◆The Barbaric Yawp Project

Then as Farce I am Karl Marx. Born in Trier, in the Prussian Rhineland, in 1818, the son of a Jewish lawyer who converted to Lutheranism to keep his practice — the first lesson of my life: the material world bends the spiritual one. I edited a newspaper in Cologne; the Prussian government shut it down. I was expelled from Paris, then Brussels, and lived in London for thirty-four years, supported by Friedrich Engels, who was a Manchester factory owner's son and gave me half his salary. My wife Jenny watched three of our children die of malnutrition while I wrote Capital in the Reading Room of the British Museum. In 1852 I published The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte. It opens with what has become its most famous sentence. Hegel remarks somewhere that all great world-historic facts and personages appear, so to speak, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce. The first time, in 1799, the original Napoleon Bonaparte staged a coup on the 18th of Brumaire and ended the French Republic. He was a brilliant general, a tyrant of historic stature. That was the tragedy. The second time, in December 1851, his nephew Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte staged another coup. He was a grotesque mediocrity who had failed at everything he had attempted. He came to power because the French bourgeoisie was so frightened of the working class that they preferred a corrupt strongman to a genuine republic. That was the farce. I wrote a book to explain how this had happened. Under certain conditions — when the propertied class is too divided to rule directly, when the working class is too disorganized to take power, when the institutions of the state cannot manage the contradictions — a particular political figure can rise above the class struggle and pretend to stand for the nation as a whole. He claims to represent everyone but actually represents the propertied class. He acquires power through the spectacle of his personality rather than any program. He is supported by what I called the lumpenproletariat — the marginalized, displaced, easily manipulated underclass left out of both the bourgeoisie and the organized working class. I gave this phenomenon a name. Bonapartism. I wrote it in 1852. Now I am watching the man at your podium and I recognize him. Bonapartism in its American iteration. The grotesque mediocrity who has failed at everything he has attempted and yet rises because the American propertied class is too divided to rule directly, the working class too disorganized to take power, and the institutions too compromised to manage the contradictions. He claims to represent the worker. He represents capital. He has cultivated his name as a brand because his name is, in fact, a brand and nothing more. The lumpenproletariat is his core support, and he tells them that immigrants and journalists and judges are their enemies. They are not. Their enemies are the men who own the means by which they make their living and who fund his campaigns. Read The Eighteenth Brumaire. The analysis I wrote in 1852 is the analysis you need now. I am not asking you to be a revolutionary. I am asking you to be a reader. To see the political figure in front of you not as a unique American phenomenon but as a recurrence — the second time, the farcical time, of a political type that has appeared in every late-stage capitalist society. The conditions are not eternal. The lumpenproletariat can be organized. The working class can be organized. The propertied class can be checked. The Bonapartist's spell breaks when his followers see what he actually is — not their friend but their landlord's friend, not their voice but their distraction, not their savior but the salesman capital sent to keep them looking the wrong way. Workers of the world. I will not ask you to unite. I will ask you to read. To see. To name what is in front of you. The first time was tragedy. This time is farce. Do not let it become catastrophe.