Thursday, January 26, 2023

correct me if I'm wrong.

Napoleon represented the last battle of revolutionary terror against the bourgeois society which had been proclaimed by this same Revolution, and against its policy. Napoleon, of course, already discerned the essence of the modern state; he understood that it is based on the unhampered development of bourgeois society, on the free movement of private interest, etc. He decided to recognise and protect this basis. He was no terrorist with his head in the clouds. Yet at the same time he still regarded the state as an end in itself and civil life only as a treasurer and his subordinate which must have no will of its own. He perfected the Terror by substituting permanent war for permanent revolution. He fed the egoism of the French nation to complete satiety but demanded also the sacrifice of bourgeois business, enjoyments, wealth, etc., whenever this was required by the political aim of conquest.

"Napoleon represented the last battle of revolutionary terror against the bourgeois society which had been proclaimed by this same Revolution, and against its policy.... He perfected the Terror by substituting permanent war for permanent revolution."

"Permanent revolution" refers to the natural state/condition of the bourgeoisie. Goethe's Faust

2

While the democratic petty bourgeois want to bring the revolution to an end as quickly as possible, achieving at most the aims already mentioned, it is our interest and our task to make the revolution permanent until all the more or less propertied classes have been driven from their ruling positions, until the proletariat has conquered state power and until the association of the proletarians has progressed sufficiently far – not only in one country but in all the leading countries of the world – that competition between the proletarians of these countries ceases and at least the decisive forces of production are concentrated in the hands of the workers. 

"[I]t is our interest and our task to make the revolution permanent until..." 

I'd misread the second one.  I'd read it as referring to permanent effects, a new stability, but it refers only to maintaining the crisis until victory.  It's the standard definition: a state of exception. But states of exception are self-perpetuating. 

Economic booms don't last, but economic depressions are self-sustaining. 

Still watching Eurotrash intellectual leftists chat with Eurotrash reactionaries because they have so much in common: race and a love of political theology. 
Someone should do a study of who debated the end of history, and who ignored it as a sideshow.

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