Trump reflects a modern Caesarism that must be evaluated by its ability to navigate the transition into the fourth industrial revolution, writes Joaquin Flores. Join us on Telegram , Twitter , and VK . Contact us: info@strategic-culture.su Donald Trump’s “Ur-Caesarism” should be analyzed through the lens of critical theory and historical precedents to prevent a monopoly on his interpretation by hostile academic institutions. By challenging the Marxist “illusion of progress,” we find Trump does not represent a regressive force because there was no viable socialist revolution to interrupt, placing him instead within a tradition of leaders who stabilize crises during shifts in productive forces.
Trump reflects a modern Caesarism that must be evaluated by its ability to navigate the transition into the fourth industrial revolution rather than by the teleological expectations of traditional leftist thought. Otherwise, the historical record will remain monopolized by institutions predisposed to mischaracterize not only Trump and his officials, but also the broader mass constituency behind him: the deplorables, the rabble, the unwashed masses, as they are so often styled by their social betters – they are in fact Trump’s own “ Society of December 10 ”. The establishment opposed to Trump has repeatedly declared its intention to retake power and persecute any stand-outs among the scores of millions of Americans who supported him across three presidential elections. Lamartine before the Town Hall of Paris Rejecting the Red Flag on 25 February 1848 – Henri Félix Philippoteaux, 1848
The progressive or regressive nature of Caesarist Trump within Marxist discourse has been one of the main questions deliberated in our series, and the other being whether the question of progress or regress is even the pertinent question, in part I; Trump is ‘No King’, but is he a Caesar? , and part II; Ur-Caesarism: The Left keeps calling Trump a Fascist , which fortunately gained interest among readers. We further the analysis onward to Georges Sorel, whose definitions of what we have termed Ur-Caesarism will figure in definitively towards our deconstruction of the Marxian-progressive framework which has defined Trump as a fascist.
Must Ur-Caesarism be understood through a Gramscian lens as a crisis-management form of power that stabilizes an order in crisis when a particular class is unable to clearly hold power? Does the Caesarian state function as something which is able to stand above the interests of a particular class, at least as understood by representatives of that class, or is it clearly subordinate to the interests of one class over another in the sense of Lenin? Gramsci’s position is a sophisticated synthesis that moves beyond the binary of the Caesarian state being a neutral arbiter versus a simple instrument of class power. While he remains a Marxist-Leninist at his core, he treats the Caesarist state as having relative autonomy; a concept that bridges the gap between Marx’s observations in The Class Struggles in France, 1848-1850 and Lenin’s strict functionalism in ‘ The State and Revolution ’(191 . Marx’s understanding of autonomy is also closer to Sorel’s reading, which is interesting considering that Lenin trumpeted himself as the orthodox Marxist against all revisionist apostasies and heresies, having called Sorel a “great muddler” in ‘ Materialism and Empirio-Criticism ’ (190 while Sorel admiringly called Lenin a “New Caesar” in 1919 in his own defense of the Bolshevik Revolution. A problem of Aristotelian “potentials” Yet to define something (a Caesarian regime) by what is not happening (a worker’s revolution) reaches back to our critique of the “Nirvana” fallacy implicit in Gramsci’s Marxist discourse. Gramsci, like Marx, makes an error of defining a phenomenon in terms of what is believed to be its potential, rather than what it is – a defect present in Hegel’s dialectics and the Aristotelianism which inspired it. But to avoid a teleological question pertaining to history, Gramsci utilizes the fascist and nationalist discourse of his time to apply his determinism by squeezing it into a framework of a biological analogy where on its face it makes sense: for surely a kitten has all that potential to grow into a cat. However, this is because that is predetermined in its biology. But do material forces through history operate that way?
No: technological progress and the development of the productive forces do not inherently entail the parallel rise of horizontal, flattening, or democratic polities, nor any necessary expansion of human rights at each phase of historical development, even if one concedes that, across the far longer arc of history, such a tendency may perhaps emerge, though this too is rather less self-evident than modern progressivist teleology typically assumes. If we strip away the presupposition that the rise of a Caesarian leader is necessarily interrupting some unrealized emancipatory possibility, then the question becomes considerably better defined. One cannot simply assume that an alternative path was historically available merely because one projected upon the present, potentially in error, that such a thing was possible. The best evidence that such a path was genuinely possible would have been its successful realization. Without that, one is often left substituting a presuppositional telos and narrative built upon counter-factual history for a more rigorous historical analysis along with an empirical assessment of the thing or process tangibly presented. Economic Development = Progress? In Marx’s Preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy , The British Rule in India , and in The Poverty of Philosophy it is clear that in the classical Marxian sense, the question is narrower: progress is not measured by “justice” or “ideas,” but by the sophistication of the technology used to produce life. So did the Caesarian resolution permit the continued expansion of the productive forces and stabilize the crisis of rule sufficiently for historical development to continue? If so, then however unpleasant its methods, it would still be regarded as historically progressive within that framework. Napoleon Crossing the Alps, Jacques-Louis David, 1801 This is broadly how Marxists historically approached the rise of Napoleon Bonaparte. Napoleon’s ascent was not considered progressive because it preserved radical democracy, nor because it spared the Jacobins, nor because it refrained from militarism, censorship, or conquest. Quite the opposite. His consolidation of power resulted in the eventual destruction of the revolutionary left wing of the French Revolution. Yet Marxists regarded the Napoleonic phase as historically progressive because it stabilized and generalized the bourgeois-democratic order at a stage when they believed no viable socialist mode of production was yet materially possible. The issue, therefore, was not autocracy as such, nor conquest, nor even the suppression of socialist factions. The issue was whether the crisis had been resolved in a way that permitted continued historical and productive development.
Only when Marxists believed the productive forces had matured sufficiently for socialist transformation to become historically achievable, would a Caesarism or Bonapartism be viewed as regressive. At that point, the Caesarian figure no longer resolves a crisis on behalf of advancing historical development, but arrests or diverts a transition now presumed possible; such was Marx’s assessment about the rise of Louis Napoleon (Napoleon III) in The Class Struggles in France . The distinction rests entirely upon the historical question of what mode of production is materially viable at a given moment, which is also why debates around “progress” in Marxism eventually collapse into arguments over an idealist teleology disguised as materialist economic historical development. Louis-Napoleon, imprisoned in the fort of Ham, conducts a physics experiment. By Philippoteaux and E. Leguay, 1853 What strikes one immediately, even if granting the general Marxist historical-materialist theory of social transformation validity, is why the socialist mode of production would be possible only after some fifty years of the bourgeois-democratic revolution realizing political power. The slavocratic mode of production seems to have endured for several thousands of years, the feudal mode of production for over a thousand. Why then would we expect to find the ripened conditions for a hypothetical socialist mode of production when the capitalist mode of production had only been developing for a few short centuries, with political power formally seized or otherwise acquired by the bourgeoisie much more recently? Even by this logic, we should expect the bourgeoisie as a political ruling class to remain in power even centuries into the development of the socialist mode, whatever that might look like.
Then, beneath all of that sits an older defect in Marxist thought itself, the unresolved question of whether history can meaningfully be said to move toward “progress” in any technologically driven, deterministic or teleological sense; a product of Marx’s attempt to invert G.W.F Hegel’s dialectics and situate them upon an ostensibly materialist basis. Georges Sorel’s Clarity In light then of Georges Sorel’s work, in Reflections on Violence (190 , Sorel argued that Caesarism arises when the middle class becomes cowardly and loses its “will to power”. Sorel assessed that in a healthy society, class conflict is sharp and heroic; even the ruling class has vigor and so when that class becomes “humanitarian” and seeks compromise rather than struggle, the state becomes a bloated, corrupt bureaucracy. And so Caesarism was the way out of this corruption: a man of action harnessing the state because the traditional institutions have become too hollow to function, bringing vitality where it was lost. While it was Sorel as a type of “heterodox” or “apostate” who first introduced the concept of Caesarism (and myth) into that Marxian political discourse and though also in this way was pointing towards so-called post-modernity, it would later be Gramsci who would attempt to give it a rigorous treatment within the rubric of a more “orthodox” Marxist thought, and also probably felt he had the license to do so as Gramsci was imprisoned by the same Mussolini (also a post-Marxist “apostate”) that Sorel had taken great interest in.
In Sorel’s work The Illusions of Progress (190 , he argued that the idea of linear, continuous progress was a bourgeois invention used to justify the present paradigm of liberal modernity and to suggest that social change should be gradual and orderly. In this sense, he was attacking the so-called economism of Bernstein and the scientistic determinism of Kautsky, while still maintaining that Marx’s revolutionary spirit captured a truth which later ‘Marxist’ reformists of the French or German socialist parties had rejected. Sorel traced the idea of progress back to the 18th-century Enlightenment, robustly arguing that it was the ideology of the “administrator” and the “technocrat”; the people who wanted to manage society like a machine. Hence the Marxist focus on “developing the forces of production” (such as in Marx’s Critique of the Gotha Programme – 1875) was just a socialist version of bourgeois industrialization. He had assessed that by focusing on material progress (more goods, better technology), Marxism was losing its moral and ethical core, and so the fight should not be over a “better-managed” society; Sorel wanted a “reborn” society. Schrödinger’s Progressive What is extremely consequential is Friedrich Engels’ ultimate acknowledgement that a worker’s revolution was not possible in 1848, nor even in 1871. As Engels himself concludes in his crucial 1895 Introduction to The Class Struggles in France , the classical Marxist understanding of revolutionary transition had been wrong. The assumption that advanced capitalist countries like Germany and France were ripe for proletarian revolution proved to be a fundamental misreading of historical stages and revolutionary dynamics.
What Engels recognized is that all so-called “proletarian” revolutions called so simply because increasing numbers of industrial wage workers participated, have actually been bourgeois-democratic revolutions in Marxist terms; transitions from feudal or quasi-feudal social relations to capitalist ones, or even simply political uprisings squarely within the capitalist mode of production relating to more particular crises of the day and not of historical-epoch significance. These were mediated by revolutionary violence and, where successful, led by exceptional individuals who consolidated state power through what appeared to be dictatorial authority but was actually the only mechanism available for achieving systemic transformation under conditions of elite resistance and popular disorganization. The French Revolution, despite the socialist aspirations of the Jacobins, produced capitalism in the sense of it being bourgeois-democratic, and eventually Napoleon. The Russian Revolution, despite Bolshevik ideology, produced state monopoly capitalism and eventually Stalin. In both cases, the “Bonapartist” or “Caesarist” figure emerged not as a betrayal of revolution but as its necessary fulfillment given the actual balance of class forces and level of economic development.
These Caesars (or Bonapartes) which would appear as regressive, are then, like Schrödinger’s cat, a quantum superposition of these two possibilities, simultaneously also progressive, depending on whether socialist transformation is or isn’t on the agenda, which makes Marx’s theory problematic like Bohr’s and Heisenberg’s. These were historically “progressive” because they created the socio-economic conditions in which the productive forces continued to expand; the pre-requisite for any later socialist development based on a real negation of the law of value (scarcity). Gramsci would contend, to resolve that contradiction in Marxism presented by Mussolini’s own Caesarism in the form of Fascism, that society had been “pruned” in such a way that the productive forces were developed while the horizons of humanity were cut back. And that may indeed fairly condemn the fascist project as a regressive Caesarism, and this is due to the scale and scope of the violent and murderous social repression and ultimately a war of total genocide. Sorel, who died in 1922, would definitely agree, with his focus on love and justice, but did not live to see fascism in power or the genocides of that war.
In evaluating Trump’s Caesarism then, we understand that there was not an imminent worker’s revolution that he frustrated, which if he had would qualify his power as regressive. He subsists electorally; no Rubicon has been crossed (or has it?), and in that sense is more like Napoleon III in his second year as president of France. In relation to Caesar, ours now is closer to the period of the First Triumvirate. There may be a collection of growing grievances, and alarming spectacles of bellicosity, but nothing outside the norm of law and war within Western democratic societies, and certainly nothing rising to the level of regressive Caesarism. So our next questions are whether Trump is indeed progressive, and here this ties back to our work several years ago on the coming historical epoch; the 4 th industrial revolution, AI, 3D printing, and the internet of things. Additionally, on the geopolitical arena, we will be able to compare Trump’s adventurism in Venezuela and Iran to Julius Caesar’s forays into Egypt and Gaul.