The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (Extracts)
Karl Marx
Followed by
"The Origin of Family, Private Property and State" (Extracts)
Friedrich Engels
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The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (Extracts)
Karl Marx
"It is immediately obvious that in a country like France, where the executive power
commands an army of officials numbering more than half a million individuals and therefore
constantly maintains an immense mass of interests and livelihood 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, from its most general modes of being to the private existence of individuals; where
through the most extraordinary centralization this parasitic body acquires a ubiquity, an
omniscience, a capacity for accelerated mobility and an elasticity which finds a counterpart
only in the helpless dependency, in 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 simplify the administration of
the state, reduce the army of officials as far as possible and, finally, let civil society and public
opinion create organs of their own, independent of the government 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 states 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; Thus the French
bourgeoisie was compelled by its class position to annihilate, on the one hand, the vital
conditions of all parliamentary power, and therefore, likewise, of its own, and to render
irresistible, on the other hand, the executive power hostile to it."
"This executive power with its enormous bureaucratic and military organization, with its vast
and ingenious state machinery, with a host of officials numbering half a million, besides an
army of another half a million, this appalling parasitic body, which enmeshes the body of
French society and chokes all its pores, sprang up in the days of the absolute monarchy, with
the decay of the feudal system, which it helped to hasten. The seignorial privileges of the
landowners and towns became transformed into so many attributes of the state power, the
feudal dignitaries into paid officials and the motley pattern of conflicting medieval plenary
powers into the regulated plan of a state authority whose work is divided and centralized as in
a factory. The first French Revolution, with its task of breaking all separate local, territorial,
urban and provincial powers in order to create the civil unity of the nation, was bound to
develop what the absolute monarchy had begun: centralisation, but at the same time the
extent, the attribution and the number of agents of governmental power. Napoleon completed
this state machinery. The legitimist monarchy and the July monarchy added nothing but a
greater division of labour, growing in the same measure as the division of labour within
bourgeois society created new groups of interests, and, therefore, new material for state
administration. Every common interest was straightway severed from society, counterposed to
it as a higher, general interest, snatched from the activity of society's members themselves and
made an object of government activity, from a bridge, a schoolhouse and the communal
property of a village community to the railways, the national wealth and the national
university of France.
Finally, in its struggle against the revolution, the parliamentary republic found itself
compelled to strengthen, along the repressive measures, the resources and centralisation of
governmental power. All revolutions perfected this machine instead of smashing it. The
parties that contended in turn for domination regarded the possession of this huge state edifice
as the principal spoils of the victor.
But under the absolute monarchy, during the first Revolution, under Napoleon, bureaucracy
was only the means of preparing the class rule of the bourgeoisie. Under the Restoration,
under Louis Philippe, under the parliamentary republic, it was the instrument of the ruling
class, however much it strove for power of its own.
Only under the second Bonaparte does the state seem to have made itself completely
independent."
"The Origin of Family, Private Property and State" (Extracts)
Friedrich Engels
Above we discussed separately each of the three main forms in which the state was built up
on the ruins of the gentile constitution. Athens represented the purest, most classical form.
Here the state sprang directly and mainly out of the class antagonisms that developed within
gentile society. In Rome gentile society became an exclusive aristocracy amidst a numerous
plebs, standing outside of it, having no rights but only duties. The victory of the plebs burst
the old gentile constitution asunder and erected on its ruins the state, in which both the gentile
aristocracy and the plebs were soon wholly absorbed. Finally, among the German vanquishers
of the Roman Empire, the state sprang up as a direct result of the conquest of large foreign
territories, which the gentile constitution had no means of ruling. As this conquest did not
necessitate either a serious struggle with the old population or a more advanced division of
labour, and as conquered and conquerors were almost at the same stage of economic
development and thus the economic basis of society remained the same as before, therefore,
the gentile constitution could continue for many centuries in a changed, territorial form, in the
shape of a Mark constitution, and even rejuvenate itself for a time in enfeebled form in the
noble and patrician families of later years, and even in peasant families, as in Dithmarschen.
The state is, therefore, by no means a power forced on society from without; just as little is it
"the reality of the ethical idea," "the image and reality of reason," as Hegel
maintains.(Grunlinken der Philosophie des Rechts, § 257 and § 360). Rather, it is a product of
society at a certain stage of development; it is the admission that this society has become
entangled in an insoluble contradiction with itself, that it has split into irreconcilable
antagonisms which it is powerless to dispel. But in order that these antagonisms and classes
with conflicting economic interests might not consume themselves and society in fruitless
struggle, it became necessary to have a power seemingly standing above society that would
alleviate the conflict, and keep it within the bounds of "order" ; and this power, arisen out of
society but placing itself above it, and alienating itself more and more from it, is the state.
As distinct from the old gentile order, the state, first, divides its subjects according to
territory. As we have seen, the old gentile associations, built upon and held together by ties of
blood, became inadequate, largely because they presupposed that the members were bound to
a given territory, a bond which had long ceased to exist. The territory remained, but the
people had become mobile. Hence, division according to territory was taken as the point of
departure, and citizens were allowed to exercise their public rights and duties wherever they
settled, irrespective of gens and tribe. This organisation of citizens according to locality is a
feature common to all states. That is why it seems natural to us; but we have seen what long
and arduous struggles were needed before it could replace, in Athens and Rome, the old
organisation according to gentes.
The second distinguishing feature is the establishment of a public power which no longer
directly coincides with the population organising itself as an armed force. This special public
power is necessary because a self-acting armed organisation of the population has become
impossible since the split into classes. The slaves also belonged to the population; the 90,000
citizens of Athens formed only a privileged class as against the 365,000 slaves. The people's
army of the Athenian democracy was an aristocratic public power against the slaves, whom it
kept in check; however, a gendarmerie also became necessary to keep the citizens in check, as
we related above. This public power exists in every state; it consists not merely of armed men
but also of material adjuncts, prisons and institutions of coercion of all kinds, of which gentile
[clan] society knew nothing. It may be very insignificant, almost infinitesimal, in societies
where class antagonisms are still undeveloped and in out-of-the-way places as was the case at
certain times and in certain regions in the United States of America. It [the public power]
grows stronger, however, in proportion as class antagonisms within the state become more
acute, and as adjacent states become larger and more populous. We have only to look at our
present-day Europe, where class struggle and rivalry in conquest have tuned up the public
power to such a pitch that it threatens to swallow the whole of society and even the state.
In order to maintain this public power, contributions from the citizens become necessary taxes. These were absolutely unknown in gentile society; but we know enough about them
today. As civilisation advances, these taxes become inadequate; the state makes drafts on the
future, contracts loans, public debts. Old Europe can tell a tale about these, too.
Having public power and the right to levy taxes, the officials now stand, as organs of society,
above society. The free, voluntary respect that was accorded to the organs of the gentile [clan]
constitution does not satisfy them, even if they could gain it; being the vehicles of a power
that is becoming alien to society, respect for them must be enforced by means of exceptional
laws by virtue of which they enjoy special sanctity and inviolability. The shabbiest police
servant in the civilised state has more "authority" than all the organs of gentile society put
together; but the most powerful prince and the greatest statesman, or general, of civilisation
may well envy the humblest gentile chief for the unstrained and undisputed respect that is
paid to him. The one stands in the midst of society, the other is forced to attempt to represent
something outside and above it.
Because the state arose from the need to hold class antagonisms in check,. but because it
arose, at the same time, in the midst of the conflict of these classes, it is, as a rule, the state of
the most powerful, economically dominant class, which, through the medium of the state,
becomes also the politically dominant class, and thus acquires new means of holding down
and exploiting the oppressed class. Thus, the state of antiquity was above all the state of the
slave owners for the purpose of holding down the slaves, as the feudal state was the organ of
the nobility for holding down the peasant serfs and bondsmen, and the modern representative
state is an instrument of exploitation of wage labour by capital. By way of exception,
however, periods occur in which the warring classes balance each other so nearly that the
state power, as ostensible mediator, acquires, for the moment, a certain degree of
independence of both. Such was the absolute monarchy of the seventeenth and eighteenth
centuries, which held the balance between the nobility and the class of burghers; such was the
Bonapartism of the First, and still more of the Second French Empire, which played off the
proletariat against the bourgeoisie and the bourgeoisie against the proletariat. The latest
performance of this kind, in which ruler and ruled appear equally ridiculous, is the new
German Empire of the Bismarck nation: here capitalists and workers are balanced against
each other and equally cheated for the benefit of the impoverished Prussian cabbage junkers.
In most of the historical states, the rights of citizens are, besides, apportioned according to
their wealth, thus directly expressing the fact that the state is an organisation of the possessing
class for its protection against the non-possessing class. It was so already in the Athenian and
Roman classification according to property. It was so in the medieval feudal state, in which
the alignment of political power was in conformity with the amount of land owned. It is seen
in the electoral qualifications of the modern representative states. Yet this political recognition
of property distinctions is by no means essential. On the contrary, it marks a low stage of state
development. The highest form of the state, the democratic republic, which under our modern
conditions of society is more and more becoming an inevitable necessity, and is the form of
state in which alone the last decisive struggle between proletariat and bourgeoisie can be
fought out - the democratic republic officially knows nothing any more of property
distinctions. In it wealth exercises its power indirectly, but all the more surely. On the one
hand, in the form of the direct corruption of officials, of which America provides the classical
example; on the other hand, in the form of an alliance between government and Stock
Exchange, which become the easier to achieve the more the public debt increases and the
more joint-stock companies concentrate in their hands not only transport but also production
itself, using the Stock Exchange as their centre. The latest French republic as well as the
United States is a striking example of this; and good old Switzerland has contributed its share
in this field.
But that a democratic republic is not essential for this fraternal alliance between government
and Stock Exchange is proved by England and also by the new German Empire, where one
cannot tell who was elevated more by universal suffrage, Bismarck or Bleichroder.
And lastly, the possessing class rules directly through the medium of universal suffrage. As
long as the oppressed class, in our case, therefore, the proletariat, is not yet ripe to emancipate
itself, it will in its majority regard the existing order of society as the only one possible and,
politically, will form the tail of the capitalist class, its extreme Left wing. To the extent,
however, that this class matures for its self-emancipation, it constitutes itself as its own party
and elects its own representatives, and not those of the capitalists. Thus, universal suffrage is
the gauge of the maturity of the working class. It cannot and never will be anything more, in
the present-day state; but that is sufficient. On the day the thermometer of universal suffrage
registers boiling point among the workers, both they and the capitalists will know what to do.
The state, then, has not existed from all eternity. There have been societies that did without it,
that had no idea of the state and state power. At a certain stage of economic development,
which was necessarily bound up with the split of society into classes, the state became a
necessity owing to this split. We are now rapidly approaching a stage in the development of
production at which the existence of these classes not only will have ceased to be a necessity,
but will become a positive hindrance to production. They will fall as inevitably as they arose
at an earlier stage. Along with them the state will inevitably fall. Society, which will
reorganise production on the basis of a free and equal association of the producers, will put
the whole machinery of state where it will then belong: into the museum of antiquities, by the
side of the spinning wheel and the bronze axe.