselves. As Marx long ago observed, right is on both sides of the contradictions of capitalism; and each side in its one-sidedness demagogues everything, such that all public exposés and accusations of injustice serve as just so much apologetic propaganda and political cover on the part of the accusers. Meanwhile, the needs of capitalism grind on.

Bonapartism and socialism

Where Hegel found in Napoleon the rogue to play a hero’s part, in Louis Bonaparte and other contemporary phenomena Marx finds that even heroes inevitably play the part of rogues in capitalism. Even and perhaps especially trying to do good results in evil: as Hegel described it, “the Unreason which is associated not only with them, but even (rather we might say especially) with good designs and righteous aims.”^[6] This is where liberalism maintains a point: we should avoid empowering the state as much as possible; but Marxism recognizes that this is actually impossible in capitalism. If we don’t understand that Trump is actually trying to do good, then we will understand nothing about what is really happening and why.

Napoleon was a Jacobin, and Louis Bonaparte was a Saint-Simonian Utopian Socialist. They claimed to defend the Revolution, but expressed its inherent limits. In the case of Louis Bonaparte, or Bonapartism per se, those limits are those of capitalism. The political limits of capitalism are found in bureaucratic rule.

Where liberalism treats the history of capitalism as the end of the world, Marxism finds the end of the world, as ever, in History.  As Adorno wrote, “the world has survived its downfall”^[7]; but “its end today is not the end.”^[8] Our farce in the Play for Today is that the Kafkaesque bureaucratic labyrinth is not a grand Existential allegory but a real one: “There is an infinite amount of hope in the universe, but not for us.” — Kafka’s humor is easily lost on the melancholic! For Marxism, there was no way out of politics but politics; but only as socialist politics: the struggle for the dictatorship of the proletariat — not as a millennial dream, but as the real bid for power against the capitalist state. Will it end in tragedy? ( — Children, please don’t go to prison!)

Whether as Napoleon or Louis, with Trump as with them, “Bonapartism” is not Bonaparte: not the figure, but the condition is historically significant. But this still means that “there is no Destiny, only politics.” There will be a future for capitalism and capitalist politics; will there be for socialism — will there be the “class struggle” for the dictatorship of the proletariat, or only the Bonapartism of the capitalist state?

For Marxism, the only politics that matters in capitalism — the only actual politics of world-historic consequence — is the “class struggle”; but: “Only he is a Marxist who extends the recognition of the class struggle to the recognition of the dictatorship of the proletariat” (Lenin, The State and Revolution). Today, we have only the pseudo-politics of the delusional pseudo-reality and the “normative psychosis of the political social world”^[9] of the state in capitalism: it is Bonapartism — not Bonaparte. | P

^[1] Walter Benjamin, “On the Concept of History” (1940), in Selected Writings: Volume 4, 1938–1940, eds. Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings, trans. Harry Zohn, et al. (Cambridge: The Belknap Press, 2006), 392.

^[2] For what is eternal in history is freedom — its transformation. From G. W. F. Hegel, Introduction to the Philosophy of History, in The Philosophy of History, trans. J. Sibree (Kitchener: Batoche Books, 2001), 96, 127–28: “While we are thus concerned exclusively with the Idea of Spirit, and in the History of the World regard everything as only its manifestation, we have, in traversing the past — however extensive its periods — only to do with what is present; for philosophy, as occupying itself with the True, has to do with the eternally present. Nothing in the past is lost for it, for the Idea is ever present; Spirit is immortal; with it there is no past, no future, but an essential now. This necessarily implies that the present form of Spirit comprehends within it all earlier steps. These have indeed unfolded themselves in succession independently; but what Spirit is it has always been essentially; distinctions are only the development of this essential nature. The life of the ever present Spirit is a circle of progressive embodiments, which looked at in one aspect still exist beside each other, and only as looked at from another point of view appear as past. The grades which Spirit seems to have left behind it, it still possesses in the depths of its present. . . .

“Spirit once more driven back upon itself, produces its work in an intellectual shape, and becomes capable of realizing the Ideal of Reason from the Secular principle alone. Thus it happens, that in virtue of elements of Universality, which have the principle of Spirit as their basis, the empire of Thought is established actually and concretely. The antithesis of Church and State vanishes. The Spiritual becomes reconnected with the Secular, and develops this latter as an independently organic existence. The State no longer occupies a position of real inferiority to the Church, and is no longer subordinate to it. The latter asserts no prerogative, and the Spiritual is no longer an element foreign to the State. Freedom has found the means of realizing its Ideal — its true existence. This is the ultimate result which the process of History is intended to accomplish, and we have to traverse in detail the long track which has been thus cursorily traced out. Yet length of Time is something entirely relative, and the element of Spirit is Eternity. Duration, properly speaking, cannot be said to belong to it.”

^[3]  Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (1852), in The Marx-Engels Reader, ed. Robert C. Tucker, second ed. (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1978), 608.

^[4] Ibid., 603.

^[5] The Fable of the Bees (1714).

^[6] Hegel, Introduction, 34.

^[7]  Theodor W. Adorno, “Those Twenties” (1962), in Critical Models: Interventions and Catchwords, trans. Henry W. Pickford (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005), 47.

^[8]  Theodor W. Adorno, “Reflections on Class Theory” (1942), in Can One Live after Auschwitz? A Philosophical Reader, ed. Rolf Tiedemann, trans. Rodney Livingstone, et al. (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003), 110.

^[9] “Pseudo-politics” and “pseudo-reality” are terms of Adorno; the “normative psychosis of the political social world” is a phrase by the Marxist-informed Freudian psychoanalyst Juliet Mitchell: “the normative delusions of an acceptable psychotic status quo, which is what our political world very often is.” See E. Efe Çakmak and Bülent Somay, “There is never a psychopathology without the social context: An interview with Juliet Mitchell,” Eurozine (April 12, 2006), <https://www.eurozine.com/there-is-never-a-psychopathology-without-the-social-context/>.