Bonapartism always bases itself on these large petty-bourgeois forces, and utilises appeals to “anti-capitalism” (Strasserism), or “anti-imperialism” (Chiang Kai Shek, Mao, Ho, Castro, Khomeini, Chavez, Hamas, Zionism, Putin, Zelensky et al), in one form or another. However, having seized political power, it has to deal with reality. In conditions where no ruling class exercises direct, political control over the state, Bonapartism, becomes fused with the state itself, as seen, by the fact that coups are usually undertaken, not by the military top brass, but by the non-commissioned officers, the colonel's coup, and so on. But, whether the ruling class exercises direct political control over the state or not, it remains the state of the ruling-class, and that reality imposes itself, in the fact that the state must act accordingly, to defend and protect the property of that ruling-class, i.e. must defend and promote that property upon which the fortune of the state itself depends.
As Marx, Engels and Lenin described, after Russia's defeat in the Crimean War, although Tsarism continued to exercise control of the political regime, the Russian state, itself, was forced to act in the interests of capitalist property, not the old feudal and Asiatic forms of property upon which Tsarism rested. Engels makes a similar point in his analysis of The Peasant War in Germany. But, in developed capitalist economies, over the last 40 years, a peculiar situation arose. In newly developing economies, a national bourgeoisie is absolutely weak; in conditions such as in Italy, in the 1920's, or Germany in the 1930's, it is only relatively weak, due to a serious challenge from a large, revolutionary proletariat, and, so, the ruling class is led into an alliance with the petty-bourgeoisie, and falls back on some form of Bonapartism/fascism.
However, in the last 40 years, the ruling class has been strong, and firmly in control of the state, whilst the proletariat has been weak and subdued, following the global defeats of the 1980's. During that period, it was the petty-bourgeoisie that became numerically larger, and socially more powerful. That is unusual. Marx described why, like the peasantry, it is a transitional class. The process of differentiation, by which competition drove out the least efficient, small commodity producers, throwing them into the proletariat, whilst turning the more efficient into capitalist producers, continually acts to squeeze and diminish, the size of the petty-bourgeoisie. But, in the 1980's, a series of developments in the advanced capitalist economies, which I had described at the time, turned this process on its head.
As these economies entered a period of long wave stagnation, and intensive accumulation, unemployment rose, whilst the expansion of large-scale industrial capital was constrained. In addition, whole swathes of industrial production, now, requiring only large quantities of cheap, unskilled, machine minding labour, was shifted to China, and other parts of Asia. That facilitated the growth of capital, and the bourgeoisie and proletariat, in those locations, at the expense of those classes in the developed economies. The ruling class, which now owns its wealth, not in the form of industrial capital, but of fictitious-capital (shares, bonds, and their derivatives) had no problem with that, as it does not matter whether it owns shares/bonds, and so derives dividends/interest, in firms whose production is in China, India, or Vietnam, rather than in Britain, France or the US. However, it can be seen how this process does provide fuel for the nationalistic rhetoric of those who use it to appeal to those that lost out in this process of globalisation.
The expansion of capital, and so of the domestic markets, in developing economies, also, necessarily leads to an expansion, also, of their own petty-bourgeoisie, as it expands to meet the needs of expanding local markets for commodities. However, the biggest relative increase, comes in the developed economies. The number of small businesses, in Britain, expanded from 2.4 million in 1980, to 3.6 million in 1989.
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