In an essay entitled “The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte,” first published in 1852, Karl Marx made a remarkably perceptive set of observations about the fragility of government legitimacy and state control. He rightly pointed out the problems that a disconnected, discontented class of urban and rural poor could create; today we would call that malaise “populism.”
Though his diagnosis was insightful, his prescription was disastrous. Marx believed that the private property regime had contributed to the establishment of this ungovernable “lumpenproletariat”—for Marx, an underclass that wasn’t yet acting in, or even aware of, the role that he believed it would play in history. The main problem, as Marx saw it, was that the commodification of labor meant individual workers had no bargaining power; they faced what modern public choice would call collective action problems. Marx’s solution, however, was bizarre: workers needed to own labor. Not their own labor, but rather all workers should collectively own all labor.
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Today we know that that didn’t happen. As Marx recounted, no one managed to unite the French proletariat around a working-class revolution. The proletariat only united, finally and unconvincingly, around the farcical person of Louis Bonaparte—and the causes of nationalism and law and order that he championed. Marx radiated disdain for France’s last emperor: “An old, crafty roué, he conceives the historical life of the nations and their performances of state as comedy in the most vulgar sense, as a masquerade in which the grand costumes, words, and postures merely serve to mask the pettiest knavery.” Law and order, nationalism, statecraft as a mere excuse for pageantry, an old familiar name that everyone from the lowest classes can instantly recognize—stop me if this sounds familiar.
The return of hard populism and bombastic strongmen has raised once again some old questions: Why does populism keep coming back? And why can’t it get anything done for the people? A close look at the institution of individual private property, and the romantic collectivist counterargument for the organic unity of labor ownership, will shed light on why populism is so persistent. To foreshadow the conclusion: Marx understood the problem, but he missed the solution completely.
Property and Liberalism
John Locke made a deceptively radical claim in his Second Treatise:
Though the earth, and all inferior creatures, be common to all men, yet every man has a property in his own person: this no body has any right to but himself. The labour of his body, and the work of his hands, we may say, are properly his. (Chapter 5, § 27)
On this foundation, liberalism was constructed. In the American context, this extension of the notion of “property” was organic and self-conscious. Individuals in a liberal society have a “property” in their conscience, or religious views; they have likewise self-ownership in their political opinions. In his essay “Property,” James Madison was quite explicit:
In its larger and juster meaning, [property] embraces every thing to which a man may attach a value and have a right; and which leaves to every one else the like advantage. In the former sense, a man’s land, or merchandize, or money is called his property. In the latter sense, a man has a property in his opinions and the free communication of them. He has a property of peculiar value in his religious opinions, and in the profession and practice dictated by them.… In a word, as a man is said to have a right to his property, he may be equally said to have a property in his rights. (emphasis added.)
The two italicized portions are the essence of liberalism, and they extend the idea beyond what Locke had asserted.
For almost all of human history, real estate was owned by local nobility, and citizens lived as serfs; conscience, or religious views, were owned, and jealously controlled, by the state church; political opinions were owned, and strictly controlled, by the king. Liberalism is dangerously subversive of those power relations because it vests in individuals a property in rights. If each individual owns his or her own labor, is free to embrace a metaphysics despite the local church, and can express political views unmolested by the powerful, the very nature of the individual, and their place in society, is transformed.
It is now a commonplace to call property “a bundle of rights.” But, as David Schmidtz has pointed out:
…at the heart of any property right is a right to say no: a right to exclude non-owners. In other words, a right to exclude is not just one stick in a bundle. Rather, property is a tree. Other sticks are branches; the right to exclude is the trunk. (“Property and Justice,” p. 80, emphasis added)
In other words, a property in rights involves not just my ability to exercise my right, but my deeper right to exclude others from the ability to exercise any part of my right; it is individual.
Anti-liberals rely on a collective conception of rights. But a right, on the Lockean and Madisonian account, is a species of property, and property requires a determinate owner—someone who can use a thing and exclude others from using it. A right assigned to all can be exercised by no one in particular, but ultimately it will be controlled by someone, an actual human, a designated agent to act on the collective’s behalf. This could only work if somehow the agent could know what is best for all, and would be willing to act on behalf of all. Each of those two problems, “seeing with the two I’s” of information and incentives, have repeatedly prevented collectivism from delivering on its promises. No agent could know enough, or be disinterested enough, for such a delegation to work.
But now, once again, anti-liberalism is having its moment. In nineteenth-century France, a conservative impulse struggled to restore old power relations, placing individual ownership back in the hands of nobility, church, and monarch. In the twentieth century, conservatives sought the return of traditional “blood and soil” hierarchies based on nationalistic impulses. In the twenty-first century, the political right in many countries has abandoned even the pretense of trusting processes of democratic power, seeking instead total control over issues of gender, race, and religion.
Because the stakes are so high in such populist contests, the one thing that is agreed upon, across the political spectrum, is the necessity of an increasing concentration of power in the executive, in order to do what must be done. Progressive impulses today have settled on a surprisingly similar control structure, based on what in earlier essays I called the “romantic” drive to transform society even further. One of the core doctrines of this progressive impulse is the view, found in Rousseau and Marx, which holds that ownership should be, and in fact must be, collective. To Marx, that collectivity is a class, loosely characterized as “labor,” or workers. When the working class is able to claim true ownership of its labor (the singular is important: the ownership is collective, not individual), then, and only then, will there be an end of exploitation.
It is worth considering the basis for this claim, because it is seeing an astonishing resurgence, often among people who are unaware of its provenance.
Mine vs. Ours
Liberalism asks whose labor, whose conscience, whose opinion this is—always a question about a particular person, who is then the locus of control and choice. The romantic alternative asks a different question: what belongs to us, to the class, to the people. The two questions sound like variations on a theme. They are not.
Karl Marx called the conditions of serfdom, a state church, and control of opinion “feudalism,” and (rightly) saw both that feudalism was an obstacle, and that it created powerful interests that would seek to limit change. The clearest discussion of feudalism as a liminal state creating the conditions where capitalism could emerge is in The German Ideology, where Marx says: “In the pre-capitalist stages of society commerce ruled industry. In modern society the reverse is true.” Under feudalism, in this view, merchants and merchants’ wealth sat outside and above production, mediating between the slave-owner, feudal lord, or state on one side and buyers on the other, without controlling how goods were made. Capitalism is the point where those who control production come to dominate and direct commerce instead.
The consequence, for Marx, was that self-ownership of labor became possible at the same time it became fruitless:
For the conversion of his money into capital, therefore, the owner of money must meet in the market with the free labourer, free in the double sense, that as a free man he can dispose of his labour-power as his own commodity, and that on the other hand he has no other commodity for sale, is short of everything necessary for the realisation of his labour-power. (Capital, Volume 1, Chapter 6, “The Buying and Selling of Labour-Power”)
In other words, workers who own their own labor suffer from Mancur Olson’s “collective action problem,” where large, dispersed groups face prohibitive costs of communication and organization. Without effective organization, they are pandered to by an endless sequence of populist authoritarians. These “strong men” affect to care about the working class, but in fact they would protect the reactionary elites they claimed to want to overthrow.
Marx’s clearest statement of this view is in “The Eighteenth Brumaire” (1852), describing the coup “restoring” Louis Bonaparte to Emperor. The account tracks the rapid exhaustion of a bewildering sequence of aspirants to power through successive votes in the assembly, following the decisive rupture—the June Days massacre of Parisian workers in 1848. By 1851, no class-based faction could rule; France had become ungovernable.
Out of that deadlock, Marx argues, the executive—the bureaucratic-military state apparatus itself—broke loose from the fetters of civil society and rose above the contending classes; Louis Bonaparte claimed to represent the nation as a whole, transcending party and class. His actual function, both by intention and by grudging selection, was to preserve bourgeois property relations while denying the bourgeoisie any real political rule.
This is the origin of what Engels and later Marxists called “Bonapartism”: a strongman state that arbitrates between deadlocked classes by suppressing genuine politics altogether. Marx’s account of why Louis Bonaparte, a self-promoting nobody (Marx later called him “a grotesque nonentity”), could win a national election rests on what would today be called a public choice analysis: peasants were locally isolated and lacked the social relations to organize, even though they were more numerous than any other group. The urban lower classes, meanwhile, sometimes saw Louis Bonaparte through an appealing haze of nationalist symbols that hearkened back to the Revolution itself. Since (as Marx put it), they “cannot represent themselves” politically, such groups must look for a savior to represent them from outside and above—a gap Louis Bonaparte’s name and populist appeals filled.
Marx describes the French state machinery—grown enormous through generations of monarchy, revolution, and empire—as a parasite that Bonaparte inherited and further bloated, in spite of his promises to cut it back. He rested his personal rule on the army, the bureaucracy, and what Marx derisively called the “lumpenproletariat.” That designation is an insult, but also an analytic classification. The German word “lumpen” means “rags"” or “tatters”; when applied to a person it means a scoundrel or rascal. The lumpenproletariat is the tattered, propertyless, feckless underclass that exists below or outside the organized industrial working class.
Individual and Collective Rights
The foundational axiom of the romantic, collective ideology is the claim that individuals are hopelessly and inevitably incapable of acting on their shared interests in a society where atomistic individual rights are the basis of sovereignty. In particular, individual ownership of the means of production is said to be the mechanism of suppression and control. Individuals have the “right” to sell their labor in a market, but their relative lack of bargaining power enfeebles and may even nullify this right. Labor is disunited and unaware of its interests; the capital that it struggles against is often just a single individual who already knows his own interests, and who needs no organizing.
The solution that Marx and his followers proposed is semantically similar to the liberal formulation, but the substantive differences are enormous. In a liberal society, each individual owns his or her own labor, and then rights are derived from that claim. Romantic theory makes only one small amendment: labor, or rather the working class, owns itself. From that claim is derived the claim that the collective has a property right to everything, including the physical means of production, conscience, and political opinions.
It is striking that Marx himself diagnosed a key problem with the optimism of this claim. In the success of Louis Bonaparte, a type of political actor later called the “charismatic leader” by Max Weber, we can locate a deadly threat to any polity where rights are defined collectively rather than individually: Even if somehow the dictatorship of the true proletariat, rather than the scorned “lumpenproletariat,” were to be realized, the system would operate under the constant threat of reconversion. Rights defined collectively destroy the ability of the individual to protect, or for that matter even to advocate for, his or her own goals and needs. The essential dividing line for property is not that which divides what is mine from what is yours, but rather that which protects what is mine from what is ours.
Madison’s formulation is worth returning to, because it is the standard the romantic alternative must but cannot meet. A class cannot speak, act, exclude, or forgive; someone—a party, a vanguard, a leader claiming to embody the general will—must always do those things in the class’s name. That representative is not just a convenience, but a necessity arising from the existence of a “right” that no one holds. And once a representative must act in the collective’s name, it is the representative’s interests, not the collective’s, that actually get protected, traded, and enforced. An individual standing up for their own rights is presumably an enemy of the entire class—or the entire society.
The road from “labor owns itself” to “a strongman speaks for labor” is not an accident of French politics in 1851; it is the road that opens up whenever a right is placed in hands that cannot, themselves, hold it. Marx watched this happen, but he read it as a contingent failure—the wrong class, the wrong leader, in the wrong country—rather than as the permanent condition of collective ownership.
Conceptually, then, there are three ways of conceiving property. One is the liberal notion of personal ownership, with private property derived from that premise. The second is collectivist, organic, ownership, organized for the benefit of all the members of the class. The third is the populist, essentially anarchic, assignment of all state power and property to a charismatic strongman who will rule for the benefit of the disenfranchised.
But there is no viable collectivist solution; the romantics are mistaken. Though it may retain some of the ideological trappings of its origin, the “labor owns itself” project always collapses into the populist strongman outcome. Collective rights are not rights at all; they are the space left over once true ownership and control have been rationalized out of existence. That space contains the de facto want ads for the Bonapartes of every era: the job can’t be done well, but the vacancy reopens every time collective ownership is tried.
Image via Wikimedia Commons, public domain.
