Haiti sets up transitional council to choose next PM in bid to quell crisis

BONAPARTISM NOT DEMOCRACY

By Evens Sanon And Dánica Coto 

 The Associated Press
Posted April 12, 2024 

Haiti crisis: Surge in gang violence, food insecurity envelopes nation – Mar 29, 2024

A transitional council tasked with choosing Haiti’s next prime minister and Cabinet was established Friday in a move supporters hope will help quell turmoil in the troubled Caribbean country where most of the capital remains under the grip of criminal gangs.

The formation of the council, announced in a decree published Friday in a Haitian government gazette, was expected to soon trigger the resignation of Prime Minister Ariel Henry, but a new provision said he would step down when a new premier is chosen. Henry did not immediately comment.

Those awarded a seat on the council are Petit Desalin, a party led by former senator and presidential candidate Jean-Charles Moïse; EDE/RED, a party led by former Prime Minister Claude Joseph; the Montana Accord, a group of civil society leaders, political parties and others; Fanmi Lavalas, the party of former President Jean-Bertrand Aristide; the Jan. 30 Collective, which represents parties including that of former President Michel Martelly; and the private sector.

The two non-voting seats are represented by someone from Haiti’s civil society and its religious sector.

“The establishment of the…politically inclusive council signals the possibility of a new beginning for Haiti,” a Caribbean trade bloc known as Caricom, who helped form the council, said in a statement.

It said that the council “will take the troubled country through elections to the restoration of the lapsed state institutions and constitutional government.”

“It is also clear that one of the first priorities of the newly installed Presidential Council will be to urgently address the security situation so that Haitians can go about their daily lives in a normal manner; safely access food, water and medical services; children can return to school; women can move around without fear of horrific abuses; and so that businesses can reopen,” Caricom said.

The published decree acknowledged what it called “a multidimensional crisis” that has worsened since the July 2021 assassination of President Jovenel Moïse. It said the crisis has led to a “catastrophic humanitarian situation” and that Haiti is experiencing “unprecedented institutional dysfunction, which has led to a political impasse.”
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It also noted that Henry would present his resignation once a new prime minister is appointed.

The decree, which was signed by Henry and his Cabinet, noted that no one can be a member of the council if they have been sanctioned by the U.N., oppose the deployment of a foreign armed force or plan to run in the next general election, among other conditions.

While an election date hasn’t been set, the decree stated that the president-elect must be sworn-in on Feb. 7, 2026 at the latest, and that the council will exercise presidential powers until then.

2:06 Haiti crisis: Canada begins airlift evacuations

The council also will be responsible for helping set the agenda of a new Cabinet and will appoint members to form a provisional electoral council, which is needed before elections are held. It also will establish a national security council whose responsibilities have not been decided.

The decree does not set any deadlines for choosing a new prime minister or Cabinet, stating only that the council must “quickly” do so.

The council will be based at the National Palace, and its mandate is supposed to end when a new president is sworn-in, with no possibility of extension.

The United Nations Integrated Office in Haiti posted on X that it would continue to closely follow the political process as it called for international support for Haiti’s National Police, saying it is “essential to restore security and the rule of law.”

“We reaffirm our commitment to supporting the country’s institutions in their efforts to restore democratic institutions,” María Isabel Salvador, the U.N. special envoy for Haiti, said in a statement.

1:00 Canadian military’s elite counter-terrorism unit deployed to Haiti

The council’s creation comes exactly a month and one day after Caribbean leaders announced plans to help form the nine-member panel, with seven members awarded voting powers.

Friday’s development was cheered by those who believe the council could help steer Haiti in a new direction and help quell widespread gang violence that has paralyzed swaths of the capital of Port-au-Prince for more than a month.

More than 1,550 people have been killed across Haiti and more than 820 injured from January to March 22, according to the U.N.
While gangs have long operated throughout Haiti, gunmen organized large-scale attacks starting Feb. 29. They burned police stations, opened fire on the main international airport that remains closed and raided the country’s two biggest prisons, freeing more than 4,000 inmates.

The attacks were meant to prevent the return of Henry to Haiti. At the time, he was in Kenya pushing for the U.N.-backed deployment of a police force from the East African country. He remains locked out of Haiti.

While the violence has somewhat subsided, gangs are still launching attacks throughout Port-au-Prince, especially in the downtown area, where they have seized control of Haiti’s biggest public hospital.

18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte. Marx 1852

Marxists Internet Archive

https://www.marxists.org › archive › marx › works › 18t...

Marx wrote The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon between December 1851 and March 1852. The "Eighteenth Brumaire" refers to November 9, 1799 in the French ...

‎Chapter I · ‎Preface · ‎Chapter IV · ‎Chapter V

The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte

Wikipedia

https://en.wikipedia.org › wiki › The_Eighteenth_Brum...

The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon is an essay written by Karl Marx between December 1851 and March 1852, and originally published in 1852 in Die ...

‎Significance · ‎Contents of the book · ‎First as tragedy, then as farce

4TH INTERNATIONAL INSIDE BASEBALL

Are You a Communist? Then Let’s Talk about the IMT


The International Marxist Tendency, led by Alan Woods, is rebranding itself as “the Communists.” Does this represent a shift to the left? Sort of. Yet decades of opportunist positions do not disappear overnight.


IDEAS & DEBATES
Nathaniel Flakin 

February 12, 2024
LEFT VOICE


This month, the International Marxist Tendency, led by Alan Woods, is rebranding some of its biggest sections. It plans to found a Revolutionary Communist Party in Great Britain, another in Switzerland, and yet another in Canada. 

As this article was going to press, they just announced they are renaming themselves the Revolutionary Communist International. For the last year, IMT members have been distributing the same sticker in several countries. “Are you a communist? Then get organized.” A QR code allows you to sign up for the IMT and start sending them money.

The IMT has existed in its current form for 30 years, and it has seldom used hammers and sickles until recently. What’s behind the rebranding? Let’s look at the IMT’s history to understand its current trajectory.

Split from the CWI

The IMT was founded in 1992 (although it adopted the name IMT only a decade later) as a split from the Committee for a Workers International. The CWI was the Trotskyist group founded in 1974 by Ted Grant, centered around the Militant tendency inside the British Labour Party.

Grant was a leader of the Fourth International, the revolutionary organization founded by Leon Trotsky, when it collapsed into centrism in the postwar period. After 1945, when the Trotskyist movement was isolated and disoriented, several leaders thought their best hope was to hibernate inside social democratic parties, turning the short-term tactic of “entryism” into a long-term strategy. While originally doubtful of this “entryism sui generis” (which can also be called “long-term entryism” or “entryism without exitism”), Grant soon became its most committed adherent.1

When a youth radicalization began around 1968, most splinters of the Trotskyist movement broke free of social democracy and founded new, independent revolutionary organizations. Grant, however, doubled down on his orientation to the Labour Party: he declared it a “historical law” that, in times of upheaval, the masses will always turn to their “traditional mass organizations,” obligating Marxists to join reformist parties.

Decades of work inside the Labour Party was naturally incompatible with defending an openly Bolshevik program. Under Grant’s leadership, Militant defended a centrist program that attempted to split the difference between revolutionary and reformist positions — raising only those demands that would not “scare off” an “average” worker. Militant, for example, claimed that socialism could be implemented peacefully if the Labour Party won a majority in parliament and carried out a bold socialist program. It claimed that police are “workers in uniform” and should be organized in trade unions. When Margaret Thatcher’s government launched an imperialist war against Argentina, Grant rejected any kind of anti-imperialist resistance because that would “put Marxists beyond the pale in the eyes of workers.”

You might also be interested in: Forty Years since Thatcher’s War against Argentina — Lessons for Today

By the mid-1980s, Militant had reached a certain influence (though claims of 8,000 members are exaggerated). Eventually, the Labour Party bureaucracy decided to rid itself of the Trotskyists running Labour’s youth organization. Militant, committed to a perpetual orientation to Labour, could not fight back — instead, Grant’s supporters attempted to burrow deeper. This led to demoralization and a collapse in membership numbers. By the early 1990s, much of the group’s sprawling apparatus under Peter Taaffe (with over 250 full-time staffers!) decided it needed to break with Labour to save what remained of the organization. This “Scottish turn” is when the majority of the CWI, after many decades, left social democracy.

What later became known as the IMT was the CWI minority, led by Grant and Woods, who opposed this break. Grant said leaving Labour would mean throwing away decades of patient work. Thus, the IMT’s whole reason for existence was to hold out inside the Labour Party, the German SPD, and other reformist workers’ parties.

The CWI and later the IMT practiced their long-term entryism not only in bourgeois workers’ parties but also in purely bourgeois parties, such as the Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD) and later MORENA in Mexico, or the Pakistan People’s Party of the hyper-corrupt Bhutto clan. The IMT has elected only a single member to a national parliament — he was elected as a PPP candidate who, by the IMT’s own account, was just as corrupt as his party.

Searching for Subjects

After splitting from the CWI, the IMT continued as “the Marxist voice of social democracy” for several more decades. Yet it faced the same objective problem as Taaffe’s supporters: as Labour, the SPD, and similar parties implemented brutal neoliberal policies, they attracted fewer and fewer socialist-minded workers and young people. So the IMT, while formally committed to its entryist principles, had to cast out for new milieus.

It found a topic that enthused left-leaning youth in the early and mid-2000s: the pink tide governments in Latin America. Woods became a cheerleader for Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez. After the coup attempt in 2002 was defeated by mass mobilizations, Chávez changed his rhetoric and proclaimed his goal to be “socialism of the 21st century.”

As we’ve explained at length elsewhere, Chávez’s government represented what Marxists call Bonapartism sui generis. Hoping to gain more autonomy from imperialism, a section of the bourgeoisie of a semicolonial country needs to mobilize the masses with progressive demands. This is how Trotsky analyzed the government of Lázaro Cárdenas in Mexico in the 1930s, for example. Woods refused to apply Marxist categories to Venezuela — he declared that Chávez was leading a socialist revolution, even though Chávez was the head of a bourgeois state and always defended private property of the means of production. Chávez never even stopped paying the country’s foreign debt to imperialism. Woods applied Grant’s theoretical justification for opportunism, writing that a clear Marxist analysis of the Venezuelan government would be “sectarian” and “would immediately cut us off … from the masses.”

You might be interested in: Was There a Socialist Revolution in Venezuela? Using Trotsky’s Ideas to Understand Chávez’s Legacy

Woods’s strategy was based on the idea that the Bolivarian government, with enough pressure from the masses, could be pushed to break from capitalism. This is a classically centrist strategy, formulated in the early 1950s by Michel Pablo as a justification for his political support for the Algerian government of Ben Bela.

It is noteworthy that the IMT broke, without any comment, with Grant’s tradition. In the 1960s, Grant had criticized Pablo and other Trotskyist leaders for their adaptation to the Cuban deformed workers’ state under Fidel Castro and Che Guevara. Grant insisted that a proletarian revolution was necessary in Cuba, one that would establish a leadership independent of the Stalinists. Yet Woods was now arguing that socialism could be achieved in Venezuela under the leadership of Chávez, the head of a bourgeois state. This echoed Militant’s old, anti-Marxist belief in the possibility of a peaceful transition to socialism.

And this is not just a break with Grant’s legacy — it is, above all, a break with everything Trotsky wrote about Latin America during his Mexican exile. While Trotsky called on workers to reject “People’s Front parties,” the IMT campaigned for workers to join Chávez’s party, the PSUV, and thus to unite with a progressive wing of the bourgeoisie.

As Chávez’s left Bonapartist project decayed under his successor Nicolás Maduro, adopting increasingly authoritarian and neoliberal policies, the IMT finally broke with the PSUV. Yet this was no break with the bourgeois-nationalist ideology of Chavismo. The IMT formed an alliance with the Stalinist party demanding a return to the Chavismo of Chávez.2 Left Voice’s sister organization in Venezuela, the Workers League for Socialism (LTS), has fought for the political independence of the working class.

You might also be interested in: Socialists Should Not Support AMLO

This opportunism was not limited to Venezuela. Woods similarly declared his support for the bourgeois government of Evo Morales in Bolivia. And for several decades, the IMT in Mexico has supported Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO), who was first mayor of the capital and is now president of the country. In the United States, the IMT correctly argues that socialists can never support Bernie Sanders because he is a bourgeois politician. South of the Río Grande, however, the IMT is unfamiliar with the principle of class independence. By embellishing Chavismo and other bourgeois governments, the IMT makes it more difficult to explain to young people what communism is and what it is not.
Creeping to the Left

Over the 2010s, while the IMT held up Grantian orthodoxy in theory, it was creeping to the left and silently breaking with its entryist strategy. In the UK, it ceased working as part of Young Labour, and instead set up its own Marxist student groups. When the Socialist Workers Party entered into crisis in 2013, losing its hegemonic spot as the largest radical left group at British universities, the IMT partially filled the void.

New layers of young people politicized during or after the capitalist crisis of 2008 are far more to identify with communism. Radicalization, facilitated by social media, has put broad swaths of young people quite a bit to the left of the IMT’s traditional positions. The IMT, for example, had always defended cop unions, claiming that these will draw police into the workers’ movement and “undermine the ability of the capitalist state to repress the working class.” Yet the millions who took to the streets in the Black Lives Matter movement in 2020 understood that cop unions are completely reactionary institutions that need to be expelled from our the labor movement.

Aiming to adapt to this new consciousness without renouncing its old position, the IMT has now ended up with hopelessly muddled formulations on police. It says it takes “the approach of opposing the actions of police unions that are at the expense of the wider working class, but supporting those actions that benefit workers and bring rank-and-file police closer to the labour movement.” In a typically centrist fudge, this sentence can mean either full support for cop unions or complete rejection. As Left Voice and the Trotskyist Fraction, we had no need to revise our positions in 2020, as we have always explained that cops are not workers. The IMT, in contrast, says that cop unions in the U.S. are irredeemably reactionary but potentially progressive in Canada or the rest of the world.

Even greater contradictions have come to the fore regarding Palestine. As we detailed in another article, for decades the IMT defended a “socialist two-state solution,” arguing that a “socialist Israel” should exist next to a “socialist Palestine.” In our opinion, the IMT’s position represents a concession to chauvinism. Growing numbers of young people support the Marxist proposal for a single, democratic, socialist Palestine as part of a Socialist Federation of the Middle East. So the IMT has silently changed its position and has been scrubbing its website of some of the most odious anti-Palestinian content from the mid-2000s (with links available here).

You might also be interested in: The Farce of the “Two-State Solution” and the Socialist Perspective for Palestine

On several questions, the IMT is moving to the left and closer to correct Trotskyist positions. At the very least, it is quieter about its support for cop unions or a “socialist Israel.” Yet nowhere is it acknowledging these shifts, much less explaining them.
Lack of Theory

This brings us to the “revolutionary communist” rebranding. In just a few weeks, the IMT will break with some 70 years of work inside reformist parties. When Taaffe led the majority of the CWI out of social democratic parties 30 years ago, he aimed for theoretical consistency. Taaffe still defended Grant’s “historical law” that Marxists needed to be inside the “traditional mass organizations” of the working class. He posited, however, that Labour and other reformist parties had ceased to be bourgeois workers parties and were now simple bourgeois parties. This theory failed to account for the fact that in many countries, reformist parties continued to base themselves on the union bureaucracy, and therefore indirectly on the working class. (This, in our opinion, never obliged Marxists to adapt to such parties and work within them for decades.) At the very least, it was an attempt to provide a theory for a major strategic shift.

Now, Woods and his IMT are taking the same turn that Taaffe and the CWI did three decades ago — yet Woods, who considers himself something of a theoretician, has provided not a word of justification for this, besides generalities about communism. If it was a sectarian adventure to leave the Labour Party and found a competing party in the 1990s, as well as just 15 years ago, so why is that the right policy in the 2020s? Is the Labour Party under Starmer that much different from what it was under Blair?

It is welcome that the IMT has set itself the goal of building revolutionary communist parties. Yet this cannot be done by propaganda groups without well-known leaders of working-class struggles making proclamations. And despite calling himself a “revolutionary communist,” it does not appear that Woods has ceased supporting Mexico’s bourgeois government.

You might also be interested in: The Split in the CWI: Lessons for Trotskyists

Without any kind of serious programmatic base, the IMT’s leftward shift cannot last — it will turn back to the right with the next fad. One wild zig is inevitably followed by an equally wild zag. The IMT comrades are breaking with their long-held strategy of adaptation to reformism, but this is a political rather than an organizational break. This is clear when looking at the CWI’s record since leaving Labour: although it was no longer part of a reformist party, it continued to believe that some kind of reformist party is a necessary halfway house on the way to a revolutionary formation. This led the CWI to support “new” reformist parties in different parts of the world.

You might also be interested in: Trans Liberation and Socialist Revolution — A Debate with the IMT

Real Class Independence

In many ways, the IMT has unceremoniously dumped many of the positions that made up Grant’s tradition. In one sense, though, Woods is proving to be Grant’s most loyal student: both were masters of self-aggrandizement. The IMT often claims that Militant was the largest Trotskyist organization in the world after 1945. This is patently false. Even at its height, Militant could not compare to the LCR in France, the MAS in Argentina, not to mention the Trotskyists in Vietnam or Bolivia.

Woods proclaims that the IMT is “the only organisation that has a responsibility for re-establishing communism.” Other organizations, simply by not being the IMT, are all “sects.” It seems that IMT leaders, while moving somewhat closer to other Trotskyist tendencies politically, are increasing their vitriol. Woods says that any proposals for collaboration between different socialists should go “straight in the waste paper basket.”

For a counterexample, let’s look at the largest Trotskyist organizations in the world today. Trotskyists in Argentina form the Workers Left Front — Unity (FIT-U), of which the largest component is the Party of Socialist Workers (PTS), the sister group of Left Voice. The FIT-U has five seats in Argentina’s congress (four of whom belong to PTS members), having won over 700,000 votes. The Trotskyist Left can mobilize some 25,000 people in Buenos Aires, filling soccer stadiums. More importantly, Trotskyist workers are in hundreds of workplaces and have led many important struggles.

With a tiny handful of members in Argentina, the IMT has made vague criticisms of the FIT, accusing the front of a “parliamentary bias.” Yet the PTS comrades have a proud record of using the parliamentary tribune for revolutionary agitation. As we have seen, the IMT has never had an opportunity to show in practice how their representatives would act in a bourgeois parliament.

Just a decade ago, Woods was calling for Marxists in Argentina to join the progressive bourgeois coalition of Néstor and Cristina Kirchner. This is completely in line with his support for Chávez, Morales, AMLO, and other pink tide governments. Fortunately, most Trotskyists in Argentina rejected Woods’s wisdom and instead founded a coalition based on class independence. They have shown that they can work together on the basis of a class-struggle program while openly debating their differences.

It is a shame that Woods was willing to form a front with Chávez, Morales, or any number of other bourgeois governments, while rejecting any collaboration between socialists. We believe that especially in the context of Israel’s genocidal assault on Gaza, it is imperative for socialists to work together as closely as possible, while making no secret of their differences. If Woods rejects this idea, we are convinced that IMT members are willing to consider it.

As Left Voice, we have a manifesto for a working-class party for socialism that we are proposing as a possibility to bring together organized socialists, militant workers, and young people in the United States. The PTS and the FIT-U in Argentina represent the largest and most successful Trotskyist project in the world right now. But it would be absurd to proclaim them to be the only revolutionaries. Instead, the experiences of the FIT can serve as a basis to build up genuine parties and rebuild the Fourth International. This can result only from both struggle and collaboration between the different tendencies of the revolutionary socialist movement.

Notes

Notes↑1 For a slightly more detailed version of this history, see my article on the split of the CWI in 2019. For a longer analysis of the Fourth International’s political collapse in the early 1950s, see “At the Limits of Bourgeois Restoration.”

↑2 For a critique of the Revolutionary Popular Alliance (APR) in Venezuela, formed by Stalinists, social democrats, and the IMT, see our sister site in Venezuela, Ángel Arias, “Sobre la APR y los ataques del Gobierno/PSUV: Se necesita un balance histórico y lecciones estratégicas.” Ideas de Izquierda Venezuela. September 27, 2020.




Nathaniel Flakin is a freelance journalist and historian from Berlin. He is on the editorial board of Left Voice and our German sister site Klasse Gegen Klasse. Nathaniel, also known by the nickname Wladek, has written a biography of Martin Monath, a Trotskyist resistance fighter in France during World War II, which has appeared in German, in English, and in French, and in Spanish. He has also written an anticapitalist guide book called Revolutionary Berlin. He is on the autism spectrum.

The Wood Theft Laws and the beginnings of Marxism

Submitted by Zac Muddle

 14 November, 2023 - 

 Author: John Cunningham

https://www.workersliberty.org/

LONG READ

Introduction

In the Ariège Department in Pyrenean France, between 1829 – 1831, men dressed up as women revolted against their landowners in what became known, curiously, as the ‘Girl’s War’ or ‘Maidens’ War’ (Guerre Des Demoiselles). 

They were trying to protect their long held right to forage for firewood and graze their animals in the forests. A new forestry code passed in 1827 denied them this right and the rebellion spread across the region with many pitched battles taking place. So strong was feeling amongst the local populace that it became difficult to recruit anyone for the mayoralty lest they became ‘tainted’ with the detested new laws. The resistance of the ‘Maidens’ continued sporadically until 1872. Around the same time, over in the Rhineland, a part of Prussia, peasants hired a local Advocate (roughly equivalent to a lawyer in the British legal system), one Heinrich Marx of Trier, to fight a court case on their behalf in an attempt to affirm and uphold their long held right to collect firewood from the forests around Koblenz. The legal proceedings ran on for a staggering 27 years (outlasting Heinrich by seven years), prompting his slightly more famous son, Karl, (left) to write a series of articles in a liberal-radical newspaper (Rheinische Zeitung, RZ) about what became known as the Wood Theft Laws. What connects these two historical events, separated by geography and a few years? The answer is simple and complex at the same time: in both cases rural communities were denied a long established right to help themselves to firewood from the forests and surrounding woods. It sounds unimportant, trivial even, yet it became a burning issue – if somewhat localised – of the time, evoked much controversy and was indicative of wider and deeper trends. It was also important for the political development of the young Karl Marx.

All over Europe ideas and practices about ownership and inherited rights were in flux as economic needs, modes of production and demographic patterns changed. The last vestiges of feudalism were being erased and replaced by the new, dynamic yet more brutal mode of capitalism. The court case pursued by Heinrich Marx began when Karl was only nine yet it ran on into his adulthood and, in total he wrote five articles for the Rheinische Zeitung on this issue, all in 1842. It was not the first of his forays into radical journalism but it was one of the most important for the future author of The Communist Manifesto, written at a time when ‘Marxism’ was unheard of and the word ‘communism’ was being used for the first time in Germany. The young journalist from Trier, on the banks of the Moselle, considered himself a radical liberal, certainly not a communist or any of those other new-fangled labels that were just starting to circulate and soon to become common currency in Europe and elsewhere, particularly in the period leading up to the revolutions of 1848-9 and beyond. Socialist and communist thought (the two terms were interchangeable at this time) began to take root in Germany in 1842 starting with a key publication: Lorenz von Stein’s ‘The Socialism and Communism of Present Day France’. This book had strange origins particularly in light of the role it would later play. It was originally commissioned by the Prussian government and planned as a report on the influence of leftist ideas among German immigrant workers in Paris. Stein was no socialist but inadvertently his book became widely read and helped spread the ideas of socialism in Germany (no doubt to the embarrassment of the Prussian government).

Throughout Europe, for generations, those who worked on the land (loosely labelled as ‘peasants’, although this was not in any sense a homogenous class), had certain rights. In England these rights went as far back as the reign of Edward the Confessor (1042-1066). For our purposes there were two main elements to this entitlement: firstly, the right to access common land to graze pigs and cattle and secondly the right to access the forests to gather firewood for domestic use. In some areas wood-burning to make charcoal was also included in these rights although the charcoal burners and wood gatherers would occasionally clash. The situation varied from place to place: killing a deer generally brought severe retaliations from landowners but catching the odd rabbit for the pot was sometimes allowed, likewise fishing in rivers was permitted in some areas but banned in others. Collecting the ‘fruits of the forest’ (mushrooms, berries, nuts etc.) was also part of this complex and varied but well-established package of rights. There were other activities such as gleaning (scouring fields after the harvest for left-over grain

‘The Gleaners’ (Les Glaneuses) by Jean Francois Millet, completed in 1857. Gleaning, although somewhat outside of the terms of our discussion, was another ancient right which came under attack from farmers and landowners and was fiercely contested by the French peasantry. The practice continues to this day and modern day gleaners can also be found in those groups who search the ‘waste’ bins of supermarkets to procure foodstuffs which are still edible, as depicted in Agnes Varda’s film The Gleaners and I (2000).

And other crops such as grapes left on the vine) which existed as long-established rights and they too came under attack. The extent to which the peasantry relied on these rights to survive (particularly in times of a bad harvest or a harsh winter) is hard to assess but it can be said with some certainty that the right to gather wood for the home fire was essential for heating and cooking, without which life would be grim indeed. The erosion of the right of access to common land and the forests was fiercely contested. Peasants would often engage in stand-up fights with the landowners and their stewards and bailiffs and it was not unusual for the military or police to be called in to crack open a few peasant skulls. In one notorious instance in the village of Newton on 8 June 1607 in Northamptonshire, England, over 40 villagers were killed in fighting. While this was an exceptional case, deaths were not uncommon. The erosion of commons rights was an issue, but not the main one in the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381 and was a central motivating element in the Jack Cade Revolt of 1450 and Kett’s Rebellion of 1549 (all in England). It was also a concern of the Levellers and Diggers during the period of the English Revolution. In Scotland the Highland Clearances (roughly 1750-1850) took on an exceptionally brutal aspect as whole families were forced off their land to make way for sheep rearing, many being forced to emigrate to North America.

In Switzerland, herdsmen take their cattle to the commons for summer grazing. From ‘A Short History of Enclosure’ by Simon Fairlie in The Land No. 7. Summer 2009.

In England, common land was closed off mainly for sheep grazing in order to supply the growing and extremely lucrative wool trade. By the reign of Henry V (1413-1422) around 63% of the Crown’s total income came from a tax on wool exports. Wool was big business – the commons simply got in the way. It was a long process and there had already been many enclosures before the first enclosure facilitated by an Act of Parliament in 1604 (there were others). In practice, this meant that a landowner had simply to apply for an enclosure to Parliament and it was usually granted. Many more applications were to follow, over 5,200 individual cases. To take just one of a myriad of examples: the last enclosure in the Sheffield area occurred in 1837 when 1,200 acres in the district of Totley were enclosed. The last enclosure in Britain, astonishingly, occurred as late as 1914! On mainland Europe the seizure of the commons did not always lead to such confrontational and bloody showdowns as at Newton but nevertheless the peasantry of the Rhineland, France, Sicily (which enclosed its commons in 1789) and elsewhere fought to protect their ancient rights, whether through the courts or through guerilla warfare, acts of sabotage or open conflict. The resort to the courts, as in the Rhineland, was unusual as legal cases were often too expensive a course to pursue and, of course, the judges were frequently drawn from the landowning class. This was not a time for the faint-hearted, many were prepared to stand up and fight for what they saw as their inalienable rights and death threats were not unusual, though it is not possible to know how many were actually ever carried out. The anonymous sentiments expressed below were probably not that usual, though in this particular case, the Lord of the Manor, wasn’t gunned down in the street.

Anonymous letter received by John Edward Dorington (and his son) Lord of the Manor, Gloucestershire, England, in 1864:

‘You are robbing the working class of the Parish and their offspring for ever in fact you are not gentlemen but robbers and vagabonds, however if it [the common land] is enclosed you shall never receive any benefit thereby as there are several on the lookout for you both and so help my God I am on the alert for you and if I have one chance of you I will shoot you as dead as mortal.’

To put it simply: firewood ceased to be something you picked up on the floor of a nearby forest and took home; it became a commodity to be sold on the market, as explained by Karl Kautsky in the first of his two volume work The Agrarian Question, written in 1899,


Once urbanisation had made wood into a desirable commodity – and in the absence of coal or iron a much more important building material and fuel than now – the feudal lords tried to grab forest lands, either by taking them off the Mark [German village with a strong communal ethos] communities to whom they belonged, or, where they themselves owned them, by restricting peasant access for the collection of wood and straw for grazing. (Kautsky 24)

As in Britain this was no recent development. Over 350 years before Kautsky put pen to paper, the rebellious peasants of the 1525 Peasant War, issued a famous statement of their beliefs. The peasants, ill-equipped and with little or no military training, were slaughtered at the Battle of Frankenhauser (15 May 1525) but they left to posterity their famous Twelve Articles, drawing attention to their ancient rights such as wood gathering and couched in the religious idiom of the time. The famous leader of the peasants, Thomas Muntzer did not write this but he penned a supporting document, The Constitutional Draft. Sections four and five of the Twelve Articles read as follows:

The Fourth Article. – In the fourth place it has been the custom heretofore, that no poor man should be allowed to catch venison or wild fowl or fish in flowing water, which seems to us quite unseemly and unbrotherly as well as selfish and not agreeable to the word of God. In some places the authorities preserve the game to our great annoyance and loss, recklessly permitting the unreasoning animals to destroy to no purpose our crops which God suffers to grow for the use of man, and yet we must remain quiet. This is neither godly or neighbourly. For when God created man he gave him dominion over all the animals, over the birds of the air and over the fish in the water. Accordingly it is our desire if a man holds possession of waters that he should prove from satisfactory documents that his right has been unwittingly acquired by purchase. We do not wish to take it from him by force, but his rights should be exercised in a Christian and brotherly fashion. But whosoever cannot produce such evidence should surrender his claim with good grace.

The Fifth Article. – In the fifth place we are aggrieved in the matter of wood-cutting, for the noble folk have appropriated all the woods to themselves alone. If a poor man requires wood he must pay double for it (or, perhaps, two pieces of money). It is our opinion in regard to wood which has fallen into the hands of a lord whether spiritual or temporal, that unless it was duly purchased it should revert again to the community. It should, moreover, be free to every member of the community to help himself to such fire-wood as he needs in his home. Also, if a man requires wood for carpenter’s purposes he should have it free, but with the knowledge of a person appointed by the community for that purpose. Should, however, no such forest be at the disposal of the community let that which has been duly bought be administered in a brotherly and Christian manner. If the forest, although unfairly appropriated in the first instance, was later duly sold let the matter be adjusted in a friendly spirit and according to the Scriptures.

The historian Christopher Clark in his monumental study of 1848-9, Revolutionary Spring, highlights how the enclosures and wood theft laws closed down the open spaces previously accessible to the rural population. The forest skirmishes and land battles in pre-1848 Europe were ‘… often (though not always) rearguard actions against the more homogenous and spatially delimited forms of ownership that would become characteristic of modern society’. (Clark 88) Clark’s academic language should not be allowed to hide the brutal reality of what this meant: hunger, starvation, immiseration and death for thousands of rural people throughout Europe.


In the Rhineland

In Prussia (which included the Rhineland) the issue became so toxic that between 1830-1836, 77% of all prosecutions were concerned, in one way or another, with forestry, hunting and pasture rights. Generally speaking peasants had, under the old system of rights, been allowed to gather wood which was lying on the ground. In some cases there were maximum dimensions to the wood which you could pick and cutting down branches was not allowed and could result in a severe penalty. Now, under the increasing restrictions being introduced even this wasn’t permitted. Given the large number of prosecutions it looks as if this policy was energetically policed by the landowners, through their bailiffs, hired hands and the police and then pursued through the courts.

Urban growth in the Rhineland during the 1800s was the fastest in the whole of what was to become Germany in 1871: The figures below show urbanisation rates (in %) between 1815 – 1850 in the Rhineland.

Although these figures are not as great as some areas in Europe they nevertheless indicate an increasing escalation in the urban population. These people had to be fed and they needed fuel for their fires. Urban growth was to have a profound effect on rural life, not least in the drift of the rural population to toil in the workshops and factories now beginning to develop in the new towns and cities; increasingly the rural economy was geared to feeding the urban population and centuries old patterns of agricultural practice were swept away. Marx’s words in the Communist Manifesto, ‘All that was solid melts in the air’ were rarely so appropriate. Wood was now collected by the landowners to be sold on the market in the growing towns and cities. If peasants collected firewood they could not use it for themselves unless they paid for it, or they could sell it to the landowner who in turn would sell it to merchants in the towns, at a profit of course.

Given that his father was the Advocate in the long-running legal battle around the Wood Theft Laws it is hardly surprising that the young Karl Marx became interested in the issue. Marx paid close attention to the debates in the Sixth Rhine Province Assembly about the Wood Theft Laws which took place between 23 May to 25 July. The Rhine Province was created in 1822 from the provinces of the Lower Rhine and Jülich-Cleves-Berg; its capital was Koblenz. The Assembly was formed a year later and was hardly democratic. The system of election was based on landownership which gave landowners a comfortable majority when it came to voting. Apparently, he attended all the sessions where the issue was discussed but, for reasons which are not clear, was not supplied with any of the relevant documentation pertaining to the issues raised in the chamber. Fortunately, he was an assiduous note-taker.

He reported, analysed and commented on what he heard in the Rheinische Zeitung (RZ) which had been established in January 1842 with Moses Hess as its editor. In October Marx was appointed to the editorial board. Before looking at what Marx wrote it is worth mentioning that, at this time in his life he was heavily influenced by the German philosopher Hegel who had taught at Berlin University before Marx arrived there. Although Hegel died in November 1831 and Marx arrived in Berlin in October 1836 the Hegelian influence was still very strong. Many of Marx’s early collaborators were Hegelians and he too fell under the spell of this philosopher who did much to shape the intellectual landscape of Germany and other parts of Europe. One result of this philosophical influence is that it renders some of what Marx wrote about the Wood Theft Laws rather abstract. In later years Marx turned away from Hegel (although never totally abandoning him) towards a class analysis based on historical materialism and a concentration on economic analysis as manifested in his monumental study Das Kapital, the first volume being published in German in 1867.

As a contributor and later as an editor on the RZ, Marx addressed a number of issues not least of which was the question of press censorship which was widely practiced at the time and would ultimately signal the death knell for the RZ in 1843. His concern for the Wood Theft Laws could be seen as an element in Marx’s growing awareness of what was often referred to, at the time, as the ‘social question’. There were numerous writings about the social conditions of the newly emergent working class which proliferated in the first half and middle of the 19thC: James Kay, Bettina von Armin, Heinrich Grunholzer, Ange Guépin and Eugene Bonamy were just five of these chroniclers of urban labour, poverty and destitution, to which we must add the classic study, The Condition of the Working Class in England written in 1845 (by which time Marx and his family were living in Belgium) by Marx’s future friend and collaborator Frederick Engels. Hal Draper elaborates,




Concern with the “social question” was not only new, it was the special characteristic of the pioneer socialists and communists whose ranks Marx was still unwilling to join. What was characteristic of these early radicals was that they mostly dissociated the “social question” from the “political question” (gaining freedom in the state) […] It was precisely Marx’s contribution to develop a communism that integrated into one consistent perspective both the battle for political democracy and the struggle on the “social question”. (Draper, Marx’s Theory of Revolution Vol. 1. p. 66)


Marx’s articles in the Rheinische Zeitung

Turning now to what Marx wrote in the RZ about the Wood Theft Laws, it is striking that he expends much energy writing in a mode that, from today’s perspective, could be called satirical (in fact throughout his life Marx displayed an abundant talent for this kind of expression and rarely missed an opportunity to ‘have a go’ at an opponent). He clearly regards the Assembly Deputies as a bunch of idiots and there are many examples of his talent for put-downs and insults, although he mentions no-one by name. Marx’s articles on the Wood Theft Laws are not easy to follow (apart from other considerations he thought the debates were ‘tedious and uninspired’). There are detailed accounts on what constitutes a right, what punishments are appropriate or not and the appointment of Forest Wardens and the role they play; none of which need detain us any further. What follows is an attempt to pick out the main issues and summarise what Marx wrote, not to provide a blow-by-blow account of what transpired in the debating chamber.

His first article (although they are usually referred to as Supplements) appeared in the RZ 298 in 25 Oct. 1842. The other Supplements appeared in No. 300 (27 Oct.), No. 303 (30 Oct.), No. 305 (1 Nov.), No. 307 (3 Nov.). Two main themes soon begin to emerge:

a) the rights of property versus the rights of the people.

b) the relation between the state and the property owner.

One of the key aspects of the wood theft debates is to what extent does an inherited right have over a new law which clearly works to the disadvantage of those who have previously benefitted from the old, well-established practice? Does a new law simply sweep away the old rights? The dynamo of capitalist development was rapidly changing the face of Europe (and the rest of the world would follow), what chance did a relatively small number of peasants in the Rhineland and elsewhere have of maintaining a practice that was perceived by many (particularly landowners) as outmoded and flew in the face of the inexorable march of modernity? What did it matter that a few peasants would have to abandon an age old right and, probably also, at some point, abandon their whole way of life and move to the cities? Why not succumb to the inevitable? Marx did not see it this way, his sympathies were clearly with the wood gatherers.

Marx argued in RZ 300 that ‘Little thought is needed to perceive how one-sidedly enlightened legislation has treated and been compelled to treat the customary rights of the poor…’ (in all quotes from RZ italics are as in the original). The very question of whether wood lying on the floor of the forest was property or not was a matter of debate as was the question, if indeed it was property, to whom did it belong? Marx elaborates,


‘…all customary rights of the poor were based on the fact that certain forms of property were indeterminate in character, for they were definitely not private property, but neither were they definitely not common property being a mixture of public and private right, such as we find in all institutions of the Middle Ages.’

‘Indeterminate’ is a key word here. The wood on the forest floor is not private property (as opposed to the trees themselves). The scattered branches are ‘accidental’ and ‘elemental’ and belong to what Marx called ‘occupation rights’, in other words to ‘those excluded from all other property’ (in this case the peasantry). Marx likened the loose wood to the ‘alms of nature’ and just as the poor could claim alms (money or food distributed to the destitute) which were given out in the street, so they could claim branches and twigs lying on the forest floor. The wood becomes an ‘accidental appendage of property’. The landowners were having none of this – an attitude starkly illustrated by the apparently innocuous practice of picking berries in the forests. Traditionally, this task was left to children and was another long-established customary right. The landowners did away with this practice and the berries too became part of the monopoly of the landowning class. As a Deputy explained in the Assembly and quoted by Marx ‘…in his area these berries have already become articles of commerce and are dispatched to Holland by the barrel.’

What was particularly striking to Marx was the way the Wood Theft Laws represented the power of the landowners over the elements of the state at both regional and local level. The authority of the state has become a servant of the landowners, ‘All the organs of the state become the ears, eyes, arms, legs by means of which the forest owner, observes, appraises, protects, reaches out, and runs.’ (RZ 303) Marx continued on this theme in RZ 305, ‘What then are the harmful results? Harmful is that which is harmful to the interest of the forest owner.’ The Deputies even discussed taking punishment out of the hands of the law and, in effect, giving it to the landowner. The possibility arose of making a convicted wood thief work (unpaid of course) for the landowner meaning that the landowner would actually profit from the activity of the wood thief. In this way crime would ‘pay’ twice over but only for the landowner. Marx, evoking the spirit of Jonathan Swift, commented, ‘We are only surprised that the forest owner is not allowed to heat his stove with wood thieves.’

In his final article on the Wood Theft Laws (RZ, 307 3 Nov. 1842) Marx attempted to sum up the situation. Private interest (i.e. of the landowners/capitalists) was paramount, all else was subordinate, ‘Our account has shown the Assembly degrades the executive power, the administrative authorities, the life of the accused, the idea of the state, crime itself and punishment as well, to material means of private interest.’ Considering that his father was a legal Advocate it must also have impressed itself upon the young Marx how the law was ‘outvoted’ by the Assembly Deputies. The principles of law, supposedly so sacrosanct to the ruling classes, were sacrificed to the interest of forest protection, for the sole benefit of the landowners,


This abject materialism, this sin against the holy spirit of the people and humanity, is an immediate consequence of the doctrine which the Preussische Staats-Zeitung [Prussian State Gazette – an official publication] preached to the legislator, namely that in connection with the law concerning wood he should think only of wood and forest and should solve each material problem in a non-political way, i.e. without any connection with the whole of the reason and morality of the state.’

The relationship of the state and local authority to the landowner was one which Marx had not yet fully worked out; this would come later beginning in 1843 with some critical notes on Hegel and The German Ideology (written in 1845-6 but not published till much later). At the time Marx has no developed analysis of the state and he expects the state authorities to defend the wood gatherers, which of course, is precisely what did not happen. Another crucial aspect of Marx’s thought, which he is only just beginning to understand, is the notion of class. He does not talk about the working class in his articles on wood theft although he does refer to the poor as the ‘elemental class of human society’. He sees in the poor many virtues and here we can also locate an area where Marx moved away from Hegel. The latter was utterly disdainful of the poor who he referred to as Pöbel (usually translated into English as ‘rabble’). All in all, Marx’s writings on the Wood Theft Laws were important stepping stones in his political development, as mentioned by Hal Draper, ‘His article on the Wood Theft Laws anticipated his critique of Hegel: the Diet debases the state officialdom into “material interests of private interests.” His article on the Moselle peasants emphasised the narrowmindedness of the bureaucratic mentality’. Much later, when Marx was dead, Engels, writing to R. Fischer in 1895, made much the same point, ‘I heard Marx say again and again that it was precisely through concerning himself with the wood theft laws and with the situation of the Moselle peasants that he was shunted from pure politics over to economic conditions, and thus came to socialism.’

The Rhineland at this time, although developing quickly was not a place where the industrial bourgeoisie yet held sway and in Germany as a whole, even after 1871, landowners, nobility and the new bourgeoisie all vied for control while keeping an eye over their shoulder at the growing proletariat in the cities. One key aspect of Bismarck’s rule was his attempt, not always successful, to play-off one class or section of a class, against another and later Marx and Engels were to regard his regime as Bonapartist in the same way (though not exactly) as the Bonapartism of the the great Napoleon’s less illustrious, nephew Louis. In time, Germany was to develop as one of the industrial powerhouses of the world, defeating France in the Franco-Prussian war of 1871, flexing its imperial muscles overseas (in Morocco for example), building a navy, a large army and gearing up for the First World War. None of which would have been possible without a powerful, highly productive industrial base. In this complex and unstoppable process the needs and rights of the Rhineland peasants were swept aside.



Sources and notes:

For general background reading there are a number of biographies of Marx which mention, in varying degrees of depth (and quality), his engagement with the Wood Theft Laws and, although it is not a biography, Hal Draper’s Karl Marx’s Theory of Revolution Vol. 1. particularly chap. 2. ‘The Political Apprentice’ is excellent. The reference to the ‘Girls’ War’ or ‘Maidens’ War’ can be found in The Revolutionary Spring by Christopher Clark. The full text of the five ‘Wood Theft’ articles by Marx in the RZ can be found in various sources, I used the Marxist Internet Archive website which was also useful for footnotes giving background information (social makeup etc.) to the Assembly. For general background to issues around the question of land, land rights, enclosures etc. the journal The Land proved invaluable; the information about enclosures in Sheffield came from an article by Peter Harvey in the website our Broomhall.org.uk in 1982. The text of the threatening anonymous letter to John Edward Dorington can be found in a review by Dinah Birch of Penning Poison: A History of Anonymous Letters by Emily Cockayne in London Review of Books, 21 Sept. 2023. Karl Kautsky’s classic study The Agrarian Question was published in English (for the first time) in two volumes by Zwan Publications in 1988. The Twelve Articles can be easily found on various websites. Some ideas about Marx and Hegel were derived from Draper (see previous reference) and ‘The Virtue of Poverty: Karl Marx’s Transformation of Hegel’s Concept of the Poor by Erica Sherover, Canadian Journal of Political Social Theory Vol. 3. No. 1 (Winter 1979) pp 53-66. Figures for urban growth in the Rhineland came from: ‘Population Growth and Urbanisation in Germany in the 19th Century’, Jurgen Reulecke in Urbanism Past and Present. No. 4. (Summer, 1977) pp 21-32. Engels’ letter to R. Fischer (15 April, 1895) is quoted in Draper, see previous reference p. 75.

Note on a source not used: For various reasons I was not able to locate a copy of Daniel Bensaїd’s The Dispossessed: Karl Marx’ Debates on Wood Theft and the Rights of the Poor (University of Minnessota Press, Minneapolis, 2021). However, I understand that Bensaїd’s text uses Marx’s writings on wood theft primarily to discuss various issues arising in the 21st century and this is outside the remit of my basic introduction to the topic. Bensaїd was a highly respected theoretician and activist long associated with the international Trotskyist movement who died in 2010. A beautifully written assessment of his life and work can be found in chapter 11 of Paul Le Blanc’s Revolutionary Collective: Comrades, Critics, and Dynamics in the Struggle for Socialism (Chicago, Haymarket Books, 2022).

Cover illustration: Peasants on a path in the forest (oil on panel, painted in 1626) by Jasper van de Lanen of Antwerp (1585-1634).

AMLO; NEO LIBERAL PERONIST
Mexican president masses supporters to show political ‘muscle’

By AFP
Published November 27, 2022

Supporters of Mexican President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador fill a thoroughfare in Mexico City - Copyright AFP -
Jennifer Gonzalez Covarrubias

Mexican President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador and thousands of supporters took to the streets of the capital Sunday for a march seen as a show of political strength by the left-wing populist.

Amid cries of “it’s an honor to be with Obrador,” the president joined flag-waving crowds to personally lead a rally that comes as his allies warm up for the race to replace him in 2024.

The aim was to celebrate the government’s “transformation of Mexico” four years into his six-year term, Lopez Obrador, known by his initials AMLO, said ahead of the march.

“The president is not alone,” read a placard at the rally, while others vowed support for the government’s controversial electoral reform plan.

“I like the way AMLO governs, always doing everything for the most vulnerable,” said Alma Perez, a 35-year-old teacher who traveled from the southern state of Guerrero to join the march.

Lopez Obrador “has done what no other president has done for the poor,” said Ramon Suarez, a 33-year-old electrician.

“He has some areas in which to improve such as security, but that’s not done overnight,” Suarez added.

Mariachi bands entertained the president’s supporters, who arrived on buses from around the country, many wearing purple, the color of his Morena party.

The rally comes two weeks after tens of thousands joined an opposition protest against the president’s proposed electoral reform.

Lopez Obrador wants to “show muscle,” said Fernando Dworak, a political analyst at the Mexican Autonomous Institute of Technology.

“It was a serious mistake by the opposition to believe that the president can be beaten on the streets,” he told AFP, referring to the November 13 anti-government protest.

– ‘Oiled machinery’ –

Lopez Obrador, who enjoys an approval rating of nearly 60 percent, owes much of his popularity to his social welfare programs aimed at helping the elderly and disadvantaged Mexicans.

Mexican presidents are barred from serving more than one term, and Lopez Obrador has ruled out trying to change the constitution to stay in office.

Even so, he is keen to see his Morena party hold onto power after he stands aside.

Three of Lopez Obrador’s allies and potential successors — Mexico City Mayor Claudia Sheinbaum, Foreign Minister Marcelo Ebrard and Interior Minister Adan Augusto Lopez — accompanied him at the rally.

Lopez Obrador knows “that in order for him to win elections he needs oiled machinery that works all the time,” said Gustavo Lopez, a political scientist at Tecnologico de Monterrey, a Mexican university.

Opposition parties accuse Lopez Obrador of being an “authoritarian” populist who is “militarizing” the country by giving a greater role to the armed forces in both security and infrastructure projects.

His efforts to revamp the independent National Electoral Institute (INE) have proven particularly controversial.

Lopez Obrador alleges that the INE endorsed fraud when he ran unsuccessfully for the presidency in 2006 and 2012, before winning in 2018.

He wants the organization to be replaced by a new body with members chosen by voters instead of lawmakers and with a smaller budget.

Critics see the plan as an attack on one of Mexico’s most important democratic institutions.

The reform would require support from at least two-thirds of lawmakers in Congress, and Lopez Obrador’s political opponents have vowed to oppose the changes.

Mexico president to 'show muscle' at big political rally

Jennifer Gonzalez Covarrubias
Sat, November 26, 2022 


Supporters of Mexican President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador are expected to flood the streets of Mexico City on Sunday in a major show of political strength by the left-wing populist.

The rally comes as presidential hopefuls, including Lopez Obrador's allies, warm up for the race to replace him in 2024.

Two weeks after tens of thousands joined an opposition protest against his proposed electoral reform, Lopez Obrador plans to lead a pro-government march through the heart of the capital.

The aim is to celebrate the government's "transformation of Mexico" four years into his six-year term, Lopez Obrador told reporters.

"I invite all the people, all those who can attend," including government ministers and lawmakers, he said.

It will be the first such march led by a Mexican president in at least four decades, and possibly the biggest pro-government rally since Lopez Obrador took office in 2018, according to experts.

Lopez Obrador wants to "show muscle," Fernando Dworak, a political analyst at the Mexican Autonomous Institute of Technology, said.

"It was a serious mistake by the opposition to believe that the president can be beaten on the streets," he told AFP, referring to the November 13 anti-government protest.

- 'Oiled machinery' -

Lopez Obrador enjoys an approval rating of nearly 60 percent, and few doubt his ability to draw a huge crowd on Sunday, when he plans to give a speech outlining his achievements in office.

Mexican presidents are barred from serving more than one term, and Lopez Obrador has ruled out trying to change the constitution to stay in office.

Even so, he is keen to see his Morena party hold onto power after he stands aside.

Two of Lopez Obrador's close allies and potential successors, Mexico City Mayor Claudia Sheinbaum and Foreign Minister Marcelo Ebrard, are expected to march alongside him.

Lopez Obrador knows "that in order for him to win elections he needs oiled machinery that works all the time," said Gustavo Lopez, a political scientist at Tecnologico de Monterrey, a Mexican university.

Opposition parties accuse Lopez Obrador of being an "authoritarian" populist who is "militarizing" the country by giving a greater role to the armed forces in both security and infrastructure projects.

His efforts to revamp the independent National Electoral Institute (INE) have proven particularly controversial.

Lopez Obrador alleges that the INE endorsed fraud when he ran unsuccessfully for the presidency in 2006 and 2012, before winning in 2018.

He wants the organization to be replaced by a new body with members chosen by voters instead of lawmakers and with a smaller budget.

Critics see the plan as an attack on one of Mexico's most important democratic institutions.

The reform would require support from at least two-thirds of lawmakers in Congress, and Lopez Obrador's political opponents have vowed to oppose the changes.

https://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/germany/1934/340715.htm

Leon Trotsky: Bonapartism and Fascism (1934)

Apr 25, 2007 ... It is a military-police dictatorship with which we are confronted, barely concealed with the decorations of parliamentarism. But a government of ...

https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1852/18th-brumaire

18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte. Marx 1852

Marx wrote The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon between December 1851 and March 1852. The "Eighteenth Brumaire" refers to November 9, 1799 in the ...