IV. Karl Marx

Any conservative readers who’ve come this far, please hold your nose for a moment and consider Marx as social theorist and not the Marx whose ideas of revolution went horribly wrong in the twentieth century. Yes, Marx thought the U.S. had some aspects of greatness. We were an industrial society without aristocracy and the baggage of feudalism, though we had slavery and its aftermath against us in his scale of social evolution. He thought well of our ability for peaceful revolution(s) by votes. “You know that the institutions, mores, and traditions of various countries must be taken into consideration, and we do not deny that there are countries–such as America, England…–where the workers can attain their goal by peaceful means.”[i]

Marx might stealthily admire the cleverness of the bourgeoisie in keeping the capitalist system running through the welfare state as in life he admired that class’s ability to remake the world. His The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon is perhaps his most relevant work regarding how the U.S. and other industrialized nations have found stability despite economic disparities and how they may lose it.

Marx had his own axe to grind against de Tocqueville’s bête noire. His biggest problem with Louis Napoleon was in terms of class theory: how did this con artist seemingly displace the authority of both the dominant bourgeoisie and the classes that contended against it? The answer was that the class struggle had created a partial political paralysis and vacuum into which Napoleon III could step. In Marx’s view, Napoleon III relied on the support of the riffraff (what Marx called the lumpenproletariat), the acquiescence of the largely inert peasantry (Marx called them a sack of potatoes), the proletariat’s general chaos, and the haute bourgeoisie’s fear of sticking their own necks out again into politics.

This last bit—the reluctance or inability of the wealthiest to assume the highest offices—persisted in many modern democracies. The haute bourgeoisie has mostly left direct governance to others that they have financed, rather than becoming themselves focal figures for political and class hostility. Indeed, Marx thought that a too prominent and direct political role for extremely wealthy individuals would be dangerous to the capitalist class as a whole.

Marx was wrong in one crucial respect about Napoleon III—he wrote early in his rule that class tensions would soon end his reign, when in fact it lasted twenty years and was only ended by total military defeat. There’s a lesson here for critics of our current regime who think historical forces will do the work for them.

We’ve done a good job up in the U.S. of avoiding a Louis Napoleon-style figure—until now. The new regime combines Louis Napoleon’s lumpenproletarian appeal with a quasi-haute bourgeoisie leader and other billionaire appointments. The prominence of the ultra-rich in this regime could be dangerous in terms of class struggle, but that may be the least of it.

Marx might note how this regime’s rise may lead to the end of American exceptionalism. In its original social scholarship sense, American exceptionalism is a particular set of theories about the mitigation of class consciousness and class struggle here in the U.S. as compared with Europe. But, under the regime’s policies, the increase in income disparity and the dismantling of the welfare state may provoke class antagonisms. The regime’s attack on voting rights may also close an important safety valve of class tension. Together, the regime’s efforts against the conditions that made America exceptional in social theory could lead to the rise of American class consciousness as a distinct political force. That may be good news for a Marxist, but bad news for American greatness.

[i] “The Possibility of Non-Violent Revolution” [1872 Amsterdam speech] from The Marx-Engels Reader, p. 522, 523.