Re: Variations of the capitalist state

I will accept the tiger and leave the sugar to Abelardo de la Espriella.

Three things in Boynton's two installments are right and worth conceding at the outset. Commercial capital can indeed profit from any mode of production, and the point matters. "Bourgeois democratic revolution" is a misnomer, and Draper made the case at length: the revolutions were made by plebeian and peasant forces whose social aims were not the bourgeoisie's, and the bourgeoisie's characteristic relation to them was fear. And Boynton's Poulantzas objection is the sharpest thing in either post. I will come to it because it locates the argument rather than refuting it.

I said that describing the English and Dutch states as precapitalist empires would not survive contact with Brenner. The reply is about conquest, chartered monopolies, the East India Companies, and the transformation of tribute into taxes and rent. All of that is maritime and fiscal. The claim was agrarian. Whether the English state rested on capitalist ground rent is a question about the domestic property regime, about competitive leaseholds, about landlords whose incomes depended on tenants' productivity rather than on extra-economic levies, and about a countryside where subsistence had already become market-dependent. None of that appears in the response.

The monopoly companies cut against the argument they are asked to support. Brenner's Merchants and Revolution is built on the split within the London merchant class between the company men, whose wealth rested on privileges granted by the crown, and the new merchants of the American and West Indian trades, who had no such grants and who supplied the parliamentary side its most radical fraction. Politically constituted property was the target of the revolution, not its social base. To offer the Levant and East India Companies as proof that the English state was precapitalist is to name the faction that lost.

Boynton's own formulation concedes the point. For the rising bourgeoisies, he writes, there was no need to destroy these states, but they badly wanted to capture them. Just so. An apparatus whose revenue genuinely rested on tribute would have needed demolition, which is why the contrasting cases have to be Russia and China. What made capture sufficient in England was that the fiscal ground had already shifted underneath the institutions. The transformation was political because the social property relations had already moved.

One further difficulty. If commercial capital is indifferent to the mode of production, as Boynton correctly says, then the East India Company tells us nothing about the mode of production prevailing at home. The evidence is disqualified by the premise. This is a commercialization model of the transition deployed against a political Marxist, and the Dutch case shows what it costs. The Dutch Republic was the most commercially advanced economy in Europe and did not generate self-sustaining capitalist development. That is the standard Brennerian reading, and it is the reason England and the Netherlands cannot be lumped together as a single type.

Boynton reads me as defining Bonapartism as an irrevocable transfer of power to a dictator and then observes that on such a definition almost nothing qualifies. The reading inverts the criterion. Revocability plus a career apparatus was offered as sufficient for the negative verdict on Lincoln and Roosevelt. It was not offered as necessary for the positive verdict on anyone. Executive autonomy is a symptom in both directions. The question is always what class relation the autonomy expresses.

The 1870 example makes the point rather than answering it. Louis Bonaparte fell at Sedan. Boynton lists the agents himself: Bismarck, Wilhelm, and the Commune. Revocation by Prussian arms and by the collapse of a regime under military defeat is not the French bourgeoisie exercising a power it retained over its own executive. That the bourgeoisie was glad to be rid of him afterward is not the same as having been able to remove him beforehand, and the twenty-two years are the measure of the difference.

So what is the relation? In the Eighteenth Brumaire, it has three terms. A bourgeoisie that surrenders political rule in order to preserve social rule, having found that its own parliamentary regime endangers its property. A mass of atomized producers who must be represented because they cannot represent themselves. And a state apparatus swollen enough to acquire a material interest of its own, which is why Marx spends so long on the half million officials and on the executive as a body that feeds. Take any of the three away, and the category stops sorting.

Trotsky's account in Bonapartism and Fascism is tighter than the quotation suggests. The axis is not the quantity of autonomy but the equilibrium of contending class forces in a crisis neither side can resolve. The government raises itself above the nation because the nation is deadlocked, and it rules through the police, the bureaucracy, and the military clique because the ordinary mediations have stopped working. That is why Trotsky could call Papen and Schleicher Bonapartist while insisting fascism was something else. Fascism destroys the workers' organizations through a mass movement. Bonapartism holds a balance without destroying either pole.

Now, the Poulantzas objection, which is the one that deserves a real answer. Boynton is right that authoritarian statism cannot be defined by personal loyalty. Poulantzas is describing a normalized structural form, not a court. If my criterion were that Bonapartism requires an apparatus staffed by fealty, authoritarian statism would fall outside it, and that would be a contradiction in my own citation.

It is not my criterion. It is the modifier. "Patrimonial" in Weber's sense means an administration recruited from the ruler's personal dependents, offices treated as the ruler's appurtenance rather than as competences defined by rule, and no clean separation between the ruler's household and the state's revenue. That is the specific difference between the case in front of us and the bureaucratic-rational intensification Poulantzas anatomized. Authoritarian statism is a form in which the executive absorbs functions and the legal-rational apparatus remains the medium. Patrimonial Bonapartism is a form in which the apparatus itself is converted into a following. The two are not rival names for one thing, and neither is a synonym for a strong presidency.

I would add that State, Power, and Socialism are not on Boynton's side here. The decline of the formal bureaucracy, the fusion of party and state, and the growth of parallel power networks alongside and through the official apparatus are all part of the authoritarian statism thesis. Poulantzas did not describe a career civil service left intact under an enlarged executive. He described its displacement.

Bonapartism as a transitory, authoritarian type of government in capitalist states in which the relative autonomy of the state becomes intensified. The trouble is that this measures one variable and names no relation. It cannot say why such governments arise, which is the only thing the concept was ever for. It cannot distinguish Papen from Perón from Fujimori from Trump since all four score high on intensified autonomy and nothing else is being asked. And "transitory" is a criterion available only in retrospect, so at the moment one would need it, it cannot be applied.

Orbán is the illustration. He was defeated on 12 April, with Tisza taking a two-thirds supermajority on the highest turnout in Hungary's democratic history. A regime that can be removed by an ordinary election is one in which parliamentary mediation had not broken down and the bourgeoisie had not surrendered political rule. On the criteria I have been defending, Orbán was never Bonapartist, and his removal is evidence for the distinction rather than against it. On the definition offered here, Bonapartism appears to be whatever loses an election eventually.

The disagreement is not about how much power an executive has taken. It is about whether the concept names a relation among classes or a position on a dial. If it is a dial, we will keep discovering Bonapartism wherever an executive is strong and losing it wherever an executive is beaten, and we will have described the weather.

Anthony P. Teso

--
Tony


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