Gopal Balakrishnan on The Geopolitics of Revolution and Counterrevolution

Although in The Communist Manifesto Marx wrote of an ongoing dissolution of nationalities within a cosmopolitan world economy, in nearly all of his commentary on the times he portrayed the Europe of his times as trapped within a post-Napoleonic settlement bolted into place by parliamentary England at the one pole and Tsarist Russia at the other. Marx assumed that the characteristic forms of modern bourgeois society depended upon the persistence of the old regime to such a degree that the destruction of the latter would lead to the final crisis of the former. England and Russia were the bulwarks of an inter-state order which buffered the European bourgeoisie from the revolutionary consequences of its own ascendancy.  How did this geo-political configuration relate to the anatomy of bourgeois society disclosed by political economy?  Writ large, it embodied the trinity of ruling class revenues- profit, rent and the fiscal exploitation of the populace. 

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Just as profit on capital was “a moving synthesis of monopoly and competition”, England’s quasi-monopolistic dominance of the world market was the basis of the laissez-faire it imposed on all others. While its world market supremacy was undermining the continental old regime, it was also thwarting the formation of independent national centers of accumulation. Industrial Revolution England was both the prop of the European status quo and an agent of its dissolution.

“The Commercial Subjugation and Exploitation of the Bourgeois classes of the various European nations by the Despot of the World Market – England.”

For its part, Russia was the bulwark of a European old regime resting on the rent-racking and over-taxing of the peasantry. A conservative status quo dependent upon the military support of the Russian Tsarism had opened up the continent to the modern day equivalent of barbarian hordes. From its entry into the European affairs in the 18th century, the Russian Empire had expanded remorselessly westward, an intrusion which had no meaning for a conception of history organized around the coming into being of civil society. Hegel, Bruno Bauer once noted, had failed to even mention Russia’s role in bringing about the supposed end of history by defeating Napoleon and restoring the sovereignty of Europe’s great powers. The Russian empire had arisen out of Mongolian bondage to cast its gaze on a European world in the era of its utmost inner crisis. Without a revolution, semi-Asiatic Russia would overwhelm this tottering old-new world. The status quo on the continent was in this way suspended in the duality of state and society, of executive vs. legislature, of public debt and landed property vs. industrial capital, of rent vs. profit, manifesting itself geo-politically as the power of Anglo-Russian Flugelmächte over Europe as a whole. Although bitter rivals, England was the dominant, Russia the subordinate hegemon of the world system of bourgeois society. European society as a whole like its individual members were caught between the terms of an unresolved dualism expressing the struggle between the forward advance of civilization and a tenacious old regime willing to unleash new forms of barbarism to arrest its decline. 

The revolution was expected to unfold roughly as follows: a republican victory in France would open the flood gates to a full-blown civil war, and lead to the overthrow of reactionary governments in Germany. The parties of the extreme left would fight their way to the top via electoral and armed struggle but would immediately confront a determined opposition backed to the hilt by the Tsar. The revolution could only hope to prevail by launching a war against the Russia whose defeat would lead to the fall of old Europe. Just as within societies where revolutionary and reactionary classes would come to blows, though this same division would reproduce itself at the level of whole nations, in wars to the finish between progressive and backward peoples. Uprisings and wars on the continent would galvanize the working class of England to take a leading role in the revolution’s concluding phase. In the opposite direction, the counterrevolutionary scenario would unfold from a civil war ending in the defeat of the extreme left, eventually resulting in a closure of the republican opening and finalized by the subjugation of parliament by coup d’état. The regimes that emerged from this counter-revolutionary spiral would keep Europe in a condition of history-less stagnation, helpless in the vice of a restored Anglo-Russian dominion. Without a revolutionary breakthrough Franco-German Europe would decline like Spain. 

It is in the light of this geo-political prognosis the pattern of Marx’s largely favorable commentary on the First Napoleonic Empire becomes intelligible. In the time of Marx’s early intellectual and political formation, West German radicals looked back in bitterness at the so-called liberation of 1813 that had placed them under Prussian rule after a glorious interlude of Gallic liberty. 

“The German citizens, who railed against Napoleon for compelling them to drink chicory and for disturbing their peace with military billeting and recruiting of conscripts, reserved all their moral indignation for Napoleon and all their admiration for England; yet Napoleon rendered them the greatest services by cleaning out Germany’s Augean stables and establishing civilized means of communication, whereas the English only waited for the opportunity to exploit them á tort et á travers.”

Napoleonic Europe had succumbed to the powers of England and Russia, just as the internal revolutionary process stumbled on the barriers imposed by unripe conditions of bourgeois society. It was only after the coup d’état of Louis Napoleon that this high estimation of his predecessor was emphatically retracted; thereafter “Bonapartism” became one of the more over-extended pejorative terms in Marx’s political vocabulary. 

Germans who grew up identifying France with modern civilization lost their historical bearings with this neo-Napoleonic putsch. What new conclusions did Marx come to as the prospect of an immediate resumption of revolutionary struggles began to close down? This is where the significance of The 18th Brumaire of Louis Napoleon lies. The political and theoretical departure that the work made was its relegation of the French Revolution and the whole legacy of Jacobinism to the past. 

“The social revolution of the nineteenth century cannot take its poetry from the past but only from the future. It cannot begin with itself before it has stripped away all superstition about the past. The former revolutions required recollections of past world history in order to smother their own content. The revolution of the nineteenth century must let the dead to bury their dead in order to arrive at its own content.”

The victorious counter-revolution seemed to have voided modern history of its revolutionary meaning. Marx initially articulated this experience of defeat within the framework of his overarching conception of state-civil society relations, by portraying it as an inversion of this inversion- a bloated state apparatus asserting its autonomy and superiority over a defeated, impotent society. Under the lumpen entourage around Louis Bonaparte, the French state had severed its relationship to a ruling class of proprietors, and was now supposedly upheld by a mass of deluded and impoverished peasant families. This caricatural portrait of a despotism over society was directed, in part, at liberals like Tocqueville who had openly denounced socialism as a regime of servile paternalism, and in the course of repressing it assisted Bonaparte’s ascent to the leadership of the Party of Order, only to be later cast aside.