https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2021/10/19/pers-o19.html

The WSWS has argued that Napoleon Bonaparte and the Bonaparte family acted as a progressive force in French and European history. This type of “progressivism” Marx rejected outrightly in his “18th Brumaire” about Louis Napoleon and 1848. He called for the removal of the Vendome Column, a large monument celebrating Napoleon Bonparte’s military victories.

The concluding words of my work: “But when the imperial mantle finally falls on the shoulders of Louis Bonaparte, the bronze statue of Napoleon will come crashing down from the top of the Vendome Column,” have already been fulfilled. Colonel Charras opened the attack on the Napoleon cult in his work on the campaign of 1815. Subsequently, and especially in the past few years, French literature has made an end of the Napoleon legend with the weapons of historical research, criticism, satire, and wit. Outside France, this violent breach with the traditional popular belief, this tremendous mental revolution, has been little noticed and still less understood.

-Karl Marx from 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, Preface to the Second Edition, 1869

A Marxist perspective must penetrate the hypocrisy of bourgeois revolutionary sophistry, “the Napoleon cult”, the Jefferson cult, and point to the limitations of bourgeois revolution as incapable of ending class rule and the exploitation of labor, and driven to the formation of a new slave class. For this reason, Marxists can advocate the orderly removal of monuments of the old government and their display in museums rather than in prominent places that serve to enforce political allegiance. No representative of the old government should hold such an important position in the estimation of revolutionaries, as the old order represents everything to be hated and removed.

The particular case of the Jefferson statue in New York City’s City Hall building shows that the capitalist system smashes its own monuments. They have even shown their willingness to destroy the monument, perhaps to ensure that it will never return. This offers a parallel to the economic process of the socialization of production under capitalism and the construction of state-regulated monopolies.

Amazon has over 1.3 million employees, organizing them all under a single authority that allows them to cooperate in the production and distribution of goods to millions more people. This will prepare them, when they take the power, to cooperate as true equals, millions of equals, under socialism rather than as Jeff Bezos and Co.’s privately owned workforce. State-regulated monopolies under capitalism show the inevitability of the switch to socialism, with their highly organized, centrally controlled, and very large scale operations.

In the same way the destruction of the monuments shows the impulse of capitalism to destroy its own sacred pillars of rule. In order to capture markets, the New York City financial elite undermine faith in institutions through out the world. Where was Muhammad, for instance, during the bombing of Iraq, Syria, and Afghanistan? Perhaps for this reason, Arabic people rose up against their leaders. They could see that only their own efforts, not their appeals to a diety, could change their situation and free them for tyranny. The effect applies in the US, as Jeffersonion Democracy, the ideal peasant-based society, abandons the majority of the US to cruel torture, terror against the population, and government abuse of every sort.

For this reason, we should see this quote differently: “…evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.” From a class perspective, a new absolute Despotism must rise to “reduce them”, the capitalist class. They will certainly see it as their “duty to throw off such a Government”, but the working class must remember the “Despotism” that they suffered, without a constitution that guaranteed economic rights or public ownership of the greatest portion of the economy to the poor, and they must make it impossible to protect the old order from the new despotism. This new despotism, with its limitations on private wealth and the power of privately-held wealth, will be, however, the greatest ever Democracy from the point of view of the working class, since they can finally elect leaders in the workplace and decide on the policies of hiring, firing, training, etc. in favor of their own interests, not some despotic owner, which they can only compete to serve. This insight into the nature of democracy and despotism separates Marxism from Idealism and allows the workers to fight for their own interests against the capitalist state.

The natural process of capitalism, to destroy its own monuments, gives hope to the revolution, and the revolution welcomes it. With every falling monument, the necessity of the decisive action of the masses draws all the nearer. With every mass action of the people, their greatest act approaches, the act of the formation of a new government and the elimination of the old oppressive system. As Marx argued of France, the US currently lacks and seeks to bring about, “this violent breach with the traditional popular belief, this tremendous mental revolution.” This can only occur through the elimination of the Jefferson legend, just as the French needed to eliminate the “Napoleon legend,” “with the weapons of historical research, criticism, satire, and wit.”