Marx points out, in relation to that peasantry/petty bourgeoisie, upon which the Bonapartists rest,
“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.)
(loc cit)
The colonial regimes attempted to perform this function, welding together the divergent class interests of colonists as against the native population. The apartheid regime in South Africa did the same. When British colonial rule in Ireland ended, the same function was carried out, via the creation of the Six County statelet, giving ascendancy to the Protestant community, formed from the descendants of the original British colonists.
This is also the nature of Zionism, as a permanent bloc of four classes (Popular Front), in which what welds its components together is only this desire for protection, not against “other classes”, but against other ethnicities, i.e. against the Palestinians and Arabs, whose land and property they stole, and whose achievement of equal political rights would shatter the basis of the Zionist state. That this arose as a reactionary, nationalist, separatist solution to the experience of anti-Semitism, does not change that reality. It is, in fact, why Zionism needs anti-Semitism, as the driver and justification of itself. But, given that only 30% of the world's Jews, themselves, have been convinced of that argument, and need to move to Israel for their survival, it has been peculiarly unsuccessful in making that argument, which requires ever greater lies, and hyperbole, to justify itself. Indeed, the greatest proponents of Zionism, outside Israel, are not Jews, but right-wing Christian zealots, and those that utilise it to advance the cause of western imperialism.
As Trotsky pointed out in his class analysis of the soviet state, this is also why the soviet bureaucracy could not constitute a ruling class either, whether considered a state-capitalist class, bureaucratic-collectivist class or whatever. The Stalinists were based on the professional middle-class bureaucracy, but the bureaucracy only existed on the basis of the property relations created by the revolution, much as a trades union bureaucracy only exists so long as there are trades unions created by workers. They could have simply restored the previous, and still dominant, bourgeois property relations, but that would have required a new civil war. They could develop the existing property relations, which is what they were led to do, but the success of that required, as permanent revolution demonstrated, the extension of the revolution on an international scale. That conflicted with the theory of Socialism In One Country, and hence the inevitable failure of the state.
The same was true of the Nazi regime. The Nazis were based on the petty-bourgeoisie, which provided them with their foot soldiers, but they could not implement the anti-capitalist measures proposed to win the support of that petty-bourgeoisie, because the needs of German imperialism, did not permit it. Hence, the Strasserites were liquidated. The same applies to the petty-bourgeois nationalist agenda of the Brexiters, of Trump, Starmer, and others across the globe, which is impossible to achieve in the era of imperialism, which means that they must either abandon them in practice, whilst claiming to be continuing with that agenda, to abandon them openly, or be forced from office by one means or other.
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