The Political Scene and the Politics of Representation: Periodizing Class Struggle and the State in The Eighteenth Brumaire

The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte has a key place in debates over Marx's theory of the state and his account of political representation. For some critics, this text provides evidence for two Marxian theories of the state: whereas Marx normally saw the state as the executive committee or direct instrument of the ruling class, in other contexts he argued that it can become relatively autonomous from the various classes in society even if it continues to perform a class function (e.g., Miliband 1965). For others, however, this same text reveals devastating inconsistencies in Marx's class-based account of the state, since it allows for an executive (apparatus) that wins autonomy for itself against the dominant class(es). This inconsistency is said to be especially clear in Marx's later remarks on the tendential rise of a praetorian state, in which the army led by Bonaparte III, starts to represent itself against society rather than acting on behalf of one part of society against other parts. According to Mehlman, for example, 'the piquancy of Bonapartism lies entirely in the emergence of a State which has been emptied of its class contents’ (cited by Stallybrass, 1990: 80; see also Hunt 1984: 47-56). Yet others suggest that Marx himself resolves these alleged inconsistencies 'by analysing the Bonapartist regime, if not as the organized rule of a class bloc, nevertheless as the determined product of the class struggle’ (Fernbach 1983: 15; cf. Berberoglou 1986). For others again, the same text confirms the generic (rather than exceptional) tendency of the capitalist state to acquire relative autonomy in order the better to organize the interests of the dominant class(es) and to win the support of subordinate classes (e.g., Poulantzas 1973). The exceptional nature of state autonomy in the Bonapartist case merely serves to indicate the exceptional nature of the circumstances in which this role has to be played (see also Draper 1977).