Re: YOU "heard" it first here

On Wed, Jul 22, 2026 at 01:45 PM, Anthony Teso wrote:

> 
> Marx's Bonaparte ruled with parliament in session, a functioning press,
> and opposition that still spoke.

Tony continues to strip Bonapartism of its repressive characteristics in order to squeeze Trump into that mold.

The two major differences between then and now:

1. Trump administers a bourgeois democracy with a functioning legislature and an independent opposition party and media which can still speak freely. It's well documented that this was not true of Bonapartist France. There all independent opposition was suppressed and its  institutions banned or transformed into their captive facsimiles beholden to Louis Napoleon after his coup d’etat and subsequent crowning of himself as Emperor.

2. The repression was a direct consequence of the Napoleonic bourgeoisie's fear, premature but real, of a socialist working class revolution in the wake of the 1848 democratic uprising. Marx’s analysis of 19th century Bonapartism remarkably prefigured the 20th century bourgeoise's voluntary destruction of its own institutions in favour of fascist dictatorships to counter a similar but more immediate fear of working class revolution.

In the Eighteenth Brumaire, Marx vividly illustrated the repressive political environment in Frannce following Louis Napoleon's 1851 coup:

"The French bourgeoisie balked at the domination of the working proletariat; it has brought the lumpen proletariat to domination, with the Chief of the Society of December 10 at the head. The bourgeoisie kept France in breathless fear of the future terrors of red anarchy – Bonaparte discounted this future for it when, on December 4, he had the eminent bourgeois of the Boulevard Montmartre and the Boulevard des Italiens shot down at their windows by the drunken army of law and order. The bourgeoisie apotheosized the sword; the sword rules it. It destroyed the revolutionary press; its own press is destroyed. It placed popular meetings under police surveillance; its salons are placed under police supervision. It disbanded the democratic National Guard, its own National Guard is disbanded. It imposed a state of siege; a state of siege is imposed upon it. It supplanted the juries by military commissions; its juries are supplanted by military commissions. It subjected public education to the sway of the priests; the priests subject it to their own education. It jailed people without trial, it is being jailed without trial. It suppressed every stirring in society by means of state power; every stirring in its society is suppressed by means of state power.

https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1852/18th-brumaire/ch07.htm


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