Karl Marx by Shlomo Avineri

Author:Shlomo Avineri
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Yale University Press
Published: 2019-08-14T16:00:00+00:00

This is scant consolation, especially as the essays describe in great detail the failure of the revolutionary movement in France. To Marx’s credit, one has to say that even at this early stage he was aware how the emergence of Louis-Napoleon created an unusual coalition of revolutionary rhetoric and conservative politics, which would show its resilience only some time later and which Marx would then describe with biting sarcasm and furious frustration in his “Eighteenth Brumaire” essay. Be this as it may, it is precisely the great length Marx goes to in the four articles describing the complexity of French society that shows that the polarization theory of the Manifesto—and the ensuing supposed radicalization of class struggle—did not play out as envisaged.

These complexities are then honestly and explicitly brought out by Marx in the “Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte.” This article, published in 1852 after Louis-Napoleon had firmly established his rule, was printed in the German-language Die Revolution in New York, with even less visibility in Europe than the earlier four articles on the class struggles in France. Marx himself was well aware how little this essay was known in Europe, and under slightly more auspicious conditions he took care to issue a separate reprint in Hamburg in 1869, a short time before Napoleon III’s ignominious defeat in the Franco-Prussian War and the collapse of his imperial rule. Engels edited a third printing in 1885, with his own introduction, which again tended to overshadow Marx’s insights.

The strange title of the essay, referring to the date according to the French revolutionary calendar of the coup d’état of Napoleon I, is mainly etched in memory due to Marx’s pithy statement in the opening paragraph that “all great incidents and individuals of world history occur twice—the first time as tragedy, the second as farce.” The substance of the article is of course much more substantial than this reference to a statement Hegel is supposed to have uttered (although there is no evidence that he ever did).

Despite what may appear as a glib attempt to make Louis-Napoleon’s ascent a target of sarcasm and irony, Marx takes his coming to power seriously. The essay follows the line Marx had taken a few years earlier in his articles describing the complexities of the class structure in French society. In an unusual insight, he characterized the appeal of Louis-Napoleon to different classes in France as typical of plebiscitarian, authoritarian rulers—in a way prefiguring later theories about the appeal across class lines of fascist and populist nationalist movements and leaders. The irony is that these very insights run, of course, contrary to Marx’s theoretical premises that political power is a mere expression of economic interests: here he admits that the relationship between economic interests and political power is much more complex and not as simplistic or linear as he himself had maintained in the Manifesto.

But in this essay Marx also goes one step further regarding his assessment of the 1848 revolution in France. First of all, he criticizes

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