 In 2017, the crown prince of Saudi Arabia, Mohammed bin Salman, imprisoned several hundred Saudi princes, government ministers, Saudi businessmen and so on in the Ritz-Carlton in Riyadh. He froze 2,000 bank accounts, which had about $800 billion in assets in them. Of all those people he detained, he accused 400 of them of corruption. He appointed 26 new judges to try them. And on that basis, extracted about $100 billion in fines from those people. Now, in a similar vein, since 2012, Xi Jinping has been carrying out an anti-corruption drive in China, which has ensnared about 120 high-ranking officials, high-ranking military officials, the senior executives of state-owned companies and so on. Last year, the Beijing regime enforced a regulatory crackdown on businesses owned by this Chinese billionaire, who you've probably heard of, Jack Ma, after he criticized the government publicly. They enforced this crackdown on his businesses, and then he was not seen in public for three months after that. And then we can give another example of this kind of phenomenon, this kind of behavior. Going all the way back to 2000, Putin, in Russia, he jailed and then exiled a man called Vladimir Gozinski, who was a media baron, a bank owner and a real estate magnate. And his media outlets were very critical of Putin. And as a result, he was jailed and exiled. And Putin, after that, took on a man called Mikhail Kordakovsky. He was an oil baron at the time. He was actually the richest man in Russia and also a political opponent of Putin. And in 2003, Putin jailed him in Siberia and seized all of his wealth and assets. And when it comes to Putin, there are many other examples of this kind. Now, all of this requires some explanation for Marxists, because as Marxists who have studied Engels and Lenin on the state, perhaps some of us were in the talk on the state this morning as well, we understand that in the final analysis, the state under capitalism is a tool of the capitalist class. That's the point of it. In the final analysis, the state is armed bodies of men and the appendages of those armed bodies of men in defense, acting in defense of private property. That's to say, fundamentally, the state and its politicians and civil servants who run the state are the faithful servants of the capitalist class. And yet those examples that I've just given were those servants, supposed servants striking blows against the capitalist class or at least individual members of the capitalist class who they are supposed to be serving. So how has that happened? How have in those situations, in those regimes, key members of the ruling class ended up imprisoned, exiled, robbed and even killed by the people who are supposed to be their faithful servants? This is what we have to understand. And the Liberals offer us no explanation for this. It's an abhorrent situation for liberals. They can't stand this kind of thing, because according to them, the state should never flex its muscles so flagrantly as this. The state should never use its military and its police and so on in this way. They say that all of those think the Liberals say that all of those things about the state, its armed bodies of men, the police, the prisons, the courts, the armies and so on, are much better kept shrouded, kept hidden behind a facade of democracy and free speech, pacifism, other kind of cuddly things like that. And that liberal democratic idea, that liberal democratic regime has really been the established world order for the past three decades and is now in a very deep crisis. And Saudi Arabia, China, Russia are probably the most virulent examples of that crisis and this crisis, this tendency is drawing out, is provoking squeals of protest from the Liberals. They don't care, by the way. They don't mind that the state's, basically, the purpose of the state is its monopoly on violence. They don't mind that the state does these things. They just don't like it done in such an open and flagrant way. They're perfectly happy with hypocrisy, the Liberals. They just don't like it to be rubbed in their faces so much. And the best example of this kind of liberal hand-wringing is most or the most recent example, certainly, it's from a man called Gideon Rackman, who is the foreign policy editor at the Financial Times. Now, in April this year, he published a book called The Age of the Strongman, How the Cult of the Leader Threatens Democracy Around the World. Now, this book is a list of all the things he doesn't like about illiberal regimes and that is it. That is all the book is. It's a winch, it's complaints. It offers no explanation at all for why these regimes come about. Well, OK, maybe that's not quite true. It says that it offers an explanation. I'll give you I'll give you the example that the book opens with a chapter on Putin, which Rackman says is the archetype of the strongman, illiberal politics. And he says, well, Putin came to power because in Russia there's a lot of nationalism and there's a lot of corruption. Now, that explains absolutely nothing because in every country at all times under capitalism, there is a lot of nationalism and there is a lot of corruption. It doesn't explain anything about why Putin came to power in that place and at that time. It's a complete non-explanation and the rest of the book just gets worse from there. The lack of explanation for why demagogues and dictators and illiberal regimes and so on come to power means that Rackman and I mean, I'm just taking him as an example, but all liberals are the same. They don't have an explanation for it and therefore they offer no solution to it either. They just complain about it and Rackman's book effectively says we should just wait and hope that these regimes eventually collapse. In one review of the book in a newspaper called The Scottish Newspaper, a newspaper called The Scotsman, the reviewer wrote this and this is the conclusion to the review. For now though, it seems that all we can do is cling fast to the hard-won wisdom of the post-Second World War era about how to build a sustainable international order and advance those principles where we still can and pray that the current storm of reactionary thinking and authoritarian rule may pass. Pathetic. This approach obviously is of no use to Marxists. We are trying to understand, we're not praying for things, we're not complaining about them and hoping they go away when we don't like them. We try to understand the world in order to change it. So we want to know what is the explanation for those things that I outlined at the beginning in Saudi Arabia, in Russia, in China? What is the explanation for the rise of demagogues and dictators? And how are they able to maintain themselves in power? And what does the future hold for regimes of that kind? Once we understand all of that, we have a basis on which we can fight such regimes. Now Mohammed bin Salman, Xi Jinping and Putin are not the first dictators ever in history, obviously. Their actions are not the first time that a state or supposed servants of the ruling class has turned, or at least partially turned, on some of its own masters. It is unusual, obviously, but it is not unheard of and Marx analyzed this precise phenomenon in his book on the 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte. Lenin and Trotsky also wrote about this phenomenon and they developed Marx's ideas much further. It's what we refer to, it's what Marx is referred to as Bonapartism, that's the importance of the term, and it is key to understanding demagogues and dictators. Now the archetype of Bonapartism was obviously Napoleon Bonaparte himself. So we should study the original Bonapartist regime to understand exactly what we mean by Bonapartism. Now Napoleon Bonaparte came to power in the wake of the French Revolution. More specifically, he came to power during the ebb of that revolution. Because starting in 1789, that revolution was an alliance of the bourgeois class with the Paris proletariat and with the masses of the French peasantry and together they put an end to the French monarchy. That was the essence of the French Revolution. They gave land also to the peasants. That was a really crucial part. They took the land away from the aristocracy and the monarchy and gave it to the peasants and began waging war on feudal Europe and establishing the capitalist system on the continent. The French Revolution's Committee of Public Safety, as it was known, unleashed the terror, the Jacobin terror on the counter-revolutionary forces who were trying to restore the monarchy. And enthused by all of this success, the Paris proletariat in that situation, a very small working class. The vast majority of the population in France was peasantry at that time. But there was a small proletariat in Paris itself. Enthused by the success, they tried to go further and they actually began to strike blows against private property itself. They took that slogan of the French Revolution, liberty, equality, fraternity. They took it at its word and thought, yeah, we want not just formal liberty, equality and fraternity, but real genuine economic liberty, equality and fraternity. And they started striking these blows against private property and workers' control, not just bourgeois control, which was the gain of the revolution, the initial gain of the revolution overthrowing the monarchy. That was a bourgeois revolution, but then workers' control began to enter into people's consciousness in at least among the Paris proletariat. Now, this was really the high point of the French Revolution. This was as far forward as it got at that time. Well, obviously that point was one from which the bourgeois and the peasantry recoiled. They were not in favor of striking blows against private property. They wanted private property. The peasants wanted to own the land they had just been granted. The bourgeois obviously wanted private property. And of course they were more numerous than the Paris workers. And they began to swing the pendulum of revolution back in the other direction, the terror that had been unleashed against the counter-revolutionary forces, the pro-monarchist forces, then began to be used against the most revolutionary elements in society as well. And they began to demand that order be restored. That was the call of the peasantry and of the bourgeois in France. Restore order. Not the order of the monarchy, which had been overthrowing, but bourgeois order is what they wanted. Enough of these rowdy proletarians in Paris, enough of their demonstrations and their strikes and so on. Enough of these blows against private property. We want order to be restored. Now, the proletarians, the Paris proletariat, they tried to stem the tide, the ebb tide. They tried to stem that with riots, demonstrations. There were bread riots in Paris and so on. In 1795, these were put down in blood, the movements of the workers. They were put down in the name of order, in the name of bourgeois society. Yes, in the name of overthrowing the monarchy, but not striking blows against private property. And they were put down by a young army officer called Napoleon Bonaparte. The bourgeois, what happened is the bourgeois had called the proletarians into struggle against the monarchy and been successful in overthrowing the monarchy. But after that, once that aim had been achieved, neither side, neither one of the classes was in a position to decisively assert control over the situation. And in that kind of situation, the struggle between the bourgeois and the proletariat, the struggle was deadlocked. That was the point. And in such a situation, force, armed force, became the deciding factor. And Napoleon was at the head of that force, flushed from his military successes, commanding the loyalty of the army on that basis. And the army itself was drawn predominantly from the peasantry. He was the savior that the bourgeois had been. This is the man who can restore order. And in order to get himself into power, he balanced between these deadlocked classes. To the bourgeoisie, he promised order and ends to these disturbances and an end to the revolutionary movement. To the soldiers and the masses and the peasants and so on, he promised to save the revolution. He said, I will protect this revolution from the monarchist conspiracies. There are people who still want to restore the monarchy. I don't want that either. I'll protect you from that. And I will protect you from the, and to the bourgeois saying, I'll protect you from the revolutionary disturbances. He faced both ways and all the while raised himself. He balanced on both, balanced first on one side and then the other and raised himself above both sides. Obviously, this was demagogie. It was trying to appear all things to all men. Despite that, he did fundamentally, although he was saying, don't worry, I'm gonna protect you from monarchist conspiracies and all the rest of it. He did. When Push came to shove, he was basing himself on a very definite class system. He was basing himself on bourgeois private property, on the system of private property that had been established by the bourgeoisie. In that sense, he was a bourgeois bonapartist. He had no other choice, obviously, for that. His support base was the army, which was drawn from the peasantry and the peasantry had an interest in private property, obviously. Now, as the economy grew, as it did, because this was the dawn of capitalism in France, obviously, Napoleon was able to keep the masses not happy, but at least quiet on that basis. And whilst the economy was great, he paid lip service to the revolution. He talked about how great the French Revolution was and what a huge success that was, all the while completely liquidating the political regime that it had created. He maintained, the only thing he maintained was the economic conquest of the French Revolution, which was, he retained the system of private property, the basis of the economy being the private ownership of property, which was the break with feudalism that had come. But everything else, all the other gains, all the democracy and everything else that the French Revolution had brought, he completely liquidated all of that. And once in power, he based himself entirely on brute force. He built up a big network of spies. He reopened the monarchist prisons. He censored the press. He restored the church and embarked upon all these military adventures around the continent, plundering abroad and so on. He ruled by the sword. That was the basis of his power. By 1804, he had styled himself as emperor. He presented all of this. Every policy he did, he did it, presented it as a fate accompli and asked for a plebiscite, asked for a referendum on it and said, and present, this has happened. There's no freedom of discussion because I've censored the press. Now vote, are you in favor or are you against? And obviously he got votes in favor on that basis, but that's clearly not real democracy. That was ruled by the sword because all possibility to dissent or disagree or discuss or anything like this had been crushed by the rule of the sword. None of this stuff that Napoleon did was a fundamental change to the bourgeois character of the post-revolutionary regime. He didn't roll back those primary gains of the revolution, private property and so on. What changed was the political character of the regime. It became a dictatorship instead of a democracy for which and that dictatorship, the cost of all the state apparatus, the armies, the police, the spies, the prisons, everything else, obviously was paid for very heavily by both the bourgeoisie and the proletariat and Napoleon had lifted himself above both and he was forcing them all to pay. In that sense, he can be described as normally these people, the state is supposed to be the servant of the ruling class. It's supposed to stand at the gates and keep watch, keep guard. Although watchmen in this situation had climbed onto the roof of the house and built himself a throne up there basically and was forcing the occupants of the house to pay for it. This is the archetypal bonapartism and its key features are this situation of unstable equilibrium between the classes, which allows a strong man to balance between the classes and elevate the state above society to a greater extent than normal. The state is anyway always to a certain extent elevated a bit above society that was dealt with in the session this morning, but to a greater extent than normal, the state can be elevated above society and the strong man then rules by the sword subordinating everyone to his executive power and that changes the political regime into one of bonapartism without changing the class character, the fundamental class character of that regime. Now, this isn't a blueprint what I've outlined here. When we describe regimes as bonapartist, we're talking about an analogy with bonapart's regime. We're not talking about a blueprint or a checklist, we just compare the two regimes and we tick them off and we say, yes, that's bonapartist or no, that's not bonapartist. That's not very helpful and that's not a serious approach to these things. The idea of bonapartism, the concept, the theory, the idea of bonapartism doesn't absolve us of needing to actually think and look at the regime that we have in front of us. Now, when we talk about a bonapartist regime, we're comparing it to Napoleon's regime and we're saying which traits in particular are similar and where there might be differences. So Marx himself analyzed the regime of Louis Bonapart who is Napoleon's nephew and that's what the text of the 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonapart is all about. And in that Marx explains that in France in 1848, there was this revolutionary movement of workers. That was drowned in blood again by the bourgeoisie. Now that movement had exhausted the workers, yes, but it was something of a pyrrhic victory for the bourgeois who in the course of liquidating that movement drained the bourgeois of the energy and authority that they needed in order to rule. And so you have this uneasy, unstable equilibrium between the classes with neither side able to assert itself. In that context, Marx says, and this is his quote, he says, Louis Napoleon was raised on the shoulders of a drunken soldiery which he bought with whiskey and sausages. And on that basis, Louis Napoleon, Louis Bonapart promised order. He said, there's been this massive class struggle, revolutionary movement and the putting down in blood of that movement and everybody's exhausted, everybody's tired, I've got my soldiers who I've bought with whiskey and sausages, I'll sort everything out, I'll bring order, I'll bring calm to society. And on that basis, he demagogically appealed to all sides, including the masses. His social base again was in the peasantry which still was very strong in France at that time. He balanced between the classes and the different layers in society. Once in power, he ruled by the sword. He defended ultimately the capitalist economy but he demanded an enormous payment for doing so. He was not the servant, he was the watchman on the roof, he was not the watchman at the gate, he was the watchman on the roof. He said, yes, I will defend your capitalist system because you, the capitalists are too weak to be able to do so, but you will pay me an enormous amount to do so and you will fund my massive state apparatus through which I can rule by the sword, the political servant was dictating to his bourgeois master. Now there is a certain parallel here then with other regimes. For example, the regimes established by Hitler, Mussolini and Franco after they had seized power, we can also characterize as Bonaparte's regimes. But we have to be very careful here because the way in which those leaders came to power was different, the way in which Napoleon, either Napoleon I or Napoleon III came to power. Because the movements that brought Hitler, Mussolini, Franco to power were fascist mass movements. They were mass movements of the frenzied petty bourgeoisie. This is what characterizes fascism. This is not a lead off about fascism and I can't go into it in a lot of detail. But that's what characterizes fascism is it's a mass movement of the middle classes driven mad by the crisis in society and seeing no way out on any other basis. That can't be said for Napoleon's regime. That was not how Napoleon came to power. His base in society was a much narrower base based mainly on the army and the armed bodies of men and so on. In the case of the fascists, their mass movement of the middle classes of the petty bourgeoisie was funded by the capitalist class and used, for example, by Hitler to smash the workers' organizations. He didn't appeal demagogically in that way to the workers' organize. Hitler never got any votes among the workers, for example. The Nazis never got votes there. He didn't lean on that side of society. He didn't lean on that layer, make them promises that he may or may not have gotten a Napoleon and Napoleon won Napoleon III Bonapartists off and make promises that they don't keep. Hitler didn't even do that. He just, he wanted, he used this mass movement to smash the workers' organizations, which was different to previous types of Bonapartists. But that being done, once the fascists had done that, on the ruined exhaustion of the working class, the fascists then converted their regimes into, from this regime based on a mass movement, into something based on a military police dictatorship. And in the case of Germany, for example, that's what the Night of the Long Knives was. That was the shedding of the mass movement side of the mass movement base of Hitler's regime, of the Nazi regime. Converting into a military police dictatorship which ruled by the sword and subordinated, yes, also the capitalist class. It was based on the ruined exhaustion of the working class and then on that basis they subordinated the capitalist class to the will of the regime. So the class basis remained capitalist, defending as it did private property, but its base in society became the army and the police. It was ruled by the sword in a classical Bonapartist style. So we have this kind of classical Bonapartism based on this unstable equilibrium between the classes achieved after a period of war and revolution and counter-revolution and exhaustion on all sides. And on that basis someone balances between the sides, demagogically appeals and raises themselves in the state above society based on the exhaustion of the contending classes. And in the case of Napoleon, that brought a certain stability coming as it did at the dawn of capitalist development basically in capitalism's youth, the beginning of an economic upswing. But that kind of equilibrium between the classes producing this situation of rule by the sword, that can also appear and has also appeared before big revolutionary events in anticipation of war and revolution and counter-revolution and so on. It's a kind of preemptive Bonapartism that we have also seen in several episodes in history and that completely lacked the stability of the classical Napoleonic regime. Take the interwar years in France and Germany as an example, this was a period and a place of extreme instability. In 1934, there was a government in France, their barman called Gaston du Merge. And that came to power in the midst of, on the one hand, fascist armed fascist gangs demonstrating on the streets of Paris with their weapons. And at the same time, the workers were conducting general strikes. Now the classes there were clearly not exhausted and yet they were squaring up for a fight. They were in this kind of equilibrium, but not on the basis of the ruined exhaustion of the contending classes after a revolutionary period. But in advance of such a period, they were squaring up for a fight and there was this balance between them on that basis. And this du Merge government tried to balance between the two in that situation. He tried to hold them back, du Merge tried to hold both sides back. He promised the world to both of them, demagogically appealed to both of them and promised everything. And he used, he raised himself above the contending classes on that basis and used the sword, used the army as his prop. There was a legislature, there was a parliament and so on. It may as well have not existed. He didn't use that. He couldn't use that in that kind of situation. His power base was the armed bodies of men. Now Trotsky has an interesting and slightly peculiar analogy for Bonapartist regimes that arise under circumstances like that. He says it's like a cork with two forks stuck in it, balanced on the head of a pin. And what that obviously, the picture that portrays is the weight of these two classes balancing each other out, but keeping this very unstable and unsteady equilibrium. It's a very precarious position to be in. And sure enough, that 1934 du Merge government in France lasted about nine months and was succeeded then by a whole series of very short-lived and unstable regimes. So unlike that relatively stable regime of Napoleon, that stable Bonapartism in the period of capitalism's youth, what you have with du Merge with that interwar period is this incredibly unstable Bonapartism of capitalism's senile decay. Nevertheless, you still have those essential same features of unstable equilibrium between the classes, allowing balancing between the classes and raising the state apparatus above society, giving rise to rule by the sword. All without changing the fundamental class, characteristic, the class, nature, all of these capitalist regimes at the end of the day. Now Bonapartism is very concrete phenomenon. It's only really comprehensible in the context of the place and time that we are analyzing. But with each example of it, this is the point of Bonapartism. This is why we discuss it. The point of it is that it can sharpen our understanding of the impact of the class struggle, the relations between class forces in society at any given time. What impact does that have on the political character of a particular regime? That's the point of Bonapartism. That's why we use it. That's why it's an interesting thing, an important thing for us to understand. So with that, I'm not gonna go into a lot of detail on any of these, but you can study other regimes of this kind and maybe comrades can ask questions or maybe make contributions on some of these regimes. For example, other classical, like bourgeois Bonapartist regimes like Pinochet in Chile, for example, in 1973, that arose in a situation where the A&A government was unable to consolidate the gains that it had made, was unable to deliver the promises that it had given to the working class and the pendulum was swinging therefore in the opposite direction. On that basis, Pinochet used the army as a prop to raise himself above society and rule viciously through the sword, all while defending private property and bourgeois interests. There's another interesting type of example, which is Bonapartist regimes in the colonial and ex-colonial world take the Cardenas regime in Mexico, for example, in the 1930s. That was balancing between the revolutionary Mexican masses on the one hand and the interests of foreign imperial capital on the other hand, two different class forces in society. Now fundamentally, Cardenas defended private property in the form, though, of state capitalism. And in doing so, he made a lot of concessions to the working class. He leaned on the working class. He nationalized the oil and the railways and things like this. Yes, they were run as state capitalist enterprise, but they were huge concessions to the working class. He balanced between, he used that, he used the mass movement of the Mexican workers to balance against the interests of foreign capital, all while raising himself and his state apparatus above society. There are other interesting examples. Even pre-Napoleonic examples, even before Napoleon was around, you can see, I mean, it is a kind of Bonapartist. It's not fully developed and it's on a different class basis, but there are many of the same features. Take Caesarism, for example, in ancient Rome. That was the product of balancing between different layers in society, using demagogy among the masses and elevating a strong man who based his power, based himself on the armed bodies of men, not on the Senate, based himself on the army and eventually, obviously, the Praetorian God and raising himself in that way above the rest of society. Another example is the aftermath of the Wars of the Roses in 15th century England, where what that was was a civil war. Different factions of the ruling class in England at that time exhausted themselves in this war. They decimated themselves, basically. And out of that, you've got the Tudor monarchs who balanced between these different layers and also the very nascent bourgeoisie that was developing in London at the time, they balanced between all these different layers in society to consolidate a centralized and absolute monarchy, which ruled, once again, at first, anyway, mainly through the sword. And then you could also take examples like what Marxist would refer to as proletarian Bonapartism. So that is dictatorial rule, but on the basis not of capitalism, but of a socialized planned economy instead of this free market capitalism. So if we take Stalin as the example, just as Napoleon based himself on the ebbing of the Revolution retired in 1789, it reached a certain point, the pendulum swung back and Napoleon came in promising order. So Stalin based himself not on the advancing revolution of 1917 upon the ebbing tide of that revolution. Because after 1917, there were years of imperialist war, obviously before 1917, years of imperialist war, after that civil war, the Russian masses, yes, they had successfully engaged in revolution, but they were exhausted. You had a certain stabilization of World Capitalism in the 1920s that strengthened the forces of imperialism internationally. And it was balancing between those two. It was balancing in that situation between these different layers that Stalin was able to rise to power. He spoke like Napoleon, he spoke in the name of the revolution while completely liquidating the political regime that that revolution had created. Like Napoleon, yes, he defended the fundamental gains of the revolution upon which he based himself. Now, Napoleon's was a bourgeois revolution and he defended the fundamental economic gains, the predominance of private property. Napoleon defended that fundamentally. Well, Stalin's was a proletarian revolution, obviously. And he fundamentally, when push came to shop, he defended the socialized planned nature of the economy. But just as Napoleon styled himself as an emperor and undid all of the political gains that have been made by the revolution, so Stalin undid every so reversed all the social and political gains of the Russian workers in 1917, clamping down on workers, democracy, for example, restoring the church, and so on and so on. Both Napoleon and Stalin imposed these very costly dictatorships with a huge and oppressive state apparatus that allowed them to rule by the sword. Obviously, in the final analysis, their regime has represented different class interests, one bourgeois and one proletarian, but we can characterize them both as Bonapartist regimes. And then, of course, you can consider modern day Bonapartism. Such as Putin's Russia or Xi Jinping's China. The restoration of capitalism in Russia in the early 90s provoked this orgy of gangsterism by the new Russian bourgeoisie. State assets were sold off, corruption penetrated every layer of society, under Yeltsin, the degeneration, the degeneracy of the capitalist class and the misery that was creating for the workers threatened that this discontent was really gonna bubble to the surface in that period. Putin came to power in that situation in 2000, promising order. He made promises to the oligarchs that he would deal with the workers. He would deal with the potential mass movements and the mass discontent and so on. As long as you stay out of my way, I will deal with it, he said. About the same time, he promised the masses that he would deal with the oligarchs. And with some of them, who also, he picked the ones who were his political enemies, he struck these very public blows against them and jailed them and exiled them and all the rest of it. Which enthused the masses or at least kept them quiet, because he was delivering on some of his promises. After the chaos of the collapse of the USSR and the restoration of capitalism in Russia, Putin appears as this arbiter with the sword. He comes in, he says, I will restore order. Yes, on a capitalist basis, but he says I will restore order. He balanced between these contending classes, making the promises, the demagogic appeals to both sides and raised his status, security apparatus above society, and then since then is dictated down to all classes alike. And in China, you have something, a similar phenomenon, a similar endpoint or a different route to get there, because what you had in China was not a chaotic collapse into capitalism, but a very carefully managed transition back to capitalism. Under the leadership of the Communist Party, that situation obviously leaves the Chinese regime subject to pressures from both the masses and from the capitalist class. Xi Jinping's anti-corruption drive is a really classic example of balancing between contending classes, striking blows against some individual members of the ruling class in order to keep the masses in check. So this is a bourgeois Bonapartist regime that we have in China, but this one is the product of a thought out plan by the ruling class to raise the state apparatus above society and ruled by the sword. And the state apparatus is very much above society, it's certainly above the capitalist class. The Chinese Communist Party now has party cells in most businesses in China to keep checks on them. That is the control of the state over the capitalists. It's the servant dictate, or what should be the servant in normal times in liberal democracy, so dictating to the master. And the regime, as we know, spends more on internal security than it does on external defense. That is the rule of the state, ruled by the sword in Chinese society. But obviously ultimately, it's a police dictatorship, Xi Jinping's China, but obviously ultimately, it rules in the interests of capitalism. Now, all of the, how we do for time. Okay. All of these Bonapartist regimes, and there are obviously many more that could be cited, they all have certain differences, but they do have one thing in common. They have a very central contradiction in common. And that is Bonapartist regimes are obviously the product of a striving for order in a situation of class struggle, revolution, counter-revolution, either preemptively or after these things have taken place. And to a certain extent under the right circumstances, the Bonapartist regime obviously can bring a certain amount of order, but it can only do that at the expense of building up much greater instability in the longer term. Bonapartist, this is a central contradiction of a Bonapartist regime. By its nature, it brings stability, but also provokes greater instability in the future. Obviously, instability can be provoked by economic crisis and everything else. Like in Britain, we don't have a Bonapartist regime. We're not living under a military police dictatorship and yet you have massive instability. I'm not saying the only thing that creates instability is Bonapartist regimes, obviously not. But all other things being equal, a Bonapartist regime will provoke much greater instability in the future than a liberal democratic regime, which is why the capitalist and Lenin writes this in state and revolution. That's why the capitalist class prefer a liberal democracy. I think he says a democratic republic is what Lenin writes, but they prefer a liberal democracy to a dictatorship because in the long run, it provokes less instability. And take Napoleon himself. He did bring a certain amount of stability. His regime brought a certain amount of stability to France for a period of time, but at the expense of enormous instability created by the Napoleonic Wars all across Europe because obviously foreign military, if you rule by the sword at home, you are going to have to use the sword a lot more in your foreign policy as well. And so foreign military adventures are a common product of rule by the sword at home. And you can see that now in relation to Russia, for example, Putin rules by the sword at home, and now you have a military adventure, which is provoking enormous instability for the Russian ruling class, but also for the world ruling class. Stalin's proletarian bonapartism, yes, brought a certain stability to a very convulsive situation, but it also led to the Moscow trials and the purges, which was massively a destabilizing force in Russian society. In fact, it created a mortal threat because when the Nazis invaded, all the generals had been purged and it could have ended in the complete destruction of the Soviet Union. The collapse of the Franco regime in Spain in the 1970s led to a revolutionary movement that almost had the potential anyway to abolish capitalism altogether. The bourgeois bonapartist dictatorship established by Salazar in Portugal led eventually to the Carnation Revolution in 1974 and so on and so on. There are many examples of this that yes, in a certain period in this revolution, period of revolution, counter-revolution, war and so on, you can bring in a bonapartist or a bonapartist can rise to power and bring a certain amount of stability, but later on, further down the line, that is gonna create tremendous contradictions which can completely upend society as a whole because bonapartism doesn't have a stable base in society. It's only base is the army and the police and that is a very narrow base in society. It doesn't have mass support from anyone. It only has this very narrow base of support and so bonapartists are constantly maneuvering between different layers in society, constantly shifting whether that's between, often it's between classes, certainly the way they get there is often between classes but take Putin for example or other bonapartists, they'll maneuver between different ethnic groups for example in a particular country. Constantly maneuvering, balancing, they only have repression as a crutch upon which to lean. That is a very unstable basis for a political regime and bonapartism like all dictatorship, it shuts down all avenues of dissent, the workers' organizations are curtailed, free speech is censored, political opposition is crushed. In the short term that obviously brings a certain stability but in the longer term that is removing the safety valves on a pressure cooker and it can build up the pressure, it looks on the surface like everything is stable now but actually of course the pressure is still building up, you just can't see it on the surface and eventually it will come to the surface in a much more explosive way than if you had kept the safety valves for example. As long as there's economic growth, bonapartist regimes have a certain ability to maneuver, a certain amount of money to fund their state apparatus and certain concessions can be made obviously if the class struggle starts to rear its head. High price of oil has been the basis of Putin's regime for the last 20 years and China's economic growth has underpinned Xi Jinping. Economic crisis massively narrows the room for maneuver of bonapartist dictators and it can cause really, it can make it very difficult to contain the trouble that economic crisis brings because there are no opposition parties that can be rotated into power to try an alternative policy because they've all been crushed. There are very few real workers organizations to express the anger that exists in society. There's no independent state institutions to scapegoat or to blame or to balance off. All the anger is directed against this all powerful bonapartist regime. It's no coincidence for example that the bonapartist regime in Iran now is facing this revolutionary upheaval at this particular moment, a time of massive economic crisis. It's no coincidence that feeling the discontent bubbling up in Russian society, Putin chose this moment to be battled with the West over Ukraine. It is among other things a diversionary tactic to cut across potential class struggle because this kind of anger is such a mortal threat to the regime in Russia. It's also why in 2008, the Chinese regime launched the biggest stimulus program that the world has ever seen to head off the economic crisis that was heading its way and that hit the rest of the world because economic collapse in China would be disastrous as it would be anywhere else but it would be particularly, it would have revolutionary consequences immediately or very quickly in a place like China, much more dramatic, much more profound consequences in a shorter space of time. It's also why the Chinese ruling class is looking with such fear at the unfolding crisis today and it's why they're doubling down on this bonapartist regime that they have by giving more and more power to Xi Jinping as they are doing as we speak. So we understand a little bit more about bonapartism now where it comes from how it works. We're in a position to discuss how to fight it and these will be the points that I finish on. Now bourgeois liberals also don't like bonapartist regimes. We don't like them, clearly Marxists don't like them. Bourgeois liberals also don't like the rule of the sword and verbally, they say that they also want to fight it. Gideon Rackman of the Financial Times, he insists that he prefers these cuddly liberal democratic institutions to defend private property and the interests of the bourgeoisie. So he also wants to fight the bonapartists, the dictators and demagogues and so on. But history shows us time and time again that when push comes to shove in the heat of the class struggle, bourgeois liberals will always side with a dictator who promises to maintain capitalism rather than handpower to a worker's democracy. Marx explains this again, brilliantly, in the 18th room era of Louis Bonapart. He shows, through successive chapters, how the bourgeois liberals in that situation in the face of this growing wave of working class struggle, very reluctantly and crying about it as they do it and screaming in protest to say, we don't wanna be doing this, but we're gonna keep giving more and more power to Louis Bonapart to restore order. The workers are coming, we don't want to, but we're just gonna have to give more and more power to you to stop the workers. And they just complain about it as they do it, but nevertheless they do it anyway. All in the name of restoring order. And the same phenomenon actually was visible during the consolidation of the Bonapartists' Khomeini regime in Iran in the 1980s. There was an Iranian revolution which overthrew the Shah and the liberal middle class slayers, the merchants, the bazaaris as they're known, they were one of the first groups actually to rise against the Shah's regime, to rise against the monarchy. But after Khomeini took power, the revolution continued. Just like the French Revolution, the workers began to assert themselves, yes, they overthrew the Shah, but then the workers continued and the movement began to take on a more proletarian character, at which point the bazaaris took fright and decided to join and support the Khomeini regime in springing about order. They actually joined it even with their own party, with their national front party. They supported the Khomeini regime in crushing the working class movement. And all in the name of restoring order. So the middle classes, the liberal bourgeois, when put, although they say they don't like, rule by the sword, when push comes to shove if they're forced to choose, between workers' power and a bourgeois, a Bonapartist dictator, they will choose the latter. So what this teaches us is that we cannot fight Bonapartism with liberal democracy. Our approach is that when the class struggle is in this convulsive state of fragile equilibrium, we want to push for the resolution of that equilibrium in the interest of the working class. That's the point. By breaking that state of equilibrium, we prevent a Bonapartist being able to balance between the classes and come to power. This is exactly what played out in Russia, 1917 between February and October. The regime that came to power in February was trying the Kerensky regime, which came to power after the overthrow of the Tsar, tried to become a Bonapartist regime. It wanted to move in that. It was making promises left, right and center. It was promising the world to everybody. It was a situation of tense class struggle. And they were promising everything to everybody and trying to base themselves on the army. And the Bolshevik approach at that time was no support for the bourgeois government. All power to the Soviets. They were unequivocally on the side of one particular class in that situation and tipped the balance, worked to tip the balance in that way. And that Kerensky regime as a result was not able to become a Bonapartist regime. It wasn't able to balance between the classes because one class began to assert itself more predominantly. I have other examples, but I am out of time, so I will not go into them. The point is that with Bonapartist regimes today, for example, in Russia and China, we don't join this hypocritical chorus of liberal whaling about the lack of liberal democracy and so on. We certainly don't advocate class collaborationist policies falling into line with the bourgeois liberals or joining them or taking up their arguments in any way. We advocate an independent working class struggle. All power to the Soviets, that kind of approach against these regimes basing ourselves on the methods, the revolutionary methods and the potential of the working class alone. Now, you can see, hopefully, on the basis of everything, I said the value of Bonapartism as a tool. It's a very sharp tool. Like all sharp tools, if misused, it can cause serious damage. There are those on the left who would describe Trump or Bolsonaro or Modi, for example, as Bonapartist. Gideon Rackman in his book, even he talks about Mohammed bin Salman and Xi Jinping and Putin. And he also puts, he's got a chapter on Boris Johnson as well. This is very wide of the mark. A lot of these people are populists and demagogues. Some of them, like Orban in Hungary, for example, is explicitly opposed to liberalism. But it is not true to say that these people run military police dictatorships nor have they raised the state apparatus fully above society or anything else, acting with a greater independence from the ruling class. Now, these figures rule through the establishment state apparatus, even if they despise it, nevertheless, they do that. This is not a pedantic or small point. If we were to characterize Trump or Johnson as Bonapartists, then we would basically be saying the class struggle in the US or Britain is right now at a point where it could be resolved one way or the other imminently in the interests of one class or another. We could be on the cusp right now of a slogan of all power to the Soviets and all power to the working class in Britain or America, which clearly we are not. We're not in that situation. Alternatively, we could be saying, well, actually the revolutionary movement has happened, it's passed. There have been revolutionary battles and there is exhaustion of the contending classes. And now you've got Trump and Johnson raising themselves above these exhausted classes and balancing on that base and ruling by the sword. It's not the case, it's wrong. So, theoretical mistakes can lead to mistakes in practice also. So we have to be quite precise when we talk about these things. The concept of Bonapartism is a very useful one to analyze a given regime, but that has to be, as I said earlier, it doesn't absolve us from the responsibility of actually thinking and studying a particular regime in more detail. You can't just say Bonapartism and that explains everything about the regime. Clearly it doesn't. Now it's just a starting point really and it has to be considered in the historical and social context of a particular country with particular class relations at a moment in time. It's not useful to just throw around terms like Bonapartism with a half digested understanding of what they mean. We have to be very rigorous in our theoretical approach. If we are, and that is the purpose, as the chair said, that is the purpose of this weekend. If we are rigorous in that approach, then we will be able to understand the world and on that basis change it.