krebscycle

Slavoj Žižek invokes Marx’s “18th Brumaire of Louis Napoleon"  to half-heartedly support an argument against the doctrine of human rights and Professor Corey Robin (a far more pedestrian thinker) cites Marx’s work as  "master text” in yet another tired episode of “Obama is teh suxxor”.  What makes The 18th Brumaire valuable 160 years later is the ferociously detailed reporting of events that turned out to be watersheds: the development of the first social democratic party, the success of the first right wing populist, the emergence of left wing “vanguardism” and the failure of the teleological part of Marxist theory – something Marx documents reluctantly and in deep denial.

Žižek quotes Marx ranting about the members of Louis Napoleon’s political organization in  Paris:

Alongside decayed roués with dubious means of subsistence and of dubious origin, alongside ruined and adventurous offshoots of the bourgeoisie, were vagabonds, discharged soldiers, discharged jailbirds, escaped galley slaves, swindlers, mountebanks, lazzaroni, pickpockets, tricksters, gamblers, maquereaux [pimps], brothel-keepers, porters^[*], literati, organ-grinders, rag-pickers, knife-grinders, tinkers, beggars—in short, the whole indefinite, disintegrated mass, thrown hither and thither, which the French call la bohème; from this kindred element Bonaparte formed the core of the Society of December 10

Mel Brooks (Or Richard Pryor) could not have produced a more ridiculous rant: 

Taggart: What do you want me to do, sir?

Hedley Lamarr: I want you to round up every vicious criminal and gunslinger in the west. Take this down.

[Taggart looks for a pen and paper while Hedley talks]

Hedley Lamarr: I want rustlers, cut throats, murderers, bounty hunters, desperados, mugs, pugs, thugs, nitwits, halfwits, dimwits, vipers, snipers, con men, Indian agents, Mexican bandits, muggers, buggerers, bushwhackers, hornswogglers, horse thieves, bull dykes, train robbers, bank robbers, ass-kickers, shit-kickers and Methodists.

Taggart: [finding pen and paper] Could you repeat that, sir?

It is one thing that Marx himself did not have the self-knowledge to be embarrassed at this display of Victorian bourgeois German stuffy class prejudice – one can almost hear the unspoken “and Jews and Gypsies” – but what the hell is Žižek thinking?  Here’s what he writes:

In the same way that the only common denominator of all royalist factions is republicanism, the only common denominator of all classes is the excremental excess, the refuse, the remainder, of all classes. That is to say, insofar as the leader perceives himself as standing above class interests, his immediate class base can only be the excremental remainder of all classes, the rejected non-class of each class

Žižek is so carried away by this meditation on shit and rhetorical magic show^[*] that he fails to notice Marx is in the position of an astronomer explaining away divergence from his theory of planetary movement by the personality defects of the planets (“Jupiter’s vile betrayal …”). In Marxist theory conflict between economic classes is the force that advances history. The merchants and industrialists (capitalists) dispose of Feudalism and then their own industrial development creates a disciplined massive army of industrial workers who neatly dispose of them in turn. That’s the script, anyways. But mid 19th century France refused to cooperate, so Marx blames the hipsters – who somehow don’t belong to any class at all but waltz in, to the tune of their organ grinders, pounding away in drum circles, possibly declaiming poems, dying of TB romantically and so on like just totally disrupting the parade of history, man.

(Note: Žižek is a fan of the Occupy Wall Street movement- I wonder if it has occurred to him at all that Marx was describing a group very much like the one in Liberty Park. La Boheme after all, upgraded themselves in the Western imagination just a few decades after Marx wrote and became the cutting edge artistic/revolutionary demi-monde.)

The problem that faced Marx was that France was not following the Marxist model of historical development. The bourgeois revolution of 1789 was right on schedule  (not so hard when the schedule is composed after the fact) but instead of steadily marching on towards the next phase in which the industrial working class institutes Communism on the ruins and so on, things went comically and tragically off track. The 1848 revolution of Parisian workers was defeated by the combined forces of the aristocracy,Church, Army, and merchants and then they  lost control to the populist Louis Napoleon who made himself into the Emperor – an Emperor who depended on popular support and winning elections.

Marx cannot blame this side trip on the Bohemians alone because Louis Napoleon was enormously popular among the mass of French people. And the mass of the population was the peasantry. It follows that Marx has to  blame the stupid peasants. But what could motivate the peasants to get off the Revolution bus?

Insofar as millions of families live under conditions of existence that separate their mode of life, their interests, and their culture from those of the other classes, and put them in hostile opposition to the latter, they form a class. Insofar as there is merely a local interconnection among these small-holding peasants, and the identity of their interests forms no community, no national bond, and no political organization among them, they do not constitute a class. They are therefore incapable of asserting their class interest in their own name, whether through a parliament or a convention. They cannot represent themselves, they must be represented. Their representative must at the same time appear as their master, as an authority over them, an unlimited governmental power which protects them from 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 which subordinates society to itself.

The peasants, Marx announces, grubbing away in the rural idiocy of their isolated, miserable villages look for a God-like savior to protect them and bless them with “rain”. Hence Louis Napoleon – gifted with the glory of his name if nothing else. Marx goes on to explain that the stupid peasants also love uniforms, executive power, and pomp and ceremony, and marching – perhaps also shiny objects and toys that make squeaky noise.

It seems to not occur to Marx that the hipsters and peasants may have been acting rationally in their own interests – in circumstances where there were not optimal choices. Maybe being an escaped galley slave Decemberist in Paris was not as bad as being a non-escaped galley slave, you know, in the galley. In fact, the era of Napoleon III was not bad for small-holding peasants – certainly better than the era of the Second Republic. A large number of the peasantry also supported the social democratic “Mountain” party, but it was defeated by the Party of Order – the land owners and financiers and industrialists, plus the Church and right wing parts of the Army. Under the second republic, as Marx documents, the peasantry was subjected to vicious repression – their schoolteachers were put under supervision of the hated church, their mayors were suppressed by regional governors, they were taxed, beaten, and shot. Louis Napoleon did not usher in a paradisical era for the peasantry, but he was still vastly popular (among the peasants) 20 years later and lost power due to the Prussian Army, not the displeasure of the population.

Marx’s theory clearly stated that the mass of the poor were to be freed from rural idiocy and blessed with membership in the disciplined and hardy Proletarian Army under the steely, if doomed, gaze of rationalizing bourgeois industrialists. Just like the poor suckers in the UK driven off the land into the cities. But many of us, given the choice would have preferred to live in a village in Normandy drinking apple-brandy and eating well rather than starving in some factory tenement in Lyons. Is it so hard to imagine that the peasants were not stupid, but actually preferred not to have a boss and a landlord and a fulfilling job losing limbs to steam machinery in a slum? Just a thought.

Marx the teleologist has to abandon Marx the class struggle theorist because the destination of the class struggle according to teleology and the interests of the peasant free-holder class were in conflict. Here is Marx, reluctantly testifying against himself.

The Bonaparte dynasty represents not the revolutionary, but the conservative peasant; not the peasant who strikes out beyond the condition of his social existence, the small holding, but rather one who wants to consolidate his holding; not the countryfolk who in alliance with the towns want to overthrow the old order through their own energies, but on the contrary those who, in solid seclusion within this old order, want to see themselves and their small holdings saved and favored by the ghost of the Empire. It represents not the enlightenment but the superstition of the peasant; not his judgment but his prejudice; not his future but his past; not his modern Cevennes but his modern Vendée. The three years‘ stern rule of the parliamentary republic freed a part of the French peasants from the Napoleonic illusion and revolutionized them, even though superficially; but the bourgeoisie violently repulsed them as often as they set themselves in motion. Under the parliamentary republic the modern and the traditional consciousness of the French peasant contended for mastery. The process took the form of an incessant struggle between the schoolmasters and the priests. The bourgeoisie struck down the schoolmasters. The peasants for the first time made efforts to behave independently vis-à-vis the government. This was shown in the continual conflict between the mayors and the prefects. The bourgeoisie deposed the mayors. Finally, during the period of the parliamentary republic, the peasants of different localities rose against their own offspring, the army. The bourgeoisie punished these peasants with sieges and executions. And this same bourgeoisie now cries out against the stupidity of the masses, the vile multitude that betrayed it to Bonaparte. The bourgeoisie itself has violently strengthened the imperialism of the peasant class; it has preserved the conditions that form the birthplaces of this species of peasant religion.

But what this tells is is that the free-hold peasants had been infected with the virus of human rights and resisted the capitalists efforts to return them to serfdom.   One thing Marx documents in this essay is the power of the doctrine of human rights.  Even Žižek is forced to back off – after some juggling of the standard Marxian theory that human rights is a bourgeois sham, he shamefacedly acknowledges that  it has a revolutionary potential. Actually there more of interest in Žižek’s story – including a fascinating part where (I’m sure this is entirely unconscious) he sounds something like Burke as he looks aghast at the potential of revolutionary violence to spiral into terror.

The starting point of Balibar’s text on violence is the insufficiency of the standard Hegelian-Marxist notion of ‘converting’ violence into an instrument of historical Reason, a force which begets a new social formation. […] The 20th century confronted us with catastrophes—some directed against Marxist political forces, others generated by Marxist engagement itself—which cannot be ‘rationalized’ in this way.

Robin on the other hand, is mostly interesting for what’s missing from his essay. His task is attempting to explain why the American masses are not rising up against the austerity budget he imagines the evil Obama to be promoting.  Of course, the guilty party is obvious

And here Democrats like Obama and his defenders, who bemoan the stranglehold of the Tea Party on American politics, have only themselves to blame

As a left wing professor in the Borough that contains New York’s current Bohemia, Robin cannot join Marx’s hipster bashing, but the peasants out there west of the Hudson are fair game.

If there’s a master text for this moment, it’s Marx’s Eighteenth Brumaire. Not the over-cited first time as tragedy, second time as farce line, but his astonishingly prescient analysis of the reactionary behaviour of the French peasantry during the Bourbon and July monarchies. Though the 1789 Revolution and Napoleon had liberated the peasants from their landlords, the next generation of peasants was left to confront the agricultural market from small private holdings that could not sustain them. They no longer had to pay their feudal dues, but now they had to pay their mortgages and taxes to a state that seemed to do little for them. What the state did provide, under Napoleon III, was imperial spectacle. That wasn’t nothing, as Marx noted, for in and through the army the peasants were ‘transformed into heroes, defending their new possessions against the outer world, glorifying their recently won nationality, plundering and revolutionising the world. The uniform was their own state dress; war was their poetry.’ This Marx called ‘the imperialism of the peasant class’.

In brief, Robin’s argument is that the weak Democrats having spent years whittling away government services have produced a peasant class of tax whiners who love men in uniform and so when Obama caved (as he always does in these stories) to the Republican Austerity Program, the masses  turned the TV on, popped the top of a PBR, and let it pass – much like the French Peasants of the 19th Century. 

What’s striking about Robin’s argument is that the debt limit agreement that he uses as pivot appears to be something he understands only in the most hazy way. The detailed retelling of the political/historical process is the saving of The 18th Brumaire but Robin is just reporting the cable TV/The Nation conventional wisdom. He has not attempted to look at the nitty gritty of what was adopted or even whether this “austerity budget” is smaller than the pre-austerity budget (it is not). More fundamentally, while Marx is attempting to add  non-class magic components to his theory to save it, Robin has no use at all for class analysis let alone race. You would not know from Robin’s story that Obama was African-American or that polls show strong support for increasing taxes on the rich or that the anti-tax groups that have morphed into the Tea Party are  motivated by racial animosity or that the collapse of manufacturing employment has radically changed the US labor market. You certainly would not get a taste of the oddness of right wing populism, which Robin claims arises from the paucity of state services, demanding that the Government “keep its hands off medicare” (a universal health program for older people). What remains of Marx’s hobbled class analysis is kind of a snobby distaste for the masses.

Why not look at Marx’s theory about what was happening in France by taking advantage of 150+ years of hindsight? We could see that the modern state with the mass army and bureaucracy became nearly impossible to overthrow in the West partly because it has shown a flexibility and willingness to reign in the extremism of the financial/industrial class. What Louis Napoleon did in the 1850s is quite similar to what Franklin Roosevelt did in the US in the 1930s – saved the state and the social order in the face of bitter hostility from the capitalist class.  We could see the advent of social democratic parties and their mass appeal and limits. We might wonder at the enduring appeal of Blanquism (what Fred Hampton called Custerism in the USA) which promises immediate results for the impatient.  The modern left, however, is based on nostalgia and the class interests of academics and other “knowledge workers”- it has not much interest in figuring out what political actions will improve the lot of the downtrodden.

footnotes

^[*] I’m now mystified by the presence of “porters” in such historical peaks of reaction. A porter also took Dr. Cornel West’s inauguration ticket – conspiracy or coincidence?

^[*]

Žižek, in keeping with his role as a traditional French intellectual, is both from Eastern Europe and unable to resist the hint of sadism in this argument:

At the level of the law, the state power merely represents the interests of its subjects; it serves them, is responsible to them, and is itself subject to their control. However, at the level of the superego underside, the public message of responsibility is supplemented by the obscene message of the unconditional exercise of power: ‘Laws do not really bind me, I can do to you whatever I want, I can treat you as guilty if I decide to do so, I can destroy you on a whim’. This obscene excess is a necessary constituent of the notion of sovereignty

[minor edits for clarity 3/18/2017]