All posts tagged lumpenproletariat

Gareth Stedman Jones on Marx and 1848

Having just read Karl Marx’s two great works of political analysis about the ill-fated French Second Republic (The Class Struggles in France: 1848 to 1850 and The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon), I thought I’d reread the hundred or so pages of Gareth Stedman Jones’s masterly intellectual biography of Marx which cover the same period – to remind myself of the wider European political and intellectual context, and to have Jones explain the development of Marx’s thought to me.

The Communist Manifesto

The Manifesto of the Communist Party was published in January 1848. According to Jones, Marx was:

the first to evoke the seemingly limitless powers of the modern economy and its global reach
the first to chart the staggering transformation unleashed by the productive powers of modern industry
the first to describe the restless, unfinished nature of capitalism which, in order to survive, must continually invent new human needs and new products to satisfy them
the first to describe how capitalism disrespects all previous boundaries and hierarchies, dissolving all conventional relationships, turning all humans into objects for sale, reducing all human relationships to the cash nexus

There is no doubting the innovativeness and power of much of Marx’s thought.

The creation of the ‘bourgeoisie’ and the ‘proletariat’

Karl’s writings of the earlier 1840s had used concepts inherited from the Hegelian tradition: ‘the Christian state’, ‘the philosopher’, ‘the rational state’, ‘civil society’, ‘the peasantry’, ‘the Germans’, ‘the Philistines’. From about 1845 these were replaced by a new ‘cast of characters’, as Jones describes them – ‘the modern state’, ‘the class struggle’, ‘the bourgeoisie’ and ‘the proletariat’.

Karl borrowed bourgeoisie from contemporary French radicals, notably Louis Blanc. Blanc wrote about the banking industry enthralling trade and commerce, enforcing competition in all sectors, pushing small businesses and traders to the wall, undermining those of middle stature and creating ‘an oligarchy of bankers’. That sense of capitalism’s all-conquering dynamism would become familiar in Marx’s writings. But whereas in France the word ‘bourgeois’ referred to individual fat cats, often satirised in contemporary cartoons, Marx greatly expanded the idea to make it identical with the great impersonal historical force of Capital itself.

The words proletarian and proletariat derive from the Latin root meaning ‘child’. They also were widely used in French radical writing of the 1840s to refer to the lowest order of society who have no property and so nothing to offer the state except their children. Again Marx adopted the word and vastly increased its meaning by using it to denote the entire working class population, not just of one, but of all the European nations, indeed of the whole world. (cf Engels, quoted on page 243.)

On the plus side, this drastic simplification enabled the stirring rhetoric of The Communist Manifesto which paints the contemporary world as a titanic clash between the Bourgeoisie and the Proletariat. On the down side, it led Marx to lump together all kinds of disparate groups under his new master terms – for example, lumping the mill owners of Lancashire with the financiers of Paris or the ruling elite of Berlin, groups which, in actuality, had very little in common and were acting in completely different situations and often with very different aims.

Similarly, despite superficial similarities, factory workers from Wigan, the unemployed of Paris and army conscripts in Berlin were all described by Marx as ‘the proletariat’ but, once again, didn’t really have that much in common, and were thinking and acting in completely different societies and political systems.

This Great Conflation and Conceptual Simplification encouraged Marx and his followers to minimise or just plain ignore the very real differences between actually existing social groups, groups which sometimes came into active antagonism to each other, as well as the very real differences in the economic situations and the political systems of Britain, France and Prussia.

The Battle at the barricade in the Rue Soufflot, Paris, on 24 June 1848 by Horace Vernet

The revolutions of 1848

Jones gives detailed accounts of the revolutions which broke out in France in February 1848 and in Germany in March 1848, as well as the parallel uprisings which occurred across the continent in countries like Austria, Italy and Poland.

Karl was expelled from Brussels for his political activities in March 1848, and went to Paris (arriving 4 March) where he witnessed at first hand the early developments in the French Republic which had been created when King Louis-Philippe had been forced to abdicate only a few weeks earlier.

These were heady, euphoric days when radicals thought the final workers’ revolution had arrived. But Karl had barely settled into digs in Paris before news came of anti-government disturbances in Germany, specifically in the Prussian capital Berlin, as well as other cities like Frankfurt and Dresden. Karl decided to return to his homeland, arriving in Cologne on 10 April, and remaining there for the next thirteen months.

Along with fellow communists, Karl set up a radical newspaper, the Neue Rheinische Zeitung which quickly established itself as the leading radical journal in Germany, with a circulation of 5,000. However, Jones cautions that it never had any influence because of ‘its dogmatic tone and its reductive conception of politics’ (p.295).

The problem Karl and his journal created for themselves was they had a schizophrenic position created by their split worldview. On the one hand Karl believed the Great Proletarian Revolution was just around the corner and that therefore he needed to support whatever events were pushing the situation to extremes, whatever seemed likely to spark the Final Insurrection. From this grand historical point of view Marx was often in favour of governments taking repressive actions; the more repressive, the more they would hasten The Great Uprising.

But, on the other hand, as editor of a journal claiming to represent the best interests of the working classes, Karl had to give some kind of practical advice about who to support and what to campaign for as events unfolded day by day – forcing him to take part in the messy, compromising business of actual politics.

In Jones’s view Marx’s flip-flopping between these positions not only made the Neue Rheinische Zeitung an unreliable guide for working class readers, it looked to many like indecisiveness, and led some on the left to ridicule it (and Karl) for his often grandiose visions of a world on the brink of utopian transformation.

Karl’s political commentaries

During his eight months in Cologne Karl wrote intense and furious commentary on political developments, but this is where – for Jones – it starts to go wrong, for a number of reasons.

1. Jones says that Karl and his circle thought the 1848 revolution would follow the pattern of the Great French Revolution i.e. there would be an initial bourgeois phase dominated by the usual liberal rhetoric about the rights of man and democracy (1789-1792), but this would then be followed by the True Proletariat Revolution (which is how Karl interpreted the rise of Robespierre, the Committee of Public Safety, and the Terror of 1792-3).

This was the part of the French revolution which executed the king, declared a republic, created universal suffrage, abolished church land and took far-reaching radical steps which all of which Karl strongly admired. So Marx expected the events of 1848 to fit into this pre-ordained schema: first bourgeois revolution, then proletariat revolution.

But he was wrong.

Jones says that the very strength of the Communist Manifesto is also its weakness. It appeals because of its simplicity: the wicked bourgeois grow richer but numerically smaller and smaller; the impoverished proletariat grow poorer, but more and more numerous. The result is as inevitable as a simple maths problem: eventually the proletariat will outnumber the bourgeoisie to such an extent that the Great Proletarian Revolution will become inevitable, the oppressed Proletariat will rise up, overthrow their exploiters and bring human history to an end in a peaceful utopia.

But the world wasn’t and isn’t that simple, never has been.

One of the undoubted strengths of Karl’s analysis is that it enabled him to look behind the scenes of daily politics in France and Germany to identify the class-based interests of different political groupings in a way that more conventional commentators couldn’t. But this X-ray vision also led to what Jones sees as Karl’s greatest mistake: which was to underestimate the messy and unpredictable realm of actual politics.

Karl’s conviction that History proceeds along an unavoidable course, moving through inevitable stages (industrial revolution, the economic then political triumph of bourgeoisie, the rise of proletariat, the communist revolution) led him and his colleagues in the Communist League and on the Neue Rheinische Zeitung to underestimate the complexity of the societies they were commentating on (Britain, France and Germany) and to ignore the complexity of the actual political manoeuvring taking place in them, under very fraught circumstances.

It led them to overlook the massive differences between all three countries (for instance, Prussian liberals and radicals had no republican tradition whatever to look back to or draw upon, unlike the French radicals who had the 1789 revolution and the 1830 revolutions to refer back to and invoke).

It led them to make mistakes in the history they claimed to be so fond of (the French state of 1789 was bankrupt and tied to a moribund church, whereas the French state of 1848 was relatively well off and backed by the richest parts of society, the industrial and financial bourgeoisie: no wonder the two revolutions unfolded in completely different ways).

The opening of Karl’s essay on French politics, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, is one of the most quoted things he ever wrote:

Hegel remarks somewhere that all great world-historic facts and personages appear, so to speak, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce.

The clarity, the sweep, the confidence, the shiny brilliance of this insight are typical Marx and typically misleading. It may well be true that politicians drape themselves in the costumes, postures and words of their predecessors, particularly at times of stress. But rereading Marx this time round has made me realise that one clever insight is not enough. While Karl was elaborating the parallels between the actors of 1848 and their predecessors in 1789 (or, as he often does, to figures in classical Rome, or Biblical times) the real politicians of his time were getting on with their plotting and reacting to completely new circumstances in the here and now.

Americans have an irritating phrase – ‘If you’re so clever, how come you ain’t rich?’ You can apply a variation of this to Marx and his followers: ‘If you’re so clever, with all your unique insights into economic and social forces — how come your cause lost?’ Lost again and again.

Because it did lose.

In Britain, the Chartist agitation which looked like producing a real change of the political scene in early 1848, fizzled out.

In Germany, Jones shows how the Prussian emperor cleverly manoeuvred his way through the revolutionary turmoil, until he finally outwitted his National Assembly, carried out a coup and imposed a new constitution, retaining all his powers.

In France, it took three years of very complex political chicanery until the preposterous figure of Louis-Napoléon managed to make himself emperor (December 1851), crystallising the defeat of the revolution.

The Polish uprising of 1848 was crushed by Russia.

The January rising in Sicily was defeated with the return of its Bourbon rulers. An uprising for independence in Hungary was eventually crushed by Russian and Austrian armies. And so on.

By 1853, Queen Victoria (Britain), King Frederick William IV (Prussia), the emperor Louis-Napoléon (France), the emperor Francis Joseph (Austria) and Czar Nicholas I (Russia) were all secure on their thrones as they had been in 1847.

Karl underestimates the importance of politics

In all his political analyses, Karl can’t hide the tone of contempt and sarcasm (the ‘contemptuous tone’, the ‘derision and condemnation’ as Jones describes them p.283) directed at the politicians he regards as mere puppets fronting various conflicting ‘class interests’.

The assumption in all of his writings is that he and his communist group alone in all of Europe understand the true nature of technological, economic and social change.

This, in fact, may have been true: his economic and class-based analyses are fascinating and way ahead of his time — but nonetheless, they ignore the reality of politics, which is that victory goes not go to the virtuous or to ‘the vanguard of History’ – it goes to the cunningest and most Machiavellian.

Karl is more in thrall to ‘the histrionics of revolution than to its actuality’; ‘he underestimated the ability of the leaders of the reaction’ (p.284). His ‘hostility towards the modern representative state’, his ‘consequent belittlement of the significance of manhood suffrage and the democratic republic’, his ‘disregard of political and legal forms’ (p.307) led Karl and Engels to systematically underestimate the importance of these goals for the working classes of their time, and explains the way their predictions for all the 1848 revolutions (and indeed for the rest of the century) turned out to be diametrically wrong.

Jones’s critique of The Class Struggles in France: 1848 to 1850

Jones says it is the difficulty of reconciling the great global Hegelian vision of the two vast world-historical categories which Marx had invented (the Bourgeoisie and the Proletariat) lumbering towards the Great Day of Revolution with the day-to-day confusing and messy manouevrings of political factions, which gives Marx’s long essay The Class Struggles in France: 1848 to 1850 its ‘strangeness’ of tone and content.

For a start it omits a surprising amount of basic information:

1. There is very little mention of the political causes which the left and radicals were fighting for, almost nothing about the actual political platforms of workers’ leaders like Blanqui and the radicals, next to nothing about the actual mechanics of the ‘right to work’ movement which inspired many of the workers throughout the revolution. It was rhetoric around the ‘right to work’ which mobilised huge numbers of the unemployed in Paris. The opening of National Workshops for the unemployed was the central issue in working class politics: the June riots weren’t the result of some abstract confrontation between the Proletariat and the Bourgeoisie, they were sparked by the government’s threat to close the National Workshops and were the mass protests of the thousands of men who stood to lose their life-supporting dole money. By always moving to the most abstract level, Karl consistently misses the importance of the quotidien, of practical details.

2. There is surprisingly little detailed economic analysis. Karl followed French socialist theorists who thought that capitalist crises were the result of periodic overproduction which flooded markets and produced slumps. This is what Karl attributes the 1847 economic crisis to. But Jones says it was caused by entirely different factors: the potato blight of 1846 and poor wheat harvests – which both produced hunger – and a poor cotton crop which led to lack of work in the textile industry (mass unemployment). In fact the collapse of linen production across much of northern Europe was part of a turning point in European history, which resulted in the de-industrialisation of much of the countryside of northern Europe, the movement of rural artisans to the cities or to flee starving Europe altogether and migrate to America. None of this is in Karl’s account.

3. Karl is always itching to represent every confrontation as that between the Bourgeoisie and the Proletariat, but this forces him to overlook or distort all kinds of inconvenient facts: for example, the government of the French Republic which did all the repressing, was mostly not made up of employers, industrial or otherwise; the Paris insurgents included just as many small employers as helpless wage earners; and the armed forces which confronted them, the Mobile Guard, was just as working class as the workers they were trying to control.

Karl knew this but to save his theory invents the concept of the lumpenproletariat, consisting of drunks, crooks, thieves, prostitutes and so on to explain the behaviour of the Mobile Guard. In reality they were from the same ‘class’ as the marchers, but had simply decided to take the government’s shilling and wear a uniform. The entire concept of the lumpenproletariat can be defined as ‘the elements of the working class which don’t behave in the way Karl Marx’s theory says they ought to behave and so he has to call by a different name and go out of his way to abuse and discredit’.

4. Karl takes no time to analyse the central problem the young French Republic faced, which was what to do with over 100,000 unemployed working class men and their families. Paying some to join the newly established Mobile Guards solved part of the problem. Setting up the National Workshops for the unemployed solved the rest, but cost the government a fortune. Where was the money to come from? The republic decided to tax the peasants – (which resulted in the peasants hating the new Republic and voting for the first person who promised to reduce taxes – Louis-Napoléon – in the electoin of December 1848.

So much for key elements of the revolution which Karl ignored. But Jones says that at a much deeper level, Karl’s entire analysis was wrong-headed.

It was hardly rocket science to notice that 1848 saw insurgencies against almost every established government in Europe; other people did notice this too, not least the governments in question. But Karl made two cardinal mistakes in his analysis of these events:

1. He couldn’t escape his own blinkered interpretation of the insurgencies in terms of the French Revolution of 1789. Having just read Karl’s text, The Class Struggles in France: 1848 to 1850, I can confirm that Karl is much more haunted by 1789 (and especially by the rise of the Jacobin party in 1792) than the workers and middle-class liberals he’s describing. Having interpreted the French Revolution as in fact two revolutions taking place in sequence – the ‘bourgeois’ revolution of 1789 and then the Jacobin or radical revolution of 1792 – Karl time and time again describes the political actors of 1848 as repeating, invoking, walking in the steps of and generally copying their great predecessors.

Only they weren’t. They were reacting to completely different situations, economic pressures and political realities, in completely new and unpredictable ways.

2. Karl’s philosophical position had been developed in the early 1840s, and a central tenet was that modern life in a capitalist system alienated people from traditions, customs and from themselves. Of nobody was this more true than of the industrial proletariat, who were reduced to the status of ‘hands’, to mere appendages which tended the genuinely valuable items in factories, the machines. Alienated from their work, from the products of their labour, from the value of their labour, Karl saw this class as being subjected to such an extreme of dehumanisation, that it would eventually – by a kind of law of physics – rebound, reclaim the means of production and distribution, overthrow its oppressors, and institute a new era of history in which all men and women live alienation-free lives, in touch with themselves, enjoying the fruits of their labours in harmonious associations.

You don’t need a degree in politics and economics to see that this is a pitifully simple-minded fairy tale.

What Jones specifically accuses Karl of is placing his own ideologically-blinkered philosophy over the actual facts. Karl thought the proletariat had to be pushed right to the brink, to be ground into utter misery, before the world-shaking transformation could come about. But in the event the working classes of Europe turned out not to be so keen on being ground into the mud in order to prove the theory of an obscure German philosophy student; what they wanted was work, shorter hours and more pay.

And most of the radical leaders in Britain, France, Germany, Austria and beyond thought this could best be achieved not by overthrowing the existing political system but by being granted entry into it.

The central demand of the Chartists wasn’t to abolish property and overthrow the bourgeoisie: it was to have the vote. Similarly, the issue of male suffrage was central to the 1848 revolution in France. The ‘class consciousness’ of workers in Britain or France was caused less by the notional stage of development of capitalist technology, than by the fact that they wanted the vote so that their representatives could fight their cause in Parliament and the National Assembly.

Jones’s point is that the central issue of the 1848 revolutions was not Karl’s ‘class consciousness’, it was widespread concern about ‘political exclusion’.

When Marx and Engels ridicule the whole notion of parliamentary politics, when they pour scorn on the English Constitution as ‘a tissue of lies’, when they mock moderate socialist leaders in Britain and France – they are denying the voices of the working classes themselves.

Highly ideological and doctrinaire themselves, Karl and Friedrich projected onto working class people their own theories and ideas about how the working classes ought to think and behave, ignoring the actual stated wishes of the majority of the workers – shorter hours, better pay and the vote.

Is there any way of adjudicating between these conflicting interpretations of events? Yes. By seeing what happened subsequently: Did the working classes of Britain, France and Germany turn out to want violent revolutionary overthrow, or did they just want more say in existing political systems?

The fact that exclusion and lack of recognition rather than exploitation were the prime precipitants of the insurrectionary sentiments of the peoples of 1848 was borne out by the subsequent history of Western Europe. With manhood suffrage and a representative system established in France after the fall of the Second Empire, and renewed talk of Reform in England, the working classes were progressively re-incorporated back into the political system. Thus the political and extra-constitutional significance of the ‘class struggle’, as it had been invoked by the Communist Manifesto, faded away. (p.313)

Karl superimposed over the actual stated aims of working class radicals in 1848 an arcane schema derived from the Idealist philosopher Hegel, which bore little relation to economic, social or political realities, and which has bedazzled restless intellectuals ever since.

Workers didn’t want to overthrow the system; they wanted more of a say in the system, and a fairer distribution of the spoils. The proof is the way that, as the century progressed, the ‘proletariat’ didn’t rise up against the ‘bourgeoisie’ of England, France or Germany – it was step by step co-opted into the system and running of those countries, which all avoided revolution and became social democracies – the precise opposite of what Karl and Engels predicted and never gave up hoping for.

Jones’s critique of The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon

In the summer of 1849 the king of Prussia, Frederick William IV, introduced a new cabinet of his reactionary supporters, who implemented counter-revolutionary measures to expel leftist and other revolutionary elements from the country. The paper Karl had been editing and writing for, the Neue Rheinische Zeitung was soon suppressed and Marx was ordered to leave the country on 16 May.

He returned to Paris, which was then in the grip of both a reactionary counter-revolution and a cholera epidemic. But he wasn’t there long before he was expelled by the city authorities, who considered him a political threat. With his wife Jenny expecting their fourth child and unable to move back to Germany or Belgium, in August 1849 Karl arrived as a refugee in London, where he was to live for the rest of his life.

It was in Dean Street, in London’s Soho district, between December 1851 and March 1852, that Karl wrote his analysis of the rise of Louis-Napoléon, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon, which went on to be published in 1852 in Die Revolution, a German monthly magazine published in New York.

On pages 334 to 343 of his biography Jones analyses The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon. For a start it was, apparently, Engels’s idea that the grand history of 1789 was repeating itself as farce in the 1848 events, and that the coup by which Louis-Napoléon seized power in December 1848 echoed the coup by which his uncle, Napoléon Bonaparte seized power on 9 November 1799. We know this because we have the letter in which Engels suggests the idea to Karl.

At the time of the first Bonaparte’s coup, France was still living under the fanciful calendar dreamed up by the earlier French revolutionaries, according to which November was known as Brumaire and the 9th of November translated as the 18th day of ‘Brumaire’. Thus Bonaparte’s coup was known as the 18th Brumaire, and so the title of Marx’s long article is a direct reference (once again) to the events of the first French Revolution, jokingly labelling the coup of the nephew by the term previously used for the coup of the uncle.

As with his critique of Marx’s writings about the 1848 revolution, Jones heavily criticises Marx for being trapped and blinkered by his own theory. His obsession with interpreting everything as part of the great struggle between the abstract categories of Capital and Proletariat, and his obsession with the revolutions of the past, completely blinded him to the novelty of the situation in 1848.

This consisted in the fact that the Second Republic had consciously created the role of a president, something which had never existed in France before and which they modelled on the role of the American president.

It seemed like a good idea, but in practice nobody in France knew how to manage the resulting political situation, specifically the confrontation between president and National Assembly, both claiming the authority of having been elected.

It was Louis-Napoléon’s wisdom (or luck) to realise that he could appeal over the heads of both the liberals and the so-called ‘Party of Order’ in the National Assembly, and even of the radical socialist leaders of ‘the street’, to the largest element in the Paris population – the petty bourgeoisie – and to by far the largest section of the population of France – the peasants – to secure power.

Far from being a pygmy reincarnation of his giant forebear, a retread of an old formula (as Marx saw him), Jones claims that Louis-Napoléon was in fact a talented pioneer of an entirely new politics – he was arguably the first European populist politician, happy to ignore the entire political class and appeal directly to ‘the people’.

Once again, Karl’s dismissal of democratic politics as a mere smokescreen concealing the ‘reality’ of class conflict, and his obsessive interpreting of every twist and turn in the complex story solely in terms of his wished-for conflict between Bourgeoisie and Proletariat, completely blinded him to the novelty of this situation and to the actual power politics on the ground, which led to an outcome exactly contrary to what he predicted.

As a result Karl’s reading of the sequence of events which had culminated in the implementation of universal suffrage, Bonaparte’s massive electoral majority and finally his coup d’état was wilful and perverse. He claimed that these events signified the ripening of the ‘party of insurrection’ into ‘a really revolutionary party’, and the establishment of the Second Empire was not a defeat of the bourgeoisie, but a new form of bourgeois rule. But he had little to say about what was to be its more obvious consequence – that, as a result of the political demand for universal male suffrage in France in 1848, and again in Germany in the 186os, both the liberals and the more traditional parties of order found themselves defeated, not by radical democrats on the left, but by the demagogic manoeuvres of maverick post-Legitimist leaders on the right – Bonaparte and Bismarck. (p.341)

Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte aka the Emperor Napoleon III by Franz Xaver Winterhalter

Conclusions

Marx developed a way of interpreting society and history which is simultaneously powerful, persuasive and deeply misleading. Societies are driven forward by technological innovation. Capitalism does suck all societies into its vortex of trade and banking. (By now, 2018, the entire world has been subsumed into a global capitalist ‘system’, or system of interlocking systems.) Political leaders are often the puppets of big business and finance. Culture as a whole, and even individual artists or writers, can very usefully be thought of as expressing class interests or of reflecting the stage of development of their society.

All of these ideas have gone on to have brilliant careers in sociology, literary and wider cultural theory.

BUT the fundamental teleology, the view that History is inevitably and unstoppably heading in a particular direction, turns out to be completely unfounded.

And the idea that that direction amounts to the ‘Bourgeoisie’ becoming a tiny class of all-powerful capitalists grinding the faces of an enormous class of propertyless ‘Proletariat’ who will, inevitably, rise up to overthrow them – turned out to be completely wrong.

His position of teaching his followers to belittle and ignore the complexities of the political sphere, dismissing democracy, constitutions, the vote and the law as ‘bourgeois fictions’, and instead to rely on completely fictional ideas of ‘historical inevitability’, goes a long way to explaining why Marxist parties have repeatedly failed in industrialised and developed countries and have always been defeated by parties which understood the realities of power in complex societies much better.

Where Marxist tenets were to triumph was in the backward, economically more simple states of Russia and China and, even then, only under the chaotic conditions created by devastating wars. These essentially military seizures of power led to state dictatorships which were able to export or impose their ideologies on their neighbours by force (Eastern Europe in Stalin’s case, South-East Asia in Mao’s), with terrible consequences.

Karl Marx’s prose style

My daughter is studying sociology and I get to help her with her homework and read her textbooks. The flat, dull tone of would-be scientific writing is enough to drive you mad.

The prose style of Karl Marx, according to some people the founder of modern sociology, is the exact opposite.

It is a constant surprise how rhetorical Marx is: pithy poetic phrases, bombastic generalisations, baggy lists, nifty antitheses, classical references, all these are deployed in a tone dominated by sarcasm and satire – Marx constantly expects the ‘bourgeoisie’ to do its worst and is rarely disappointed.

This blog post simply aims to highlight the importance of techniques of rhetorical persuasion in Marx’s writings.

It’s based on a close reading of Karl Marx Political Writings Volume 2: Surveys from Exile edited by David Fernbach – specifically from Marx’s two long essays about the political turmoil in France between 1848 and 1852, The Class Struggles in France: 1848 to 1850 and The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte. Page numbers refer to the 1973 Pelican paperback edition.

Insults

For a start Marx is not respectful. He doesn’t feel any inhibitions about abusing and insulting all his enemies, from the bourgeoisie in general to the hollow trickster, Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte, who he calls

a grotesque mediocrity
a ludicrous, vulgar and hated person
the adventurer who hides his trivial and repulsive features behind the iron death mask of Napoleon

The Provisional Assembly which replaced the French king in February 1848, had the bright idea of declaring universal male suffrage i.e. all adult men were empowered to vote, most importantly in the election for a new president to replace the abdicated king. 1. The urban liberals in their idealism overlooked the fact that by far the biggest single part of the electorate was the millions of peasants, who outnumbered the populations of all French cities and towns several times over. 2. By the time the presidential election was held in December 1848, the political landscape had changed out of all recognition. The result was an overwhelming victory for the buffoonish figure of Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte.

Thus Marx not only doesn’t like Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte, he actively despises the backward, clumsy, ignorant peasants who voted for him.

The symbol that expressed the peasants’ entry into the revolutionary movement, clumsily cunning, knavishly naive, doltishly sublime, a calculated superstition, a pathetic burlesque, a cleverly stupid anachronism, a world-historic piece of buffoonery and an indecipherable hieroglyphic for the understanding of the civilized – this symbol bore the unmistakable physiognomy of the class that represents barbarism within civilization.

But his strongest vituperation is, of course, reserved for the hated ‘bourgeoisie’.

The mortgage debt burdening the soil of France imposes on the French peasantry an amount of interest equal to the annual interest on the entire British national debt. Small-holding property, in this enslavement by capital toward which its development pushes it unavoidably, has transformed the mass of the French nation into troglodytes. Sixteen million peasants (including women and children) dwell in caves, a large number of which have but one opening, others only two and the most favored only three. Windows are to a house what the five senses are to the head. The bourgeois order, which at the beginning of the century set the state to stand guard over the newly emerged small holdings and fertilized them with laurels, has become a vampire that sucks the blood from their hearts and brains and casts them into the alchemist’s cauldron of capital. (p.242)

Note how solid factual analysis (of the results of debt on French peasants) is inextricably entwined with highly alarmist and exaggerated similes and metaphors – of enslavement, troglodytes and vampires. Abuse and insults are an intrinsic part of Marx’s analysis, not an accident, not a removeable element – bitter hatred of the bourgeois enemy is a key part of Marx’s worldview.

Rhetorical repetition

Marx uses rhetorical repetition, often in the time-honoured form of the three clauses trick.

Thus the awakening of the dead in those revolutions served the purpose of glorifying the new struggles, not of parodying the old; of magnifying the given task in the imagination, not of fleeing from its solution in reality; of finding the spirit of revolution once more, not of making its ghost walk about again.

Bonaparte represented the peasant’s superstition, not his enlightenment; his prejudice, not his judgement; his past, not his future.

Antitheses

He likes antithesis, or the repetition of an idea with variations – ideally a straight inversion – to produce a snappy phrase.

The republic had announced itself to the peasantry with the tax collector; it announced itself to the republic with the emperor.

The December 10 Society was to remain Bonaparte’s private army until he succeeded in transforming the public army into a December 10 Society.

This tendency is more important than it seems because it indicates the underlying fondness for neat patterns of Marx’s thought. He thinks that History moves in neat antitheses, just like his prose (just like the neatly antithetical prose he learned as a student at the feet of the classically trained Idealist philosopher, Hegel).

Repetition of phrases

Sometimes Marx uses repetition with variation (as above). On other occasions he uses simple repetition, its flatness and bathos indicating the batheticness of the actors he attributes it to, in this case the charlatan, Louis-Napoléon. The use of deadpan repetition reminded me of modern stand-up comedy.

As a fatalist, [Louis-Napoléon] lives by the conviction that there are certain higher powers which man, and the soldier in particular, cannot withstand. Among these powers he counts, first and foremost, cigars and champagne, cold poultry and garlic sausage. With this in mind, to begin with, he treats officers and non-commissioned officers in his Elysée apartments to cigars and champagne, to cold poultry and garlic sausage.

Out of context this comes over as a bit flat, but in the warmth of his ongoing text this little trick comes as a moment of comic relief. Boom, boom.

Lists

There is nothing so glorious as a long, ragbag, rollercoaster of a list.

On the pretext of founding a benevolent society, the lumpenproletariat of Paris had been organized into secret sections, each section being led by Bonapartist agents, with a Bonapartist general at the head of the whole organization. Decayed roués with dubious means of subsistence and of dubious origin, ruined and adventurous offshoots of the bourgeoisie, rubbed shoulders with vagabonds, discharged soldiers, discharged jailbirds, escaped galley slaves, swindlers, mountebanks, lazzaroni, pickpockets, tricksters, gamblers, maquereaux, brothel keepers, portes, literati, organ-grinders, ragpickers, knife grinders, tinkers, beggars – in short, the whole of the nebulous, disintegrated mass, scattered hither and thither, which the French call la bohème; from this kindred element Bonaparte formed the core of the December 10 Society…

Having conjured up this vivid Dickensian mob, Marx proceeds in his characteristic tone of High Sarcasm to reveal the ‘real’ motives of such bourgeois shams, and uses a panoply of rhetorical tricks to ram home his contempt for Louis.

… A ‘benevolent society’ – in so far as, like Bonaparte, all its members felt the need to benefit themselves at the expense of the labouring nation. This Bonaparte, who constitutes himself chief of the lumpenproletariat, who here alone rediscovers in mass form the interests which he personally pursues, who recognizes in the scum, offal and refuse of all classes the only class upon which he can base himself unconditionally, is the real Bonaparte, the Bonaparte sans phrase. An old crafty roué, he conceives the historical life of the nations and their performances of state as comedy in the most vulgar sense, as a masquerade where the grand costumes, words and postures merely serve to mask the pettiest knavery.

Note the use of three clauses to build rhetorical power. Note the insult words (scum, refuse). Note the ad hominem attack on Louis-Napoléon (a crafty old roué with a vulgar sense of theatre). Rhetoric and insults are central.

Conjuring ghosts and spectres

The word ‘conjure’ appears five times in the Brumaire, ‘ghost’ eight times, ‘spirit’ 16 times. Circe and her ‘black magic’ are mentioned.

The opening sentence of The Communist Manifesto is bold and memorable – ‘A spectre is haunting Europe: the spectre of communism’ – but reading further into Marx, you realise that the use of imagery connected to ghosts, spirits, conjurors and magicians is not that exceptional. It is a routine fixture of his imagination and his rhetoric.

Even a mere Vaisse [a deputy in the national assembly] could conjure up the red spectre… (p.212)

The social republic appeared as a phrase, as a prophecy, on the threshold of the February Revolution. In the June days of 1848, it was drowned in the blood of the Paris proletariat, but it haunts the subsequent acts of the drama like a ghost… (p.234)

All the ‘Napoleonic ideas’ are ideas of the undeveloped small holding in the freshness of its youth; they are a contradiction to the outlived holdings. They are only the hallucinations of its death struggle, words transformed into phrases, spirits transformed into ghosts. (p.244)

1. The frequency of ghost imagery reminds you that Marx the writer grew to maturity in the 1830s, the heyday of High Romantic writing, of plays and operas about the supernatural, especially in Germany, and so it’s no surprise that there is a certain Gothic quality to his imagination, teeming as it is with ghosts and spectres.

2. It worryingly reminds you that Marx was above all a writer, given to conjuring up words, classes, nations, conflicts with the stroke of a pen, without a second thought. Historical eras, sociological classes, leading politicians, can all be made to appear or disappear in a puff of smoke by Marx, the political prestidigitator.

The constitution, the National Assembly, the dynastic parties, the blue and red republicans, the
heroes of Africa, the thunder from the platform, the sheet lightning of the daily press, all the other publications, the political names and the intellectual reputations, the civil law and the penal code, liberté, egalité, fraternité, and the second Sunday in May, 1852 – all have vanished like a series of optical illusions before the spell of a man whom even his enemies do not claim to be a magician. (p.151)

So we find his compadre, Engels, writing in the aftermath of the 1848 revolutions with the optimistic hope that all the reactionary types who had helped to crush the uprisings (specifically, in the Austrian empire) would be swept away.

The Austrian Germans and Magyars will be set free and wreak a bloody revenge on the Slav barbarians. The general war which will then break out will smash this Slav Sonderbund and wipe out all these petty hidebound nations, down to their very names. The next world war will result in the disappearance from the face of the earth not only of reactionary classes and dynasties, but also of entire reactionary peoples. And that, too, is a step forward. (The Magyar Struggle in Neue Rheinische Zeitung, 13 January 1849).

Unfortunately, their descendants in the Marxist-Leninist line of ideology would take them at their word and, instead of merely textual flourishes, would make real people in the real world and – in Stalin and Mao’s cases – entire groups of people (the kulaks, the urban intelligentsia), disappear with the stroke of a pen into freezing gulags or mass graves.

The language of theatre

The language of magic and conjuring is intimately linked with the lexicon of drama, theatre, comedy, masquerades, costumes and stage with which these texts are drenched.

Bourgeois revolutions, like those of the eighteenth century, storm more swiftly from success to
success, their dramatic effects outdo each other, men and things seem set in sparkling diamonds,
ecstasy is the order of the day. (p.152)

The opening pages of the Brumaire are famous for stating an enormous theory of history, which is that current political actors always clothe themselves in the names and values of previous ones. This allows Marx to compare all of the actors, throughout the book, with their predecessors in everywhere from ancient Israel to the Jacobin Revolution via the Rome of the Caesars.

Whether Marx’s theory that history repeats itself with modern political pygmies dressing up in the clothes of Great Men of the Past has any factual validity, as an imaginative and rhetorical trope it creates a vast sense of a) historical knowledgeableness, and of b) intellectual spaciousness – we feel we are privy to a mind which understands all of human history.

If we consider this conjuring up of the dead of world history, a salient difference is revealed immediately. Camille Desmoulins, Danton, Robespierre, Saint-Just, Napoleon, the heroes as well as the parties and the masses of the old French Revolution, performed the task of their time in Roman costume and with Roman phrases, the task of unchaining and setting up modern bourgeois society.

The first ones smashed the feudal basis to pieces and mowed down the feudal heads which had grown on it. The other created inside France the only conditions under which free competition could be developed, parcelled landed property exploited and the unchained industrial productive power of the nation employed; and everywhere beyond the French borders he swept the feudal institutions away, to the extent necessary to provide bourgeois society in France with a suitable up-to-date environment on the European Continent. Once the new social formation was established, the antediluvian Colossi disappeared and with them resurrected Romanity – the Brutuses, Gracchi, Publicolas, the tribunes, the senators, and Caesar himself.

This long quote demonstrates the way Marx thought of politics as intrinsically theatrical, and the way his imagination constantly recurs to Great Men of the (real or legendary) past.

But he is not only pointing out the way that modern political actors often invoke the shades of the Great Protagonists of the past to bolster their authority – there is also a deeper reference in this idea to Marx’s fundamentally Hegelian worldview: the worldview that History is moving through inevitable phases to an inevitable conclusion. The Jacobins ‘performed the task of their time’; Napoleon ‘swept the feudal institutions away’: both prepared the way for the triumph of ‘free competition’. Marx’s view of History is profoundly teleological; the basis of his entire position is that human History is moving along a pre-determined course towards a pre-determined end.

And if History is heading towards an inevitable conclusion, it must follow that we are all to some extent actors on a stage, playing parts in a drama which is already written. This premise maybe explains Marx’s fondness for theatrical metaphors.

The first act of his ministry was the restoration of the old royalist administration. The official scene was at once transformed – scenery, costumes, speech, actors, supers, mutes, prompters, the position of the parties, the theme of the drama, the content of the conflict, the whole situation.

The revolution made progress, forged ahead, not by its immediate tragicomic achievements but, on the contrary, by the creation of a powerful, united counterrevolution…

Marie’s ateliers, devised in direct antagonism to the Luxembourg, offered occasion, thanks to the common label, for a comedy of errors worthy of the Spanish servant farce…

Instead of only a few factions of the bourgeoisie, all classes of French society were suddenly hurled into the orbit of political power, forced to leave the boxes, the stalls, and the gallery and to act in person upon the revolutionary stage!

The people cried: À bas les grands voleurs! À bas les assassins! when in 1847, on the most prominent stages of bourgeois society, the same scenes were publicly enacted that regularly lead the lumpenproletariat to brothels, to workhouses and lunatic asylums, to the bar of justice, to the dungeon, and to the scaffold.

The terrible attempt of April 16 furnished the excuse for recalling the army to Paris – the real purpose of the clumsily staged comedy and for the reactionary federalist demonstrations in the provinces.

In the many places where Marx invokes the theatre, we join him in the audience watching a political drama which has already been written, assimilated and analysed: while the poor political actors take their parts in the farce or tragedy totally seriously, we, the privileged spectators, understand what is really going on behind the sham of bourgeois rhetoric and in the drama of History.

The rhetoric of both these long essays encourage in the reader a sense of superiority to other commentators and analysts, to the politicians and moralists who are taken in by the play. We are not taken in. We know what is really going on. We are the only ones who understand that all human existence, all human history and all political events are based on class conflict, that this dizzying vaudeville of political acts are all combinations on the theme of the ‘bourgeois’ control of power – and that the entire giddy play will one day come tumbling down when we, the clever ones, and the workers, rise up in revolution.

It is in the opening lines of the Brumaire that he expresses most pithily the idea that History repeats itself, first as tragedy, then as farce.

Hegel remarks somewhere that all great world-historic facts and personages appear, so to speak, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce. (p.147)

Taken in isolation this has the crisp appeal of an Oscar Wilde witticism. But I hope I have provided enough context to show that it is just one among many examples of Marx’s highly theatrical way of thinking about history, and of his very dramatic and rhetorical way of writing.

It isn’t, in other words, the one-off insight it is so often painted as being.

On the contrary, this pithy quote is a key which opens up Marx’s entire imaginative worldview of the world as being a stage, a platform on which a pre-scripted drama is unfolding towards its preordained end and we, his readers and the members of his ‘party’ – sitting by his side – are privileged to be in on the secret of the plot, we are the cognoscenti, we have a front row seat at the great drama of History.

Summary

There are plenty more examples, and I could have elaborated a bit more on the connection between rhetorical tropes and his actual ideas – but I wanted to keep this blog post short and sweet.

The point is simply that, whenever you read that Marx founded a form of ‘scientific’ socialism, invented the objective ‘scientific’ analysis of society, of its economic and class basis and so on – you should also remember that he did so in texts notable for their sustained irony, ad hominem abuse, rhetorical play and theatrical melodrama.

Karl Marx: Surveys from Exile 1848-1863

Back in the left-wing, strike-ridden 1970s, Penguin launched a standard edition of the works of Marx and Engels. It was produced in collaboration with New Left Review magazine (founded in 1960 as a forum for new left cultural and political debate, and still going strong in 2018 – New Left Review).

Marx wrote a lot: he was, after all, a freelance journalist by trade. Articles, pamphlets, books, historical studies, economic theory, introductions to other people’s books, political commentary, speeches, as well as a copious correspondence poured from his pen.

Penguin assembled some of this into three volumes devoted to Marx’s ‘political writings’ i.e. the shorter, more ephemeral pieces combined with the handful of book-length commentaries he wrote on contemporary events.

This is Volume Two of the political writings, covering the years from 1848 – after Marx was forced to flee the continent in light of the failed revolutions in Germany and France of that year – through to 1863, half way through the American Civil War. Fifteen years of writing and thinking.

The shorter pieces are:

a book review and eight articles about contemporary politics in Britain
four articles about India (specifically the Indian Mutiny of 1857)
one about China
two about the American Civil War
a speech celebrating the anniversary of The People’s Paper
a ‘proclamation’ on Poland for the German Workers Educational Association

But the lion’s share of the book (250 of its 370 pages) is taken up by Marx’s two seminal works of contemporary political analysis, The Class Struggles in France: 1848 to 1850 (four separate newspaper articles published in Germany in 1850 and spliced together into book form by Engels) and The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (written as newspaper articles between December 1851 and March 1852).

These works represent Marx’s most sustained attempts to apply the theories about class conflict and the ‘inevitable’ triumph of the industrial proletariat over the capital-owning bourgeoisie, which he had laid out in The Communist Manifesto of early 1848, to specific contemporary historical events in France.

The book benefits from a very focused, densely intellectual introduction by the Marxist scholar David Fernbach.

Five levels

Marx is always very readable, and often a very enjoyable read. However, assessing the validity / importance / relevance of what he wrote is very difficult, for a number of reasons. As I read through the book, I realised that there are at least five distinct levels at play, or five areas to be aware of:

Historical facts All the texts refer to historical events. You can’t really understand the essays unless you have a good grasp of the actual events he’s analysing. Wikipedia is the obvious first stop.
Marx’s interpretation Clearly the essays themselves present Marx’s interpretation of historical events, an interpretation which sees them all in terms of the struggle between the industrial proletariat and the capitalist bourgeoisie (in western countries) and interprets events further afield (in India or China) insofar as those countries are ruled or dominated by western imperialist nations and are being dragged into the international capitalist system.
Fernbach’s interpretation Fernbach is a very knowledgeable Marx scholar. His introduction gives the context to each piece before going on, very candidly, to assess their strengths and weaknesses. In other words, as you read them, you should bear Fernbach’s comments in mind (or frequently refer back to them, as I did).
Stedman Jones I have just finished reading Gareth Stedman Jones’s vast and hugely erudite biography of Marx. The difference between Fernbach and Stedman is the difference in perspective between 1973 and 2016. Jones gives a more thorough account of the actual historical events than Fernbach has room to do, and also presents Marx’s texts in the context of his other writings and with regard to the controversies he was involved in with other, rival, socialist writers and thinkers. I deal with Stedman Jones’s interpretation of this period and these essays in a separate blog post.
A rhetorical reading Marx was a very rhetorical writer. In his student days he wanted to be a poet (who didn’t?) and in his adult prose he deploys quite a range of rhetorical devices, from biting satire, to crisp antitheses, to sprawling lists, to withering personal abuse – all of which make his prose surprisingly fun to read, or at least, a pleasure to analyse. I deal with Marx’s prose style in a separate blog.

Levels 1, 2 and 3 in more detail

1. Historical facts

The Class Struggles in France: 1848 to 1850 and The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte give Marx’s interpretation of the extremely complicated sequence of political events in France between early 1848 and December 1851, the period of the ill-fated Second Republic.

Briefly, in February 1848 popular discontent reached a head when King Louis Philippe banned the ‘banqueting clubs’ under cover of which, for several years, radicals had been taking the opportunity to lambast the ineffectiveness of the king’s economic policy which, combined with a depression of 1847, had led to large-scale poverty and unemployment.

A particularly provocative banquet had been planned in a working class part of Paris for 21 February and, when it was banned, on 22 February, Parisians took to the streets and called for the resignation of Prime Minister Guizot. Guizot did in fact resign the next day but, as a large crowd gathered outside the Ministry of Foreign Affairs to celebrate, it was fired on by soldiers, leaving over 50 dead.

Parisians erected barricades, lit fires, marched on the royal palace with vengeance in mind. As a result of the escalating chaos, Louis Philippe abdicated and fled to England.

Lamartine in front of the Town Hall of Paris rejects the red flag on 25 February 1848 by Henri Félix Emmanuel Philippoteaux

Lamartine (the slender figure in the middle standing on a green chair) in front of the Town Hall of Paris rejects the red flag in favour of the patriotic tricolour, on 25 February 1848 by Henri Félix Emmanuel Philippoteaux

Louis Philippe was replaced on 26 February by a provisional government which announced the formation of the ‘Second Republic’. (The First Republic dated from when the French revolutionaries deposed King Louis XIV in 1792, until Napoleon declared himself emperor, in 1804.)

This led to a very complex sequence of events: the provisional government scheduled elections for March 1848, declaring universal male suffrage, and thus creating at a stroke an electorate of nine million voters. National Workshops were set up to provide work for the urban unemployed, the brainchild of the socialist Louis Blanc. Taxes were levied on rural voters (mostly the peasants) in order to subsidise these workshops, profoundly alienating them from the republic. When the national elections went ahead in April, the nine million voters elected a mainly conservative administration.

As 1848 progressed, the early hope of radicals were crushed as the elected government showed itself to be surprisingly reactionary, banning free association and introducing draconian press laws, etc. In May a crowd of Parisian workmen invaded the National Constituent Assembly and proclaimed a new Provisional Government. They were quickly suppressed by the National Guard and the leaders of the revolt imprisoned.

As you might expect, this attempt at a coup united the factions of the bourgeoisie into a ‘Party of Order’ which decided to close the much-hated National Workshops on 21 June. This would have ended the dole being given to some 100,000 unemployed Parisian working men, and so the decision sparked the ‘June Days’, when up to 170,000 working class people set up barricades all across Paris in opposition to the decision. The government put General Louis Eugène Cavaignac, fresh back from the conquest of Algeria, in charge of the Mobile Guard and the National Guard with orders to crush the rebellion and take the barricades. Which they did, with thousands of lives lost.

The working classes were defeated: up to 3,000 were killed and in the months that followed some 15,000 were sent to prison, including the main leaders of the proletariat. The June Days marked the exit of the working classes from the political activity of the Second Republic.

The political forces in the National Assembly realigned to maximise the Party of Order and to isolate any radical or working class factions. Cavaignac was appointed head of state, a position he held from June until 10 December 1848, when a full presidential election was held. Cavaignac was one of the four candidates who stood for the presidency but to everyone’s surprise the winner was a complete outsider, the semi-comical figure of Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte (nephew of the great general, Napoleon) who got 5,587,759 vote, compared with 1,474,687 votes for Cavaignac, and 370,000 votes for Ledru-Rollin (the candidate of the left).

Louis-Napoléon was a comic figure because he had been sent into exile as a boy after the defeat of Napoleon in 1815, had done a variety of undignified odd jobs (working for a while as a police constable in London) but most notoriously, tried a few ridiculous coups, attempting to rally barracks full of soldiers behind his (and his uncle’s names) both times being easily defeated and, after the second attempt, in Boulogne, in 1840, imprisoned for 6 years.

Marx’s two long essays detail the convoluted political manoeuvring which took place from 1848, throughout 1849, 1850 and 1851, and in particular the two years leading up to ‘president’ Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte staging a coup in December 1851, declaring himself sole ruler of France, a position he consolidated when he formally took the throne as Napoleon III in December 1852.

This historical period in France thus saw a huge narrative arc from the revolutionary optimism of February 1848, through the bloody insurrection of June 1848, on to the surprise election of Louis Napoléon, and then to two years of cynical manoeuvring and backstabbing, which led to the utter failure of radical hopes and the seizure of power by a comic-book character whose empire represented the triumph of all the reactionary forces in French society.

Three things are going on in these two long essays.

1. Actual history It is impossible to understand them unless you have read a very good account of the actual historical events elsewhere because, although Marx often descends to day-by-day analysis, he assumes the reader already knows the story, so he is constantly alluding to historical characters, twists and turns in the story, which you have to know already.

2. Applying theory to reality From the point of view of understanding Marx’s theory, the obvious thing about both these long texts is that in them Marx was trying to apply the purely theoretical principles of his abstract texts, like The Communist Manifesto, to actual contemporary history.

To the reader who is not an expert in Marxist theory, the most obvious result of this is that, whereas in the Manifesto, and elsewhere, Marx and Engels confidently write about just two classes – the fiendish bourgeoisie which is reducing an ever-growing number of the population to utter poverty as part of the industrial proletariat – in the two French essays Marx is forced to concede that there are in fact lots of classes or political groups or factions or interests at work in France.

The immensely complicated squabbling of the Assembly and its deputies, the turnover of different administrations, the management of violence in the streets between mob, militia and army, the numerous newspapers and pamphleteers supporting various sides – in order to make sense of this kaleidoscope of events, Marx has to abandon the simple bourgeois-proletariat dichotomy of his theoretical writings and invent a raft of new ‘classes’ or class interests. these include:

the financial bourgeoisie – the bankers and stock market speculators, who were the ultimate seat of power
the industrial bourgeoisie – whose wealth and income are dependent upon the production and sale of goods, and weren’t numerous enough to seize power by themselves
the petty bourgeoisie – shopkeepers, teachers, generally conservative in tendency
the Montagne (or the Democratic Socialists) named after the similar group who came to prominence in the 1790s revolution, in 1848 this faction of the National Assembly came to represent the petty bourgeoisie
numerous types of royalist:
- legitimists, or Bourbonists – who wanted the return of Louis XVIII, overthrown in 1830
- Orleanists – who wanted the restoration of Louis-Philippe, descended from the Orleans branch of the royal family, hence their name

Marx has to account for the fact that a lot of the ‘street’, the rough elements of the Paris working classes, voted against their own interests when they voted for – and defended in street fighting – the ludicrous Louis Napoléon.

Obviously this can’t be the class-conscious proletariat of his theoretical writings, so he has to invent a new group, the lumpenproletariat (a term which Marx, apparently, invented), meaning worthless drunks and wastrels. Unlike the ‘heroic’ proletariat, the lumpenproletariat will follow anyone who offers them free beer and cigars, which Louis-Napoléon does. In fact Napoleon actually set up an organisation specially, called the December 10 Club – members becoming known as the ‘Decembrists’.

To the list above should be added the large ‘agrarian interest’ which Marx finds he needs to account for the fact that rural voters numbers more than all the urban classes put together. He divides the ‘agrarian interest’ into two great factions:

the wealthy landowners who had dominated French society from the Middle Ages down until the advent of the Industrial Revolution, small in number, big in power, but being squeezed out of representative assemblies by the urban bourgeoisie
the peasants – the largest single group in French society, who gave the decisive support to Louis Napoleon in the 1848 election

(As an aside: giving the vote to all adult males may have sounded progressive to Paris radicals but they forgot, like so many radicals in so many countries down to our own time – that the majority of the population does not want a violent and drastic overthrow of all existing social structures and values. They just want a return to prosperity, jobs and security, and will vote for whoever promises it, from Louis-Napoléon to Donald Trump).

The net effect of this proliferation of names and factions is that Marx is sometimes in danger of sounding like just any other historian, simply describing a complex world of multiple factions and interests. In order to maintain his separateness from being ‘just another chronicler’, he is at pains to continually remind the reader of the various groupings’ relationships to types of capital, the economic lynchpin of his entire theory (for example, in the distinction he makes between the industrial and the financial bourgeoisie). Quite often the proliferation of terms Marx is inventing gets very confusing.

Whether he convinces you that his fine-sounding socio-economic theories can be applied to complex contemporary history, is a judgement call every reader must make for themselves.

3. Wrong predictions As Both Fernbach and Stedman Jones point out, all Marx’s predictions in these texts turned out to be wrong. The revolutionary hopes triggered by the events of 1848 proved utterly illusory. Louis-Napoléon consolidated his grip on power and there followed ten years of relative prosperity, from which peasants and workers, as well as the bourgeoisie, industrial and financial, all benefited (there was an economic slump in the late 1850s which caused discontent but the emperor managed to weather it).

A slow legalisation of trade unions allowed working men into the power structures of the state. In fact, it was to be 22 long years before a situation remotely like the 1848 days reoccurred, when the workers rose up in the Paris Commune of 1871 – and that only happened because the disastrous Franco-Prussian War had caused the collapse of peacetime government in Paris – and even then the Commune only lasted a month or so before being brutally crushed.

2. Marx’s interpretation of French politics 1848-1852

1. Truth and reality

Putting to one side the difficulty Marx has in matching simplistic theory to complex reality, and the fact that history was to prove all of Marx’s predictions wrong – nonetheless these two books are rich in ideas, some of which only make sense within the realm of Marxist-Leninist discourse, but others which are open to anyone regardless of political orientation, and are very thought-provoking.

Take the opening page of The Eighteenth Brumaire:

Men make their own history, but they do not make it just as they please; they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves, but under given circumstances directly encountered and inherited from the past. The tradition of all the generations of the dead weighs like a nightmare on the brain of the living. And just when they seem involved in revolutionizing themselves and things, in creating something that has never before existed, it is precisely in such periods of revolutionary crisis that they anxiously conjure up the spirits of the past to their service and borrow names, battle cries and costumes from them in order to act out the new scene of world history in this time-honoured disguise and this borrowed language. (p.146)

This is a richly metaphorical language: conjuring up spirits, costumes and disguises, it invokes a world of theatre and drama. But the actual idea expressed is simple and profound: we humans are free but not completely free; we are able to make our own lives and times, but that freedom is massively constrained by the accumulation of all the human history leading up to us.

This short passage also introduces an idea which is central to the Brumaire in particular, which is the distinction between mask and reality, disguise and true identity.

Previous historians had tended to take politicians, kings and diplomats at their word, or to point out where they were ‘lying’, by contrasting their words with other versions of events, other people’s statements and so on. For Marx all this is skating on the surface of things; he envisions a much bigger, much deeper sense of the notion of masks or disguises.

Because throughout his work Marx develops the notion that human culture is the contingent product of a particular stage of economic and technological development: it doesn’t float freely as the beautiful thoughts of ‘great’ thinkers and artists; human culture is profoundly influenced, determined and constrained by the social arrangements of the society which produces it, which are in turn dictated by the technological and economic base of that society.

A whole superstructure of different and specifically formed feelings, illusions, modes of thought and views of life arises on the basis of the different forms of property, of the social conditions of existence. The whole class creates and forms these out of its material foundations and the corresponding social relations of a people.

Note the word ‘illusions’. Especially in the modern bourgeois society of his time, maybe more than ever before, the ruling class was at pains to conceal the reality of their power and their program beneath high-sounding ideals. For Marx the mask isn’t a small, trivial thing which some individual politicians hide behind – it is the huge facade of fake ‘values’ and ‘morality’ which an entire class hides behind in order to conceal its control of production and distribution, which is in turn based on the exploitation of the proletariat.

This is why Marx is dismissive of parliamentary democracy: it is a smokescreen, a facade of high-sounding verbiage which conceals the economic i.e. class-based realities of society. It gives the population the ‘illusion’ of having some kind of control over events, when events are controlled behind the scenes by the ruling class. Class struggles cannot be solved in the parliamentary arena. He dismisses the belief that they can, with characteristic brusqueness, as ‘parliamentary cretinism’.

Similarly, in the writings about India and China, Marx points out that the entire rhetoric of imperialism, all the discourse about ‘the white man’s burden’ and the French mission civilisatrice were humbug, cant and lies designed by the imperialists to hide from their own peoples (and even from themselves) the brutal reality of the conquest and rape of far-off lands.

This explains the consistent tone of irony & sarcasm found throughout Marx’s writings, because it is so obvious to him that everything a king or ruling politician or their pet journalists say or write is a lie designed to conceal the true basis of their rule in a system which methodically exploits the labour of the working poor (or foreign peoples). Marx’s attitude is that of course they would say that, publish that, declare that – all lies lies lies to distract from their real economic and financial interests.

And this is why his sarcasm rises to such heights of vituperation whenever he describes the impostor Louis-Napoléon, because his rise and rule is a kind of climax of lies and deceptions. Louis-Napoléon claimed to rule ‘for all the people’, hence his success with the peasantry who were largely responsible for voting him into power – but Marx almost bursts with frustration at the obviousness of the way this preposterous fraud in the event ruled solely to protect and promote the interests of the bourgeoisie.

To some extent it may be due to the relatively limited number of metaphors available to a writer in the 1840s, but nonetheless it is striking how consistently Marx applies metaphors of the stage, of the drama, of acting, of masks and disguises and conjuring, to all the reactionary elements in society – to the crown, the various elements of the bourgeoisie, their paid lackeys in the press and so on.

For the entire duration of its rule, for as long as it gave its grand performance of state on the proscenium, an unbroken sacrificial feast was being staged in the background – the continual sentencing by courts–martial of the captured June insurgents or their deportation without trial.

Bonaparte, on horseback, mustered a part of the troops on the Place de la Concorde; Changarnier play-acted with a display of strategic manoeuvres; the Constituent Assembly found its building occupied by the military.

In this great comedy of intrigues the Montagne showed its lack of revolutionary energy and political understanding…

June 1849, was not a bloody tragedy between wage labor and capital, but a prison-filling and lamentable play of debtors and creditors.

And Louis-Napoléon especially is seen as the arch actor.

An old, crafty roué, Louis Napoleon conceives the historical life of the nations and their performances of state as comedy in the most vulgar sense, as a masquerade in which the grand costumes, words, and postures merely serve to mask the pettiest knavery. (p.197)

At a moment when the bourgeoisie itself played the most complete comedy, but in the most serious manner in the world, without infringing any of the pedantic conditions of French dramatic etiquette, and was itself half deceived, half convinced of the solemnity of its own performance of state, the adventurer, who took the comedy as plain comedy, was bound to win. Only when he has eliminated his solemn opponent, when he himself now takes his imperial role seriously and under the Napoleonic mask imagines he is the real Napoleon, does he become the victim of his own conception of the world, the serious buffoon who no longer takes world history for a comedy but his comedy for world history. (p.198)

All these groups and factions in society are associated with play-acting, because the only class which can strip away the lies and confront the economic and power realities of the day, is the proletariat.

The proletariat is the cure for the disease of endless amateur dramatics which characterised the brief Second Republic (1848-1852). Quite apart from all the economic, social and moral benefits which the revolution will bring, the triumph of the proletariat will also be the triumph of Truth over acting.

France now possessed a Napoleon side by side with a Montagne, proof that both were only the lifeless caricatures of the great realities whose names they bore. Louis Napoleon, with the emperor’s hat and the eagle, parodied the old Napoleon no more miserably than the Montagne, with its phrases borrowed from 1793 and its demagogic poses, parodied the old Montagne. Thus the traditional 1793 superstition was stripped off at the same time as the traditional Napoleon superstition. The revolution had come into its own only when it had won its own, its original name, and it could do that only when the modern revolutionary class, the industrial proletariat, came dominatingly into its foreground.

2. Marx’s political analysis

So Marx’s analysis is based on the idea that all of the jostling factions which contested power in France after the fall of Louis-Philippe in February 1848 represented class interests which can be defined by their economic and commercial situations.

The ordinary ‘liberal’ historian analyses the clashing parties of the Second Republic according to their stated aims and values: the radicals want ‘equality’, the royalists talk about ‘legitimacy’, the financial bourgeoisie and the industrial bourgeoisie for a while ally together to create ‘the party of Order’ which wants precisely that, and so on.

Marx spent 100 densely-written pages showing that they are all living a lie. Whatever airy values, customs and traditions they invoke (he singles out ‘property, family, religion and law’ as the siren call of the hypocritical bourgeoisie), each of these groups represents its own financial interests: the royalists want a return of the king so they can get back their cushy jobs in the administration; the industrial bourgeoisie wants better terms of credit and trade; the financial bourgeoisie is happy to see a kleptocratic president elected since he has to borrow off them at high interest rates.

And, when the republicans made the fateful decision of instituting universal suffrage, effectively handing power to the peasants, the largest single group in France, they, in their rural ignorance (Marx doesn’t like peasants) voted for the most deceitful idea of all, for simple-minded conservative values and the gloire they associated with the venerable name of Napoleon.

Economics

Marx also digs deeper into the broader economic and trade context of these years, to point out that the late 1840s saw an agricultural crisis caused by the potato blight, a financial crisis caused by the end of Britain’s railway boom, and an industrial crisis caused by temporary over-production of cotton goods. All these added urgency to the motivation of the differing elements of the bourgeoisie in 1848 and 1849.

Marx highlights the way that France’s economy (as the economies of most of Europe) was dependent on Britain in its role as workshop and financial centre of world capitalism: Britain sneezes, Europe catches a cold, and that was certainly among the causes of the initial unrest in France in early 1848.

Marx interprets the Second Republic as maybe the most suitable form of government for the French bourgeoisie, because it allowed the varying factions within it to thrash out their differences without violence. But nothing in Marx is that straightforward; he rarely makes a formulation without going on to turn it into a paradox – something Fernbach takes to be the application of his ‘dialectical’ thinking but which the neutral reader might be tempted to think was just an addition to witty paradoxes and pithy phrase-making.

For although the republic created a safe environment for business to proceed, unhampered by the often unpredictable monarchy of Louis Phillippe, it also (alas) let other classes of society into power (the petty bourgeoisie and the working classes) thus creating a new set of problems and power dynamics for the bourgeoisie to manage.

Universal suffrage had allowed the backward peasantry to elect Louis-Napoléon president, as a result of which universal suffrage was promptly repealed by the conservative National Assembly, but too late. His huge mandate added to an unstable economic and political situation by creating with two centres of power, a National Assembly clothing itself in the rhetoric of liberty (which in fact wanted to restrict the suffrage and close down the National Workshops and make France safe for business) and a president who clothed himself in the rhetoric of empire and grandeur, but in fact relied on the arms and support of the lumpenproletariat in Paris and the conservative peasants beyond it to remain in power.

It’s the instability of this situation which makes for a very complicated story, as all of the competing sides put forward laws, made political moves, tried to redraft the constitution, called their supporters out onto the streets, and so on, for the three years from Louis-Napoléon’s election in December 1848 to his coup in December 1851.

At a deep, psychological level, the chancer and trickster Louis-Napoléon was able to gain power because he represented everything to everyone.

At a practical level, Marx’s hundred pages are devoted to cataloguing the excruciatingly long, drawn-out sequence of political manouevring which created the conditions for Louis-Napoléon to carry out his coup in December 1851 (basically all his opponents fought themselves to a stalemate, leaving Louis-Napoléon as almost the only centre of viable authority left standing).

But at the beginning, middle and end of these essays Marx has continually to explain away the fact that the proletarian revolution which he and Engels expected any day, not only didn’t happen, but that its polar opposite – a capital-friendly empire – was put in place.

Marx’s basic excuse is that France wasn’t economically advanced enough. The industrial proletariat was in a distinct minority, outnumbered in the cities by the petty bourgeoisie (shop-keepers, teachers, junior lawyers and so on) and in the countryside by the peasants, who made up the vast majority of the French population. In a nutshell, France wasn’t ready.

The struggle against capital in its developed, modern form – in its decisive aspect, the struggle of the
industrial wage worker against the industrial bourgeois – is in France a partial phenomenon, which after the February days could so much the less supply the national content of the revolution, since the struggle against capital’s secondary modes of exploitation, that of the peasant against usury and mortgages or of the petty bourgeois against the wholesale dealer, banker, and manufacturer – in a word, against bankruptcy – was still hidden in the general uprising against the finance aristocracy.

Nonetheless, Marx claims that the confusing and short life of the Second Republic was a ‘necessary’ stage on the pathway to revolution:

It was necessary for the various elements of the Party of Order (the two types of royalists, the two types of bourgeoisie) to fall out with each other and help make the National Assembly so ineffectual that almost everyone was relieved when Louis Napoleon stepped in and dissolved it in December 1851.
It was necessary for the proletariat to be politicised in the street fighting of June 1848 (which they very bloodily lost) because it taught them that they needed greater numbers and strength to win eventual victory.
It was necessary for the peasants to vote for Louis-Napoléon so that they could become bitterly disillusioned by his inability to solve the deep structural problems of the French rural economy, disillusioned with the essentially bourgeois political system, and so prepared them to make an alliance with the urban proletariat when the great day comes.
It was necessary for the whole of French society, in other words, to be simplified into the primal antagonism which Marxist theory requires, between the vampire bourgeoisie and its countless helpless victims.

Thus Marx claims that all the tortuous political manouevring of these four years has ‘cleared the stage’ for the next development – The Red Revolution.

The only problem with this entire reading being, of course – that it didn’t. We know that nothing of the sort occurred and that, apart from the historical accident of the Commune, France was never to experience a proletarian revolution, even during the darkest days of the Great War.

Thus, clever though they generally are, Marx’s arguments and analyses often sound like special pleading. His incisive association of particular groups with particular economic and commercial interests is totally persuasive; but his argument that the squabbles among these groups is leading in a pre-determined direction, towards the inevitable victory of the proletariat now reads like science fiction.

The preposterous chancer Louis-Napoléon would in fact remain in power for 19 more years, longer than his famous uncle, and wasn’t toppled by any social revolution from within France but by the completely contingent actions of the Prussian Chancellor Bismarck, who wanted to seize Alsace and Lorraine in 1870 as part of his campaign to create a unified Germany, provoked war with France and promptly thrashed the French, capturing Louis-Napoléon and forcing him to abdicate. No dialectical materialism involved.

3. Fernbach’s interpretation of the other essays

Fernbach’s extremely knowledgeable introduction to the book explains the context to each piece before going on to candidly assess the strengths and weaknesses of Marx’s essays. He lists the insights of Marx’s writings, but is also clear where Marx glossed over areas of theory which he and Engels had not yet found a solution for – or where he was just plain wrong.

For example, Fernbach brings out the shortcomings of Marx’s essays about India and China (later in the book). Marx regarded both these vast nations as history-less blank slates on which the European colonisers could write. It was left to Lenin, in his writings about imperialism, to really explain the relationship between the metropolis and the colonies in the European imperialist systems. (Fernbach says Marx has a ‘Europocentric’ perspective, presumably writing before the expression ‘Eurocentric’ had become commonplace on the left.)

Indeed, Marx regarded the European colonising of India and China as a good thing because a) these countries had no history beforehand b) and were trapped in ‘rural idiocy’, in the strait jacket of the caste system and poverty c) Marx insisted that these countries had to develop according to his pre-ordained schema (the ‘textbook course of development’, as he called it, p.150). They had to have bourgeois industrialisation before they would be ready for the revolution of the proletariat, and being conquered and ruled by European nations was the only way they could move forwards. Hence, in a roundabout way, imperialism was a good thing.

Thus, paradoxically, although he was a vitriolic critic of the brutally exploitative rule of European empires, Marx thought the technological and commercial nature of British imperial rule had produced ‘the greatest and, to speak the truth, the only social revolution ever heard of in Asia’, while its profit-seeking urges had destroyed the ‘solid foundation of Oriental despotism’ that had ‘restrained the human mind within the smallest possible compass’. England may have been ‘actuated only by the vilest interests’ but these were essential for ‘mankind to fulfil its destiny’.

Marx was confident that the modernising forces of empire would end up undermining its own rule: by creating an Indian army, education system, press, and industrial base (with the inevitable industrial proletariat), the imperial rulers would lay the ‘material premises’ for their own downfall – they really would become their own grave-diggers.

The British Empire was, for a Marx, a kind of cruel necessity, which would drag non-European countries into the world system of capitalism, and thus push them quickly towards the promised land of proletarian revolution.

The first part of Marx’s prediction did indeed come to pass i.e. the oppressed Indian nation did rise up to seize the imperial infrastructure of its oppressors, albeit 90 years after Marx was writing about it (1857-1947). However, the Indians did not then proceed to have a proletarian revolution and create a communist society. Very much the reverse.

Pondering these short essays about India from a modern perspective makes you wonder, yet again, at the central paradox of Marx: he was wonderfully insightful about the dynamic power of capitalism in his time, an acute analyst of the way it restructured the means of production and social relationships in industrialised countries, and was completely right to see it as the agent of change and modernisation right around the world, dragging every single nation into the network of capitalist trade and finance – a vision which is as thrillingly global as it is excitingly insightful.

You only have to compare Marx’s writings with those of contemporary ‘thinkers’ – especially in philistine England – like Thomas Carlyle or John Stuart Mill or Benjamin Disraeli to be embarrassed at the obtuse stupidity of their ideas, their absurd vapourings about ‘the superior national character of the British’ or ‘the moral duty of the aristocracy’, and a thousand and one other formulas which all concealed the real commercial and power relationships, between classes and between countries, which Marx makes so dazzlingly clear.

But then, Marx proved to be entirely wrong in predicting that all these developments must inevitably lead to proletarian revolution. It’s 160 years since he wrote these essays about France, a long, long time. Reviewing those 160 years of history, and the events of our day – how ‘capitalism’ has survived two catastrophic world wars and the 70-year opposition of a huge bloc of communist countries, and continues to survive major global banking crises and depressions – makes you suspect that maybe the world will just stick in capitalist mode for the foreseeable future, until environmental calamity rewrites the rules of our tenure on planet earth.

Maybe there only is a capitalist mode; maybe there simply isn’t any viable alternative. Corrupt and cruel though ‘capitalism’ routinely is, maybe this is the only way humans can manage to have industrialised societies. All the evidence of the past 160 years points that way.

The same thought is prompted by the gaggle of Marx’s shorter pieces at the end of the book. Take his optimistic piece on the Chartists which predicted that the extension of universal suffrage would be the precursor to ‘the political supremacy of the working class’. Well… no.

Or the piece entitled Agitation Against the Sunday Trading Bill, where Marx optimistically describes a now long-forgotten mass protest in Hyde Park as the moment when ‘the English revolution began’. Er… nope. As Fernbach candidly comments:

Marx was never able to get to the root of the peculiarities of the British state (p.20)

an admission which arguably undermines his entire achievement, since Britain was the leading economic and technological power in the world.

What Marx couldn’t understand is why the most advanced capitalist nation on earth had no standing army and a relatively small bureaucracy, so that power was diffused to a thousand localities and actors – so very unlike the militarised Prussian state of his youth, and the centralised government of France.

Fernbach has a go at explaining why English society didn’t conform to Marx’s expectations: he explains that the settlement of 1688, after the Glorious Revolution, established a much collaboration between landed aristocracy, merchant adventurers, and (100 years later) industrial factory owners, than existed anywhere on the continent. In Germany and France the new industrial bourgeoisie had to fight hard to win any power from the obstructive feudal landowners and an aristocratic reaction. In England, the Glorious Revolution had prepared the way for a century of agricultural, commercial and imperial growth (the 18th century). New money slotted seamlessly into old, no bourgeois revolution (such as fizzled out in France in 1848 and never had chance to take place in Germany) was required.

After the failure of the Chartist campaign of 1848, labour leaders turned their energies from campaigning for grand utopian goals, and put their energy into developing model trade unions and settling disputes on a case-by-case basis. When it eventually became clear that these unions presented no threat to the powers-that-be, the franchise was widened in 1867 and again in 1884, and the English working classes proceeded to dutifully vote for the existing political parties, the Conservatives or Liberals.

Instead of growing into an unstoppable opposition to the bourgeois state, the English proletariat assimilated (fairly) smoothly right into it. Fernbach quotes Engels writing rather despairingly to Marx:

The English proletariat is actually becoming more and more bourgeois, so that this most bourgeois of all nations is apparently aiming ultimately at the possession of a bourgeois aristocracy and a bourgeois proletariat alongside the bourgeoisie! (quoted on page 26)

Hopefully, this brief summary shows that Fernbach’s introduction is in many ways more useful than the rest of the book in highlighting the strengths and weaknesses of Marx as political analyst, and in going beyond Marx to give some really useful insights into British and European history.

Fernbach’s worldview

If Fernbach has a shortcoming it’s that he doesn’t write as an objective outsider but as a devout follower of Marx, one who has drunk deep of the faith and is every bit as doctrinaire as the Master. He takes sides. He is as much against the capitalists and imperialists as Karl himself. This is Fernbach’s own voice, picking up on Marx and taking him further, teaching us, lecturing us:

Since every propertied minority must rely on the exploited masses to fight its battles for it, it can only exert political power by presenting its own particular interest as the interest of society in general. It is thus always necessary for the propertied classes to appear on the political stage in ideological disguise. (p.12)

While the worst years of reaction saw the steady maturation of Marx’s general theory, and his critique of bourgeois economics, his political theory made little progress compared with the heady developments of the 1848 period. Revolutionary political theory can only develop in response to the new problems and tasks raised by mass struggle, and this was completely lacking in Marx’s England. (p.19)

Fernbach clearly himself thinks that Marxism (or ‘dialectical materialism’) is the Truth and the Way. This makes his own explanations – such as the page explaining Marxist-Leninist thinking about imperialism (page 27) – very useful and informative. But it does result in some controversial and out-of-date pronouncements which pull you up short.

In the most glaring example, Fernbach thinks that Czechoslovakia and East Germany were fortunate to have carried out their ‘socialist revolutions’ under the protective umbrella of the Soviet Union, and so managed to avoid being dominated by the capitalist West.

After the socialist revolution in Russia it became possible for countries that made anti-imperialist revolutions to escape from the tyranny of the world market, and industrialise within socialist relations of production. (p.27)

This ignores the fact that both Czechoslovakia and East Germany had communist dictatorships forced on them by the Soviet occupying forces after the second World War. And it sees the state of having had a ‘revolution’ as fortunate and blessed.

Compare and contrast this utopianly doctrinaire Marxist view with the detailed description of the takeover of East Germany by the Soviets given in Anne Applebaum’s history, Iron Curtain, and the wretchedly repressive, Stasi-ruled society which resulted.

I wonder if Fernbach is still alive. I wonder if he has repented his devoutly Marxist defence of the Soviet Union and its imperialist conquest of Eastern Europe.

In summary, Fernbach lucidly explains what is important about the development of Marx’s theory as shown in these political writings from the 1850s, clarifies what is enduring about Marx’s insights and highlights their shortcomings – but we are constantly aware that his own perspective comes from a now antediluvian world.

Conclusions

Marx and his followers are:

too clever and right about some things (the economic base of society, the technological innovativeness, the radical cultural breaks and the violent political impact of capitalism) to dismiss
but too profoundly wrong in all their ‘scientific’ predictions (Germany going communist in 1848, Britain teetering on brink of communist revolution in 1860 etc) to take seriously
and their social theories proved so catastrophically wrong when put into practice in Russia, China and the rest of the communist world, that is impossible not to feel periodic bouts of nausea and horror at the casual way Marx dismisses entire classes and groups of people

Because less than forty years after his death, entire classes and groups of people would start to be dismissed with bullets and mass starvation by the tyrants he had directly inspired.

Books & Boots

All posts tagged lumpenproletariat

Gareth Stedman Jones on Marx and 1848

The Communist Manifesto

The creation of the ‘bourgeoisie’ and the ‘proletariat’

The revolutions of 1848

Karl’s political commentaries

Karl underestimates the importance of politics

Jones’s critique of The Class Struggles in France: 1848 to 1850

Jones’s critique of The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon

Conclusions

Related links

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Karl Marx

Communism in Russia

Communism in China

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Communism in Germany

Communism in Poland

Communism in France

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Communism in England

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Karl Marx’s prose style

Insults

Rhetorical repetition

Antitheses

Repetition of phrases

Lists

Conjuring ghosts and spectres

The language of theatre

Summary

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Karl Marx

Communism in Russia

Communism in China

Communism in Vietnam

Communism in Germany

Communism in Poland

Communism in France

Communism in Spain

Communism in England

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Karl Marx: Surveys from Exile 1848-1863

Five levels

Levels 1, 2 and 3 in more detail

1. Historical facts

2. Marx’s interpretation of French politics 1848-1852

1. Truth and reality

2. Marx’s political analysis

Economics

3. Fernbach’s interpretation of the other essays

Fernbach’s worldview

Conclusions

Related links

Related blog posts

Marx

Communism in Russia

Communism in China

Communism in Vietnam

Communism in Germany

Communism in Poland

Communism in France

Communism in Spain

Communism in England

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