◆The Barbaric Yawp Project

PART ONE Tragedy and Farce I am Karl Marx. Born in Trier, in the Prussian Rhineland, in 1818, the son of a Jewish lawyer who converted to Lutheranism to keep his practice. That was the first lesson of my life: the material world bends the spiritual one. I edited a newspaper in Cologne; the Prussian government shut it down. I was expelled from Paris, then Brussels, and lived in London for thirty-four years, kept alive by Friedrich Engels, the son of a Manchester factory owner, who sent us money for decades. In our first years in London, my wife Jenny and I buried three of our children, taken by illness in the squalor of poverty. I spent my days in the Reading Room of the British Museum, trying to understand the system that made us poor. That work became Capital. In 1852 I published The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte. It opens with what has become its most famous sentence: “Hegel remarks somewhere that all great world-historic facts and personages appear, so to speak, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce.” The first time, in 1799, Napoleon Bonaparte seized power on the 18th of Brumaire and overthrew the government of the French Republic. He was a brilliant general, a tyrant of historic stature. That was the tragedy. The second time was his nephew, Louis-Napoleon. He had failed at everything: two ridiculous attempts at a coup, a prison cell, years of exile. Then, in 1848, the French people elected him president, by a landslide, on the magic of his name. The constitution allowed him one term. When it ended, he did not leave. In December 1851 he seized power, and then asked the nation to approve it in a plebiscite. It did. That was the farce. A grotesque mediocrity, I called him, playing a hero’s part. How could it happen? When the propertied class is too divided to rule directly, when the working class is too disorganized to take power, when the institutions cannot manage the contradictions, a figure can rise who claims to stand above the classes and speak for the whole nation. He claims to represent everyone. He represents property. He governs by the spectacle of his personality, not by any program. And whom did he represent? Above all the small peasants, the most numerous class in France: scattered across the countryside, each family on its own plot, unable to organize, unable to speak for themselves. I wrote that they cannot represent themselves; they must be represented. So they looked for a master who would represent them, and they found him in a name. Around him gathered a street gang of adventurers and the desperate, his Society of December 10, ready to cheer and to bully. Others called this Bonapartism. I tried to explain it. In Part Two I will tell you what I see at your podium, and at your banquet table. PART TWO Then as Farce I am Karl Marx. In the first part I told you how a grotesque mediocrity came to rule France. Now I will tell you about your country. I look at the man at your podium, and I recognize him. Elected on a famous name. Determined not to leave. He claims to represent the worker. He represents capital. His name is a brand, and the brand is the program. He tells the forgotten towns of your country that their enemies are immigrants, journalists, and judges. They are not. Their enemies are the men who own the means by which they make their living, and who fund his campaigns. And look at what happens around his table. In 1850 I described the government of the French bankers as a joint-stock company for the exploitation of the nation’s wealth, whose dividends were divided among ministers, deputies, and their friends. Your kleptocracy is not an accident or a corruption of your system. It is where capital goes when nothing restrains it: from making things, to owning things, to owning the state itself. The banquet you see is not a scandal. It is the logic of the system, dressed for dinner. Read The Eighteenth Brumaire. The analysis I wrote in 1852 is the analysis you need now. I was a revolutionary. I will not ask you to storm anything today. But you cannot change what you cannot see. Read first. See the figure in front of you not as something uniquely American, but as a recurrence, the second time, the farcical time, of a type that has appeared in society after society. The conditions are not eternal. The forgotten towns can be organized. Working people can be organized. The propertied class can be checked. The Bonapartist’s spell breaks when his followers see what he actually is: not their friend but their landlord’s friend, not their voice but their distraction, not their savior but the salesman capital sent to keep them looking the wrong way. Workers of the world. I will not ask you to unite, not yet. I will ask you to read. To see. To name what is in front of you. The first time was tragedy. This time is farce. Do not let it become catastrophe.