Doug Lain, in his recent response to our ongoing discussion on the correct Marxist relationship to the existing bourgeois state and civil society, has doubled down on the idealist, and now clearly ahistorical, errors I pointed out previously. In particular, the way he has cited Marx’s Class Struggles in France are illuminating in his misunderstanding: Lain has fundamentally confused and conflated bourgeois civil society and proletarian civil society, and, whenever he insists on the universality of the proletarian subject, quickly substitutes all examples and points to the bourgeoisie.
Lain writes:
In fact, Marx does not claim that there is no universal self-transcending position within civil society. What he points to as both the universal position and the self-transforming position during the revolutions of 1848 is the working class. It was the working class who, by insisting that the bourgeois order make good on its own promises, might have been able to overcome capitalist conditions and negate its own class position.
The promise the bourgeois had to make good on, specifically, was the “right to work”, which in the context of the second French Republic refers to a kind of job guarantee which employed the working class masses in national workshops.
Lain continues:
If he’d bothered to read Marx, or just remember history, rather than misread him or distort it, he’d know that “The Class Struggles in France, 1848 to 1850” is primarily the story of how both the petty and big bourgeoisie inevitably hollowed out republican principles, and even more how the petty bourgeoisie’s betrayal of the workers, their turn against a revolution rising out of civil society, inevitably led to both the rise of the Farcical Louis Napoleon Bonaparte and to the petty bourgeoise’s own defeat at the hands of big capital.
What Lain misses, however, is that the “Right to Work” was not a promise born out of bourgeoisie republican principles! It was directly the consequence of the proletariat’s own political subjectivity, its ideology, and its own “apparatus”.
This becomes clear when Marx describes how this demand came about:
Marche, a worker, dictated the decree on the right to work, 25 February 1848, by which the newly formed Provisional Government pledged itself to guarantee the workers a livelihood by means of labor, to provide work for all citizens, etc. And when a few days later it forgot its promises and seemed to have lost sight of the proletariat, a mass of 20,000 workers marched on the Hôtel de Ville with the cry: Organize labor! Form a special Ministry of labor! Reluctantly and after long debate, the Provisional Government nominated a permanent special commission charged with lending means of improving the lot of the working classes! This commission consisted of delegates from the corporations [guilds] of Paris artisans and was presided over by Louis Blanc and Albert. The Luxembourg Palace was assigned to it as its meeting place. In this way the representatives of the working class were banished from the seat of the Provisional Government, the bourgeois part of which retained the real state power and the reins of administration exclusively in its hands; and side by side with the ministries of finance, trade, and public works, side by side with the Bank and the Bourse, there arose a socialist synagogue whose high priests, Louis Blanc and Albert, had the task of discovering the promised land, of preaching the new gospel, and of providing work for the Paris proletariat. Unlike any profane state power, they had no budget, no executive authority at their disposal. They were supposed to break the pillars of bourgeois society by dashing their heads against them. While the Luxembourg sought the philosopher’s stone, in the Hôtel de Ville they minted the current coinage.
Bourgeois civil society did not create the Right to Work, proletarian civil society did. The workers who invaded the legislature, who challenged the bourgeois republicans to their face, were never a part of the same civil society, nor did they read the same newspapers or participate in the same secret societies, their banners, the tricolor, and the red flag were also different. When Lamartine, the liberal Republican who founded the Second Republican, was confronted by these workers, he described them as follows:
They had chosen for their orator a young workman, who was a mechanic, the Spartacus of this army of the intelligent destitute. He spoke not as a man, but in the name of the people who wished to be obeyed, and who did not mean to wait. He prescribed the hours and minutes for the submission of government. He commanded it to perform miracles. He repeated to it, with accents of greater energy, all the conditions of the programme of impossibilities which the tumultuous cries of the people had enjoined it to accept and to realize on the instant:– the overthrow of all known society; the destruction of property and capitalists; spoilation; the immediate installation of the destitute into the community of goods; the proscription of the bankers, the wealthy, the manufacturers, the bourgeois of every condition above the receivers of salaries; a government, with an axe in its hand, to level all the superiorities of birth, competence, inheritance, and even of labor; in fine, the acceptance, without reply, and without delay, of the red flag, to signify to society its defeat; to the people, their victory; to Paris, terror; to all foreign governments, invasion: each of these injunctions was supported, by the orator, with a blow of the butt of his musket upon the floor, by frantic applause from those who were behind him, and a salute of shots, fired on the square.
To the bourgeois republicans, the proletariat’s political subjectivity was defined precisely by its lack of republican principles. Such principles had to be interpellated into them, in this case by Lamartine, through the calls for moderating the radicalness of the Parisian revolutionaries of 1848 with the vote of all of France. This isn’t to say the radical promises of the bourgeois republic in its liberalism were not important, many of the radical newspapers of Paris shared these commitments, including those Marx wrote for.
The point is, the universality of the working class position, its ability to see just beyond the limits of the bourgeois republic, was something that was labored into being, same as the socialization which created those limits in the first place. It required intellectual labor on behalf of the proletariat, in this case by Marche, Blanc, Albert, and the nameless Spartacus. And, crucially, it required some conscious connection between these intellectual laborers, the ideology they were creating, and the working class – what Althusser called interpellation. All of which is to say, the universality of the working class doesn’t come about automatically. It isn’t some latent mental power which rests in pure observation and deliberation.
Marx did not believe that the dictatorship of the proletariat would spring up out of thin air to take the baton from the bourgeois republic and fulfill its promises. As an active participant in the revolutions of 1848 he tried to foster this alternative civil society through his own newspaper, as well as through his involvement in the 1st and 2nd internationales. This civil society was necessarily something separate from existing bourgeois civil society, given its persistence even when it was explicitly banned and cast out by the state. Today, such proletarian civil society does not exist, and I believe it is our first and most important task as Marxists to reboot it. This is why public forums such as Cosmonaut are so essential.
Lain, in contrast, has essentially put the cart before the horse. Until Lain’s media operations can be linked into an actual working class political movement and its accompanying civil society, his partisan siding on polarizing issues can only turn people into partisan’s of either the Republican or Democratic parties. This is, after all, where nearly all the existing partisans of these issues end up.
One reason Lain has done this is because he conflates, in an idealist manner, the nature of the working class’s universality, which occurs on the basis of its role in the material reproduction of society, with the idea of a subject which provides a unique insight into universal truth. When it comes to the pursuit of scientific truth as a kind of knowledge, there is no privileged position in society – there are only privileged positions for operationalizing that knowledge. There is, after all, no escape from ideology, whether we are workers or capitalists. The creation of scientific knowledge, of universal truths, is something which is generally undermined by attempts to build ideological legitimacy on top of it. Just as much as bourgeois states twist and hollow out the social sciences for their own purposes, we can look to the history of Communist parties the world over to see how scientific socialism can be transformed into pure ideology.
Having been a watcher of Lain’s podcasts for some years now I’m sure that he is aware of how even genuinely proletarian movements can be caught up in slogans, and more general ideologies, which often miss the mark of scientific truth. The inescapable nature of ideology means that such ideological distortions are more or less inevitable. Nor is this a problem of the “stupid masses” versus the “enlightened cadre”, as both are liable to these vices in equal measure. This shouldn’t dissuade people who care about scientific truth, though we should generally be concerned with picking our battles, with a particular focus on programmatic concerns. After all, this is where Marx made most of his interventions. It is also why I believe it is essential to always bring up the problems of anti-trust advocacy when dealing with social democrats, for example.
Lain’s naive belief that the universality of the working class and their interest will automatically guide him to the truth, or, more likely the inverse, that the truth will automatically guide him to the universality of the working class, is likely to end in nihilism as he’s confronted with continual failure. One can believe it is important to get concrete answers on specific questions like whether or not the US government is involved in a UFO coverup, or if Covid was the result of a lab leak, while at the same time not fetishizing these issues as the lifeblood of proletarian subjectivity. This is especially the case when the working class remains totally atomized and disorganized, and thus an actual political subjectivity still needs to be brought into being. If Lain objects that Marxists becoming partisans in these controversies such as Russiagate and Hunter Biden’s legal problems will somehow catalyze this subjectivity, I would counter that, from a strategic and even game theoretic perspective, there’s very little to gain: for someone interested in their issues the Democrat and Republican parties can offer far more than Marxists ever could, a direct way to operationalize their sentiment. What is the logical conclusion of questions about UFOs, Russiagate, Hunter Biden and so on if not congressional action? The only issues that the Democrats and Republicans can’t monopolize in this way are ones where, for some structural reason, they are unable to actually deal with.
One thing I don’t think Lain appreciates is what comparing Trump to Bonaparte really entails. If Trump is Bonaparte, and the Republicans are the Society of December 10th, then the Democrats are the Party of Order, a party of political dynasties and idiot liberal intellectuals. The story of The Class Struggle in France and The 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte is not only the story of the petty bourgeoisie and bourgeoisie proper abandoning their promises to the working class in order to stamp out revolution, it’s also the story of how the bourgeois state came into its own: brought into being and sustained by extralegal force, it was the fecklessness and incompetence of bourgeois political representatives, who did not actually grasp the despotism of their own rule, which allowed Bonaparte to rise to power.
As Marx explains:
While the bourgeois republicans in the Assembly were busy devising, discussing, and voting this constitution, Cavaignac outside the Assembly maintained the state of siege of Paris. The state of siege of Paris was the midwife of the Constituent Assembly in its travail of republican creation. If the constitution is subsequently put out of existence by bayonets, it must not be forgotten that it was likewise by bayonets, and these turned against the people, that it had to be protected in its mother’s womb and by bayonets that it had to be brought into existence. The forefathers of the “respectable republicans” had sent their symbol, the tricolor, on a tour around Europe. They themselves in turn produced an invention that of itself made its way over the whole Continent, but returned to France with ever renewed love until it has now become naturalized in half her departments – the state of siege. A splendid invention, periodically employed in every ensuing crisis in the course of the French Revolution. But barrack and bivouac, which were thus periodically laid on French society’s head to compress its brain and render it quiet; saber and musket, which were periodically allowed to act as judges and administrators, as guardians and censors, to play policeman and do night watchman’s duty; mustache and uniform, which were periodically trumpeted forth as the highest wisdom of society and as its rector – were not barrack and bivouac, saber and musket, mustache and uniform finally bound to hit upon the idea of instead saving society once and for all by proclaiming their own regime as the highest and freeing civil society completely from the trouble of governing itself?[Emphasis Mine] Barrack and bivouac, saber and musket, mustache and uniform were bound to hit upon this idea all the more as they might then also expect better cash payment for their higher services, whereas from the merely periodic state of siege and the transient rescues of society at the bidding of this or that bourgeois faction, little of substance was gleaned save some killed and wounded and some friendly bourgeois grimaces. Should not the military at last one day play state of siege in their own interest and for their own benefit, and at the same time besiege the citizens’ purses? Moreover, be it noted in passing, one must not forget that Colonel Bernard, the same military commission president who under Cavaignac had fifteen thousand insurgents deported without trial, is at this moment again at the head of the military commissions active in Paris.
Marx ridiculed these parliamentary politicians for their tepidness, their inability to bring to heel actual force against Bonaparte, their fear of revolution at once bringing their own downfall as well as the perfection of the bourgeois state.
Just as the command of the National Guard appeared here as an attribute of the military commander in chief, so the National Guard itself appeared as only an appendage of the troops of the line. Finally, on June 13 its power was broken, and not only by its partial disbandment, which from this time on was periodically repeated all over France, until mere fragments of it were left behind. The demonstration of June 13 was, above all, a demonstration of the democratic National Guards. They had not, to be sure, borne their arms, but had worn their uniforms against the army; precisely in this uniform, however, lay the talisman. The army convinced itself that this uniform was a piece of woolen cloth like any other. The spell was broken. In the June days of 1848, bourgeoisie and petty bourgeoisie had united as the National Guard with the army against the proletariat; on June 13, 1849, the bourgeoisie let the petty-bourgeois National Guard be dispersed by the army; on December 2, 1851, the National Guard of the bourgeoisie itself had vanished, and Bonaparte merely registered this fact when he subsequently signed the decree for its disbandment, Thus the bourgeoisie had itself smashed its last weapon against the army; the moment the petty bourgeoisie no longer stood behind it as a vassal, but before it as a rebel, it had to smash it as in general it was bound to destroy all its means of defense against absolutism with its own hand as soon as it had itself become absolute. Meanwhile, the party of Order celebrated the reconquest of a power that seemed lost in 1848 only to be found again, freed from its restraints, in 1849, celebrated by means of invectives against the republic and the constitution, of curses on all future, present, and past revolutions, including that which its own leaders had made, and in laws by which the press was muzzled, association destroyed, and the state of siege regulated as an organic institution.
Neither I, nor Marx, celebrated the dictatorial measures taken by the state. But just as in this late stage of the Second French Republic, and our present situation, the bourgeois state has already defeated the revolution and the proletariat. The primary use of these authoritarian measures, of the “state of siege”, just as with Bonaparte against the legislature, is with a power struggle within the political factions of the bourgeoisie. Marx did not lament the reversal of these powers against the Party of Order:
Thus the party of Order, when it was not yet the National Assembly, when it was still only the ministry, had itself stigmatized the parliamentary regime. And it makes an outcry when December 2, 1851, banishes this regime from France! We wish it a happy journey.
It is my contention that if Bonaparte had lost the power struggle, there would be no tears spent either.
Contemporary intrigues are even more farcical. The irrelevance of Russiagate is in the simple fact that it didn’t work, Trump did get elected, if anything it is primary evidence of the impotence of the Democratic Party. The expansion of the security state in the past decade has been much more related to down-to-earth concerns: the rise of lone-wolf terrorism, the Arab spring, the 2020 protests and riots.
What is much more significant was the power struggle between Trump and the “Deep State” revolving around the January 6th insurrection. The military, particularly the Joint Chiefs of Staff, took extralegal action to circumvent the authority of the president over the armed forces. In this clearly unconstitutional action against a “democratically” elected president, the public, the working class, were not suddenly set back in their bourgeois freedoms.
The bourgeois state has evolved a great deal since the times of Bonaparte, the practice of social control, and the use of force, is more precise. The political parties and the repressive state apparatus are much more capable of preventing revolutions, insurrections, civil wars and so on than a lone strongman, which is why Trump is unlikely to succeed in his Bonapartist ambitions – the real Bonaparte had to get the bourgeois on board.
We can see this when dig deeper into one of Lain’s arguments about the failures of the Marxist left. He says:
put that in a less sentimental way, I charge the Marxist left with abandoning its own project, choosing instead to side with big capital politically while taking up the failure of bourgeois politics as a limit to its own project and its own imagination. Further, I do not claim that there is a conspiracy at work. The left is not doing the bidding of the security state in secret, but quite openly. The left’s lack of interest in opposing the war on “disinformation,” an effort that could at least rival its previous effort to thwart the war on terror, demonstrates its subservience to the political party responsible for this war on thought.
Lain only ever asserts the left is this way, if there is any deeper reason why, it’s because simply the left has “decided to be this way”, there is no underlying materialist analysis. If we bother to do a real material analysis, we’d quickly find civil society as it is produced by actual, concrete, intellectual labor. Surely the Democratic party deserves some credit here, in the structure it has created and the way it has socialized so many to buy into it. So do the universities, and the media, as state ideological apparatuses. This is contemporary civil society. To defer to it, is to create more people socialized exactly the same way! This is what the state ideological apparatus has gotten so good at doing in the 175 years since 1848.
Lain claims that my emphasis on the overcoded nature of the state, which allows multiple competing ideologies, and factions to see their interests contained within the state, prevents any possible opposition to it. But this is only because Lain is incapable of imagining a non-bourgeois civil society, a different kind of apparatus. The state is not the only thing that can be overcoded, all the ideological tools of the state, including overcoding, and the way it socializes people to reproduce existing society, can be employed to different ends. Building a worker’s party and an associated ecosystem of institutions and media is what creates the universal subjectivity of the working class, allowing it to envision and realize alternatives to the bourgeois state.
I hope that Lain will reassess his commitment to his idealist framework of political engagement, and takes it upon himself to continue to pursue both scientific truth and the creation of proletarian political subjectivity in a way that separates the two, lest both suffer through their conflation. If not, his defense of bourgeois civil society will only serve to prevent the emergence of any alternative.
-Nicolas D Villarreal
