Karl Marx: A biography by David McLellan

LONDON (^235)
organisation, with its ingenious state machinery, embracing wide strata,
with a host of officials numbering half a million, besides an army of
another half million, this appalling parasitic body, which enmeshes the
body of French society like a net 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.^6 '
During and after the revolution of 1789 the bureaucracy had prepared the
class rule of the bourgeoisie; under Louis Philippe and the parliamentary
republic it had still been the instrument of the ruling class; under the
second Bonaparte 'the state seems to have made itself completely indepen-
dent'.^62 Marx then immediately qualified this by saying: 'and yet the state
power is not suspended in mid-air. Bonaparte represents a class, and the
most numerous class of French society at that, the small-holding peas-
ants.'^63 The identity of interest of these peasants did not create a com-
munity, since they were physically so scattered. Thus they could not
represent themselves, but had to be represented. But the peasants on
whom Napoleon relied were burdened by a mortgage debt whose interest
was equal to the annual interest on the entire British national debt. Finally
the army had degenerated from the flower of the peasant youth into 'the
swamp flower of the peasant Lumpenproletariat'.^64 Thus, according to
Marx, the three key ideas of Napoleon I - independent small-holdings
for peasants, taxes to support strong central administration and a large
army drawn from the peasants - had found their ultimate degeneration
under Louis Napoleon. However, centralisation had been acquired and
that would be an important feature of the future society:
The demolition of the state machine will not endanger centralisation.
Bureaucracy is only the low and brutal form of a centralisation that is
still afflicted with its opposite, with feudalism. When he is disappointed
in the Napoleonic Restoration, the French peasant will part with his
belief in his small-holding, the entire state edifice erected on this small-
holding will fall to the ground and the proletarian revolution will obtain
that chorus without which its solo song becomes a swan-song in all
peasant countries.^65
It is interesting to note that this passage, with its emphasis on centralis-
ation as a progressive factor, was omitted in the second edition of the
Eighteenth Brumaire in 1869.
The conclusion that a new revolution was possible only as a result of
a new crisis marked the end of Marx's first period of political activism
and his return to the economic studies that had been interrupted by the
events of the late 1840s. Inevitably the implications of Marx's views were
quite unacceptable to many members of the Communist League. In
London the chief spokesman for this opposition was Willich.