Writes Marx in the opening sentence of The Eighteenth Brumaire (The Brumaire, hereafter) that “Hegel observes somewhere that all the great events and characters of world history occur twice, so to speak. He forgot to add: the first time as high tragedy, the second time as low farce” (Marx, 19). It seems that Marx here claims that there is something singularly authentic about the “first time”; that it possesses a creative— even revolutionary— potential that cannot be found in its untimely and puerile repetition. Such an interpretation seems all the more plausible when one considers Marx’s statement that “the resurrection of the dead in those revolutions served to glorify new struggles… to magnify fantastically the given task” (Marx, 21). But one must understand this statement in relation to the rest of Marx’s treatise. I would like to suggest that Marx, far from lauding these revolutions, condemns them as harshly as the events that follow them. The failure of the second is also the failure of the first since the first does not simply serve as a model that the second imitates, rather, the second repetition is an immanent possibility of the first; the farcical or comic is contained within the tragic. The two must accordingly be taken together in any analysis of the failure of the bourgeois revolutions. As Marx argues, “[b]ourgeois revolutions… storm along from strength to strength… ecstasy is the feeling of the day; but they are short lived, quickly attaining their zenith, and a lengthy hangover grips society before it soberly absorbs the resulting lessons of such Sturm und Drang” (Marx, 22). This hangover that is the condition of possibility of farcical revolutions necessarily follows from the ostensibly successful earlier revolutions. To repeat is to invoke the past, and herein, according to Marx, does one encounter the failure of the bourgeois revolutions: a repetition that takes as its guiding principle a return to the past (this criticism, as mentioned above, applies both to its creative use and farcical misuse). Proletarian revolution, on the other hand, refuses such a return and is characterized by an essential incompleteness and a ruthless self-criticism. If proletarian revolution resists a certain image of revolution by leaving behind the past — letting “the dead bury the dead” — does it also abandon the theater of repetition (Marx, 22)? Can proletarian revolution as theatrical repetition be conceived if the proletariat purge from it any glorification of the past, or is repetition itself always already sterile and connected to the past? If the latter is the case, how does Marx reconceive human agency and historical action as it relates to the poetry of the future in The Brumaire? Is the future already with us, or can the proletariat, through a new model of revolution gain unmediated access to it? These are some of the questions that I will consider in my essay, though my treatment will no doubt be inexhaustive.

Analyzing Marx’s use of theatrical language in The Brumaire is not only useful for detailing a proletarian political programme, but indispensable if one is to elaborate a Marxist conception of ideology (though these two poles of Marx’s thinking are without a doubt related). Marx makes frequent use of the metaphor of masking and drama in The Brumaire, take, for example, his statement: “[t]he bourgeoisie was playing an utter comedy…[o]nly now [in early 1852] that he has removed his solemn opponent, when he has taken on the imperial role in earnest and with his Napoleonic mask means to represent the real Napoleon, does he become a victim of his own world-view” (Marx, 52-53, 64). Should not Bonaparte, in donning this Napoleonic mask, be able to transcend the particularity of the historical situation; is not the mask the signifier of the universal? No, replies Marx. The complete opposite is the case: the situation of the bourgeoisie has always been one of utter comedy. The removal of Bonaparte’s “solemn opponent”, far from guaranteeing a truly revolutionary moment results in a mere lapse into self-delusion in which the “comedian” thinks his “own comedy as world history” (Marx, 64). Bonaparte’s cowardice, his inability to bring something new into the world— this remarkable irresoluteness— cannot be understood as a simple personal failing since it is the hallmark of all bourgeois revolutions: it is precisely at the moment when “they appear to be revolutionizing themselves… in creating something unprecedented… that is when they nervously summon up the spirits of the past, borrowing from them their names” (Marx, 19). And yet it is in Bonaparte’s cunning ability to take comedy as comedy—rather than seriously, like his compatriots— that one finds his success; he is a “swindler, who took the comedy straight” (Marx, 64). That is, it is to the extent that Bonaparte assumes the mask of Napoleon while knowing full well that it is only a mask, that he is successful (in his cognizance of the fact that he is only producing an illusion). But it is at the moment that he takes his “own comedy as world history”; that he thinks himself “the real Napoleon” does he fail and fall into disrepute (Marx, 64). Bonaparte in producing “anarchy in the name of order, while stripping the halo from the whole machinery” might cause “the bronze of Napoleon… [to] plunge to the ground”, but this profanity is not creditable to Bonaparte himself; it is an act of (Napoleonic) self-destruction, one mask being succeeded by another— a logic that is immanent to bourgeois revolution as such (Marx, 109). Napoleon, then, is here just as culpable as his ridiculous heir. If Bonaparte is only successful insofar as he plays a role— can one even speak of a “real” Bonaparte lurking behind the mask of Napoleon? We know nothing of this Bonaparte except for his abject failure, his constitutive inability to be someone. This has important consequences for a Marxist theory of ideology. It is a truism of Marxism that Marx’s critical philosophy posits a distinction between reality and ideology; that false consciousness can be likened to a veil covering over a more fundamental truth. Marxist critique is tasked with lifting the veil of ideology, in order to apprehend this truth, or reality. A proponent of this view might argue, for example, that the peasantry’s support of Bonaparte can be attributed to their inability to “unmask” him; an inability to discern the pathetic reality of Bonaparte. They thereby allowed themselves to be seduced by the beguiling features of his mask. But this conception of the relationship between ideology and reality is limited— The Brumaire unsettles, rather than affirms, such an account. For in unmasking Bonaparte one would be met with the visage of the lofty commander which itself is yet another mask and so on, ad infinitum. One would look in vain for an authentic, that is, originary face or model. Behind one illusion— the peasantry’s belief in the miraculous victory of Bonaparte, for example— there resides not a truth to be uncovered, but countless other illusions. The mask itself then assumes its own reality; it does not need to be understood in relation to a face. The very same can be said of the relationship between reality and ideology. If there are no “real” faces but only masks, then ideology is not simply the deformed offspring of reality. Rather, what we call reality itself has ideological content: men make their history under circumstances that are “cartoon-like” not “as they please… rather they make it in present circumstances, given and inherited” (Marx, 19). The “making” of history does not occur, then, ex nihilo nor is its progression by any means natural, but is instead dictated at every turn by tradition (Marx, 19). The bourgeoisie, then, are unsuccessful against Bonaparte because they forget, or do not acknowledge this; they take in earnest what are in fact comic conditions, and thus partake in this illusion “in the most serious way in the world, without infringing even the most pedantic strictures of French dramatic etiquette… half convinced of the solemnity of their own high politics” (Marx, 63). As Michel Chaouli argues in “Masking and Unmasking: The Ideological Fantasies of the Eighteenth Brumaire”, “[i]t is not that the comedy masks the real conditions and thus blinds the bourgeoisie, but that the conditions themselves are comic and that the bourgeoisie takes them seriously (and is therefore blind)”; the comedy does not lie in this or that belief of this or that person, but the structure of historical reality as such (Chaouli, 63).

If the past constrains the choices we can make in the present; if we can only repeat what has been handed down to us in tradition, then what is to be said of historical agency— acting in history? Can one speak of a subject who acts, if one cannot locate the origins of this action in the subject? Over this determinism looms the shadow of various remarks that Marx makes in The Brumaire wherein he accords great significance to world-historical actors, or agents, such as Napoleon— he assigns him as direct cause to such developments as free competition, France’s industrialization, and the overthrowing of old feudal idols (Marx, 20). Does Marx not contradict himself here by offering the reader— in quick succession—opposing views of historical development? It seems that we are presented with two conceptions of agency, or the subject-object relation in The Brumaire:

1. Orthodox, basically determinist, free will exists but is basically inessential/contingent, the imposition of certain subjective characteristics by objective structures ultimately dictates change.
2. Will-as-decisive-contingency, where objective factors produce certain subjective conditions but the choice of which subjective conditions are acted upon is contingent on what individual wills decide (a variant of voluntarism).

Marx wants to say something that is not quite either of these positions in The Brumaire— these two options are presented to the reader precisely in order to go beyond them. For Marx, the objective structures of capital produce certain subjective dispositions (though as tendencies or generalities, not as universal necessities) as well as certain objective structures which appeal to the subject under capitalism in certain ways. The responses to this relation between subjective desire and objective relation are highly overdetermined, and this is how we ought to understand Marx’s famous statement that “[m]en make their own history, but they do not make it just as they please”; he does not want to offer a clear picture of what kind of role the will plays in this overdetermined relation, but I think it is clear that the experience of these desires is at the very least highly individualized and situational, and that even the role of will in the commonsense definition of the term is unclear (Marx, 19). Marx’s argument is that there are different ways in which individuals can become conscious of the objects of their activity which form aspects or parts of the social reproduction process; depending on what form this consciousness takes, they will either miscognize capitalist relations as a universal relation that offers them a means of self-betterment (in a variety of senses) if one participates in it (as is the case with the peasants who supported Bonaparte), or they will have a different consciousness of it (a proper recognition) which will reveal to them that the universal is incomplete and that further relation between subjects must be formed before the bad universal can be appropriated and transformed into an immanent, non-abstract universal relation (as is the case with proletarian revolution). There is no definitive role one can ascribe to the will as a cause here, then, for Marx, but one can understand that will qua conscious relation to objectivity is a necessary part of this process in general. Marx thus avoids both a liberal, voluntaristic conception of agency, as well as one that is structurally deterministic. As Chad Lavin argues in “Postliberal Agency in Marx’s Brumaire”, even Marx’s praise of Napoleon is a rhetorical trick : he does so only in order to demonstrate the inadequacy of a voluntarist conception of agency that reduces “complex convergences of historical forces to unified actors” (Lavin, 439). This is a practice, according to Lavin, “that finds rhetorical manifestation in the metonymical process of naming” such as when “the sword” is made to represent the entire “political-military apparatus” (Lavin, 439, 443). The “metonymic consolidation” that constitutes a name (or mask) eschews the complexity of the historical process— the name or mask represents the heroism of these world-historical actors: “Camille Desmoulins, Danton, Robespierre, Saint-Just, Napoleon” are the heroes that “[accomplish] the business of the day” (Lavin, 443; Marx, 20). But they are heroic only to those whom they have fooled; they appear to these people as if capable of stepping outside history itself in order to condemn or redeem it. Yet they are trapped within the theater of repetition, their masks signifying nothing else but their impotence.

Proletarian revolution explodes the comedy of bourgeois life and society, not through a revolution that is all the more ridiculous, but one that incessantly returns “to what is apparently complete in order to begin it anew, and deride with savage brutality the inadequacies… and pitiful aspects of their first attempts… until a situation is created which makes impossible any reversion” (Marx, 22-23; emphasis mine). It would appear, then, that only the proletariat have the strength to liberate the very concept of revolution from the tyranny of theater, thereby introducing something new into the world. The past is barred off. It is severed from the creative will that is a condition of the success of proletarian revolution. The future, wherefrom the proletariat creates, is privileged. In what sense, however, does the proletariat access the future? Is the future some concrete entity to be apprehended? More importantly, who or what is the proletariat? Interestingly, it is in this category itself (that is, the proletariat) that one finds the future. Marx disabuses us of the notion that the future must have a determined content or that revolution proceeds according to a set of edifying propositions or dictums: “[t]he revolution of the nineteenth century must let the dead bury the dead in order to realise its own content” (Marx, 22). “Ownness” is here a signifier of indeterminacy, of infinite potential— that the revolution produces and realizes its own content means that it breaks radically with tradition and the dead. Nothing is given, nor guaranteed in advance. Just as the future is radically undetermined (it does not have any positive content as such) the proletariat itself, insofar as it inhabits and thus creates from the future, must be similarly undetermined; just as the future cannot be said to be a concrete entity, so the proletariat are not a homogeneous group but rather a milieu the coordinates of which are constantly shifting. Writes Marx in The Brumaire that, “[t]he bourgeois republic was triumphant. On its side stood the finance aristocracy, the industrial bourgeoisie, the middle classes, the petty bourgeoisie, the army, the lumpenproletariat organised as a militia, the intellectual authorities, the church and the landowners. On the side of the Paris proletariat there was none but itself” (Marx, 26). Here, Marx equates the victory of the bourgeois republic with various classes and interests— the proletariat is defined only through an exclusion, that is, its absence from this process. The proletariat is absent from this social totality only to the extent that it opposes the bourgeois republic (resistance that is, as Marx notes in The Brumaire, repeatedly marked by failure). As Slavoj Žižek argues in Mapping Ideology, “‘class struggle’ designates the very antagonism that prevents the objective (social) reality from constituting itself as a self-enclosed whole” (Žižek, 14). It is in this sense that one can say that the proletariat are the site of a radical indeterminacy: the proletariat cannot possess a self-certain identity since it is precisely that which disrupts the self-certain identity of the bourgeois republic, of the social totality. It is this flight from identity that constitutes the proletariat’s escape from the theater: the shedding of masks represents not the coming into existence of an authentic proletarian “face”, but the movement of the abolition of the proletariat as such (and by extension, the theater of bourgeois society).

Works Cited

Chaouli, Michel. “Masking and Unmasking: The Ideological Fantasies of the Eighteenth Brumaire.” Qui Parle, vol. 3, no. 1, 1989, pp. 53–71. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/20685872. Accessed 6 Mar. 2023.

Chad Lavin (2005) Postliberal Agency in Marx’s Brumaire, Rethinking Marxism, 17:3, 439-454, DOI: 10.1080/08935690500122305

Martin, James, and Mark Cowling. Marx’s Eighteenth Brumaire: (Post) Modern Interpretations. Pluto Press, 2002.

Žižek Slavoj. Mapping Ideology. Verso, 2012.