What do you think?
Rate this book
Political Writings #2
Surveys from Exile
English, German (translation)
375 pages, Paperback
First published September 27, 1973
About the author
Karl Marx
3,439 books7,032 followersWith the help of Friedrich Engels, German philosopher and revolutionary Karl Marx wrote
The Communist Manifesto
(1848) and
Das Kapital
(1867-1894), works, which explain historical development in terms of the interaction of contradictory economic forces, form many regimes, and profoundly influenced the social sciences.
German social theorist Friedrich Engels collaborated with Karl Marx on The Communist Manifesto in 1848 and on numerous other works.
Mikhail Mikhailovich Bakunin in London opposed Communism of Karl Marx with his antithetical anarchy.
Works of Jacques Martin Barzun include Darwin, Marx, Wagner (1941).
The Prussian kingdom introduced a prohibition on Jews, practicing law; in response, a man converted to Protestantism and shortly afterward fathered Karl Marx.
Marx began co-operating with Bruno Bauer on editing Philosophy of Religion of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (see Democritus and Epicurus), doctoral thesis, also engaged Marx, who completed it in 1841. People described the controversial essay as "a daring and original piece... in which Marx set out to show that theology must yield to the superior wisdom." Marx decided to submit his thesis not to the particularly conservative professors at the University of Berlin but instead to the more liberal faculty of University of Jena, which for his contributed key theory awarded his Philosophiae Doctor in April 1841. Marx and Bauer, both atheists, in March 1841 began plans for a journal, entitled Archiv des Atheismus (Atheistic Archives), which never came to fruition.
Marx edited the newspaper Vorwärts! in 1844 in Paris. The urging of the Prussian government from France banished and expelled Marx in absentia; he then studied in Brussels. He joined the league in 1847 and published.
Marx participated the failure of 1848 and afterward eventually wound in London. Marx, a foreigner, corresponded for several publications of United States.
He came in three volumes. Marx organized the International and the social democratic party.
Marx in a letter to C. Schmidt once quipped, "All I know is that I am not a Marxist," as Warren Allen Smith related in Who's Who in Hell .
People describe Marx, who most figured among humans. They typically cite Marx with Émile Durkheim and Max Weber, the principal modern architects.
Bertrand Russell later remarked of non-religious Marx, "His belief that there is a cosmic ... called dialectical materialism, which governs ... independently of human volitions, is mere mythology" ( Portraits from Memory , 1956).
More: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karl_Marx
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/marx/
http://www.econlib.org/library/Enc/bi...
http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/...
http://www.historyguide.org/intellect...
http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/historic...
http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/...
http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/t...
German social theorist Friedrich Engels collaborated with Karl Marx on The Communist Manifesto in 1848 and on numerous other works.
Mikhail Mikhailovich Bakunin in London opposed Communism of Karl Marx with his antithetical anarchy.
Works of Jacques Martin Barzun include Darwin, Marx, Wagner (1941).
The Prussian kingdom introduced a prohibition on Jews, practicing law; in response, a man converted to Protestantism and shortly afterward fathered Karl Marx.
Marx began co-operating with Bruno Bauer on editing Philosophy of Religion of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (see Democritus and Epicurus), doctoral thesis, also engaged Marx, who completed it in 1841. People described the controversial essay as "a daring and original piece... in which Marx set out to show that theology must yield to the superior wisdom." Marx decided to submit his thesis not to the particularly conservative professors at the University of Berlin but instead to the more liberal faculty of University of Jena, which for his contributed key theory awarded his Philosophiae Doctor in April 1841. Marx and Bauer, both atheists, in March 1841 began plans for a journal, entitled Archiv des Atheismus (Atheistic Archives), which never came to fruition.
Marx edited the newspaper Vorwärts! in 1844 in Paris. The urging of the Prussian government from France banished and expelled Marx in absentia; he then studied in Brussels. He joined the league in 1847 and published.
Marx participated the failure of 1848 and afterward eventually wound in London. Marx, a foreigner, corresponded for several publications of United States.
He came in three volumes. Marx organized the International and the social democratic party.
Marx in a letter to C. Schmidt once quipped, "All I know is that I am not a Marxist," as Warren Allen Smith related in Who's Who in Hell .
People describe Marx, who most figured among humans. They typically cite Marx with Émile Durkheim and Max Weber, the principal modern architects.
Bertrand Russell later remarked of non-religious Marx, "His belief that there is a cosmic ... called dialectical materialism, which governs ... independently of human volitions, is mere mythology" ( Portraits from Memory , 1956).
More: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karl_Marx
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/marx/
http://www.econlib.org/library/Enc/bi...
http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/...
http://www.historyguide.org/intellect...
http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/historic...
http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/...
http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/t...
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
September 13, 2011
Not really going to get into a deep analysis of Fernbachs work right here. But i had quite a few problems with the entire 'political writings of Karl Marx' series (1-3). First of all it contains quite a few factual errors. To name one this volume claims that Marx could not even consider supporting an independent anticolonial movement in India in the 1850s, while its should be obvious for anyone that has read Marx' writings on India that he did support such a movement. Not only when the Sepoy-riots started, but also in the early 1850s, he stated that the Indians had to "throw of the english yoke" in order to reap the benefits brought about by colonialism.
Lets just say that none of the introductions are thrustworthy, and i would just avoid reading them at all. (Even in the 2010 edition, this is true.) However the collection of articles isnt bad, and i guess its worth buying the books in order to get your own copy of them.
Lets just say that none of the introductions are thrustworthy, and i would just avoid reading them at all. (Even in the 2010 edition, this is true.) However the collection of articles isnt bad, and i guess its worth buying the books in order to get your own copy of them.
April 11, 2026
The Republic can only be saved now by the Devil in person, and you ask for angels
Stranded in London (the poor bugger!), Marx spent much of the 1850s and early 1860s surveying social and political developments on the continent with a dispassionate scrutiny perhaps unavailable to those caught in the thick of it. Likely frustrated with finding himself in seemingly the one place at the time where nothing of epochal political and social import was transpiring, Marx’s Surveys from Exile find him at his most incisively polemical and deliciously mordant.
Once the cradle of liberal progress, France had fallen to reaction in the guise of Louis Napoleon, who is systematically torn apart in the stunning, landmark work of the period that is The 18th Brumaire. Preceding this, however, is Marx’s equally cutting study of The Class Struggles in France in the years preceding Bonaparte’s rise, which is itself essential reading both for its fascinating exploration of internecine class conflict and its genealogy of the social and political landscape which gave rise to Bonaparte.
Socialism in one country has always been an absurd proposition in light of the global system of capital. Marx notes how, even as far back as the February Revolution of 1848, the prospect of proletarian emancipation purely confined to the national borders of France was conceivable only on the grounds of a continental conflict. When relations of production are inextricably conditioned by foreign trade, the transformation of said relations must inevitably spill over domestic boundaries.
Even at this early, patently quixotic stage, we already bear witness to the ideological ferment that would invite the vulgar, empty heroics of Bonaparte. Once synonymous with the equality of man and the abolition of atavistic privilege, the promise of fraternité now ceased to express these revolutionary foundations, returning as an empty fantasy of class rapprochement. And yet, this didn’t prevent the February Revolution from falling to its seductive power, sapping the proletariat of the clarity it required to recognise the intractable antagonisms embedded in its class position.
“The Paris proletariat was still incapable, except in its imagination, in its fantasy, of moving beyond the bourgeois republic; when it came to action it invariably acted in the service of the republic”
The bourgeoisie got what they wanted – the financial aristocracy assumed unfettered control as the proletariat languished under its new servitude. As far as Marx was concerned, this brought down the crushing weight of fatalism upon the Parisian proletariat, who, in the aftermath of the June insurrection, foreswore, in the manner of a prototypical capitalist realism (if you’ll excuse the anachronism), the possibility of even the slightest amelioration as an idealistic fantasy par excellence.
“Every demand for the simplest bourgeois financial reform, every demand of the most ordinary liberalism, the most formal republicanism, or the most commonplace democracy, was simultaneously punished as an ‘attack on society’ and denounced as ‘socialism’”. Sound familiar?
The immediate consequences of this dour mood upon the proletarian imagination were dire, lapsing into reveries of utopian socialism at best, and at worst, encouraging the reconciliation of class antagonisms without systematic transformation. Marx locates the genesis of social democracy itself in this defeat, rising out of the reformist collaboration between the proletariat and the petit-bourgeoisie. I have found it rather helpful to think of such attempts to externally pave over contradiction in terms of Giorgio Agamben’s distinction between the People and the people, the body politic as-such versus the marginalised masses. In Means Without Ends, he makes a convincing case for all politics being an expression, in one way or another, of the negotiation between these two definitions. As distasteful as it sounds, what social democracy has in common with Bonapartism is that both seek to collapse the distinction between the people and the People within the scope of capitalist conditions.
“As against the bourgeoisie, Bonaparte sees himself simultaneously as the representative of the peasants and of the people in general, as the man who wants to make the lower classes happy within the framework of bourgeois society”
The constitution of the new bourgeois republic was little more than an instrument of domination under the guise of liberty. Marx’s analysis of its contradictions incidentally provides us with an instructive demonstration of the limits of universality, the exception inscribed in the heart of its emancipatory promise. The supposedly “unconditional” rights owed to the French citizenry were inconspicuously limited by the condition that they do not infringe upon the “equal rights of others and the public safety”. What seems to be a standard inscription of negative liberty actually reveals how any formal universality must be grounded upon its conditioning factor that it cannot absorb, the state of exception it cannot countenance within its structure. In all fairness to the ascendent bourgeoisie, then, could they really have constituted their rule otherwise (not to imply that Marx doesn’t think so. He’d be the last to moralise…)?
Where the republic went the extra mile, however, is inscribing these contradictions into every line of the constitution, such that its proclaimed freedoms would never risk transgressing beyond the nominal. Fittingly enough, here we find another antecedent to the Louis Napoleon’s rule, this time in the legal sphere. Thanks to the new constitution, the president would henceforth be elected by direct suffrage, endowing the executive with a legitimacy and mandate leagues above the legislature. Marx thus ominously describes the President as the national spirit’s “very incarnation”, possessing “a kind of divine right, he is there by the grace of the people”. The consequences of such a “personal relation” between the executive and the masses will prove to be staggering.
Where does this leave the peasantry? They would suffer the results of the February revolution most dearly, and it is for this reason, amongst others, that “among them the counter-revolution found its main material”. Marx’s study of the role of the peasantry in France’s class conflicts between 1848 and 1852 is controversial to say the least (though not half as much as his attitude towards the lumpenproletariat, which we will get to later), but it would be reductive and frankly false to paint his depiction of them as purely negative or wholly dismissive. No doubt, his description of their insurrection in December 1848 is as derogatory as it is lyrical:
“10 December 1848 was the day of the peasant insurrection. The symbol that expressed their entry into the revolutionary movement, clumsy but cunning, rascally but naïve, oafish but sublime, a calculated superstition, a pathetic burlesque, an inspired but stupid anachronism, a momentous, historic piece of buffoonery, an undecipherable hieroglyph for the understanding of the civilized – this symbol bore unmistakably the physiognomy of the class which represents barbarism within civilization”
For Marx, the peasantry “is absolutely incapable of any revolutionary initiative”, but this is less a result of a blind and haughty prejudice and more a function of what he deemed to be the objective limits of the peasants as a class. He insists that, whilst both the peasantry and the proletariat are exploited by capital (in different forms, of course), only the latter are capable of forming a class insofar as they are capable of articulating their interests and consciously mobilising their material demands in the field of struggle. The “small peasant proprietors” in particular are deemed far too atomised to organise, crushed between class interests on both ends. This analysis gives rise to perhaps one of Marx’s most infamous, and certainly most paternal, dictums: “They cannot represent themselves; they must be represented”. Marx does not deny that the peasantry can be mobilised for revolutionary aims, but at the same time, he is rather pessimistic about their limits.
“The peasant’s claim to property is the talisman with which capital has hitherto held him under its spell, the pretext on which it set him against the industrial proletariat”
He would be horrified, I imagine, to learn that, today, much of the isolation and disintegration he attributes to the peasantry can be better applied to the very class that was supposed to be responsible for leading the charge – the proletariat. Not to jump the boat, but this undeniably goes some way to explaining the fascistic inclinations of the modern working classes.
Another class of which much of this could be said is the petty-bourgeoise, who similarly found (and continue to find) themselves split within their material interests and plagued by an exceptional vulnerability to ideological obfuscation. Both the peasantry and the petty-bourgeoisie allied with the proletariat in 1848, both are supposedly impotent in such an endeavour without the proletariat at the helm, and both soon fell into the service of reaction. The latter are especially vacillating in their allegiances, evincing a political mercuriality profoundly sensitive to the micro-movements in the economy. That “nobody was more fanatical about the alleged machinations of the communists than the petty bourgeois, who tottered helplessly on the brink of bankruptcy” could be just as easily ascribed to today’s petty bourgeois testifies to the enduring analytical validity of Marx’s insights.
One sense in which Marx’s analysis perhaps falters, however, is with regards to the question of novelty and revolution. In Class Struggles, and most famously in The 18th Brumaire, Marx passionately argues for a clean break between the proletarian revolutions of the future and the material of the past. Whilst the revolutionary task is no doubt essentially forward thinking in nature, liable to be corrupted by an excess of nostalgia which might distract from the fecundity of the future to which it points, Marx certainly overstates the degree to which the proletariat needs to shed its heritage. Theorising a sort of cultural revolution avant la lettre, Marx insists that the proletarian struggle’s essence needs to emerge almost from out of nothing, to such a degree that, for all its inspiring wonder, it goes against the implications of Marx’s own socio-economic determinism (if you’ll excuse the crude term).
For good reason, Class Struggles is primarily regarded as where Marx complicates the picture of class conflict, theorising the struggle between bourgeois elements and integrating it seamlessly into his overarching framework. Consonant with his earlier thinking, Marx dissects what ideologically presents itself to be monolithic interest, revealing the antagonism between different factions of the bourgeoisie, represented here in the Bourbons (industrial bourgeoisie, landed property) and the Orleans (financial aristocracy, capital). Only in the form of the republic could they temper their conflict of interests without being forced to sacrifice them. By contrast to this arrangement, Marx argues later in his articles on Britain that the English revolution retained a distinctly “conservative character" precisely because these two factions were united from the very outset, even if this fact was only recognised with the repeal of the Corn Laws in 1846.
This touches on an important theme for Marx, which we can trace back to Hegel’s “silent weaving of the spirit” – the haunting of social forces in name only, unaware (or unwilling to accept) that their material base has given way, that history no longer holds a place for them. There’s a certain comedy to this, but at the same time, Marx is under no illusions of what such a situation asks of these ghostly energies – “that before their final death agony these social forces summon up their strength once more and move from the defensive to the offensive, issuing challenges instead of giving ground, and attempting to draw the most extreme conclusions from premises which have not only been called into question but have already been condemned”. Does this not perfectly describe what we have been witnessing in modern day America?
Contemporary resonance aside, in the case of the French bourgeoisie, there was a degree of conscious participation in this movement. Once the republic had forced them to confront the proletariat without the crown to hide behind, it soon became apparent that, if they wished to retain their social and economic hegemony, they would have to give up their political hegemony. But who to? Why, to Louis Bonaparte of course! Here we see perfectly the sort of class dynamic that results in the bourgeoisie ceding their political power to fascism, or in this case “proto-fascism”/Bonapartism. When the political comes into contradiction with the social, the ruling class will, through gritted teeth if need be, always relinquish the former in order to save their latter, for of course it is in their social and economic control that their power truly lies.
“the parliamentary party of Order condemned itself to acquiescence by its clamour for tranquility. It declared the political rule of the bourgeoisie to be incompatible with the bourgeoisie’s own safety and existence by destroying with its own hands the whole basis of its own regime, the parliamentary regime, in the struggle against the other classes of society. Similarly, the extra-parliamentary mass of the bourgeoisie invited Bonaparte… It hoped that it would then be able to pursue its private affairs with full confidence under the protection of a strong and unrestricted government.”
When the bourgeoisie does hand its political power over to a strongman, this represents not the disintegration, but the fulfilment of their republic. None could have put it better than Marx himself:
”That work of art, the bourgeois republic, has not been distorted into a monstrous shape by the black magic of a Circe. It has lost nothing but the appearance of respectability. The parliamentary republic contained present-day France in finished form. It only required a bayonet thrust for the abscess to burst and the monster to spring forth before our eyes”
Not to beat a dead horse, but is this not precisely the situation of Trump’s America? Practically all his crimes, at least in form and intent, have plenty of precedent in practically every preceding administration. The most traumatic and shocking difference is, in effect, the dropping of the mask, the shedding of the “appearance of respectability” in favour of vulgar displays of naked violence.
Bonaparte was the ideal figure for this role. He made a virtue of necessity, flaunting the vulgarity of his situation in the vulgarity of his person. In the words of Marx, this “princely lumpenproletariat” stripped “the halo from the state machine, profaning it and making it both disgusting and ridiculous”. Is there, perhaps, an upshot to this obscene chaos? Might it be the case that the crudity, that the “stripping of the halo”, entails the demystification of the reified state apparatus? Just look at Trump – how much damage has he wrought upon the integrity and status of US empire through his presentation and treatment of the most hallowed office in the land?
Just as the reactionary populists of today rely heavily upon the anger and anxiety of the petit-bourgeois, only to squeeze them under the boot of capital once assuming control, Louis Bonaparte rose to power upon promises to alleviate the tax burden upon the peasantry, only to later cement their exploitation and immiseration.
Another decisive base for Bonaparte’s ride was, of course, the so-called lumpenproletariat. If there is a class Marx has absolutely no love or hope for whatsoever, it’s them. For as cruel and unremitting as he is with regards to the most vulnerable of society, the detritus of the reserve army of labour, the events of 1848-1852 gave him little cause for charity. Not only were they at the forefront of Bonaparte’s rise, they were also instrumental in filling the ranks of the Mobile Guards in crushing proletarian resistance. That being said, there is little evidence here that Marx fully recognises the psychological and social conditions responsible for this waxen susceptibility (let alone the possibility of their recruitment to the revolutionary cause), for if he did, I suspect he might have been ever so slightly less brutal in his assessment.
Speaking of Marx at his most contentious, this collection also includes his writings on India, reflecting on its ongoing colonisation by the British. Whilst he clearly recognised just how catastrophic this interference was for Indian society, tearing it’s economic foundation limb from limb and demolishing traditional bonds, he is nonetheless unrepentant in his analysis of what this means for the nation's objective social progress. Although hailing it as “the only social revolution ever heard of in Asia” certainly spoke to his ignorance, it is undeniable that, for all its horror, the colonisation of India did expedite its arrival into capitalism. And yet, what Marx fails to appreciate is that this is really no cause for celebration, even from the perspective of History. Pulling a community kicking and screaming into the future at the tip of the bayonet causes far more problems than it solves, as the following century would prove all too vividly.
“All the English bourgeoisie may be forced to do will neither emancipate nor materially mend the social condition of the mass of the people… But what they will not fail to do is to lay down the material premises for both. Has the bourgeoisie ever done more? Has it ever effected a progress without dragging individuals and peoples through blood and dirt, thought misery and degradation?”
Stranded in London (the poor bugger!), Marx spent much of the 1850s and early 1860s surveying social and political developments on the continent with a dispassionate scrutiny perhaps unavailable to those caught in the thick of it. Likely frustrated with finding himself in seemingly the one place at the time where nothing of epochal political and social import was transpiring, Marx’s Surveys from Exile find him at his most incisively polemical and deliciously mordant.
Once the cradle of liberal progress, France had fallen to reaction in the guise of Louis Napoleon, who is systematically torn apart in the stunning, landmark work of the period that is The 18th Brumaire. Preceding this, however, is Marx’s equally cutting study of The Class Struggles in France in the years preceding Bonaparte’s rise, which is itself essential reading both for its fascinating exploration of internecine class conflict and its genealogy of the social and political landscape which gave rise to Bonaparte.
Socialism in one country has always been an absurd proposition in light of the global system of capital. Marx notes how, even as far back as the February Revolution of 1848, the prospect of proletarian emancipation purely confined to the national borders of France was conceivable only on the grounds of a continental conflict. When relations of production are inextricably conditioned by foreign trade, the transformation of said relations must inevitably spill over domestic boundaries.
Even at this early, patently quixotic stage, we already bear witness to the ideological ferment that would invite the vulgar, empty heroics of Bonaparte. Once synonymous with the equality of man and the abolition of atavistic privilege, the promise of fraternité now ceased to express these revolutionary foundations, returning as an empty fantasy of class rapprochement. And yet, this didn’t prevent the February Revolution from falling to its seductive power, sapping the proletariat of the clarity it required to recognise the intractable antagonisms embedded in its class position.
“The Paris proletariat was still incapable, except in its imagination, in its fantasy, of moving beyond the bourgeois republic; when it came to action it invariably acted in the service of the republic”
The bourgeoisie got what they wanted – the financial aristocracy assumed unfettered control as the proletariat languished under its new servitude. As far as Marx was concerned, this brought down the crushing weight of fatalism upon the Parisian proletariat, who, in the aftermath of the June insurrection, foreswore, in the manner of a prototypical capitalist realism (if you’ll excuse the anachronism), the possibility of even the slightest amelioration as an idealistic fantasy par excellence.
“Every demand for the simplest bourgeois financial reform, every demand of the most ordinary liberalism, the most formal republicanism, or the most commonplace democracy, was simultaneously punished as an ‘attack on society’ and denounced as ‘socialism’”. Sound familiar?
The immediate consequences of this dour mood upon the proletarian imagination were dire, lapsing into reveries of utopian socialism at best, and at worst, encouraging the reconciliation of class antagonisms without systematic transformation. Marx locates the genesis of social democracy itself in this defeat, rising out of the reformist collaboration between the proletariat and the petit-bourgeoisie. I have found it rather helpful to think of such attempts to externally pave over contradiction in terms of Giorgio Agamben’s distinction between the People and the people, the body politic as-such versus the marginalised masses. In Means Without Ends, he makes a convincing case for all politics being an expression, in one way or another, of the negotiation between these two definitions. As distasteful as it sounds, what social democracy has in common with Bonapartism is that both seek to collapse the distinction between the people and the People within the scope of capitalist conditions.
“As against the bourgeoisie, Bonaparte sees himself simultaneously as the representative of the peasants and of the people in general, as the man who wants to make the lower classes happy within the framework of bourgeois society”
The constitution of the new bourgeois republic was little more than an instrument of domination under the guise of liberty. Marx’s analysis of its contradictions incidentally provides us with an instructive demonstration of the limits of universality, the exception inscribed in the heart of its emancipatory promise. The supposedly “unconditional” rights owed to the French citizenry were inconspicuously limited by the condition that they do not infringe upon the “equal rights of others and the public safety”. What seems to be a standard inscription of negative liberty actually reveals how any formal universality must be grounded upon its conditioning factor that it cannot absorb, the state of exception it cannot countenance within its structure. In all fairness to the ascendent bourgeoisie, then, could they really have constituted their rule otherwise (not to imply that Marx doesn’t think so. He’d be the last to moralise…)?
Where the republic went the extra mile, however, is inscribing these contradictions into every line of the constitution, such that its proclaimed freedoms would never risk transgressing beyond the nominal. Fittingly enough, here we find another antecedent to the Louis Napoleon’s rule, this time in the legal sphere. Thanks to the new constitution, the president would henceforth be elected by direct suffrage, endowing the executive with a legitimacy and mandate leagues above the legislature. Marx thus ominously describes the President as the national spirit’s “very incarnation”, possessing “a kind of divine right, he is there by the grace of the people”. The consequences of such a “personal relation” between the executive and the masses will prove to be staggering.
Where does this leave the peasantry? They would suffer the results of the February revolution most dearly, and it is for this reason, amongst others, that “among them the counter-revolution found its main material”. Marx’s study of the role of the peasantry in France’s class conflicts between 1848 and 1852 is controversial to say the least (though not half as much as his attitude towards the lumpenproletariat, which we will get to later), but it would be reductive and frankly false to paint his depiction of them as purely negative or wholly dismissive. No doubt, his description of their insurrection in December 1848 is as derogatory as it is lyrical:
“10 December 1848 was the day of the peasant insurrection. The symbol that expressed their entry into the revolutionary movement, clumsy but cunning, rascally but naïve, oafish but sublime, a calculated superstition, a pathetic burlesque, an inspired but stupid anachronism, a momentous, historic piece of buffoonery, an undecipherable hieroglyph for the understanding of the civilized – this symbol bore unmistakably the physiognomy of the class which represents barbarism within civilization”
For Marx, the peasantry “is absolutely incapable of any revolutionary initiative”, but this is less a result of a blind and haughty prejudice and more a function of what he deemed to be the objective limits of the peasants as a class. He insists that, whilst both the peasantry and the proletariat are exploited by capital (in different forms, of course), only the latter are capable of forming a class insofar as they are capable of articulating their interests and consciously mobilising their material demands in the field of struggle. The “small peasant proprietors” in particular are deemed far too atomised to organise, crushed between class interests on both ends. This analysis gives rise to perhaps one of Marx’s most infamous, and certainly most paternal, dictums: “They cannot represent themselves; they must be represented”. Marx does not deny that the peasantry can be mobilised for revolutionary aims, but at the same time, he is rather pessimistic about their limits.
“The peasant’s claim to property is the talisman with which capital has hitherto held him under its spell, the pretext on which it set him against the industrial proletariat”
He would be horrified, I imagine, to learn that, today, much of the isolation and disintegration he attributes to the peasantry can be better applied to the very class that was supposed to be responsible for leading the charge – the proletariat. Not to jump the boat, but this undeniably goes some way to explaining the fascistic inclinations of the modern working classes.
Another class of which much of this could be said is the petty-bourgeoise, who similarly found (and continue to find) themselves split within their material interests and plagued by an exceptional vulnerability to ideological obfuscation. Both the peasantry and the petty-bourgeoisie allied with the proletariat in 1848, both are supposedly impotent in such an endeavour without the proletariat at the helm, and both soon fell into the service of reaction. The latter are especially vacillating in their allegiances, evincing a political mercuriality profoundly sensitive to the micro-movements in the economy. That “nobody was more fanatical about the alleged machinations of the communists than the petty bourgeois, who tottered helplessly on the brink of bankruptcy” could be just as easily ascribed to today’s petty bourgeois testifies to the enduring analytical validity of Marx’s insights.
One sense in which Marx’s analysis perhaps falters, however, is with regards to the question of novelty and revolution. In Class Struggles, and most famously in The 18th Brumaire, Marx passionately argues for a clean break between the proletarian revolutions of the future and the material of the past. Whilst the revolutionary task is no doubt essentially forward thinking in nature, liable to be corrupted by an excess of nostalgia which might distract from the fecundity of the future to which it points, Marx certainly overstates the degree to which the proletariat needs to shed its heritage. Theorising a sort of cultural revolution avant la lettre, Marx insists that the proletarian struggle’s essence needs to emerge almost from out of nothing, to such a degree that, for all its inspiring wonder, it goes against the implications of Marx’s own socio-economic determinism (if you’ll excuse the crude term).
For good reason, Class Struggles is primarily regarded as where Marx complicates the picture of class conflict, theorising the struggle between bourgeois elements and integrating it seamlessly into his overarching framework. Consonant with his earlier thinking, Marx dissects what ideologically presents itself to be monolithic interest, revealing the antagonism between different factions of the bourgeoisie, represented here in the Bourbons (industrial bourgeoisie, landed property) and the Orleans (financial aristocracy, capital). Only in the form of the republic could they temper their conflict of interests without being forced to sacrifice them. By contrast to this arrangement, Marx argues later in his articles on Britain that the English revolution retained a distinctly “conservative character" precisely because these two factions were united from the very outset, even if this fact was only recognised with the repeal of the Corn Laws in 1846.
This touches on an important theme for Marx, which we can trace back to Hegel’s “silent weaving of the spirit” – the haunting of social forces in name only, unaware (or unwilling to accept) that their material base has given way, that history no longer holds a place for them. There’s a certain comedy to this, but at the same time, Marx is under no illusions of what such a situation asks of these ghostly energies – “that before their final death agony these social forces summon up their strength once more and move from the defensive to the offensive, issuing challenges instead of giving ground, and attempting to draw the most extreme conclusions from premises which have not only been called into question but have already been condemned”. Does this not perfectly describe what we have been witnessing in modern day America?
Contemporary resonance aside, in the case of the French bourgeoisie, there was a degree of conscious participation in this movement. Once the republic had forced them to confront the proletariat without the crown to hide behind, it soon became apparent that, if they wished to retain their social and economic hegemony, they would have to give up their political hegemony. But who to? Why, to Louis Bonaparte of course! Here we see perfectly the sort of class dynamic that results in the bourgeoisie ceding their political power to fascism, or in this case “proto-fascism”/Bonapartism. When the political comes into contradiction with the social, the ruling class will, through gritted teeth if need be, always relinquish the former in order to save their latter, for of course it is in their social and economic control that their power truly lies.
“the parliamentary party of Order condemned itself to acquiescence by its clamour for tranquility. It declared the political rule of the bourgeoisie to be incompatible with the bourgeoisie’s own safety and existence by destroying with its own hands the whole basis of its own regime, the parliamentary regime, in the struggle against the other classes of society. Similarly, the extra-parliamentary mass of the bourgeoisie invited Bonaparte… It hoped that it would then be able to pursue its private affairs with full confidence under the protection of a strong and unrestricted government.”
When the bourgeoisie does hand its political power over to a strongman, this represents not the disintegration, but the fulfilment of their republic. None could have put it better than Marx himself:
”That work of art, the bourgeois republic, has not been distorted into a monstrous shape by the black magic of a Circe. It has lost nothing but the appearance of respectability. The parliamentary republic contained present-day France in finished form. It only required a bayonet thrust for the abscess to burst and the monster to spring forth before our eyes”
Not to beat a dead horse, but is this not precisely the situation of Trump’s America? Practically all his crimes, at least in form and intent, have plenty of precedent in practically every preceding administration. The most traumatic and shocking difference is, in effect, the dropping of the mask, the shedding of the “appearance of respectability” in favour of vulgar displays of naked violence.
Bonaparte was the ideal figure for this role. He made a virtue of necessity, flaunting the vulgarity of his situation in the vulgarity of his person. In the words of Marx, this “princely lumpenproletariat” stripped “the halo from the state machine, profaning it and making it both disgusting and ridiculous”. Is there, perhaps, an upshot to this obscene chaos? Might it be the case that the crudity, that the “stripping of the halo”, entails the demystification of the reified state apparatus? Just look at Trump – how much damage has he wrought upon the integrity and status of US empire through his presentation and treatment of the most hallowed office in the land?
Just as the reactionary populists of today rely heavily upon the anger and anxiety of the petit-bourgeois, only to squeeze them under the boot of capital once assuming control, Louis Bonaparte rose to power upon promises to alleviate the tax burden upon the peasantry, only to later cement their exploitation and immiseration.
Another decisive base for Bonaparte’s ride was, of course, the so-called lumpenproletariat. If there is a class Marx has absolutely no love or hope for whatsoever, it’s them. For as cruel and unremitting as he is with regards to the most vulnerable of society, the detritus of the reserve army of labour, the events of 1848-1852 gave him little cause for charity. Not only were they at the forefront of Bonaparte’s rise, they were also instrumental in filling the ranks of the Mobile Guards in crushing proletarian resistance. That being said, there is little evidence here that Marx fully recognises the psychological and social conditions responsible for this waxen susceptibility (let alone the possibility of their recruitment to the revolutionary cause), for if he did, I suspect he might have been ever so slightly less brutal in his assessment.
Speaking of Marx at his most contentious, this collection also includes his writings on India, reflecting on its ongoing colonisation by the British. Whilst he clearly recognised just how catastrophic this interference was for Indian society, tearing it’s economic foundation limb from limb and demolishing traditional bonds, he is nonetheless unrepentant in his analysis of what this means for the nation's objective social progress. Although hailing it as “the only social revolution ever heard of in Asia” certainly spoke to his ignorance, it is undeniable that, for all its horror, the colonisation of India did expedite its arrival into capitalism. And yet, what Marx fails to appreciate is that this is really no cause for celebration, even from the perspective of History. Pulling a community kicking and screaming into the future at the tip of the bayonet causes far more problems than it solves, as the following century would prove all too vividly.
“All the English bourgeoisie may be forced to do will neither emancipate nor materially mend the social condition of the mass of the people… But what they will not fail to do is to lay down the material premises for both. Has the bourgeoisie ever done more? Has it ever effected a progress without dragging individuals and peoples through blood and dirt, thought misery and degradation?”
May 22, 2023
Much of this book is hard to follow due to the specific historical contexts Marx is constantly referring to. The substance of the analysis makes it well worth reading, but that difficulty is omnipresent and takes a lot away from reading it today.
January 6, 2016
A superb selection of mature political writing from Marx. In slogging through his heavy weight economic work, I had forgotten how engaging his political and journalistic work can be.
This volume includes two of his more well known pieces of political writing - the Class Struggles in France, and the Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte. These are significant examples of Marx starting to use his developing economic theories for practical analysis. Both are very interesting on this basis, but are also very readable in their own right.
An excellent short volume, easy to read, and very insightful for Marx's overall thought.
This volume includes two of his more well known pieces of political writing - the Class Struggles in France, and the Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte. These are significant examples of Marx starting to use his developing economic theories for practical analysis. Both are very interesting on this basis, but are also very readable in their own right.
An excellent short volume, easy to read, and very insightful for Marx's overall thought.
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews