Bernard E. Harcourt | Class Struggles in France 1848-1850 and Black Reconstruction in America: Introduction to Marx 7/13

By Bernard E. Harcourt

The revolution is dead! – Long live the revolution!

    — Karl Marx, Class Struggle in France 1848-1850

Imagine what it might have felt like to be in the throes of writing and disseminating the Communist Manifesto and to learn that the workers of Paris had begun to rise up, in an insurrection, and demand democratic elections, a ministry of labor, and national workshops—as if the historical account of the Manifesto was coming to life before one’s very eyes. Imagine then receiving news a few weeks later that the revolution was erupting in Vienna and the German states, and then traveling from Cologne to Baden and the Palatinate to observe and participate in the uprisings. Engels joined the workers on the barricades in Baden, carrying munitions, and fighting alongside the armed workers against the Prussian army. (Engels would recount his involvement in an article “The Campaign for the German Imperial Constitution” after their defeat at the battle of Rinnthal and his escape to Switzerland). Marx was with Engels at first but then set off to Paris for meetings on behalf of the central committee of the German democrats and to begin the process of launching a new radical newspaper, the Neue Rheinische Zeitung (“New Rhenish Gazette”).

A few months later, the Parisian workers were decimated in the bloody June days of 1848, and with that, the second proletarian revolution prefigured in the Communist Manifesto was quashed in France. But Marx nevertheless identified a win: the counterrevolution and repression by the bourgeoisie had effectively crystalized the workers into a class and given birth to a revolutionary proletariat, self-conscious of its role in history. In a set of newspaper articles that Marx drafted in 1850 on the situation in France and published in the Neue Rheinische Zeitung—and that Engels later collected into a book titled Class Struggles in France 1848-1850—Marx argued that the June defeat gave birth to a proletariat class and a proletarian revolution of the same character, texture, or longevity as a monarch. The proletarian revolution now had two bodies—like the king’s two bodies described by Ernst Kantorowicz—one that can be crushed, repressed, and killed, and another that lives on. And so, Marx’s first article concludes with the epigraph above: “And we cry: The revolution is dead! – Long live the revolution![1]

The set of articles collected in Class Struggles in France 1848-1850 were written and published over a year after the June defeat, after Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte had been elected president of the Second Republic (December 1848), and during the time of a conservative consolidation or counterrevolution in France, but before Louis-Napoleon would seize power in a coup d’état (December 2, 1851) and before he was proclaimed emperor a year later on December 2, 1852. So by contrast to the Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, which as its title reflects addressed the coup d’état and birth of the Second Empire—and which we will study next at Marx 8/13 with Kendall Thomas—this first set of articles appear in the middle of the story.

In these articles, Marx is first and foremost a political essayist, editorialist, and historian, writing quickly about fast-moving historical circumstances, drawing on first-hand sources and informants, and confronting his materialist historical approach with the reality of revolutionary developments on the ground. These are not philosophical manuscripts intended for self-clarification, but punctual opinion-journalistic long-form essays that serve to generate historical and political hypotheses and are intended to stimulate revolutionary praxis. Intermixed in the factual historical reporting, Marx proposes theoretical glosses and offers economic analyses and statistics. There are sections of the articles that present economic data, statistics, and research, and that foreshadow the kind of work Marx is about to do in the Grundrisse and Capital.[2]

What is especially remarkable about these articles—and what has caught the attention of commentators ever since—is the way in which Marx dissects the complex class relations and conflicts, which are now far more nuanced than the binary bourgeoisie vs. proletariat struggle of the opening of the Manifesto. The analysis now includes small property owners, the petty bourgeoisie (shopkeepers, keepers of cafes and restaurants, wine merchants, small traders, handicrafts, etc.[3]), rural workers (who are called “peasants”), the financial capitalists versus the industrialist capitalists, the workers and their political representatives of different stripes (Louis Blanc, Albert, Auguste Blanqui, and at different times, François-Vincent Raspail, or even at times Ledru-Rollin), and all the different political factions as well. There is now a highly fragmented landscape, with many different interests and shifting coalitions. And in that far more complex panorama, Marx develops an argument about the way in which a class like the proletariat develops a conception of self, a self-consciousness, precisely by being attacked and undermined—in other words, how the development of a class depends upon intricate historical interactions with other classes and the economic context.

Marx’s nuanced analysis of class struggles in France in the Neue Rheinische Zeitung serves as a model for historical and theoretical inquiry—and for the constant clash and contradictions between the two. At Marx 7/13, we will read Marx’s text in conversation with W.E.B. Du Bois’s magisterial book written in 1935, Black Reconstruction in America, 1860-1880. There, Du Bois explicitly builds on Marx’s edifice to create what he called an “inductive” study of the “Marxian theory of the state.”[4] Du Bois interprets the social struggles of the Civil War, Reconstruction, and its demise, through the lens of Marxian categories of the proletariat, of the general strike, of the counterrevolution. Du Bois turns enslaved Black people into the agents of history who brought about the collapse of Southern slavery and their own emancipation, in a similar way that Marx turned the industrialized proletarianized workers into the subjects of history. We had the privilege of studying Du Bois’s brilliant book, Black Reconstruction in America, during the year-long seminar titled Abolition Democracy 13/13 in 2020-2021, at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. It is thrilling to return to Du Bois now in the context of Marx’s writings on the 1848 revolution.

Few scholars have worked more productively on the relationship between Marx and Du Bois than Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, who dedicated her Du Bois lectures at Harvard and her forthcoming book from those lectures to Marx and Du Bois. It is thus an honor privilege to welcome Gayatri Spivak back to these 13/13 seminars to discuss and read Class Struggles in France 1848-1850 in conversation with Black Reconstruction in America. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak is University Professor at Columbia University and a founding member of the Institute for Comparative Literature and Society. She is a preeminent expert on Marx and Du Bois, and was recently celebrated for the publication of the 2016 fortieth-anniversary edition of Jacques Derrida’s Of GrammatologyReadings (2014). She is the author of many books, including Can the Subaltern Speak?, A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Toward a History of the Vanishing Present, and Death of a Discipline. She is also an activist in rural education and feminist and ecological social movements since 1986. Most importantly, perhaps, Gayatri Spivak is one of the most generous and engaged public intellectuals in the world today and the best colleague one could ask for.

In this full-length introduction, I will provide more background on Marx’s articles collected in Class Struggles in France 1848-1850 and on Du Bois’s Black Reconstruction. But let me begin by providing a quick primer on the French Revolution of 1848 for those who might not have attended a French Lycée and been gavage-fed French history throughout their childhood!

A Quick Primer on French History

After the second and final downfall of Napoleon Bonaparte (Napoleon I) in 1815 and his exile to the island of Saint Helena, off the west coast of Africa, the Bourbon monarchy was restored in France. The two brothers of Louis XVI, Louis XVIII and Charles X, succeeded to the throne of France under a form of constitutional monarchy for a period known as the Second Bourbon Restoration (1815-1830).

The July Revolution of 1830, which lasted three days (26–29 July 1830), toppled the reign of Charles X, who was replaced by his cousin, Louis Philippe I, the Duke of Orléans, who ruled France for 18 years until the French Revolution of 1848. (The French army had begun the colonization of Algeria at the beginning of July 1830, and most of the brutal conquest occurred under Louis Philippe.) By 1848, Louis Philippe was becoming increasingly conservative, groomed by the leading conservative French statesman, François Guizot—whose administration had expelled Marx from France in February 1845.

The 1848 revolution breaks out in Paris at the end of February 1848 (22-24 February 1848). Louis Philippe abdicates the monarchy, and a provisional government is put in place, consisting of ministers ranging from constitutional monarchists to more leftist politicians like Alexandre-Auguste Ledru-Rollin. A further round of revolt by more radical republican leaders leads to the proclamation of the Second Republic on February 24, 1848, and the inclusion in the provisional government of Louis Blanc, a radical socialist, and a member of the working class, known as Albert.[5] National elections in April 1848 favored the moderate republicans and constitutional monarchists, who now outnumbered 10 to 1 the radicals and socialists in the constituent assembly. The assembly passed more conservative budgets and eliminated the national workshops that had just been established.

In June 1848, the workers of Paris rise up against the provisional government, in what is known as the “June Days” (23–26 June 1848), quickly barricading themselves and demanding radical measures. The workers, artisans, and students are crushed by the artillery of General Louis-Eugène Cavaignac, who would then govern provisionally himself.

Following the bloody June days, the assembly passes a democratic constitution providing for the election of a president and single-branch legislature by universal male suffrage. At the ensuing elections on December 10, 1848, Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte, the nephew of Napoléon I, is elected president of the republic. Following that, there are legislative elections in May 1849 that produce a monarchist majority in the assembly, that slowly but surely enacts increasingly conservative measures.

Faced with a one-term limit that looms in 1852, and significant personal debts, Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte seizes power in a coup d’état on December 2, 1851, extending his presidential powers for 10 years. (Marx referred to this coup of December 2, 1851, as the “Eighteenth Brumaire” of Louis-Napoleon in reference to the earlier coup d’état of Napoleon Bonaparte, which had taken place on November 9, 1799, or the 18 Brumaire, Year VIII, of the French Revolutionary calendar. On the 18 Brumaire, Napoleon Bonaparte seized power as the First Consul of France, which ultimately led to him declaring himself emperor.)

Following uprisings in Paris and a revolt in southeastern France that are quickly quelled, and a plebiscite that overwhelmingly (92%) favors Louis-Napoleon’s constitutional revisions—and following calls for the reestablishment of the empire—the Senate proclaims Louis-Napoleon emperor under the name Napoleon III on December 2, 1852. There was no protest to mention, and a subsequent plebiscite afforded Napoleon III an even larger landslide (97%). The Second Empire of France began at the end of 1852.

Class Struggles in France: The Timing of The Publications

Marx wrote Class Struggles in France 1848-1850 as a series of three articles from January through October 1850, to be published in the newspaper that he co-founded with Engels and edited called the Neue Rheinische Zeitung. Friedrich Engels collected those three articles (and added, as a fourth part, excerpts from other later articles that Marx published in November 1850) into a book that he published in 1895 under that title—Class Struggles in France 1848-1850.

First, a word about that paper, the Neue Rheinische Zeitung. Marx and Engels fundraised and laid the foundation for the new paper in April and May 1848, in the midst of the German Revolution of 1848, which erupted in March of that year, a month earlier.

The newspaper was originally called the Neue Rheinische Zeitung. Organ der Demokratie (New Rhenish Gazette. Organ of Democracy) and was published as a daily newspaper. Marx was based in Cologne at the time, and the first issue published on June 1, 1848. It was intended to be the successor to the Rheinische Zeitung which Marx had edited in 1842-1843 and in which Marx had published several of the earlier articles we have studied and read in Marx 2/13, including “The Philosophical Manifesto of the Historical School of Law” (August 1842) and “Debates on the Law on Thefts of Wood” (Oct-Nov 1842). Marx was the editor-in-chief, and other editors included Engels as well as Heinrich Bürgers, Ernst Dronke, George Weerth, Ferdinand Wolff, and Wilhelm Wolff. The new paper, published out of Cologne, in the Rhine Province, operated from June 1, 1848, to May 19, 1849.[6]

In May 1849, Marx, Engels, and the other editors of the Neue Rheinische Zeitung were expelled from Germany by the Prussian government for their involvement in the paper. Marx took his family in exile to London and invited Engels to London help him restart the paper. Marx raised funds again and was able to secure a publisher in Hamburg for the continuation of the paper on a monthly basis under the slightly revised name Neue Rheinische Zeitung. Politisch-ökonomische Revue (New Rhenish Gazette. Political-Economic Review). The intention of the new newspaper was to publish about the events surrounding the 1848-49 revolutions in Europe and their impact.[7]

The Neue Rheinische Zeitung. Politisch-ökonomische Revue published six issues from January 1850 to the end of November 1850 when the last issue, which was a double issue (no. 5 and 6), came out. The publication of the paper was prevented thereafter.[8] So the three articles and fourth excerpt that forms Class Struggles were published in the following issues on the following dates:

  1. Part 1 originally titled “The Defeat of June 1848” was published in issue no. 1 of the Neue Rheinische Zeitung. Politisch-ökonomische Revue in January 1850.
  2. Part 2 originally titled “June 13, 1849” was published in issue no. 2, around February 1850.
  3. Part 3 originally titled “Consequences of June 13, 1849” was published in issue no. 3, around March 1850.
  4. The final part, Part 4, titled “The Abolition of Universal Suffrage in 1850,” added by Engels when he published the set of articles in book form under the title Class Struggle in France 1848-1850 included passages from articles that Marx wrote and published in the final double issue of the Revue, nos. 5 and 6, at the end of November 1850.[9]

The important temporal point is that these articles were all written and published after the June defeat of the proletariat and after Louis-Napoleon was elected president of the Second Republic, but one year before he seized power in a coup d’état (Dec. 2, 1851) and two years before he was proclaimed emperor on December 2, 1852.

The Text: Class Struggles in France 1848-1850

In these 1850 articles, Marx theorizes at the same time as he recounts history, and vice versa: he confronts theoretical insights and hypotheses with historical developments, statistics, economic research, and first-hand accounts. These articles are a form of praxis and intended to stimulate revolutionary action. They are political, engaged, opinionated, often satirical and witty, biting at times, punchy, and rallying. Reading them, one senses that they are a call to revolution. They are not intended to be neutral or detached: Marx is pushing theoretical interpretations on historical facts with the obvious pedagogic intention of educating the reader/ally about the proletariat and about revolution, and of fomenting a proletarian revolution.

In the process, Marx develops a central thesis: the revolution of 1848 may not have brought about the emancipation of the proletariat, but it turned the proletariat into a more self-conscious class, into a “real revolutionary party.”[10] All the wins and the many more losses of the workers—and their defeat in the bloody June days of 1848—gave birth to the working class. The February Revolution was not for naught, because it created a united counterrevolutionary front that helped crystalize the workers into a revolutionary party. What was defeated, Marx asserts, was not the revolution, but instead “the pre-revolutionary traditional appendages” that had not yet sharpened into real class struggle. That would only happen, Marx maintained, “not by the victory of February, but only by a series of defeats.”[11] In a telling passage, Marx writes:

The proletariat, by dictating the republic to the Provisional Government and through the Provisional Government to the whole of France, stepped into the foreground forthwith as an independent party, but at the same time challenged the whole of bourgeois France to enter the lists against it. What it won was the terrain for the fight for its revolutionary emancipation, but by no means this emancipation itself.[12]

As for the Republic, Marx argues, the bourgeois republic was really born, not in February 1848 during the initial revolutionary days and proclamation of the Republic, but instead in May 1848 when the Provisional Government excludes Louis Blanc and Albert, throws out the demand for a labor ministry, and pushes out the proletariat. “The real birthplace of the bourgeois republic is not the February victory,” Marx writes, “it is the June defeat.”[13]

Marx’s argument, in essence, is that the French revolution of 1848 fundamentally changed French history and was the condition of possibility of a proletarian revolution. It put the communist revolution next in line. Prior to June 1848, the notion of revolution was political. It referred to a change in the political form of the state. But after June 1848, the notion of revolution becomes social. It is now about transforming society. It is now about class struggle within society. As Marx writes, “revolution, after June, meant: overthrow of bourgeois society, whereas, before February, it had meant overthrow of the form of state.”[14]

In all this, Marx attributes to the proletariat specific actions during the February Revolution. The proletariat, on Marx’s reading, acts as a collective entity: it has intention, cohesion, a will, and an embodiment in specific actions.

So, for instance, it is the proletariat, according to Marx, that demanded and obtained the proclamation of the republic after the initial days of the February revolution. As you will recall, the revolution started on February 22, 1848, and it was fueled by a combination of different interests and social groups, including the industrialists and the Paris bourgeoisie, the petty bourgeoisie made up of shopkeepers and grocers, as well as the working class; but still, after a few days of revolt and the fall of Louis Philippe, the Provisional Government had not yet declared a Republic. Marx attributes to the workers the demand that the Republic be proclaimed. He writes, “the workers were this time determined not to put up with any swindling like that of July 1830.”[15] Marx maintains that the socialist politician (and natural scientist) François-Vincent Raspail demanded on the steps of the Hotel de Ville, on behalf of the proletariat, that the Provisional Government proclaim the Republic at the threat of armed insurrection, and that the Provisional Government caved in to those demands, such that it was the proletariat that forced the bourgeoisie during the February Revolution to proclaim the Republic and to impose universal male suffrage. (Note that Marx here and elsewhere refers to “universal suffrage,” even though it was only universal male suffrage).

This was a major achievement of the workers, with significant repercussions, according to Marx, because, as he writes, “Instead of a few small factions of the bourgeoisie, whole classes of French society were suddenly hurled into the circle of political power, forced to leave the boxes, the stalls and the gallery and to act in person upon the revolutionary stage!”[16]At the same time, this served to unify the bourgeoisie and demonstrate the way in which it had become prominent by re-enfranchising the small propertied classes who had lost all power, gradually, under the July monarchy, to the financial aristocracy. The small proprietors, what Marx refers to as the “nominal proprietors, who form the great majority of the French people, the peasants” became the ruling class, at least at that moment, by means of universal suffrage: “The February republic finally brought the rule of the bourgeoisie clearly into prominence, since it struck off the crown behind which Capital kept itself concealed.”[17] Marx writes:

Just as the workers in the July days had fought and won the bourgeois monarchy, so in the February days they fought and won the bourgeois republic. Just as the July monarchy had to proclaim itself as a monarchy surrounded by republican institutions, so the February republic was forced to proclaim itself a republic surrounded by social institutions. The Parisian proletariat compelled this concession too.[18]

Marx describes how the workers forced the Provisional Government to create social institutions, including a special commission to address the condition of the working class, and to appoint Louis Blanc and a worker (Albert) to the commission. Marx recounts how Blanc and Albert became the representatives of the Parisian proletariat, their “high priests.” That achievement could ultimately have been viewed as a failure, except that what is important here is that the proletariat was crystallizing, developing a sense of self, a self-consciousness.

Marx also details how the Provisional Government turns the proletariat against itself by forming a militia mainly constituted by the lumpenproletariat to begin policing the workers. The Provisional Government formed mobile guards made up mostly of young men who, as Marx writes:

belonged for the most part to the lumpenproletariat, which, in all big towns form a mass strictly differentiated from the industrial proletariat, a recruiting ground for thieves and criminals of all kinds, living on the crumbs of society, people without a definite trade, vagabonds, gens sans feu et sans aveu, with differences according to the degree of civilization of the nation which they belong, but never renouncing their lazzaroni character … capable of the most heroic deeds and the most exalted sacrifices, as of the basest banditry and the dirtiest corruption.[19]

Paid very low wages, they were bought on the cheap, given uniforms and leaders, and they became the bloodhounds of the Provisional Government. The proletariat were fooled, duped into believing that those were its protectors, when in fact they would serve to protect bourgeoisie.

Alongside this military wing, the Provisional Government also created a column of workers in the national workshops. Marx viewed the national workshops that were created, not as the product of Louis Blanc, nor as his vision, but instead as a deceptive bourgeois plot. These were not the workshops that Blanc envisioned, but instead tedious, monotonous, unproductive earthworks—nothing more than “English workhouses in the open.”[20] They were used as a ploy, an excuse for the bourgeoisie to attack the form of socialism that was being developed. They ended up being more of a ploy than an advance for the proletariat.[21]

Two-Stages of Revolution

Marx had made clear in the Manifesto that advanced bourgeois revolutions—like the one that was supposed to take place in Germany, and surely like the one taking place in France in 1848—were precursors of proletarian revolutions. In the case of Germany, Marx had forecast a bourgeois revolution of a more advanced nature than the revolutions in England or France, followed by a proletarian revolution: “the bourgeois revolution in Germany will be but the prelude to an immediately following proletarian revolution.”[22] This was also plainly stated by Engels in his two draft credos discussed in Marx 6/13.

Technically, then, the early stage of the French Revolution in February 1848 could possibly have been the second proletarian stage of the revolution, insofar as there had already been a full bourgeois revolution in 1789 and the workers formed a significant part of the February revolution. Alternatively, the February revolution could have served as the completion of the first stage—and in fact it was largely a “bourgeois” revolution—and the second stage could have been the June uprisings.

Under either scenario, there were moments when it must have seemed to Marx that the two-stage theory was being instantiated. It might have seemed that way in the first few days of the February uprising. The bourgeoisie and the workers, together, overthrew the July monarchy. The workers put in place the Republic. Plus, the Provisional Government would come to include two radical socialists, Louis Blanc and Albert—and recall that in the Manifesto, Marx and Engels specifically stated that the Communist League was allied in France with the “Social-Democrats,” by which they meant (according to Engels’ note) Ledru-Rollin, Louis Blanc, and the radical republicans associated with the newspaper Réforme, what Engels called “a section of the Democratic or Republican Party more or less tinged with Socialism.”[23]The Provisional Government even implemented national ateliers (workshops)—which, to be sure, Marx criticized harshly, claiming that they were a bourgeois conspiracy to undermine socialism and had nothing to do with worker-cooperative workshops or the ateliers nationaux that Blanc favored; but even so, they did create national workshops. And even though the Provisional Government did not establish a ministry of labor or government entity for workers, and did not give Blanc or Albert their own ministerial functions, the two were part of the Provisional Government—which, from the outside, must have looked promising.

On top of that, there had been a proletariat uprising within the bourgeois republic: for several days in June 1848, the most radical, avant-gardist, proletariat revolutionaries—the communists in effect—rose up in revolt under Louis Auguste Blanqui.  Blanqui was a Marxist-Leninist avant la lettre. He believed in a vanguard revolutionary party that would take power for the workers. And for a few days in June, Blanqui led a revolution on the heels of a bourgeois revolution. It must have felt, for a moment, that reality was actualizing itself—that critical theory was coming alive, that Marx’s theory of the two-stages was being realized.

In the end, though, the predictions about a two-stage revolution did not pan out. Engels discusses this at length in his 1895 introduction, arguing that Marx and he ultimately understood, as early as the autumn of 1850, that “the first chapter of the revolutionary period was closed and that nothing further was to be expected until the outbreak of a new world crisis.”[24] Engels spotlights Marx’s argument, in the final chapter of Class Struggles, that economic crises are the main drivers of revolutions and that the February revolution was principally the product of the world trade crisis of 1847.[25] As Marx wrote, “A new revolution is only possible as a result of a new crisis. It is just as certain, however, as this.”[26]

In any event, the two-stage theory would continue to play a central role in Marx’s thought and, of course, come back to life during the Commune uprising of Paris in the Spring of 1871. Importantly, it served as the lens through with Lenin would read, interpret, and aspire to actualize the Communist Manifesto—as we discussed at Marx 6/13. Sixty-seven years after the publication of Class Struggles in France 1848-1850, Lenin would pronounce the April Theses and call for a second proletariat revolution to complete the job of the February 1917 Russian revolution.

Two other quick points. First, it is interesting to see that Marx twines his two-stage theory with a model of civil war. Marx quotes a passage from the New Rhenish Gazette (not sure if he wrote it himself) about the June defeat, which clearly reflects a civil war matrix. He is discussing the notion of fraternity—the fraternity that was proclaimed in February 1848 and pasted on walls throughout Paris—and he notes: “its true, unadulterated, its prosaic expression is civil war, civil war in its most fearful form, the war of labor and capital.”[27] It’s interesting to see here the matrix of civil war as the true expression of fraternity, in very much the same way that Michel Foucault would develop his theory that relations of power should be modeled on civil war in the 1970s. Second, there is a fascinating passage on page 58 about order, where Marx argues that the call for order is the common thread through all counterrevolutionary appeals and actions. Order is the counter revolution—something I hope to come back to later if we have the chance to discuss Revolution and Counter-Revolution, Or, Germany in 1848.

The French “Peasantry”

On my reading, Marx’s analysis of the French “peasantry” reflects, more than anything, their fickleness. Marx portrays the French “peasant” as a weathervane. Marx is most disparaging of the rural populations in their reactionary moments, at which point Marx characterizes them as treasonous and unreliable; more charitable and valorizing when they align themselves with the proletariat. But in these articles, Marx is not so much explicitly critiquing their fickleness, as he is alternating between two modes: attacking them for their conservatism, signaling hope that they may be a force for revolution. The articles end, for instance, in November 1850, on an upbeat note with the “peasants” outraged at Louis-Napoleon allowing the legislature to reimpose a wine tax. Now, given that the rural populations are so fickle and change their politics so easily, it is hard to imagine how they could ever be good allies.

Let me just note, at the outset, that I find the term “peasant” offensive and demeaning today. The problem is that the most obvious substitute terms, such as rural workers or agricultural workers, do not function very well, first because the inclusion of the term “worker” creates too much of a proximity to the working class, and second because many of the “peasants” were implicated in property ownership of one form or another, and of mortgage relations, which was not the case for workers. I am at a loss, though, to find the perfect term, farmers and farmhands is not right either because we generally think of large farmers or “fermiers” when we use that term. Rural population and rural class are closest, but seem almost too broad. So, not entirely satisfied, I will use the terms peasant and peasantry with scare quotes and, as synonyms, sometimes use rural population, rural class, or rural workers.

In the early period of the February revolution, on Marx’s account, the rural population becomes the bastion of the counterrevolution because the Provisional Government, facing growing deficits, decides to impose a tax that ultimately lands on the “French peasantry.” The Provisional Government avoids burdening the financiers and bankers, who were putatively the target of the February Revolution but in fact continue to dominate the industrial bourgeoisie. (I should note that Marx practically always refers to the bankers and financiers as “Jews,” in what can only be described as an antisemitic way, referring to the Rothschilds as “les juifs rois de l’époque,” to “the Jews of finance,” and the “Bourse Jews,” for instance.[28] Marx does not so much impugn them because of their Jewishness as because of their capitalism, but he is unquestionably playing into the antisemitic tropes of French and European society at the time.) Faced with growing deficits, then, the Provisional Government, instead of imposing a tax on the banks or financial classes, or on the manufacturers or property owners, imposes one that hits hardest on the rural populations. So at an early stage of the February revolution, the rural class gets transformed into a counterrevolutionary force. Marx writes, “Whereas the Revolution of 1789 began by shaking the feudal burdens off the peasants, the Revolution of 1848 announced itself with a new tax on the rural population, in order not to endanger capital and keep its state machine going.”[29]

One of the key lessons of the February revolution, for Marx, is the conservatism of the rural population. Whereas in the Communist Manifesto, Marx viewed the rural workers as fellow travelers supportive of proletarian revolution, now, two years later, Marx is far more critical of the “peasants.” Marx portrays the election of Louis Napoleon as president in December 1848 as the coup d’état of the peasants.  He portrays Louis Napoleon’s victory as an insurrection of the rural population against the Republic. “December 10, 1848, was the day of the peasant insurrection,” Marx writes.[30]  It was the reactionary coup d’état of the rural population, overthrowing the existing bourgeois government—and anticipating the coup of Louis Napoleon three years later.

But a year later, on December 20, 1849, the legislature restores the wine tax in the name of a Bonapartist ministry, and the rural populations turn against Louis Napoleon like a weathervane—or so Marx believed. The wine tax, Marx suggested, was considered the greatest possible offense to the “peasants.” In fact, Louis Napoleon’s uncle supposedly declared at St. Helena that it was the reintroduction of the wine tax that led to his downfall, because it alienated the rural populations.[31] In 1849, the rural class is particularly upset because they feel that they have been betrayed: they are the ones who brought Louis Bonaparte to power, it was treasonous that under his rule, the wine tax would be reimposed. Marx writes: “The French peasant, when he paints the devil on the wall, paints him in the guise of the tax collector. From the moment when Montalembert elevated taxation to a god, the peasant became godless, atheist, and threw himself into the arms of the devil, socialism.”[32] Marx intimates that the rural people will change political position at will, based on their perceived interests, and are prepared to be either conservative or radical based on whoever is enforcing or resisting the tax collector.

Toward the end of the three articles, in late 1850, Marx gives the impression that the rural populations, the petty bourgeois, and other forces in society seem to be getting closer to the proletariat and to revolutionary socialism, specifically to the revolutionary socialism of Auguste Blanqui.[33] Marx seems to have some hope that political circumstances will turn in the proletariat’s favor. He writes, “little by little we have seen peasants, petty bourgeois, the middle classes in general, stepping alongside the proletariat, driven into open antagonism to the official republic, and treated by it as antagonists.”[34] He even gets carried away with the idea that the kind of socialism that the proletariat are increasingly embracing is the radical version of Blanqui—or more specifically, “the declaration of the permanence of the revolution, the class dictatorship of the revolution, the class dictatorship of the proletariat as the inevitable transit point to the abolition of class differences generally, to the abolition of all the productive relations on which they rest, to the abolition of all the social relations that correspond to these relations of production, to the revolutionizing of all the ideas that result from these social connections.”[35]

Marx is careful, but I detect a sense of promise at the end of the third article. There is a silver lining to the elections of March 10, 1850. There is a possibility that, in Marx’s words, the proletariat may be “on the point of making a revolution.”[36] This is tied, in part, to the shifting winds of the rural population. It seems as if there may be a realignment of interests. Marx characterizes the election in March 1850, which is where the third article ends, as a premonition. Prefiguring the famous line of the Parisian students in May ’68, « Sous les pavés, la plage ! », Marx writes: “Behind the ballot papers lay the paving stones.”[37]

Whether the French rural populations were realigning themselves with the workers, well, later events in France in 1851 would cast doubt on that—at our next seminar, we will read Marx’s Eighteenth Brumaire and will see his position on this. As for whether rural populations more generally could serve as allies of the working class, that is a much larger debate that develops in the twentieth century with the communist revolutions in Russia, China, and elsewhere. As it stands today, the debate raises interesting questions that are at the heart of new readings of the late Marx and eco-socialist and degrowth-communist reinterpretations of Marx, such as Kohei Saito’s Slow Down! How Degrowth Communism Can Save the Earth,[38] which argue for a Marx that is not productivist, but instead attuned to climate change and the need for degrowth, and that imagines a path to communism that does not require industrialization but can go directly through rural populations. More on that, hopefully, later in this seminar, especially with the (new) late Marx!

Financial Capitalism

Another key dimension that Class Struggles raises has to do with the role of the bankers and financiers—and more generally, of credit and finance—in the capitalism of the time, and in Marx’s thought.

There is a deep awareness, in these articles, of the importance of financial capitalism. Marx interpreted the July monarchy (the rule of Louis Philippe from 1930 to 1848) as gradually dominated by bankers and the “finance aristocracy.” By contrast, the industrialist bourgeoisie, petty bourgeoisie, and rural population were excluded from power.[39] Marx viewed the financiers as thugs and criminals—just like lumpenproletariat. They act, Marx writes, in the same way “that regularly lead the lumpenproletariat to brothels, to workhouses and lunatic asylums, before the Bench, to bagnos and to the scaffold.”[40] Interestingly, Marx expresses an equal disdain for the financiers as for the lumpenproletariat—something I will come back to in a moment.

Marx argues that a set of two economic crises in the period leading up to 1848—what he refers to as “the potato blight and the bad harvest of 1845 and 1846” and “a general commercial and industrial crisis in England”[41]—led the Paris bourgeoisie to the barricades in protest of the financiers’ capture of Louis Philippe, resulting in the February revolution and the establishment of the Provisional Government. This question of the role of finance in capitalism and of the financiers in bourgeois republicanism is another major theme of Class Struggles that we will need to track as we proceed forward toward the Grundrisse, Capital, and beyond Capital to the “late Marx.” We might ask, from now on:

  1. What role for rural populations (“peasants”) in the communist revolution, according to Marx?
  2. What role for finance in our understanding of capitalism, and for the financiers and bankers in the historical trajectory of capitalism, again according to Marx?

Chapter 4: The Abolition of Universal Suffrage, 1850

In the final part of Class Struggles, added by Engels using extracts of Marx’s writings from November 1850, Marx writes about the abolition of universal (male) suffrage in the law of May 22, 1850, and the restrictions on the press, another law that followed shortly thereafter. He is somber at this point. He characterizes the passage of these laws as the moment at which “the revolutionary and democratic party steps off the official stage.”[42] It is on this note that the series of articles ends, awaiting the reopening of the National Assembly in November 1850.

Crime, Punishment, and the Lumpenproletariat

It is interesting to note, at least to a penalist like myself, the centrality of crime and punishment in the history of the February revolution and in Marx’s writings. Questions of punishment played a key role in the Provisional Government. Many of the first and important reforms that the Provisional Government enacted involved abolition of punishments. One of their first acts was to abolish slavery in the colonies. They abolished capital punishment for political offenses. As Marx noted, “The bloody terror of the first French republic was disavowed by the abolition of the death penalty for political offenses.”[43] They also abolished corporal punishments and prohibited imprisonment for debt. Now, many of the early reforms of the Provisional Government were annulled after the workers were crushed by the bourgeois republicans and after a set of inquiries (following the May 15, 1849, uprising) against Louis Blanc, Ledru-Rollin, and the worker turned député, Marc Caussidière. So, for instance, the law that limited the working days to 10 hours was repealed. Similarly, the law that had prohibited imprisonment for debt was reversed.[44] But I find it intriguing that punishment was such a central topic.

It is also in Class Struggles that Marx discusses most the lumpenproletariat—which represented the criminal class. The lumpenproletariat, for Marx, was a micro-class of petty criminals, within his more refined class analysis, who could perform “the most heroic deeds and the most exalted sacrifices, as of the basest banditry and the dirtiest corruption.”[45] Marx’s aversion to the lumpenproletariat was not new. Recall how, in the Manifesto, Marx and Engels suggested that the lumpenproletariat, whom they referred to so disparagingly as “that passively rotting masse,” are better prepared, from their conditions of life, “for the part of a bribed tool of reactionary intrigue” than to participate in proletarian revolution.[46] In addition, at the time, in his writings on Germany, Marx almost gratuitously proposed to exclude those convicted of crimes from the suffrage. He didn’t have to; he deliberately made that choice. He effectively anticipated a Thirteenth Amendment-style exception to voting rights. In the “Demands of the Communist Party in Germany,” written during the Revolution of 1848 in Germany by Marx and Engels, and approved by the members of the central authority of the Communist League, Marx and Engels proposed, as their second demand:

Every German, having reached the age of 21, shall have the right to vote and to be elected, provided he has not been convicted of a criminal offence.[47]

Comparison with Huey Newton

This contrasts sharply with someone like Huey Newton who, by contrast, saw the lumpenproletariat as the very force of revolution. Newton himself identified as a petty criminal, which was why he studied law—to be a better burglar. And it was mostly among those in prison and re-entering society that Newton felt most kinship and promise. (We discussed all this at Coöperism 10/13 on the Black Panther Party).

Sylvia Wynter recognizes that, today, in the United States, the people in prison are the functional equivalent of Fanon’s wretched of the earth—and by analogy to Fanon, would be those who are best situated to challenge the social order. “Fanon’s category of les damnés,” Wynter writes in her essay “Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom,” is comprised today in the United States of “the criminalized majority Black and dark-skinned Latino inner-city males now made to man the rapidly expanding prison-industrial complex, together with their female peers—the kicked-about Welfare Moms—with both being part of the ever-expanding global, transracial category of the homeless/the jobless, the semi-jobless, the criminalized drug-offending prison population.” These are, Wynter writes, the “category of the damnés that is internal to (and interned within) the prison system of the United States” and they are “the analog form of a global archipelago, constituted by the Third- and Fourth-World peoples of the so-called ‘underdeveloped’ areas of the world—most totally of all by the peoples of the continent of Africa.”[48]

How the lumpenproletariat could have seemed so threatening to Marx is not clear to me. I hope to develop these questions in further writings. Let me move on.

Du Bois on Class Struggle

At Marx 7/13, we will be reading Class Struggles in conversation with W.E.B. Du Bois’s Black Reconstruction in America, a text that we studied extensively a few years ago at Abolition Democracy 13/13. Gayatri Spivak joined us back then in one key session on Du Bois. Amy Allen offered a compelling reading of Du Bois’s proximity to Marx. I tried to highlight the productive tensions between Marx and Du Bois.

The best place to begin, perhaps, is with a footnote to the title of Chapter 10 of Du Bois’s Black Reconstruction in America. The chapter is titled “The Black Proletariat in South Carolina,” and after the word “proletariat,” Du Bois drops a note in the margin: “The record of the Negro worker during Reconstruction presents an opportunity to study inductively the Marxian theory of the state.”[49] This brilliant opening line effectively synthesizes the whole work.

Du Bois’s method is inductive: Du Bois is proceeding up from the thick historical material of the Black experience during Reconstruction, inductively, to the theoretical level of Marxian analysis. In the same way that Marx was constantly confronting historical facts and political theory in Class Struggles, Du Bois is continually clashing the historical record of Reconstruction (and its downfall) with an analysis of the political and economic dimensions in the style of Marx.

Now, there is more in that footnote—it is brilliant—including a fascinating discussion of how democracy alone, how universal male suffrage alone, is not enough to amount to the “Dictatorship of the Black Proletariat,” as Du Bois had originally titled the chapter. No, the vote alone is not adequate. The class struggle cannot rest until the workers “use their votes consciously to rid themselves of the domination of private capital.”[50] Too many of the freed Black workers, Du Bois argues, were still under the spell of what he calls “the idea of that day,” namely “that the only real escape for a laborer was himself to own capital.”[51] These writings from almost one hundred years ago speak so vividly to our times.

In Black Reconstruction in America, Du Bois demonstrates how the enslaved Black people became the subjects of history and achieved their own emancipation by escaping the plantations in waves and joining the Northern armies en masse.[52]By contrast to the dominant historiography of the Civil War, which attributed little agency to enslaved persons, Du Bois turned the enslaved Black people into the motor of history—just like Marx turned the proletariat into the agent of history. On Du Bois’s reading, the tide of runaways and volunteers determined the outcome of the Civil War: “this withdrawal and bestowal of his [the enslaved Black person] labor decided the war.”[53] Du Bois interpreted the phenomenon through the prism of “the general strike”—the very title of Chapter 4, wherein it is argued (in Du Bois’s words in his subtitle): “how the black worker won the war by a general strike, which transferred his labor from the Confederate planter to the Northern invader, in whose army lines workers began to be organized as a new labor force.”[54]

An essential reference point to understand this is Gayatri Spivak’s entry for “General Strike” in Rethinking Marxism, which I have linked on the website for Marx 7/13 here. As Gayatri Spivak writes there:

Du Bois was, in other words, rethinking Marxism to see if collective subaltern agency bringing about the necessary change in the mode of production could also be theorized into a general strike, although not on the factory floor. This is what caused him to describe “waiting and watching” for the right moment to join the Union Army—so that Northern capital could find its consolidation through abolition democracy and Negro suffrage over against the historically anomalous plantation capitalism—a general strike.[55]

At the other end of Reconstruction, Du Bois interprets the demise of Reconstruction through the lens of “counterrevolution,” borrowing perhaps one of the most iconic terms “counterrevolution” from Marx and Engels, and their analysis of class struggles during the 1848 revolutions in France and Germany. Chapter 14, specifically titled “Counter-Revolution of Property,” draws a direct link back to Marx and the primacy of economic forces—as well as our general ignorance of that. It is here that the reader will find telling passages like the one where Du Bois laments that “Charles Sumner [the abolitionist Senator from Massachusetts] did not realize, and that other Charles—Karl Marx—had not yet published Das Kapital to prove to men that economic power underlies politics.”[56]  Du Bois analyzes the Northern proponents of abolition through the lens of the “petty bourgeoisie,”[57] and engages in the type of nuanced analysis of intra- and inter-class and micro-class conflicts that characterize the best work of Marx in Class Struggles.

Ultimately, Du Bois’s analysis, in the words of Amy Allen, “renders the emancipation of slaves as the first successful workers’ revolution, prefiguring the Bolshevik revolution by more than 50 years.” Allen captures Du Bois’s project—what she calls “the argumentative backbone of DuBois’s text” succinctly: “the slave becomes the black worker, the slave rebellion a general strike, the Reconstruction Era the dictatorship of the proletariat in the states of the former Confederacy, and the subsequent dismantling of Reconstruction as a counterrevolution of property.”[58]

All of this calls on us to actualize the analysis, both Marx’s and Du Bois’s, in present times—in the opening moments of this second Trump presidency.

The Task Today

The task today, as I see it, is to engage in the kind of nuanced analysis of class struggles that Marx and Du Bois modeled, but with a conception of class writ large—no longer just the working class or the proletariat, no longer centered on industrialized labor for Marx or the Black experience in the afterlife of slavery for Du Bois, although both are central to the analysis, but class struggles understood broadly as all the societal cleavages along the lines of race and ethnicity, gender, wealth, precarity, sexuality, education, religiosity, etc. The key now is to understand and dissect (1) the intricate social conflicts between evangelicals, urban abolitionists, white nationalists, undocumented immigrants, college protesters, the MAGA base, Silicon Valley billionaires, Haitian immigrants, tech bros, Cuban expats, Black women voters, anti-fascists, and everything in between, (2) in the context and against the backdrop of the political-economic forces of globalization, energy consumption, AI, climate change, etc., that are driving history forward, (3) in order to get a handle and gain leverage on the current moment to push it toward forms of cooperation and solidarity. Of this, I have no doubt. As for its execution, well, that is the most pressing task. It is our work in progress. It is the raison d’être of this seminar…

Revolutionary Contagion and the Permanence of Revolution

Marx and Engels viewed the French revolution of 1848 as a precursor to revolutions throughout Europe. The French workers found themselves and turned into a revolutionary force in the bloody days of the June defeat, and they would serve, Marx believed, as an international vanguard.

Class Struggles in France proposes a constantly evolving, cyclical, almost permanent revolution. The February revolution did not stop with the implementation of quasi-democratic institutions, or of a bourgeois republic, not even a radical bourgeois republic. It brought about cycles of further protest and uprisings. It gave birth to the idea of a “revolution in permanence,” an idea that Trotsky would take up and mobilize. It instantiated the idea of stages of revolution—an idea that Lenin would take up and mobilize.

But our story here, for this seminar, ends in late 1850, at a moment of interregnum. As we know, things did not go as planned for the Parisian revolutionary workers. The rural population, in particular, led a counterrevolution—which is what gives rise to the next text we will be studying at Marx 8/13 with Kendall Thomas, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte. Already in Class Struggles, Marx characterized Napoleon as “the most simple-minded man in France.”[59]The task of The Eighteenth Brumaire, Marx would write, was to “demonstrate how the class struggle in France created circumstances and relationships that made it possible for a grotesque mediocrity to play a hero’s part.” But let’s not get ahead of ourselves.

For now, welcome to Class Struggles in France and to Marx 7/13!

 

To watch the seminar and read more, go to: https://marx1313.law.columbia.edu/7-13/

 

Henri Félix Emmanuel Philippoteaux (1815-1884). “Lamartine repoussant le drapeau rouge devant l’Hôtel de Ville, le 25 février 1848”. Musée des Beaux-Arts de la Ville de Paris, Petit Palais.

Notes

[1] Karl Marx, Class Struggles in France (New York: International Publishers, 1997), at p. 59.

[2] See, e.g., Marx, Class Struggles in France, at pp. 119-120.

[3] Marx, Class Struggles in France, at p. 63.

[4] W.E.B. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction in America, 1860-1880 (New York: The Free Press, 1998), at p. 381 n.*.

[5] Frederick de Luna, “France: Constitution of 1848,” Encyclopedia of 1848 Revolutions, online at https://sites.ohio.edu/chastain/dh/frconst.htm; Isser Woloch and Thomas Henry Elkins, “The Second Republic and Second Empire,” in “France,” Encyclopaedia Britannica, available at https://www.britannica.com/place/France/The-Second-Republic-and-Second-Empire, last updated Jan 6, 2025.

[6] See Marx and Engels, “Statement of The Editorial Board of the Neue Rheinische Zeitung,” in Neue Rheinische Zeitung, No. 1, June 1, 1848, available at https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1848/06/01a.htm, at n.1; see generallyWalter Schmidt, “Neue Rheinische Zeitung,Encyclopedia of 1848 Revolutions, online at https://web.archive.org/web/20071027175745/http://www.ohiou.edu/~Chastain/ip/nrz.htm.

[7] See Works of Karl Marx, 1850, “Reviews from the Neue Rheinische Zeitung Revue,” available at https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1850/nrz-revue/index.htm.

[8] Note from Marx, Selected Works, Volume 1 (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1969), available at https://wikirouge.net/texts/en/The_Class_Struggles_in_France,_1848_to_1850#Foreword_by_Marx; “Texts published in the Neue Rheinische Zeitung. Politisch-ökonomische Revue,” available at https://wikirouge.net/texts/en/Collection:Neue_Rheinische_Zeitung._Politisch-ökonomische_Revue.

[9] Note from Marx, Selected Works, Volume 1 (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1969), available at https://wikirouge.net/texts/en/The_Class_Struggles_in_France,_1848_to_1850#Foreword_by_Marx; “Texts published in the Neue Rheinische Zeitung. Politisch-ökonomische Revue,” available at https://wikirouge.net/texts/en/Collection:Neue_Rheinische_Zeitung._Politisch-ökonomische_Revue.

[10] Marx, Class Struggles in France, at p. 33.

[11] Marx, Class Struggles in France, at p. 33.

[12] Marx, Class Struggles in France, at p. 40.

[13] Marx, Class Struggles in France, at p. 55.

[14] Marx, Class Struggles in France, at p. 60.

[15] Marx, Class Struggles in France, at p. 39.

[16] Marx, Class Struggles in France, at p. 40.

[17] Marx, Class Struggles in France, at p. 41.

[18] Marx, Class Struggles in France, at p. 41.

[19] Marx, Class Struggles in France, at p. 50.

[20] Marx, Class Struggles in France, at p. 51.

[21] It is worth noting here that although Marx was not a fan of government workshops, he called for national workshops in his “Demands of the Communist Party in Germany” in March 1848. He actually demanded national workshops. Marx fully recognized that achieving communism would have to happen in stages, in gradual steps. That was explicit in Engels’ two pre-Manifesto credos. Workshops were gradual change, that not only Blanc, but Marx himself advocated for.

[22] Marx and Engels, The Communist Manifesto, at p. 44.

[23] Marx and Engels, The Communist Manifesto, at p. 43 and 47 n.30.

[24] Engels, “Introduction” to Marx, Class Struggles in France, at p. 13.

[25] Engels, “Introduction” to Marx, Class Struggles in France, at p. 11.

[26] Marx, quoted by Engels, “Introduction” to Marx, Class Struggles in France, at p. 11.

[27] Marx, Class Struggles in France, at p. 57.

[28] Marx, Class Struggles in France, at pp. 37, 46, 47, etc.

[29] Marx, Class Struggles in France, at p. 49.

[30] Marx, Class Struggles in France, at p. 71.

[31] Marx, Class Struggles in France, at p. 116.

[32] Marx, Class Struggles in France, at p. 115-116.

[33] Marx, Class Struggles in France, at p. 126.

[34] Marx, Class Struggles in France, at p. 123-124.

[35] Marx, Class Struggles in France, at p. 126.

[36] Marx, Class Struggles in France, at p. 127.

[37] Marx, Class Struggles in France, at p. 128.

[38] Kohei Saito, Slow Down! How Degrowth Communism Can Save the Earth (W&N, 2024).

[39] Marx, Class Struggles in France, at p. 34.

[40] Marx, Class Struggles in France, at p. 37.

[41] Marx, Class Struggles in France, at p. 38.

[42] Marx, Class Struggles in France, at p. 139.

[43] Marx, Class Struggles in France, at p. 45.

[44] Marx, Class Struggles in France, at p. 63.

[45] Karl Marx, The Class Struggle in France (1848-1850) (London: Martin Lawerence, 1895), p. 50.

[46] Marx and Engels, The Communist Manifesto, at p. 20.

[47] Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, “Demands of the Communist Party in Germany,” in Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Manifesto of the Communist Party, February 1848, online at https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/download/pdf/Manifesto.pdf, at p. 56.

[48] Sylvia Wynter, “Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom: Towards the Human, After Man, Its Overrepresentation—An Argument,” The New Centennial Review 3(3), 257-337 (2003), available at https://dx.doi.org/10.1353/ncr.2004.0015, at p. 261.

[49] Du Bois, Black Reconstruction in America, p. 381 n.*.

[50] Du Bois, Black Reconstruction in America, p. 381 n.*.

[51] Du Bois, Black Reconstruction in America, p. 381 n.*.

[52] Du Bois, Black Reconstruction in America, p. 121.

[53] Du Bois, Black Reconstruction in America, p. 57.

[54] Du Bois, Black Reconstruction in America, p. 55 (subtitle).

[55] Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “General Strike,” in Rethinking Marxism, Vol. 26, No. 1, 9-14 (2014), at p. 13.

[56] Du Bois, Black Reconstruction in America, p. 591.

[57] Du Bois, Black Reconstruction in America, p. 595.

[58] Amy Allen, “Slavery, Work, and Property: Du Bois’s Black Marxism,” Nov. 29, 2020, available at https://blogs.law.columbia.edu/abolition1313/amy-allen-slavery-work-and-property-duboiss-black-marxism/

[59] Marx, Class Struggles in France, at p. 72.