"It is immediately obvious that in a country like France*, where the executive power commands an army of officials ... and therefore constantly maintains an immense mass of interests and livelihoods in the most absolute dependence; where the state enmeshes, controls, regulates, superintends and tutors civil society from its most comprehensive manifestations of life down to its most insignificant stirrings,... where through the most extraordinary centralisation this parasitic body acquires a ubiquity...which finds a counterpart only in the helpless dependence, the loose shapelessness of the actual body politic - it is obvious that in such a country the National Assembly forfeits all real influence when it loses command of the ministerial posts, if it does not at the same time...let civil society and public opinion create organs of their own, independent of the governmental power.
"But it is precisely with the maintenance of that extensive state machine in its numerous ramifications that the material interests of the French bourgeoisie** are interwoven in the closest fashion. Here it finds posts for its surplus population and makes up in the form of state salaries for what it cannot pocket in the form of profit, interest, rents and honorariums.
"On the other hand, its political interests compelled it to increase daily the repressive measures and therefore the resources and the personnel of the state power, while at the same time it had to wage an uninterrupted war against public opinion and mistrustfully mutilate, cripple, the independent organs of the social movement, where it did not succeed in amputating them entirely."
It is not hard to feel, in these words of Karl Marx from 1852, the chill wind of a Cape winter in South Africa . For " France *", read South Africa . For "French bourgeoisie**", read "BEE bourgeoisie". Here Marx is discussing the preparatory conditions in France for a coup d'etat, the "18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte" - a coup which transformed Louis Bonaparte (or Napoleon the Little, the nephew of his more famous uncle) into Napoleon III, emperor of the French, having seized power in the aftermath of the revolution of 1848, which in turn had displaced the Citizen King, Louis Philippe.
The first period after the 1848 revolution in Paris is caustically described by Marx. He calls it the "Universal brotherhood swindle". Comparisons with South Africa are easy.
This happy paradise on earth leads through a succession of stages to "the victory of Bonaparte over parliament, of the executive power over the legislative power, of force without phrases over the force of phrases." In Marx's understanding, the leader of the coup, Louis Bonaparte, "precisely because he was a Bohemian, a princely lumpenproletarian, had the advantage...in that he could conduct the struggle meanly...".
His instrument was a ragtag outfit, part political party, part militia, part street gang, called the Society of December 10. As Marx points out, the Society of December 10 was to "remain the private army of Bonaparte until he succeeded in transforming the public army into a Society of December 10." The means for this were the promise and provision of loot. Bonaparte lived in the conviction that "there are certain higher powers which man, and the soldier in particular, cannot withstand. Among these powers he counts, first and foremost, cigars and champagne, cold poultry and garlic sausage". The culinary tastes of a French member of the Society of December 10 may be different from his equivalent contemporary in South Africa , but the parallel is there. Bacchus, the god of wine, as Marx points out, was "the tutelary deity of the Society of December 10".
But what was the Society of December 10?
Marx explains, with delicious irony and vitality of phrase. "On the pretext of founding a benevolent society, the lumpenproletariat of Paris had been organised into secret sections, each section being led by Bonapartist agents, with a Bonapartist general at the head of the whole.
"Alongside decayed roués [seducers] with dubious means of subsistence and of dubious origin, alongside ruined and adventurous offshoots of the bourgeoisie, were vagabonds, discharged soldiers, discharged jailbirds, escaped galley slaves, swindlers, mountebanks, lazzaroni [Italian rascals], pickpockets, tricksters, gamblers, maquereaus [pimps], brothel keepers, porters, literati, organ-grinders, rag-pickers, knife grinders, tinkers, beggars - in short, the whole indefinite, disintegrated mass, thrown hither and thither, which the French term la boheme; from this kindred element Bonaparte formed the core of the Society of December 10. A ‘benevolent society' - in so far as, like Bonaparte, its members felt the need of benefiting themselves at the expense of the labouring nation. ...
"On his journeys the detachments of this society packing the railways had to improvise a public for him, stage public enthusiasm, roar vive l'Empereur [long live the Emperor], insult and thrash republicans, of course under the protection of the police. On his return journeys to Paris they had to form the advance guard, forestall counter-demonstrations or disperse them. The Society of December 10 belonged to him.... Bonaparte with official phrases about order, religion, family and property in public, before the citizens, and with...the society of disorder, prostitution and theft behind him - that is Bonaparte himself as original author, and the history of the Society of December 10 is his own history."
Through a whole series of moves and counter-moves which Marx describes with zest, Parliament and the Constitution were reduced to a farce, in which "the executive power no longer thought it worth while to be seriously represented in the National Assembly. The more his ministers were pure dummies, the more manifestly Bonaparte concentrated the whole executive power in his own person and the more scope he had to exploit it for his own ends. ...
"In November 1849, Bonaparte had contented himself with an unparliamentary ministry, in January 1851 with an extra-parliamentary one, and on April 11 he felt strong enough to form an anti-parliamentary ministry....This gradation of ministries was the thermometer with which parliament could measure the decrease of its own vital heat."
Thus, "stricken, disintegrated and death-tainted", the parliament of the French republic - the triumphal prize of the revolution of 1789, the repository of the ideals of Liberty, Equality and Fraternity - succumbed to brute force, while its conqueror, Bonaparte, "stripping its halo from the entire state machine, profanes it and makes it at once loathsome and ridiculous. ...A bunch of blokes push their way forward to the court, into the ministries, to the head of the administration and the army, a crowd of the best of whom it must be said that no one knows whence he comes, a noisy, disreputable, rapacious boheme...."
As for the new Emperor himself, Bonaparte "would fain be the most obligeant [obliging] man in France and turn all the property and all the labour of France into a personal obligation to himself. He would like to steal the whole of France in order to be able to make a present of her to France or, rather, in order to be able to buy France anew....And all the state institutions, the Senate, the Council of State, the legislative body, the Legion of Honour, the soldiers' medals, the washhouses, the public works, the railways, the etat major [General Staff] of the National Guard... - all become parts of the institutions of purchase. Every place in the army and in the government machine becomes a means of purchase.
"But the most important feature of this process, whereby France is taken in order to give to her, is the percentages that find their way into the pockets of the head and the members of the Society of December 10...".
Thus Karl Marx: a little fable for South Africa , as it prepares for elections for a new government.
