By Bernard E. Harcourt
We interrupted our last seminar with the publication by Marx in November 1850 of a series of articles in the Neue Rheinisch Zeitung on the French Revolution of 1848 and the first years of the Second Republic—articles that Friedrich Engels collected and published under the title Class Struggles in France 1848-1850.
Those first two years of the French revolution of 1848 had already complicated the landscape that Marx and Engels had painted in the Communist Manifesto, published in February 1848. And Marx had already engaged in several important recalibrations of the Manifesto in his articles on Class Struggles in France 1848-1850.
First, in those 1850 articles, Marx dramatically refined and enriched the analysis of class struggles that he had sketched in the Communist Manifesto. The simple binary of bourgeoisie versus proletariat had given way to a far more nuanced analysis. The bourgeois class itself was now divided and internally conflicted between the financial aristocracy, financiers, and bankers in one camp, the industrialist and manufacturing bourgeoisie in another, the large landholding property owners in another, all separate and at odds with the petty bourgeoisie consisting of shopkeepers and merchants. Marx developed a more nuanced analysis of the proletariat class as well—with the emergence of a lumpenprolateriat that the bourgeoisie would instrumentalize as a militia against the workers. It is in Class Struggles that he wrote the most about the lumpenproletariat. In addition, the rural populations take on a far greater importance and are divided and dissected into the rural workers (the “peasants”), the small property owners, and the large farmers, who, together form what Marx qualifies as the vast majority of the French population.
So from a binary theory about two classes struggling throughout history—recall the famous opening of the Manifesto:“free men and slaves, patricians and plebeians, barons and serfs, sworn masters of journeymen, in a word, oppressors and oppressed in constant opposition, [who] waged an uninterrupted war, sometimes overt, sometimes covert, a war that always ended, either with a revolutionary transformation of the whole of society, or with the destruction of both classes in struggle”[1]—Marx proposes in Class Struggles with a fractured civil war model with multiple actors forming and breaking coalitions and alliances. It was a far more nuanced historical account already.
Second, Marx had updated his analysis of capitalism. In his earlier work, Marx had given the impression that the financial dimensions of capitalism were parasitic of the industrialist elements, of the factories, of the workers. Marx felt that the core of capitalism was the industrial form, which was crucial for revolutionary change because it was the factory workers who would rise up and crush the bourgeoisie—as “its own grave-diggers.”[2] In Class Struggles, by contrast, the financial bourgeoisie and bankers play a central role both in the collapse of the July Monarchy and at each stage of the February revolution. And the path forward for communism now turns in part on the doings of the financial bourgeoisie.
This would lead Marx back to the drawing board in his studies of political economy. In a letter to Engels from the early 1850s, Marx tells Engels that it is time to get back to work.
That is the work he would start with the Grundrisse (1857-1861), in which finance capitalism is a delicate issue. The Grundrisse starts with a chapter on money, aimed primarily against Proudhon, and creates a sharp opposition between those who work and those who make money. This will then be developed, of course, in Capital, Volume I (1867), especially in chapter 4 on the two concepts of surplus-value (one as the increase of monetary value, the other as the increase of work). More on that later.
Third, Marx is beginning to anticipate, in 1850, a longer trajectory to communism. Recall that in the Communist Manifesto, Marx and Engels had proclaimed the imminent death of capitalism: The contradictions of capital had rendered the survival of the capitalist modes of production impossible. Capitalism was in its end times. It could no longer feed its workers. The end was near.
Well, not so near, the Revolution of 1848 had revealed. Marx was chastened by the events of 1848, especially by the bloody June days in 1848 when the Parisian workers, who had risen up in arms against the bourgeois republic, were crushed.
But by the end of that period, in November 1850, Marx still seemed to express some hope for a proletarian uprising in alliance with the petty bourgeoisie and the rural populations. The national assembly had just restored a wine tax at the end of 1849 at the urging of the Bonapartist ministry, and the rural populations felt betrayed by Louis-Napoleon, whom they believed they had elected to the presidency. As Marx wrote, “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.”[3] Those words were published probably around March 1850 (they appear in the third article[4]), and the final articles were published a few months later.
That was 1850.
Then came 1851 and Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte’s coup d’état. Louis Napoleon at the time was president of the Second Republic, elected in a landslide in December 1848. (For anyone who needs a primer on French history, I gave it last time in my introduction to Marx 7/13 here). Near the expiration of his term-limited presidency, facing huge debts, Louis-Napoleon seizes power in a coup d’état on December 2, 1851, and proclaims for himself another ten years as president at the head of the Republic. In a plebiscite that he calls shortly thereafter, 92% of the male suffrage supports his new mandate.[5] This essentially paves his path to becoming emperor. One year later, to the day, on December 2, 1852, Napoleon III is declared Emperor of the French.
Meanwhile in Austria and the German states, a revolution has come and gone—as have others in Hungary, Italy, and elsewhere on the Continent. Many of the defeated revolutionaries have fled in exile to the United States.
Marx is approached by editors in New York to write about the French and German revolutions.
That gives rise to two important texts: Engels’ nineteen articles on the German situation published in the New-York Daily Tribune between October 1851 and October 1852 under the title “Germany: Revolution and Counter-Revolution”; and Marx’s seven articles on the French revolution published in Joseph Weydemeyer’s Die Revolution in New York in 1852 under the title “The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon.”
These two texts discuss not only the revolutions in France and Germany, but more importantly perhaps for us today the counterrevolutions that prevailed throughout the Continent.
We are living through, right now, in the first few weeks of the second Trump presidency, the triumph of a new offensive of the American Counterrevolution. It is critical that we study and understand this moment. Few texts are more important to do that than Engel’s Germany: Revolution and Counter-Revolution and Marx’s Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon.
So we turn to those texts today in the context of our own Counterrevolution. And to enrich our understanding, we will place these texts in conversation with Herbert Marcuse’s tract, Counterrevolution and Revolt, published in 1972 at the time of a previous triumphal offensive of counterrevolution in the wake of the Civil Rights movement and during the Vietnam War protests.
Let me start, though, by discussing the two Engels and Marx texts in order.
I. Engels, Germany: Revolution and Counter-Revolution (1851-52)
In early 1851, Marx is approached by an editor at the New-York Daily Tribune, Charles Dana, to contribute articles to the newspaper.[6] Marx agrees and begins a decade-long correspondent relationship with the Tribune that lasts until 1862.
Marx publishes under his by-line a series of nineteen articles in the Tribune from October 1851 to December 1852 about the German revolution of 1848-49—which, as you will recall, erupted in Vienna, Baden, and the German states in mid-March 1848, a few weeks after the Parisian uprisings of February 1848, and eclipsed with the dissolution of the Frankfurt National Assembly (May 1849) and the military defeat of the May insurrections by the middle of July, 1849.[7]
Those articles were later collected, edited, and published by Marx’s daughter, Eleanor Marx-Aveling, in 1896, under the title Revolution and Counter-Revolution, Or Germany in 1848.[8] At the time of that edition, Eleanor Marx-Aveling did not have access to the Marx-Engels correspondence.
The Marx-Engels correspondence reveals that Engels is the one who drafted these articles at Marx’s request. In a letter dated August 14, 1851, Marx asked Engels to write “a series of articles about Germany, from 1848 onwards.”[9] Engels agreed and drafted the set of articles based on almost daily correspondence with Marx and sent them to Marx. According to the editors of the MECW, “Engels used as the main source of reference a file of the Neue Rheinische Zeitung, apart from some additional material given him by Marx, whom he constantly consulted and who read every article before mailing it.”[10]
The articles were published in the Tribune under Marx’s by-line and a general heading “Germany: Revolution and Counter-Revolution.” Each article was numbered and thus did not carry titled captions.[11]
The Text: Germany: Revolution and Counter-Revolution
Engels kicks off the articles with the kind of flourish we are used to from Marx, declaring the revolutions of 1848 dead and over. The opening line sets the tone: “The first act of the revolutionary drama on the continent of Europe has closed.”[12] Engels follows that up in the opening of the next paragraph by referring to the most “signal defeat” of a revolution one could possibly imagine.[13]
Although the revolutions on the Continent were roundly defeated, Engels—like Marx in Class Struggles—focuses on the positive, on the silver lining: the revolutions achieved a change of consciousness. People throughout Europe now understood that these revolutions were not the product of a handful of extremists, but the sign of real social unrest and demands in the face of “outworn institutions.”[14] In other words, the revolutions transformed the public sphere. Plus, their repression only made them stronger and more likely to succeed the next time around.
As with the Manifesto and Class Struggles, Engels’ articles are a call to arms. They are intended to motivate revolutionary fervor. Engels implicates himself. He is engaged in the struggle. Engels is not merely describing what happened, he is calling for the next revolution: “If, then, we have been beaten, we have nothing else to do but to begin again from the beginning.”[15] It is important to realize that many German, Hungarian, and other revolutionaries fled the Continent in 1849, with the armed defeat of the revolutions, found exile in New York and the United States, and would have counted themselves among the readers of the Tribune).
Engels emphasizes that defeat is a driving force in revolution. Rehearsing a main theme from Class Conflicts in France, Engels argues that revolutionary losses represent fuel for the revolutionary movement. “A well-contested defeat is a fact of as much revolutionary importance as an easily-won victory,” Engels writes.[16] He goes on to say, by means of illustration, that “The defeats of Paris in June, 1848, and of Vienna, in October, certainly did far more in revolutionizing the minds of the people of these two cities than the victories of February and March.”[17]
This actually leads him to argue that in November 1848 the Assembly and the people of Berlin should have fought the Prussian army in the streets, rather than delivering themselves and their city to the incoming soldiers. “The Assembly and the people of Berlin would, probably, have shared the fate of the two towns above-named; but they would have fallen gloriously, and would have left behind themselves, in the minds of the survivors, a wish of revenge which in revolutionary times is one of the highest incentives to energetic and passionate action. It is a matter of course that, in every struggle, he who takes up the gauntlet risks being beaten; but is that a reason why he should confess himself beaten, and submit to the yoke without drawing the sword?”[18]
The articles reflect Engels’ passion for war strategy. Engels sets forth strategic principles for an insurrection, such as the need to always stay on the offensive and to always act with audacity. “Insurrection is an art quite as much as war or any other, and subject to certain rules of proceeding, which, when neglected, will produce the ruin of the party neglecting them.”[19] These passages are resoundingly military in strategy. Revolutions are won or lost, Engels argues, on decisiveness, on offensiveness, on resolution: on showing a strong front, on attacking, on being on the offensive, on “the highest necessity to stake everything on the decisive moment, whatever the odds may be.”[20] As Engles writes, “in the words of Danton, the greatest master of revolutionary policy yet known, de l’audace, de l’audace, encore de l’audace!”[21]
Engels focuses the reader’s attention on those decisive moments, often decrying the revolutionaries for their lack of courage, resolve, and strategic acumen. This is especially so regarding the final defeat of the revolutionaries in the summer of 1849—marked by the “often inconceivable panic in the revolutionary army.”[22] Engels denounces the “slovenly,” “stolid” leadership of revolutionary commanders.[23] “Everything was got into confusion, every good opportunity was lost, every precious moment was loitered away with planning colossal, but impracticable projects,” he laments.[24]
But he also recognizes the symbolic and contagious effect of some decisive moments. One of them is actually the bloody June defeat of the Parisian workers, which ricocheted throughout the Continent. Engels argues that the crushing defeat of the workers in Paris energized the counterrevolution across Europe. “The proletarians of Paris were defeated, decimated, crushed with such an effect that even now they have not yet recovered from the blow,” Engels writes. “And immediately, all over Europe, the new and old Conservatives and Counter-Revolutionists raised their heads with an effrontery that showed how well they understood the importance of the event. The Press was everywhere attacked, the rights of meeting and association were interfered with, every little event in every small provincial town was taken profit of to disarm the people to declare a state of siege, to drill the troops in the new maneuvers and artifices that Cavaignac had taught them.”[25]
It was from that moment on, Engels suggests, that the counterrevolution in the German states got the wind in their sails. “For the first time since February, the invincibility of a popular insurrection in a large town had been proved to be a delusion; the honor of the armies had been restored; the troops hitherto always defeated in street battles of importance regained confidence in their efficiency even in this kind of struggle,” Engels writes. “From this defeat of the ouvriers of Paris may be dated the first positive steps and definite plans of the old feudal bureaucratic party in Germany, to get rid even of their momentary allies, the middle classes, and to restore Germany to the state she was in before the events of March.”[26]
In the articles, Engels identifies the parts played by every different class—and the struggles between and within those classes—in both the revolutionary struggles and the counterrevolutionary reactions. He describes the feudal nobility, which by contrast to France and England had retained most of their ancient privileges still at mid-century. He analyzes the backward manufacturing bourgeoisie and how it had become part of the liberal opposition.[27] In fact, he even describes the place of German philosophy and literature, and Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, and the “Young Hegelians,” to show the emergence of a liberal ideology of constitutional monarchy that fueled a confrontation with the various monarchs of the German states. “German philosophy,” Engels writes, “that most complicated, but at the same time most sure thermometer of the development of the German mind, had declared for the middle class [by which he means the bourgeoisie], when Hegel in his Philosophy of Law pronounced Constitutional Monarchy to be the final and most perfect form of government.”[28] Engels adds, to explain: “In other words, he proclaimed the approaching advent of the middle classes of the country to political power.”[29] Engels even gives a short genealogy of the Rheinische Zeitung (Rhenish Gazette) that Marx edited in Cologne from 1842 to 1843 (see Introduction to Marx 2/13). Engels writes:
In the Rhine Provinces, and more or less generally all over Prussia, they [the middle classes, i.e. the bourgeoisie] were so exasperated that they, being short themselves of men able to represent them in the Press, went to the length of an alliance with the extreme philosophical party, of which we have spoken above. The fruit of this alliance was the Rhenish Gazette of Cologne, a paper which was suppressed after fifteen months’ existence, but from which may be dated the existence of the Newspaper Press in Germany. This was in 1842.[30]
We should place a landmark here for our future discussions of ideology and of cultural studies, especially Stuart Hall’s British school of cultural studies. More on that soon.
Engels writes as well about the petty tradesmen and shopkeeping class, in other words the petty bourgeoisie, who he considered to be “the leading class of the insurrection of May, 1849.”[31] The working class, which he describes as more akin to small tradesmen of the Middle Ages, also took up arms, following what he calls “its only true policy”: namely, “ to allow no class that has risen on its shoulders (as the bourgeoisie had done in 1848) to fortify its class-government, without opening, at least, a fair field to the working classes for the struggle for its own interests.”[32] Engels also describes the rural classes, the country folk—from the large and wealthy property owners, from the small freeholders, the feudal tenants, and the agricultural laborers—the latter of which “lived and died poor, ill-fed, and the slaves of their employers.”[33] The rural populations that joined the fight in 1849 did so, Engels tells us, because of “the relatively enormous load of taxation” and the “feudal burdens pressing upon them.”[34]
Engels acknowledges the difficulty of revolutions and the way that, when successful, they immediately lead to internal conflict, factionalism, and collapse. “No sooner is the victory gained against the common enemy,” Engels writes, “than the victors become divided among themselves into different camps and turn their weapons against each other.”[35]
But at the same time, the failures push history forward in a revolutionary direction. They trigger the internal class divides and antagonisms that produce progress and that motor history. “It is this rapid and passionate development of class antagonism which, in old and complicated social organisms, makes a revolution such a powerful agent of social and political progress; it is this incessantly quick upshooting of new parties succeeding each other in power, which, during those violent commotions, makes a nation pass in five years over more ground than it would have done in a century under ordinary circumstances.”[36]
Where does Engels get that optimism? That idea of progress? First, from the belief that repression invigorates revolt: “every attempt at forcible repression will only bring it forth stronger and stronger, until it bursts its fetters.”[37] But second, and perhaps more importantly, from the materialist theory of history, namely from the idea that society must go through the phases of capitalism and industrialization in order to ultimately achieve communism.
Important to recognize that Engels is at the height of his interest in military strategy. He has just come off the barricades at Baden, fought and was defeated in the battle of Rinnthal in June 1849 in the Palatine, escaped to Switzerland. He is writing about events that he witnessed first-hand, more that he participated in. He is now plunging himself in the study of military strategy, or as the editors of MECW write, “immersed himself in studying the art of war.”[38] These articles reflect his fascination with revolutionary military strategy.
Engels will eventually distance himself from the arts of war. By the time he writes his 1895 introduction to Marx’s Class Struggles in France, he has a much less sanguine view of street fighting. “Let us have no illusions about it,” he emphasizes there: “a real victory of an insurrection over the military in street fighting, a victory between two armies, is one of the rarest exceptions.”[39] Engels then explains how the relations of force have tilted in favor of the armies, and concludes:
Does that mean that in the future street fighting will no longer play any role? Certainly not. It only means that the conditions since 1848 have become far more unfavourable for civilian fighters and far more favourable for the military. In future, street fighting can, therefore, be victorious only if this disadvantageous situation is compensated by other factors. Accordingly, it will occur more seldom at the beginning of a great revolution than at its later stages, and will have to be undertaken with greater forces. These, however, may then well prefer, as in the whole great French Revolution or on September 4 and October 31, 1870, in Paris, the open attack to passive barricade tactics.[40]
For the Engels of 1895, revolutionary workers need to be much more careful about taking to the streets with arms, and far more strategic about it. “The time of surprise attacks, of revolutions carried through by small conscious minorities at the head of masses lacking consciousness is past.”[41] Now, different tactics come to the fore, such as “slow propaganda work” and “parliamentary activity.”[42]
In 1895, Engels extols the electoral encroachments of the German Social Democrats and its two million voters, and warns against undermining that progress by street fighting that would only bring about repression and a blood bath. Engels remarks how the communist revolutionaries are becoming far more successful, and properly so, through the ballot box than the gun. “The irony of world history turns everything upside down. We, the ‘revolutionaries,’ the ‘overthrowers’—we are thriving far better on legal methods than on illegal methods and overthrow.”[43]
But that is a very different Engels talking than the one from Revolution and Counter-Revolution in Germany!
Let’s move on now to Marx’s text.
The Eighteenth of Brumaire of Louis Napoleon
In the immediate wake of the coup (December 1851) through mid-February 1852, Marx writes seven articles on the events surrounding the 1848 revolution under the title The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte. Intended for serial publication in a weekly newspaper, the articles are instead published all together in Spring 1852 in a monthly paper called Die Revolution edited in New York by Joseph Weydemeyer, a long-time friend and collaborator. At the time, Marx is living in London, where he had moved with his family after being expelled from Germany by the Prussian government in May 1849. He has just finished editing and publishing the last issue of the Neue Rheinische Zeitung in November 1850 and is now immersed in his economic research and journalistic writings (reproduced in MECW Volume 11).
In the preface to the 1869 edition of The Eighteenth Brumaire, Marx provides some background context regarding the writing of the text:
My friend Joseph Weydemeyer […] intended to publish a political weekly in New York starting from January 1, 1852. He invited me to provide this weekly with a history of the coup d’état. Down to the middle of February, I accordingly wrote him weekly articles under the title The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte. Meanwhile, Weydemeyer’s original plan had fallen through. Instead, in the spring of 1852 he began to publish a monthly, Die Revolution, whose first number consists of my Eighteenth Brumaire. A few hundred copies of this found their way into Germany at that time […]
From the above facts it will be seen that the present work took shape under the immediate pressure of events and its historical material does not extend beyond the month of February, 1852.[44]
(Recall that Napoleon seizes power on Dec. 2, 1851, and is declared emperor on Dec. 2, 1852. So these articles are written and published smack in the middle of those two events—the coup and the imperialization).
Marx’s Contribution to the Theory of Class Struggle
At around the time that he publishes The Eighteenth Brumaire, Marx specifies exactly what his contribution to the theory of class struggle consists of. In a letter to Joseph Weydemeyer dated March 5, 1852, Marx writes:
And now as to myself, no credit is due to me for discovering the existence of classes in modern society or the struggle between them. Long before me bourgeois historians had described the historical development of this class struggle and bourgeois economists the economic anatomy of the classes. What I did that was new was to prove: 1) that the existence of classes is only bound up with particular historical phases in the development of production, 2) that the class struggle necessarily leads to the dictatorship of the proletariat, 3) that this dictatorship itself only constitutes the transition to the abolition of all classes and to a classless society.[45]
The first thesis—“that the existence of classes is only bound up with particular historical phases in the development of production”—Marx established in the 1844 Paris manuscripts, the 1845-46 Brussels manuscripts (The German Ideology), and the Communist Manifesto. In those works, Marx demonstrated, for instance, that the proletariat was only born with industrialization and did not exist beforehand.
The second thesis—“that the class struggle necessarily leads to the dictatorship of the proletariat”—Marx set forth in the Brussels manuscripts and the Manifesto.[46]
The third thesis—“that this dictatorship itself only constitutes the transition to the abolition of all classes and to a classless society”—is from the Manifesto.
These three theses undergird the text of the Eighteenth Brumaire.
The Significance of The Eighteenth Brumaire
In his preface to the second edition of the Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, written in 1869, Marx emphasizes the central thesis of his work: to demonstrate that the rise of Napoleon III was the product of class struggles in France and not a “great man” story. The famous sentence that encapsulates the argument is the one where Marx states that his objective in writing the articles 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.”[47] We tend to emphasize the humor in that sentence—the idea of a grotesque mediocrity—at the expense of the theoretical thrust of the sentence. But the important point is that the entire account is a study about class struggles and how they played out, not about the rise of an individual, nor about Louis Napoleon himself. Marx is emphasizing that this is not a traditional “great man” story—not even the story of a grotesque mediocrity’s rise to power. The engine of history is entirely the social conflicts, not the individual. Marx attacks the two other books on the coup d’état that have drawn attention—those by Victor Hugo and by Pierre-Joseph Proudhon—precisely for turning the individual, Louis Bonaparte, into the agent of history, when in fact he is not the main actor of history, which is rather the proletariat and other classes in conflict.
Engels had done the same in the articles on Germany: to show that the revolutions, as well as counterrevolutions, “were not the work of single individuals, but spontaneous, irresistible manifestations of national wants and necessities, more or less clearly understood, but very distinctly felt by numerous classes in every country.”[48] The political project is make people understand the larger forces at play—so as not to be blindsided.
Marx specifically targets the idea of “Caesarism.” He criticizes any parallel between the rise of Napoleon III and the rise of the Roman emperors. This is not a story about emperors, nor the desire or lust for imperial power, nor the desire to have an emperor, or what is called Caesarism, because the conditions were totally different in ancient Rome. In ancient Rome, the enslaved population was purely passive, it played no role. According to Marx, Caesar may have been the product of class struggle, but one that only involved the privileged: “the class struggle took place only within a privileged minority, between the free rich and the free poor, while the great productive mass of the population, the slaves, formed the purely passive pedestal for these combatants.”[49] By contrast, at mid-century France, the proletariat, the working class, is an active participant in the class struggles. Therefore the analogy to Rome, to the rise of Caesar or emperors, or to Caesarism, is entirely inapposite. What is important to understand in mid-century France is precisely the role of the proletariat in class struggle that serves as the engine of history. This is completely different than the Roman period where the enslaved persons, so the Roman proletariat, played no role. In referring to Sismondi, Marx writes “The Roman proletariat lived at the expense of society, while modern society lives at the expense of the proletariat.”[50] That being the case, there is nothing in common between the Roman experience and the French coup d’etat.
Again, the central point of the Eighteenth Brumaire is to detail the class conflicts that made possible the rise of Napoleon III—the class conflicts and the proletariat struggles. It is not surprising that Friedrich Engels would call the earlier writings from 1850 “Class Struggles in France,” which we studied last week. Perhaps it is worth repeating here the “great law of motion of history” that Engels discusses in his preface to the third edition. Now we must, of course, discount Engels’s over-enthusiasm and take his formulation with a grain of salt. But I think that it reflects the basic idea that Marx was trying to get at. So we should read it less dogmatically, less rigidly, and less scientifically than Engels wrote it, but there is in there the grain of what I was just talking about. Engels writes that what Marx discovered and what permeates the Eighteenth Brumaire is “the law according to which all historical struggles […] are in fact only the more or less clear expression of struggles of social classes.”[51] That’s the first point. The second point is that these class struggles “are in turn conditioned by the degree of development of their economic position, by the mode of their production and of their exchange determined by it.”[52] So, second, that the classes and the relations between the classes are determined by modes of production and this applies to all historical struggles—Engels writes “political, religious, philosophical or some other ideological domain.”[53] Now, we can criticize Engels for trying to render scientific Marxist thought or rigid or too law based, but that is effectively the core of Marx’s contribution in the Eighteenth Brumaire. It is an analysis of how class struggles themselves, shaped by economic relations of production, serve as the law of motion of history.
The Historical Account
Right in the first article, Marx delivers a succinct history of the French revolution of 1848 in three phases.
The first period, from the outbreak of the Parisian uprising in February 1848 to the meeting of the National Assembly in May 1848, is the provisional transition period that witnesses the overthrow of Louis Philippe and the July monarchy, and the temporary establishment of a provisional government—a period in which everything is considered provisional. During this first period, all of the different social classes and actors—from the bourgeoisie, to the petty bourgeoisie, to the workers—form part of the provisional government, so none in effect stand out. “Nothing and nobody ventured to lay claim to the right of existence and of real action,” Marx writes.[54]
The second period, from May 1848 to the end of May 1849, witnesses the defeat of the workers during the bloody June days and the establishment of the bourgeois republic. In the bourgeois republic, Marx says, the entirety of the bourgeoisie rules for the people, by contrast to the earlier bourgeois monarchy, the July monarchy, in which only parts of the bourgeoisie had ruled in the name of Louis Philippe.[55] This occurs as a result of the crushing of the Parisian workers in June 1848. Marx characterizes the June insurrection as “the most colossal event in the history of European civil wars.”[56] Marx details the different classes and interests that united to defeat the workers: “the finance aristocracy, the industrial bourgeoisie, the middle class, the petty bourgeois, the army, the lumpenproletariat organized as the Mobile Guard, the intellectuals, the clergy and the rural population.”[57] They all stood unified against the workers, all by themselves. “On the side of the Paris proletariat stood none but itself,” Marx writes.[58] The result was brutal and bloody. “More than 3,000 insurgents were butchered after the victory, and 15,000 were deported without trial.”[59] And with that, the proletariat would no longer play an important role in the following developments. As Marx writes: “With this defeat the proletariat recedes into the background on the revolutionary stage.”[60] Marx contends that the proletariat turns instead to more limited, autonomous, or self-contained projects, like workers’ associations and exchange banks, that are separate from larger society—what might be thought of as cooperative projects among workers.[61] He speaks of a proletariat “movement in which it renounces the revolutionizing of the old world by means of the latter’s own great, combined resources, and seeks, rather, to achieve its salvation behind society’s back, in private fashion, within its limited conditions of existence.”[62] This sounds very much like the forms of cooperation that could serve today as an alternative to capitalism… And in the place of the workers, there rises the “dictatorship of the pure bourgeois republicans.”[63] It is, though, a short lived dictatorship, set aside in a matter of months on December 10, 1848, by the election of Louis Napoleon as president of the Second Republic, and later, on May 28, 1849, by the exit from the stage of the Constituent Assembly.[64]
The third and final period, from May 28, 1849, and the date of the opening of the Legislative National Assembly, to December 2, 1851, when Louis Napoleon conducts his coup d’état, Marx characterizes as the period of the constitutional republic.[65] It is marked by three periods itself. First, in the months till June 1849, by the defeat of the petty-bourgeoisie at the hands of the bourgeoisie and Louis Napoleon. Second, a period of parliamentary struggle ending with the abolition of universal (male) suffrage with the law of May 31, 1850. And finally, the last months of the Republic that mark the end of the bourgeois rule and the restoration of Empire.[66]
The Import of the Text
Napoleon’s coup and the writing of The Eighteenth Brumaire would settle a few things for Marx—at least temporarily.
First, Marx is far more clear that the rural populations are in fact a reactionary force. They play a decisive role in the crushing of the proletariat and the rise to power of Louis-Napoleon. Marx is very hard on the “peasants” in The Eighteenth Brumaire. As he writes, “Bonaparte represents a class, and the most numerous class of French society at that, the small-holding peasantry. Just as the Bourbons were the dynasty of the big landed property and just as the Orleans the dynasty of money, so the Bonapartes are the dynasty of the peasants, that is, the French masses. Not the Bonaparte who submitted to the bourgeois parliament, but the Bonaparte who dismissed the bourgeois parliament is the chosen man of the peasantry.”[67]
Marx then launches into a long disquisition attacking the French peasantry. Long paragraphs of the final article that eviscerate the rural populations. “They are,” he writes, “incapable of enforcing their class interests in their own name, whether through a parliament or a convention. They cannot represent themselves, they must be represented. Their representative must at the same time appear as their master, as an authority over them, as an unlimited governmental power that protects them against the other classes and sends them rain and sunshine from above. The political influence of the small-holding peasants, therefore, finds its final expression in the executive power subordinating society to itself.”[68]Note that this is the passage that Gayatri Spivak famously deploys in “Can the Subaltern Speak?” – the passage about having to be represented and the different German words that Marx uses.[69]
It is in this context that Marx develops a theory about the distinction between a “class in itself” and a “class for itself.” This is a hotly contested distinction—some people praise the analysis, others criticize it, and still others do not believe there even is such a distinction made.[70] Scholars point to a passage in the Eighteenth Brumaire, and usually accompany it with a passage from The Poverty of Philosophy where Marx expressly uses the term “a class for itself.”[71] The passage in Eighteenth Brumaire is:
Insofar as millions of families live under economic conditions of existence that separate their mode of life, their interests and their culture from those of the other classes, and put them in hostile opposition to the latter, they form a class. Insofar as there is merely a local interconnection among these small-holding peasants, and the identity of their interests begets no community, no national bond and no political organisation among them, they do not form a class.[72]
This raises important questions as to how a class becomes a class for itself and what are the different stages that are required to pass from one to the other.
Second, Marx recognizes that while there are revolutionary elements among the proletariat and artisans, there are also many workers who are reactionary. Not all of them are radicalized. Not all of them are revolutionaries. Following the June defeat, especially, the proletariat disappoint. “The more important leaders of the proletariat in the Assembly and in the press successively fall victim to the courts, and ever more equivocal figures come to head it,” Marx writes.[73] Even more caustically: “It seems to be unable either to rediscover revolutionary greatness in itself or to win new energy from the connections newly entered into.”[74]
Third, Marx entrenches his more nuanced analysis of classes. They are no longer binary. There are multiple different groups in a society that forms a civil war. Earlier, in the Brussels manuscripts (The German Ideology) for instance, Marx consistently spoke of a polarization of society into two separate classes. He wrote of the polarization within the ancient communal contexts, noting that there, “The class relation between citizens and slaves is now completely developed.”[75]He spoke of the subsequent polarization between the cities and the country, and then of the rise of the proletariat. In the Communist Manifesto, famously, Marx opens with the polarization of society throughout history. But here, the class analysis is far more nuanced and modeled on a civil war.
Note that these are not permanent shifts for Marx. They are more like ebbs and flows—any coherence or permanence is just academics trying to impose coherence to the oeuvre. So, for instance, a more linear schematic resurfaces in the 1859 “Preface” from The Critique of Political Economy, which takes up once again a more linear history similar to the Brussels manuscripts (binary opposition of classes through the progression of ancient, feudal, and capitalist regimes) with a more simplified binary class struggle, and the rural populations there, for instance, are left aside as simply a derivative problem and a contingency. And we will find again duality and polarization in Capital, especially in the passages discussing the laws of populations and the proletarian product.
Fourth, Marx develops a more refined comparison of the bourgeois versus the proletarian revolutions. He has more material to theorize now. The bourgeois revolutions of the eighteenth century, he characterizes as dramatic but short lived. They “storm swiftly from success to success, their dramatic effects outdo each other, men and things seem set in sparkling diamonds, ecstasy is the everyday spirit, but they are short-lived, soon they have reached their zenith, and a long crapulent depression seizes society before it learns soberly to assimilate the results of its storm-and-stress period.”[76] By contrast, the proletarian revolutions of the nineteenth century are far more agonistic, self-critical, demanding of themselves, and self-questioning. They “criticize themselves constantly, interrupt themselves continually in their own course, come back to the apparently accomplished in order to begin it afresh, deride with unmerciful thoroughness the inadequacies, weaknesses and paltriness of their first attempts, […] and recoil again and again from the indefinite prodigiousness of their own aims…”[77] They are not satisfied with any talk about what they have accomplished, nor any mere claims. They want to see things being done, and know people by their deeds. Borrowing from Aesop’s fable of the Boastful Athlete, Marx famously writes:
Hic Rhodus, hic salta!
Here is the rose, here dance![78]
Fifth, with 1848-50, Marx mostly sets aside the notion of ideology. If it was important in 1845-46 in the Brussels manuscripts—although there, I argued it was about ideologues more than ideologies—Marx is already moving away from it in 1848 in the Communist Manifesto. In the Manifesto, there is no real use of the concept of ideology already. Marx mentions ideologues, yes, but not ideology. After the 1848 revolution, Marx will not really return to the idea of ideology. As Étienne Balibar emphasizes in his reading: Althusser may not have been entirely correct with regard to his hypothesis of an epistemological rupture in Marx in 1845. But there certainly was a rupture. Balibar places it at 1848 and the revolution, after which Marx decides that he needs to break with the past and really study political economy.
At the end of the Eighteenth Brumaire, Marx concludes on an optimistic note, always finding the silver lining in the defeat, always seeing the necessary progress of history. The centralization of power in the executive, with Napoleon III, Marx views as a positive and necessary step forward for the revolution. For the revolution now has a singular target. Like the political revolutions of the eighteenth century, which faced off against the king and monarchy, the locus of power is now centralized for the proletariat revolution to target. And so, Marx writes:
But the revolution is thorough. It is still journeying through purgatory. It does its work methodically. By December 2, 1851 it had completed one half of its preparatory work; it is now completing the other half. First it perfected the parliamentary power, in order to be able to overthrow it. Now that it has attained this, it perfects the executive power, reduces it to its purest expression, isolates it, sets it up against itself as the sole target, in order to concentrate all its forces of destruction against it. And when it has done this second half of its preliminary work, Europe will leap from its seat and exultantly exclaim: Well burrowed, old mole![79]
Two Famous Quotes
I would be remiss not to mention as well that the Eighteenth Brumaire is where two of the most iconic passages and quotations of Marx were published the first and they are connected.
The first is the opening line of the essay: “Hegel remarks somewhere that all facts and personages of great importance in world history occur, as it were, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second as farce.”[80] He is referring, of course, to the relationship between Napoleon and Napoleon III.
The second famous line opens the second paragraph: “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 circumstances directly encountered, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all the dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brain of the living.”[81]
The second passage is connected to the first since it is the weight of the dead generations that makes people borrow from the past and create from tragedy a farce; but readers have projected much more into that second passage, having to do with Marx’s account of history.
In any event, it would be shirking responsibility not to include those passages in any introduction of the Eighteenth Brumaire, since they are some of the most quoted passages of Marx in history.
Aftermath
We all know what happens next. A few months after the publication of The Eighteenth Brumaire—one year day for day after the coup d’état itself—on December 2, 1852, Louis Napoleon Bonaparte is declared emperor of the French and takes on the name of Napoleon III. This time, the plebiscite of male voters favors the new emperor by 97%.[82] At the same moment, capitalism starts taking off again. There is an economic boom. The Suez Canal opens in 1869. Finance capitalism blossoms. And the resistance retreats. In England, the Chartists become reformist. Marx returns to work on political economy and focuses on his tomes, first the Grundrisse and then Capital.
There will be one other major historical episode that will return Marx to these kinds of historical-political-journalistic writings: the Commune. We will get to those writings in Marx 12/13 with Bruno Bosteels when we turn to the Civil War in France, where Marx addressed the Paris revolution of 1870-71.
Stuart Hall on the Eighteenth Brumaire
Stuart Hall considered Marx’s Eighteenth Brumaire as a model for cultural studies, and so I’d like to take a moment to discuss Hall’s reading. First, some background on British cultural studies.
In Cultural Studies 1983: A Theoretical History, Stuart Hall offers a genealogy of the formation of British cultural studies, from its inception in the 1950s and early 1960s to the time in 1983 when he is lecturing at the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign.[83] Hall emphasizes how cultural studies in England grew out of a moment of reflection in the 1950s during a period of economic affluence in England, in the post-Second World War period, and responded to the question of the transformation of the working class during a period of capitalist affluence—in his words, “to a very concrete politicalproblem and question: What happened to the working class under conditions of economic affluence?”[84]
Cultural studies in England grew out of the work of literary criticism at first, especially that of Richard Hoggart and Raymond Williams, who applied a thick literary critical reading to cultural phenomena. So it grew out of literary criticism and close readings, but eventually began to borrow tools from other disciplines, such as anthropology and sociology, so that the intellectual movement extended its close reading to political and economic and cultural and social phenomena. At the time, Marx and Marxism were dangerous for intellectuals. This was during the Cold War and the censorship of leftist ideals and ideas in the West. It was only after the revolution, defeat, and invasion of Hungary in 1956 and the birth of a New Left movement that cultural studies began to more explicitly embrace Marxist cultural theory and the framework of class analysis. But it was always in deep tension with more economistic or scientific Marxisms because it emphasized the degrees of freedom of culture and of social meaning. It always took at its as its target and point of deepest contradiction the Marxist theories of base and superstructure. For this reason, the cultural studies movement always privileged the earlier Marx of the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844, the more humanistic philosophical Marx, the Hegelian Marx. Cultural studies engaged more the early humanistic Marx, the Marx writings that “gave a much wider reach to the elements of consciousness, to the question of human needs, etc.”[85]
The question of base and superstructure was always at the heart of cultural studies, since it focused on those elements that were supposedly superstructural, and did so in a way that gave them forms of autonomy, that rejected the idea of determinism. As Hall writes, “the distinctiveness of the Marxist version of Cultural Studies is surely that it finds a way of thinking the domain of cultural production, the domain of the symbolic, in relation to the material foundations.”[86] Hall traces the intellectual movement through Raymond Williams and E.P. Thompson and Hoggart, through the early stages of the Center for Contemporary Cultural Studies that Hoggart established at the University of Manchester, and that Hall inherited and took over as director in 1969 when Hoggart left for UNESCO.
This genealogy highlights the three key dimensions of cultural studies: first, the fact that it was born as a political project, as Hall writes, “as a way of analyzing postwar advanced capitalist culture.”[87] It is, first, a political project trying to understand how the cultural and social dimensions were interacting with the political and economic. The second dimension is its basis in literary criticism and the application of literary criticism techniques to cultural phenomena, especially in Stuart Hall’s work, to phenomena like youth cultures in Britain, the emergence of different kind of cultural forms among the youth in Great Britain. The third dimension is the influence of Marx’s philosophical writings, especially the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844, as a way to motivate the New Left.
In an important chapter, the fourth lecture titled “Rethinking the Base and Superstructure,” Stuart Hall takes on directly the problem of culture as superstructure. Hall is adamant in rejecting a theory of ideology that would be grounded on a notion of false consciousness. E. P. Thompson was as well.[88] Hall’s main criticism is that the idea of false consciousness always seems to apply automatically to other people and not oneself. “I wonder how it is that all the people I know are absolutely convinced that they are not in false consciousness, but can tell at the drop of a hat that everybody else is.”[89] This is again a part of the rejection of the base-superstructure model, since ideology naturally fits in the superstructural zone.
It is in this context that Stuart Hall discusses at length Marx’s Eighteenth Brumaire, which he treats as a model for cultural studies, especially insofar as it rejects the more mechanistic model that is articulated in the 1859 Preface from The Critique of Political Economy, and in the Introduction to the Grundrisse. Hall argues that the task is to push Marx’s analytic work from Capital towards the analysis of real social formations, and he argues that Marx did that best and provided the best model in the Eighteenth Brumaire: “one of the best examples of how that kind of analysis would be done is precisely The Eighteenth Brumaire.”[90]
Hall proposes an analysis of the model of the Eighteenth Brumaire. He shows how targeted it is on the specific historical conjuncture, how it highlights the variety of social and political forces that had conflicted in a sharp way, and how such a model included more detail and relief than if one focused only on modes of production. All of a sudden, he suggests, and by contrast to the Communist Manifesto, we see “the army, priests, officials, lawyers, writers and journalists” appear as real political forces, as well as “the great landowners, the industrial bourgeoisie, the financial bourgeoisie, the industrial proletariat, the peasantry and the lumpen proletariat.”[91] All of these factions and micro-classes come into focus in the articles and displace the simple binary opposition between the bourgeoisie and proletariat. “The language of politics in The Eighteenth Brumaire is never a language of whole classes ruling of over other whole classes.”[92] The analysis is far more nuanced than the determinism, especially of vulgar Marxism. “The relationship between classes and political organisations cannot be described at the level of the determinacy of the mode of production,” Hall writes; “it requires a quite different kind of analysis.”[93] Meanings become important, understandings as well. And this does not mean, Hall emphasizes, that the modes of production are irrelevant. No, instead, Marx does a nuanced job of incorporating financial capitalism and industrial capitalism and the rural economy. Hall claims that “the determination is extremely weak, extremely distant. We can only say it establishes certain limits within which the political relates to the economic, that it sets limits and opens possibilities, possible forms, including some that were not tried during that time.”[94] Hall concludes with this paragraph:
There is a relationship here between base and superstructure, between classes and the emergence of new structures of political power, but the analysis is radically different from an attempt to apply the classical base-superstructure model in a straightforward way. The model that Marx actually employs does have a place for social contradictions other than those which arise from the contradiction between capital and labour. The analysis is built, centrally, upon references to social movements, social groupings, alliances, and blocs which do not have a clear class character, although it is clear that the intrinsic language of the analysis remains decidedly materialist. The Eighteenth Brumaire, then, offers an alternative to the classical base-superstructure metaphor without giving up the ground that the metaphor has won.[95]
Herbert Marcuse, Counterrevolution and Revolt
At Marx 8/13, we will focus on the ongoing counterrevolution in the United States. So I thought it would be enlightening to read Marx and Engels’ work on counterrevolutions in conversation with Herbert Marcuse’s book Counter-Revolution and Revolt
Marcuse’s book is a radical update and counterpoint to Marx and Engels’ writings on the counterrevolutions of 1848-52. Writing in 1972, Marcuse argues that the United States and Western Europe are in a new phase of counterrevolution, representing the culmination of the development of capitalism. If Lenin spoke of imperialism as the final stage of capitalism, it is fair to say that Marcuse describes the counterrevolution as the newest stage. In the bold formulation of the first sentence of the book, Marcuse declares: “The Western world has reached a new stage of development: now, the defense of the capitalist system requires the organization of counterrevolution at home and abroad.”[96]
Marcuse argues that the current stage of capitalism has created the need for these counterrevolutionary practices. As he writes, “the ‘bourgeois-democratic’ phase of capitalism terminates in the new counter revolutionary phase.”[97]
Marcuse makes clear that the new form of counterrevolution being waged by the West is as extreme as fascism and Nazism, even though it differs from them and retains the veneer of certain liberal institutions. “History does not repeat itself exactly,” Marcuse emphasizes.[98] To be sure, like earlier ones, the present incarnation of the counterrevolution involves torture and massacres at the worst level. Marcuse is referring, for instance, to the slaughter of student protesters in Mexico City, to the shooting of students at Jackson State and Kent State, to the assassination of black militants like Fred Hampton and George Jackson. He is describing the police and CIA operations in the United States under the Nixon administration. But there is a difference with the counterrevolutions of 1848.
Marcuse suggests that the current counterrevolution—by contrast to the earlier ones, like those in 1848-52—is not a response to a revolutionary insurrection, and so, in this regard, the current situation differs markedly from Marx and Engels’s writings. Marcuse is clear that the counterrevolution in 1972 is preventative. It does not follow from a revolution, but instead is the product of the fear of a revolution. Marcuse writes: “The counter revolution is largely preventive, and, in the Western world, altogether preventive. Here, there is no recent revolution to be undone, and there is none in the offing.”[99] There is no revolutionary uprising like that of the Parisian proletariat in February or June 1848, or the German workers in March 1848 or June 1849, that would be pushing capitalism towards a counterrevolution. It is only the fear of a revolution. “Fear of revolution,” he writes, “which creates the common interest, links the various stages and forms of the counterrevolution.”[100] The counterrevolution—which, he says, “runs the whole gamut from parliamentary democracy via the police state to open dictatorship”—is the product of deliberate capitalist organization in the face of the threat, not the reality of a revolution. In part, the counterrevolution is evidence of fear among capitalists. According to Marcuse, there is a sense that capitalism is unable to satisfy the needs which it creates.[101] There is a sense that trouble is on the horizon. It is to offset those risks that, in the United States, the Nixon administration is turning to law and order and at the same time putting itself above the Law. “Capitalism,” he writes, “reorganizes itself to meet the threat of a revolution which would be the most radical of all historical revolutions. It would be the first truly world-historicalrevolution.”[102] But that is not really in the offing, he has already told us.
Marcuse equates what is going on in the 1970s with the totalitarian and fascist crackdowns of the mid 20th century. But he is careful not to suggest that the American regime is fascist. It demonstrates, in his words, a “proto-fascist syndrome.”[103] And it may well lead to a fascist phase of the counterrevolution. So, in effect, Marcuse argues that the current counterrevolution is, first, tainted by fascist tendencies, and, second, possibly veering towards fascism.
In perhaps the most ominous passage to read, in light of today’s events, Marcuse suggests that the counterrevolution may be headed towards a fascist phase: “Decisive is rather whether the present phase of the (preventive) counterrevolution (its democratic-constitutional phase) does not prepare the soil for a subsequent fascist phase.”[104] That is chilling to read today!
Even more chilling, he also writes, citing William Shirer in the Los Angeles Times, that “we may well be the first people to go Fascist by the democratic vote.”[105] Maybe we should just stop there! Those are ominous passages that resonate eerily today.
Against this backdrop, Marcuse then analyzes what revolt should look like. He argues that the only counterpoint to the counterrevolution has to be an organized radical left.[106] Marcuse is writing in the wake of the emergence of the New Left and other countercultural movements on the left, including the Hippies, the women’s liberation movement, sexual liberation, and socialist and Marxist variations, including notions of cultural revolution, Maoism, new forms of anarchism and other radical movements on the Left. Marcuse offers a Marxian analysis of the conditions of capitalism that is somewhat critical of aspects of the Lew Left, critical especially of a certain “petrification” of Marxian theory on the Left.[107] The critique here is that Marxist theory has become ritualized and applied in a cookie-cutter way, and that it needs to be rethought, in part because the contemporary conditions for practice have been completely altered.
In sum, Marcuse suggests that the West, in the 1970s, is in a uniquely different conjuncture for revolutionary action and revolt. As he writes, “The present situation of the New Left is essentially different from the period during which the radical opposition took shape and had its first nationwide effects.”[108] He is referring to the civil rights movement, war resistance, college protests, and the Hippie movement of the 1960s. Things have changed. Back then, he argues, the establishment was not prepared for those forms of revolt. “The strategy then could be massive, open, and largely offensive: mass demonstrations, occupation of buildings, unity of action, juncture with the black militants.”[109] But those times are past, he argues, because the establishment now is prepared, with much more aggressive repression and political and military force. Echoing what Engels had written already in the late 1890s, Marcuse proposes that the military and police power are too massive for there to be the kind of mass demonstrations and occupations that occurred in the 60s. In fact, he goes so far as to say that the goal of seizing state power is no longer realistic. The strategy of seizing state power can no longer be the objective. He writes:
I have referred to the notion, today widespread among radical groups of the New Left, that “seizure of power” in the sense of a direct assault on the centers of political control (the state), backed and carried out by mass action under the leadership of centralized mass parties—that such strategy is not, and cannot be, on the agenda in the advanced capitalist countries. The main reasons are: (1) the concentration of overwhelming military and police power in the hands of an effectively functioning government and (2) the prevalence of a reformist consciousness among the working classes.[110]
Faced with a new situation, Marcuse favors a shift toward decentralized organizations that are grassroots based and subversive. He speaks of a “shift to decentralized forms of organization, less susceptible to destruction by the engines of repression, and more expressive of the divergent and dispersed nuclei of disintegration. Monopoly capitalism,” he writes, “has given a new concrete sense to the ‘revolution from below’: subversive grass roots.”[111] So what he is proposing is decentralized forms of subversive action that are more spontaneous and contagious, and serve to disintegrate society, to subvert it. He argues for different forms of praxis, including autogestion and autonomia for workers to take control in the factories, along the lines of Italian theorists like Antonio Negri. He views that as a way to gradually change economic power before changing political power. Much of that discussion assumes a revolutionary working class. And even though Marcuse is somewhat cautious about the working class, I would say he remains overly sanguine—especially in light of today’s working class. He is drawing parallels to workers’ councils on the model of the Soviet councils, and favors self-determination and self-government, so autogestion.[112] But he also speaks about other forms of disruptive practices, including disruption of court procedures and peaceful occupation of buildings and the heckling of speakers.[113] He is not opposed to what he calls desperate acts that are doomed to failure because they can have symbolic force and significance. But he does seem to favor most the idea of autonomous, local bases, especially in the university. He views the university as a special place for the education of future counter-cadres.[114]
Marcuse favors the creation of counter-institutions in the media and the university.[115] He endorses the radical leader of the German SDS, Rudi Dutschke, and his idea of “the long march through the institutions.” The idea is to become part of institutions, but to subvert them. To turn them into counter institutions from within. This is how he describes it:
working against the established institutions while working in them, but not simply by “boring from within,” rather by “doing the job,” learning (how to program and read computers, how to teach at all levels of education, how to use the mass media, how to organize production, how to recognize and eschew planned obsolescence, how to design, et cetera), and at the same time preserving one’s own consciousness in working with the others.[116]
Marcuse is adamant about training the counter-cadres, creating critical thinking—the essential tool to resist the domination.[117] Halting the eternal return of domination and submission, he argues, “presupposes knowledge of its genesis and of the ways in which it is reproduced: critical thinking.”[118]
Marcuse offers essentially a tool kit of disruptive, subversive grass roots praxis and argues that it may be up to those in the university and in other counter-institutions to form the revolution. He ends the first substantial part of the book, titled “The Left under the Counterrevolution,” on these words: “Capitalism produces its own grave diggers—but their faces may be very different from those of the wretched of the earth, from those of misery and want.”[119] And what he is trying to suggest here is that the college students, professors, the educated, may be the agents or motors of revolt, more so than Fanon’s idea of the wretched of the earth.
Let me stop there on Marcuse for now. And let me end this introduction where Marx ends the Eighteenth Brumaire– which is where we will start the seminar, because it is so much like Trump:
Driven by the contradictory demands of his situation and being at the same time, like a conjurer, under the necessity of keeping the public gaze on himself, as Napoleon’s substitute, by springing constant surprises, that is to say, under the necessity of executing a coup d’état en miniature every day, Bonaparte throws the entire bourgeois economy into confusion, violates everything that seemed inviolable to the Revolution of 1848, makes some tolerant of revolution, others desirous of revolution, and produces anarchy in the name of order, while at the same time stripping its halo from the entire state machine, profanes it and makes it at once loathsome and ridiculous.[120]
Welcome to Marx 8/13!
View the Seminar Marx 8/13 here!
Notes
[1] Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, The Communist Manifesto (New York: International Publishers, 1948, 2014 printing), at p. 9.
[2] Marx and Engels, The Communist Manifesto (2014 printing), at p. 21.
[3] Marx, Class Struggles in France, at p. 123-124.
[4] Marx’s third article, “Consequences of June 13, 1849,” was published in issue no. 3, around March 1850. See 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.
[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] Frederick Engels, Revolution and Counter-Revolution in Germany, in Marx-Engels Collected Works, Volume 11 “Marx and Engels 1851-1853,” (New York: International Publishers, 1979 [Moscow]), p. 629 n.1. This is the publishers first note to the 1979 edition. Incidentally, the New-York Tribune, founded in 1841 by Horace Greeley, went by the name “New-York Daily Tribune” from 1842 to 1866. See “About New-York Daily Tribune 1842-1866,” available at https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn83030213/.
[7] Engels, Revolution and Counter-Revolution in Germany, in MECW Vol. 11, p. 91.
[8] Karl Marx, Revolution and Counter-Revolution, Or Germany in 1848, ed. Eleanor Marx-Aveling (Chicago: Charles H. Kerr & Company, 1919 [1896]). Marx-Aveling added the captions to each article; in the Tribune, they were simply numbered. See Engels, Revolution and Counter-Revolution in Germany, in MECW Vol. 11, p. 629 n.1.
[9] Engels, Revolution and Counter-Revolution in Germany, in MECW Vol. 11, p. 629 n.1.
[10] Engels, Revolution and Counter-Revolution in Germany, in MECW Vol. 11, p. 629 n.1.
[11] Engels, Revolution and Counter-Revolution in Germany, in MECW Vol. 11, p. 629 n.1.
[12] Engels, Revolution and Counter-Revolution in Germany, in MECW Vol. 11, p. 5.
[13] Engels, Revolution and Counter-Revolution in Germany, in MECW Vol. 11, p. 5.
[14] Engels, Revolution and Counter-Revolution in Germany, in MECW Vol. 11, p. 5.
[15] Engels, Revolution and Counter-Revolution in Germany, in MECW Vol. 11, p. 6.
[16] Engels, Revolution and Counter-Revolution in Germany, in MECW Vol. 11, p. 68.
[17] Engels, Revolution and Counter-Revolution in Germany, in MECW Vol. 11, p. 68.
[18] Engels, Revolution and Counter-Revolution in Germany, in MECW Vol. 11, p. 68.
[19] Engels, Revolution and Counter-Revolution in Germany, in MECW Vol. 11, p. 85.
[20] Engels, Revolution and Counter-Revolution in Germany, in MECW Vol. 11, p. 68.
[21] Engels, Revolution and Counter-Revolution in Germany, in MECW Vol. 11, p. 86.
[22] Engels, Revolution and Counter-Revolution in Germany, in MECW Vol. 11, p. 91.
[23] Engels, Revolution and Counter-Revolution in Germany, in MECW Vol. 11, p. 91.
[24] Engels, Revolution and Counter-Revolution in Germany, in MECW Vol. 11, p. 91.
[25] Engels, Revolution and Counter-Revolution in Germany, in MECW Vol. 11, p. 51.
[26] Engels, Revolution and Counter-Revolution in Germany, in MECW Vol. 11, p. 51.
[27] Engels, Revolution and Counter-Revolution in Germany, in MECW Vol. 11, p. 11; for these classes, see generally, pages 7-12.
[28] Engels, Revolution and Counter-Revolution in Germany, in MECW Vol. 11, p. 14.
[29] Engels, Revolution and Counter-Revolution in Germany, in MECW Vol. 11, p. 14.
[30] Engels, Revolution and Counter-Revolution in Germany, in MECW Vol. 11, p. 18.
[31] Engels, Revolution and Counter-Revolution in Germany, in MECW Vol. 11, p. 88.
[32] Engels, Revolution and Counter-Revolution in Germany, in MECW Vol. 11, p. 88.
[33] Engels, Revolution and Counter-Revolution in Germany, in MECW Vol. 11, p. 11; for these classes, see generally, pages 7-12.
[34] Engels, Revolution and Counter-Revolution in Germany, in MECW Vol. 11, p. 88.
[35] Engels, Revolution and Counter-Revolution in Germany, in MECW Vol. 11, p. 32.
[36] Engels, Revolution and Counter-Revolution in Germany, in MECW Vol. 11, p. 32.
[37] Engels, Revolution and Counter-Revolution in Germany, in MECW Vol. 11, p. 6.
[38] MECW, “Preface,” Volume 11, p. xiv.
[39] Engels, 1895 “Introduction,” in Marx, Class Struggles (International Publishers, 1977 printing), at p. 21.
[40] Engels, 1895 “Introduction,” in Marx, Class Struggles (International Publishers, 1977 printing), at p. 24.
[41] Engels, 1895 “Introduction,” in Marx, Class Struggles (International Publishers, 1977 printing), at p. 25.
[42] Engels, 1895 “Introduction,” in Marx, Class Struggles (International Publishers, 1977 printing), at p. 26.
[43] Engels, 1895 “Introduction,” in Marx, Class Struggles (International Publishers, 1977 printing), at p. 27.
[44] Marx, Preface to Second Edition, 1869, available online here https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/download/pdf/18th-Brumaire.pdf.
[45] Marx Lettter to Weydemeyer, March 5, 1852, available at https://wikirouge.net/texts/en/Letter_to_Joseph_Weydemeyer,_March_5,_1852; Marx, “Class Struggle and Mode of Production,” in Robert C. Tucker, Marx-Engels Reader, 2nd Edition (W.W. Norton, 1978), at p. 220.
[46] Marx, The German Ideology, in Tucker, Marx-Engels Reader, 2nd ed., at p. 161 (“every class which is struggling for mastery, even when its domination, as is the case with the proletariat, postulates the abolition of the old form of society in its entirety and of domination itself, must first conquer for itself political power in order to represent its interest in turn as the general interest, which in the first moment it is forced to do”).
[47] Marx, “Preface to Second Edition,” in Marx, Eighteenth Brumaire, at p. 6.
[48] Engels, Revolution and Counter-Revolution in Germany, in MECW Vol. 11, p. 6.
[49] Marx, “Preface to Second Edition,” in Marx, Eighteenth Brumaire, at p. 7.
[50] Marx, “Preface to Second Edition,” in Marx, Eighteenth Brumaire, at p. 7.
[51] Engels, “Preface to Third German Edition,” in Marx, Eighteenth Brumaire, at p. 14.
[52] Engels, “Preface to Third German Edition,” in Marx, Eighteenth Brumaire, at p. 14.
[53] Engels, “Preface to Third German Edition,” in Marx, Eighteenth Brumaire, at p. 14.
[54] Marx, Eighteenth Brumaire, in MECW, Vol. 11, p. 108.
[55] Marx, Eighteenth Brumaire, in MECW, Vol. 11, p. 110.
[56] Marx, Eighteenth Brumaire, in MECW, Vol. 11, p. 110.
[57] Marx, Eighteenth Brumaire, in MECW, Vol. 11, p. 110.
[58] Marx, Eighteenth Brumaire, in MECW, Vol. 11, p. 110.
[59] Marx, Eighteenth Brumaire, in MECW, Vol. 11, p. 110.
[60] Marx, Eighteenth Brumaire, in MECW, Vol. 11, p. 110.
[61] Marx, Eighteenth Brumaire, in MECW, Vol. 11, p. 110.
[62] Marx, Eighteenth Brumaire, in MECW, Vol. 11, p. 110.
[63] Marx, Eighteenth Brumaire, in MECW, Vol. 11, p. 180.
[64] Marx, Eighteenth Brumaire, in MECW, Vol. 11, p. 180-181.
[65] Marx, Eighteenth Brumaire, in MECW, Vol. 11, p. 108.
[66] Marx, Eighteenth Brumaire, in MECW, Vol. 11, p. 181.
[67] Marx, Eighteenth Brumaire, in MECW, Vol. 11, p. 187.
[68] Marx, Eighteenth Brumaire, in MECW, Vol. 11, p. 187-188.
[69] Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Can the Subaltern Speak? Reflections on the History of an Idea, ed. Rosalind Morris (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010), at p. 29.
[70] On the latter, and explaining the different positions, see Edward Andrew, “Class in Itself and Class against Capital: Karl Marx and His Classifiers,” Canadian Journal of Political Science / Revue canadienne de science politique, Sep., 1983, Vol. 16, No. 3 (Sep., 1983), pp. 577-584.
[71] Marx, The Poverty of Philosophy, in MECW, Vol. 6, 211
[72] Marx, Eighteenth Brumaire, in MECW, Vol. 11, p. 187.
[73] Marx, Eighteenth Brumaire, in MECW, Vol. 11, p. 110.
[74] Marx, Eighteenth Brumaire, in MECW, Vol. 11, p. 111.
[75] Marx, The German Ideology, in Tucker, Marx-Engels Reader, 2nd ed., at p. 151.
[76] Marx, Eighteenth Brumaire, in MECW, Vol. 11, p. 106.
[77] Marx, Eighteenth Brumaire, in MECW, Vol. 11, p. 106-107.
[78] Marx, Eighteenth Brumaire, in MECW, Vol. 11, p. 107.
[79] Marx, Engels, Eighteenth Brumaire, in MECW, Vol. 11, at p. 185.
[80] Marx, Engels, Eighteenth Brumaire, in MECW, Vol. 11, at p. 103.
[81] Marx, Engels, Eighteenth Brumaire, in MECW, Vol. 11, at p. 103.
[82] 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.
[83] Stuart Hall, Cultural Studies 1983: A Theoretical History (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016).
[84] Hall, Cultural Studies 1983, at p. 5.
[85] Hall, Cultural Studies 1983, at p. 23.
[86] Hall, Cultural Studies 1983, at p. 23.
[87] Hall, Cultural Studies 1983, at p. 7.
[88] Hall, Cultural Studies 1983, at p. 128.
[89] Hall, Cultural Studies 1983, at p. 83.
[90] Hall, Cultural Studies 1983, at p. 93.
[91] Hall, Cultural Studies 1983, at p. 93.
[92] Hall, Cultural Studies 1983, at p. 94.
[93] Hall, Cultural Studies 1983, at p. 94.
[94] Hall, Cultural Studies 1983, at p. 95.
[95] Hall, Cultural Studies 1983, at p. 96.
[96] Herbert Marcuse, Counter-Revolution and Revolt (Boston: Beacon Press, 1972), at p. 1.
[97] Marcuse, Counter-Revolution and Revolt, at p. 24.
[98] Marcuse, Counter-Revolution and Revolt, at p. 25.
[99] Marcuse, Counter-Revolution and Revolt, at p. 1-2.
[100] Marcuse, Counter-Revolution and Revolt, at p. 2.
[101] Marcuse, Counter-Revolution and Revolt, at p. 16.
[102] Marcuse, Counter-Revolution and Revolt, at p. 2.
[103] Marcuse, Counter-Revolution and Revolt, at p. 25.
[104] Marcuse, Counter-Revolution and Revolt, at p. 24.
[105] Marcuse, Counter-Revolution and Revolt, at p. 25.
[106] Marcuse, Counter-Revolution and Revolt, at p. 28.
[107] Marcuse, Counter-Revolution and Revolt, at p. 34.
[108] Marcuse, Counter-Revolution and Revolt, at p. 35.
[109] Marcuse, Counter-Revolution and Revolt, at p. 36.
[110] Marcuse, Counter-Revolution and Revolt, at p. 43.
[111] Marcuse, Counter-Revolution and Revolt, at p. 42.
[112] Marcuse, Counter-Revolution and Revolt, at p. 44.
[113] Marcuse, Counter-Revolution and Revolt, at p. 52.
[114] Marcuse, Counter-Revolution and Revolt, at p. 54.
[115] Marcuse, Counter-Revolution and Revolt, at p. 55.
[116] Marcuse, Counter-Revolution and Revolt, at p. 55.
[117] Marcuse, Counter-Revolution and Revolt, at p. 56.
[118] Marcuse, Counter-Revolution and Revolt, at p. 56.
[119] Marcuse, Counter-Revolution and Revolt, at p. 57.
[120] Marx, Eighteenth Brumaire, in MECW, Vol. 11, p. 197.
