Bonapartist - 'Bonapartist' As A Marxist Epithet

'Bonapartist' As A Marxist Epithet

Karl Marx was a student of Jacobinism and the French Revolution as well as a contemporary critic of the Second Republic and Second Empire. He used the term Bonapartism to refer to a situation in which counterrevolutionary military officers seize power from revolutionaries, and then use selective reformism to co-opt the radicalism of the popular classes. In the process, Marx argued, Bonapartists preserve and mask the power of a narrower ruling class. He saw Napoleon I and Napoleon III as having both corrupted revolutions in France in this way. Marx offered this definition of and analysis of Bonapartism in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, written in 1852. In this document, he drew attention to what he calls the phenomenon's repetitive history with one of his most quoted lines, typically condensed aphoristically as: "History repeats itself, first as tragedy, then as farce."

A Bonapartist regime for Marx appears to have great power, but only because there is no class with enough confidence or power to firmly establish its authority in its own name, so a leader who appears to stand above the struggle can take the mantle of power. It is an inherently unstable situation where the apparently all-powerful leader is swept aside once the struggle is resolved one way or the other.

The term was used by Leon Trotsky to refer to Joseph Stalin's regime, which Trotsky believed was balanced between the proletariat, victorious but shattered by war, and the bourgeoisie, broken by the revolution but struggling to re-emerge. However the failure of Stalin's regime to disintegrate under the shock of the Second World War, and indeed its expansion into Eastern Europe, challenged this analysis. Many Trotskyists thus rejected the idea that Stalin's regime was Bonapartist, and some went further – notably Tony Cliff who described such regimes as State Capitalist and not deformed workers' states at all. In the last year of his life, Trotsky responded to these elements with the example of Napoleon's expanding empire, which brought about the abolition of serfdom in Poland and other French holdings, yet was still unarguably "Bonapartist."

Some modern-day Trotskyists and others on the left use the phrase left Bonapartist more loosely to describe those like Stalin and Mao Zedong who control left-wing or populist authoritarian regimes.