Chapter 11 – Results and Prospects
Part 4
What
characterises a Bonapartist regime, therefore, is this fusion between
the state power, and the governmental power, as opposed to the normal
situation in a democratic republic (and this applies to a bourgeois
state as well as to a workers' state), in which there is a tension
between the governmental power and the state power. The tension
arises, precisely as a manifestation of democracy (whether bourgeois
democracy or workers democracy, and the same can be said about
relations under feudalism).
“On
the other hand, its political interests compelled it to increase
daily the repressive measures and therefore the resources and the
personnel of the state power, while at the same time it had to
wage an uninterrupted war against public opinion and mistrustfully
mutilate, cripple, the independent organs of the social movement,
where it did not succeed in amputating them entirely. Thus the
French bourgeoisie was compelled by its class position to
annihilate, on the one hand, the vital conditions of all
parliamentary power, and therefore, likewise, of its own, and to
render irresistible, on the other hand, the executive power
hostile to it.”
(The
Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, Chapter 4)
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The
governmental power, in the presence of democracy, arises out of some
form of parliament, which is the product of a process of democracy,
which to one degree or another, reflects the heterogeneous nature of
the society, and the electorate. Even in Presidential systems, such
as exist in France and the US, the executive power of the President
is constrained by a series of checks and balances, from parliamentary
institutions, the Assembly and the Congress, in these cases.
Hobbes,
in Leviathan, talks about the sovereign generally in the sense
we understand by that term, meaning an absolute monarch. But, Hobbes
also says that the sovereign does not need to be considered solely in
this way. Once a basis of the state is established, he says,
essentially once a constitution is determined, the sovereign could be
an elected body, on the proviso that this body, like the absolute
monarch, once appointed, has sole right to appoint its successors.
In
fact, what Hobbes is describing here is the foundation of the modern
permanent state bureaucracy. It is this permanent state that is the
real sovereign, with the governmental power acting merely as a
decoration that provides a safety valve for civil society.
The
evidence of that is that whenever the governmental power oversteps
the mark, it is reined in by the state power. Anyone who has studied
British Constitution, even to GCSE level, knows that the permanent
state bureaucracy has ample means of doing that by normal
constitutional channels; anyone who has worked in central or local
government knows where the real power lies, and it is not with the
elected politicians. A reading of Dick Crossman's Diaries gives an
indication of the means by which the bureaucracy can capture
ministers or committee chairs, and so on. “Yes Minister”
was only a comedic caricature of the reality.
And,
of course, if those means are not sufficient, the permanent state has
other options. The courts can intervene as they did over Trump's
travel bans, and May's attempts to by-pass parliament over Brexit.
The central bank can intervene, in relation to economic policy, often
in conjunction with global financial capital, to cause spikes in
interest rates, runs on the currency, and so on.
And,
as Trump has found out recently, because the permanent state controls
all of the information, it can release information that may or may
not be true, in order to mobilise the media, and thereby public
opinion, so as to push politicians in particular directions. Rumours
were continually spread, in the 1960's, about Labour ministers,
including Wilson, being Russian agents. The US security services and
FBI, have a similar power today, in relation to Trump's
administration. The plot of the current series of “Homeland” is again only a dramatisation of the actual functioning of the state,
and its manipulation of the elected politicians.
In
the US, we have seen not only this political meat grinder chew up and
spit out Trump's more nonsensical policies, but also the way it
erodes his support base, within the administration, chipping away at
his lieutenants such as Flynn and Bannon. By forcing him to drop
policies, and in the case of the bombing of Syria, to change course
180 degrees, and then force him to justify it, the state undermines
both his credibility, and his wider support base, turning him
increasingly into their puppet, isolated from any countervailing
power.
A
similar thing is happening in Britain. Bojo, already a figure of
some derision, by his own clownish behaviour, was the real face of
Brexit. His decision not to go to Russia, following the US bombing
of Syria, not only reflects the extent to which a Britain, leaving
the EU, is powerless, and lacking in any real sovereignty, but also
makes him, personally, look even more irrelevant. His failure to
gain any support for Britain's proposal for sanctions against Russia,
at the G7 meeting, and his total ostracism by the other members,
shows that not only is Bojo seen as a clown, but Britain is seen as a
bit of a joke that has not yet realised that it is a rather mediocre
second rate power.
We
can expect, over the next few years, that the political meat grinder
will strip away more of the main Brexiteers from the government, as
the case for Brexit is itself increasingly undermined.
In
a sense, the same thing is happening with Labour, even though it is
in opposition. On issue after issue, Corbyn, McDonnell and their
supporters are being led to prevaricate and even abandon principled
positions they have held for decades, and in the process their actual
support base is stripped away.
In
the most extreme case, where the governmental power threatens the
very basis of the state, the state itself rises up and and overthrows
the governmental power, thereby instituting a Bonapartist regime.
The classic example of modern times is Pinochet's coup against the
Allende government. But, in the 1960's, there were some fringe
elements that discussed a coup even against Wilson's government, with
Mountbatten being lined up as the chosen Bonaparte figure. Again,
Chris Mullin's “A Very British Coup” is only a
fictionalisation of these actual relations between the state and
governmental power.
Its
for this reason that revolutionaries have always criticised the
reformist programmes of left social-democrats, be it the British Road
to Socialism, of the Communist Party, the Alternative Economic
Strategy of the Bennite Left, or the demand for the nationalisation of
the commanding heights of the economy, put forward by the Militant
Tendency (now Socialist Party). Not only are such reformist
programmes (and similarly reformist demands for ad hoc
nationalisation, by the capitalist state, can be found in the
propaganda of nearly all the so called “Trotskyist” sects)
statist, top-down bureaucratic solutions, not only are they
impractical, but they are highly dangerous, precisely because were a
government power resting only on electoral support to implement them,
they invite a violent response from the permanent state.
In
this sense, too, Marx's comment, in The Critique of the Gotha
Programme, applies, because unless such governmental power has a
support base within civil society, not merely at an atomised, passive
level of electoral support, but active, organised support, then it
will simply fall foul of such a coup. That is the problem with the
superficial moralising approach of the liberal interventionists,
whether it is in Iraq, Libya, Egypt or Syria. They fail to ask the
basic question of why these states have Bonapartist regimes in the
first place. They assume that simply overthrowing the existing
unpleasant regime will somehow open the door to a period of bourgeois democracy and social harmony. In fact, on every occasion, it turns
simply into a period of social chaos, as contending armed powers
within civic society attempt to assert their own political power.
Trotsky
warned of such consequences in relation to the Balkan Wars, at the
start of the last century, and he carried that lesson through to his
writings of the 1930's, warning against adopting a superficial
attitude towards imperialism, on the basis of it wearing a
“democratic” mask rather than a fascistic mask.
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