Karl Marx and the Anarchists Paul Thomas

the other classes and to enjoy undisturbed property, family,
religion and order only on condition that their class be condemned
along with the other classes to like political nullity; that in order
to save its purse it must forfeit its crown, and the sword that is to
safeguard it must at the same time be hung over its head like the
sword of Damocles.⁵⁹

In this unexpected way, France escapes the despotism of a class for
the despotism of an individual. Louis Bonaparte’s coup d’etat changes
the role of the state; ‘as against civil society, the state machine has
consolidated its position so thoroughly that the chief of the Society of
Dec 10th [i.e. Louis Bonaparte] suffices for its head’.⁶⁰ The Bonapartist
state seems independent of any particular class, and it seems superior
to, set up against, society. But Marx adds an important qualification.
‘And yet’, he goes on, ‘the state power is not suspended in mid-air.
Bonaparte represents a class, and the most numerous class of French
society at that, the small-holding peasants.’⁶¹ Over and above Bona-
parte’s bribes to other sections of French society (his offer of tran-
quillity to the bourgeoisie, and a restoration of universal suffrage to
the workers), bribes which cancel each other out, his own class basis
is constituted by the peasantry. Indeed, the organization of so inherently
atomized a group as the French peasantry has to proceed from outside.
The peasants’ lack of cohesion makes them ‘incapable of enforcing
their class interests in their own name whether through a parliament
or a convention’. They therefore require a representative who

must at the same time appear as their master, as an authority over
them, as an unlimited governmental power that protects them
against the other classes and sends them rain and sunshine from
above. The political influence of the small-holding peasants,
therefore, finds its final expression in the executive power
subordinating society to itself.⁶²

But what is the nature of the representation involved here? The
peasants want, hope or expect that Louis Bonaparte will ‘represent’
their interests, but lack the wherewithal to oblige him to do so. Bona-
parte’s state is not the mere instrument of their will (if, indeed, they
can be said to have a common will at all). The peasants’ hopes may
have the effect of limiting somewhat the executive’s freedom of action;
but it is doubtful whether such limitation can be very severe, the
peasants themselves being hopelessly disunited. Moreover,

as the executive authority which has made itself an independent
power, Bonaparte feels it his mission to safeguard ‘bourgeois order’.
But the strength of this bourgeois order lies in the middle class.




He looks on himself, therefore, as the representative of the
middle class and issues decrees in this sense. Nevertheless, he is
somebody solely due to the fact that he has broken the political
power of the middle class and daily breaks it anew.

Nor is this all;

as against the bourgeoisie, Bonaparte looks on himself at the same
time, as the representative of the peasants and of the people in
general, who want to make the lower classes of the people happy
within the frame of bourgeois society .. . But, above all, Bonaparte
looks on himself as the chief of the society of the 10th of December,
as the representative of the lumpenproletariat to which he himself,
his entourage, his government and his army belong. . ,⁶³

Small wonder, then, that Marx, faced with this confusing welter of
‘representation’, stresses the ‘contradictory talk’ of Louis Bonaparte
and the ‘contradictions of his government, the confused groping about
which seeks now to win, now to humiliate first one class and then
another and arrays all of them uniformly against him’.⁶⁴ The point
remains that the Bonapartist state’s power of initiative remains very
largely unimpaired by the wishes and demands of any one particular
class - or faction. On the other hand, however, the balance is delicate;
for Bonapartism is in no way neutral as between contending classes.
It claims to represent all classes and to be the embodiment of society
as a whole, but it was called into being and continued to exist for the
sake of maintaining and strengthening the existing social order - one
which is based on the domination of labour by capital. Marx was later
to write that Bonapartism was, above all else, a transitional form: ‘it
was the only form of government possible at a time when the bour-
geoisie had already lost, and the working class had not yet acquired,
the faculty of ruling the nation’. It was, again,

at the same time the most prostitute and the ultimate form of
the state power which nascent middle-class society had
commenced to elaborate as a means of its own emancipation
from feudalism, and which full-grown bourgeois society had
finally transformed into a means for the enslavement of labour
by capital.⁶⁵

Ultimately, the Bonapartist state, however independent it may
have been politically from any given class in French society, remains
- and must remain in such a class society - the protector of an econ-
omically and socially dominant class. In this way, in the long run the
basic Marxist position reappears; the independence of the state, ‘soaring




high above society’, ultimately proves illusory as well as transitory.
Politics is still explicable in the last analysis only in economic terms;
ultimately, the social moorings of the Bonapartist state reveal them-
selves (‘Bonaparte would like to appear as the patriarchal benefactor
of all classes. But he cannot give to one class without taking from
another’),⁶⁶ and economics determines political movements again.

Driven by the contradictory demands of his situation and being
at the same time, like a conjuror, under the necessity of keeping
the public gaze fixed on himself. . .Bonaparte throws the entire
bourgeois economy into confusion, violates everything that seemed
inviolable to the Revolution of 1848, makes some tolerant of
revolution, others desirous of revolution, and produces actual
anarchy in the name of order, while at the same time stripping
its halo from the entire state machine, profanes it, and makes it
at once loathsome and ridiculous.⁶⁷

Marx in such statements - and there is no shortage of them in The
Gass Struggles in France and The Eighteenth Brumaire alike - may
(as Miliband thinks) or may not succeed in salvaging his original position
about the ultimate shaping of the political by the economic. Yet, over
and above this possibly contentious issue, what emerges from Marx’s
studies of French politics and society in the middle of the nineteenth
century is something for which his ruling-class theory of the state,
taken in its purest (or crudest) form, cannot prepare us. What is revealed
is a striking continuity between what Marx said in 1850-2 and what he
had said in 1843.

In periods when the political state as such comes violently to
birth in civil society. . . political life seeks to stifle its own pre-
requisites -civil society and its elements - and to establish itself
as the genuine and harmonious species-life of man. But it can
only achieve this end by setting itself in violent contradiction
with its own conditions of existence. . . [The] political drama
ends necessarily with the restoration of religion, of private
property, of all the elements of civil society, just as war ends
with the conclusion of peace ⁶⁸

While the continuity such passages reveal will come as a surprise
only to those for whom Marx’s theory of the state can have only one
face to present, or those who insist upon a rigid separation between
the ‘early’ and ‘late’ Marx (categories, incidentally, whose membership
tends to overlap), it is nevertheless a striking continuity. It is also one
to which insufficient attention has been paid in the literature on Marx’s
theory of the state. Yet what is Bonapartism but an attempt ‘to transform




the purpose of the state into the purpose of bureaucracy and the
purpose of bureaucracy into the purpose of the state’ - the very danger,
implicit in ‘political emancipation’, Marx had warned against a decade
earlier? Bonapartism signified that

every common interest was immediately severed from society,
counterposed to it as a higher,general interest, snatched from
the activity of society’s members themselves and made an object
of government activity, from a bridge, a schoolhouse and the
communal property of a village community to the railways, the
national wealth and national university of France.⁶⁹

This expropriation, to be sure, had its conditions. Every previous
revolution, as Marx put it, had consolidated ‘the centralized state
power, with its ubiquitous organs of standing army, police, bureau-
cracy, clergy and judicature’ so that the political character of the state
had changed

simultaneously with the economic changes of society. At the
same pace at which the progress of modern industry developed,
widened, intensified the class antagonism between capital and
labour, the state power assumed more and more the character
of the national power of capital over labour, of a public force
organized for social enslavement, of an engine of class despotism.
After every revolution marking a progressive phase in the class
struggle, the purely repressive character of the state power stands
out in bolder and bolder relief.⁷⁰

All previous revolutions, in other words, had ‘perfected this [state]
machine instead of smashing it. The parties that contended in turn for
domination regarded the possession of this huge state edifice as the
principal spoils of the victors’.⁷¹ Small wonder, then, that Marx was to
insist in 1871 that ‘the working class cannot simply lay hold of the
ready-made state machinery, and wield it for its own purposes’.⁷²
Marx’s address, The Civil War in France, insisted that ‘the direct anti-
thesis to the empire [of Louis Bonaparte] was the Commune’ of 1871
because the Commune was the ‘positive form’ of ‘a Republic that was
not only to supersede the monarchical form of class rule, but class
rule itself’.⁷³

The most positive feature of the Paris Commune, according to
Marx, was precisely that it de-institutionalized political power, and in
so doing re-politicized society. ‘Public functions ceased to be the vital
property of the tools of the Central Government. Not only municipal
administration, but the whole initiative hitherto exercised by the State
was laid into the hands of the Commune.’⁷⁴ Society seized hold of the


conditions of its own existence;

the unity of the nation was not to be broken, but, on the contrary,
to be organized by the Communal Constitution and to become a
reality by the destruction of the State power which claimed to be
the embodiment of that unity independent of, and superior to,
the nation itself, of which it was but a parasitic excrescence. While
the merely repressive organs of the old governmental power were
to be amputated, its legitimate functions were to be wrested from
an authority usurping pre-eminence over society itself, and restored
to the responsible agents of society.⁷⁵

Marx’s characterization of the ‘Communal Constitution’ is all too
clearly couched in terms of, in the very idiom of, ‘human’ as opposed
to ‘political’ emancipation. ‘The Communal Constitution’, says Marx,
‘would have restored to the social body all the forces hitherto absorbed
by the state parasite feeding upon, and clogging the free movement of,
society. By this one act’, he continues, ‘it would have initiated the
regeneration of France.’ Marx’s description of its attributes is far-
reaching.

It was a thoroughly expansive political form, while all previous
forms of government had been emphatically repressive. Its true
secret was this. It was essentially a working-class government,
the product of the struggle of the producing class against the
appropriating class, the political form at last discovered under
which to work out the economic emancipation of labour.

Except on this last condition, the Commune would have been
an impossibility and a delusion. The political rule of the producer
cannot coexist with the perpetuation of his social slavery. The
Commune was therefore to serve as a lever for uprooting the
economical foundations upon which rests the existence of classes,
and therefore of class rule. With labour emancipated, every man
becomes a working man, and productive labour ceases to be a
class attribute.⁷⁶

Marx’s praise of the Commune - his insistence that it was ‘the true
representative of all the healthy elements in French society’, ‘the bold
champion of the emancipation of labour’, and (most markedly) ‘the
glorious harbinger of a new society’⁷⁷ - has seemed exaggerated as well
as fulsome to some commentators. We now know of Marx’s private
reservations about the Commune’s political pusillanimity, about its
social composition and about the shortcomings of its ideology. (‘The
majority of the Commune was in no way socialist, nor could it be’,
Marx wrote - not at all inaccurately - ten years later in the privacy of


a letter.)⁷⁸ Much - if not all - of the apparent inconsistency involved in
Marx’s successive responses can be explained not simply by Marx’s
evident desire to make political capital from the onset of a revolutionary
movement that owed little enough to him, but also by Marx’s concern
to distinguish between what the Commune actually achieved - the
practical measures it effected were, after all, negligible - and what the
Commune represented. The draft manuscript of The Civil War in
France defines the Commune as

the reabsorption of the State power by society as its own living
forces instead of as forces controlling and subduing it, by the
popular masses themselves forming their own force instead of the
organized force of their suppression - the political form of their
emancipation, instead of the artificial force (appropriated by their
oppressors) ... of society wielded for their oppression for their
enemies.⁷⁹

That this idiom carries over into the somewhat firmer syntax of the
address Marx eventually delivered should not surprise us; it is, very
much, the idiom of Marx’s earlier writings on the French state - and,
by extension, of his earliest writings on the modern state in general,
including ‘On the Jewish Question’. The very concept of the bureau-
cratic state - which disfigures and distorts as well as reflects the society
that gave it birth - signifies the separation between the citizens and the
means to their common action, the progressive extension of the sphere
of alien regulation of life in society. It is for this reason that Marx in
The Civil War in France stresses the Commune’s de-institutionalization
of political power to the marked extent he does. This de-institutional-
ization cuts through the usurpation (and mystification) of men’s
conscious control over the social conditions of their lives; it is an act
of re-appropriation of what had been alienated away. And it is this
reappropriation that gives the Commune - for all its shortcomings -
universal significance. The problem had been that of returning to
society all the prerogatives usurped by the state so that socialized
man - man as the subject of his own existence instead of an object
worked upon by, and at the disposal of, alien forces - would freely
associate with his fellows. Men associated in this way would control
the totality of their social lives and become ‘masters of their own
movement’. Prior to the Commune this statement had to be written
in the conditional tense; what lent the Commune general, universal
significance is its character as exemplar, as prolegomenon. Working
men had shown, had demonstrated practically that they could take
control of their own conditions of existence - and it is for this, above
all else, that Marx applauds them in his address.

What makes such action political-indeed, what makes it the prototype




of the political action Marx had in mind for the proletariat - is its
character as the re-capturing of alienated social capacities. What Marx
acclaimed about the Paris Commune was that, unlike any previous
social convulsion, it had sought not the consolidation of state power
in different hands but its destruction. Whereas every previous revolution
had merely consolidated ‘the centralized state power, with its ubiqui-
tous organs of standing army, police, bureaucracy, clergy and judicature’
(so that ‘after every revolution marking a progressive phase in the class
struggle, the purely repressive character of the state power stands out in
bolder and bolder relief), the Commune would have ‘restored to the
social body all the forces hitherto absorbed by the state parasite feeding
upon, and clogging, the free movement of, society’. Marx stressed the
Commune’s popular, democratic, egalitarian character and heartily
approved also the way in which ‘not only municipal administration
but the whole initiative hitherto exercised by the State was laid into
the hands of the Commune’. While the communal form of government
was to apply even to the ‘smallest country hamlet’,

‘the unity of the nation was not to be broken, but, on the contrary,
to be organized by the Communal Constitution and to become a
reality by the destruction of the state power which claimed to be
the embodiment of that unity independent of, and superior to,
the nation itself, from which it was but a parasitic excrescence.⁸⁰

In Marx’s notes the language, if more awkward, is even stronger:

This was a revolution not against this or that legitimate,
constitutional, republican, imperialist [Marx, as in The Eighteenth