Because France was always the hope of the revolutionary left—and the home of its greatest disappointments—it is not surprising that Marx’s two most seminal post-mortem essays dealt with French developments. The first was titled “The Class Struggles in France, 1848–1850,” and the second was “The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte.” Both appeared in marginal publications and did not have much of an impact at the time. Yet in terms of Marx’s own intellectual development, they provide a clear rethinking and to a large extent also signify the direction his own interests and preoccupations would move toward for the rest of his life.
“The Class Struggles in France” was published in four installments in four consecutive numbers of the NRZ Revue in 1850. It was republished with some emendations by Engels in Berlin in 1895, more than a dozen years after Marx’s death. The introduction by Engels, written at the height of the growth of the German Social Democratic Party, aimed at a very different audience and largely overshadowed Marx’s contemporaneous analysis of what had happened in France almost half a century earlier.
The very title of Marx’s essay obviously raises the question of its relationship to the postulates of the Manifesto and clearly suggests a different historical paradigm. Whereas the Manifesto proclaimed a radical polarization of capitalist society into bourgeois and proletarians, with the eradication and proletarianization of all intermediary groups and social classes, the detailed study from 1850 suggests a very different picture of a complex, multilayered society, where many conflicting interests crisscross each other, bringing about shifting coalitions among multiple groups and subgroups and thus impeding the emergence of a clear-cut, polarized class warfare. It was this fractious nature of France’s class structure that caused the failure of working-class insurrections in Paris during the summer of 1848, according to Marx. He also dwells on the relative strength of the conservative peasantry in the countryside and other traditional groups, which reasserted themselves during the revolutionary months—again very different from the prognosis of the Manifesto about the disappearance of the peasantry as a distinct class.
Without saying so explicitly, Marx clearly admits that the apocalyptic messages of the Manifesto of a modern Armageddon did not play out in 1848 and were, in fact, not accurate. This sober analysis is the intellectual background to his opposition in the early 1850s to the attempts of the radical wing of the League of Communists to have once again recourse to revolutionary activity: the failures of 1848 were structural, not accidental, and demanded rethinking.
Marx does, however, cushion his insights by defensive language. He starts the first article by maintaining that most accounts of 1848 talk about the defeat of the revolution, arguing that “what was brought low by these defeats was not the revolution—it was the pre-revolutionary traditional trappings, the result of social relationships which had not yet intensified to sharp class antagonisms.” He goes on to suggest:
Revolutionary progress forced its way not through its immediate tragicomic achievements, but conversely in creating a united and powerful counter-revolution, in creating an opponent, combat with whom brought the party of revolt to maturity as a true revolutionary party.
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 the revolutionaries of 1848 for viewing themselves through the lens of historical memories of the French Revolution of 1789, bitingly commenting that they need “to strip themselves of all superstitions of the past.” The social revolutions of the nineteenth century “cannot draw their poetry from the past but only from the future.” This attempt to replay 1789 caused a misunderstanding of the present, Marx claimed, passing a far-reaching verdict on the 1848 revolutions, viewing them as mere episodes and not—as he himself did in the past—as turning points of history.
The February revolution [of 1848] was a sudden attack taking the old society by surprise but the nation proclaimed this unforeseen stroke as an act of universal significance, inaugurating a new epoch.
Because the 1848 revolution was not such a structural, universal event, it was relatively easy for Louis-Napoleon to do away with it by appealing to the mixed coalition of social forces that saw him both as a deliverer and a bulwark. In a statement that would later figure strongly in various interpretations of Marx’s legacy, he introduced a nuance into his former theoretical views about how history is made by human beings. Human agency is the foundation of historical action, but this action is not done in an abstract way; it is always historically contextualized and therefore circumscribed.
Men make their own history, but not at their own will under conditions they have chosen for themselves; rather it happens on terms immediately existing, given and handed down to them. The traditions of countless dead generations are an incubus to the mind of the living.
This pointing to the inextricable burden of history, which is different from country to country, is very different from the overall general statements of the Manifesto, and leads Marx in his further studies to look much more carefully at the diverse historical traditions of each society. Categories like “bourgeoisie” or references to general modes of production will have to be coupled with in-depth understanding of the peculiar
ities of each society—and this is how he explains the emergence of the unique phenomenon of Louis-Napoleon in the context of French history. Later this also led Marx to a differentiated prognosis of the conditions of a proletarian revolution in different European countries, and to a recognition of American exceptionalism, due to the availability of free land in the West.
The irony of this essay is that for all of his in-depth analysis of French social conditions, at the time he wrote it Marx imagined the ascendancy of Louis-Napoleon—later Emperor Napoleon III—would be short lived. At the end of the essay he predicts that the mantle of Napoleon will sit uneasily on the shoulders of his nephew Louis-Napoleon, and he was doomed to fail. Eventually he did, in 1871, but this occurred not as a result of internal tensions or upheavals. In any case, it took place almost twenty years after Marx published his essay.
SHIFTING VIEWS ON NATIONALISM
A much more subtle but no less far-reaching reassessment caused by the events of 1848 changed Marx’s views on the role of nationalism and the emergence of national movements.
One of the main arguments of the Manifesto was the universalizing impact of capitalist industrial development: just as local, inward-looking traditional modes of production give room to the revolutionizing powers of the world market, so local, regional, and national differences disappear in the face of the emerging universal world culture.
This approach to nationalism was one of the issues on which Marx disagreed with his friend and colleague Moses Hess, who maintained that world history is the history not just of class warfare but also of national struggles. As early as 1843, Hess envisaged and supported Italian national unification. It was this approach that eventually also led Hess to call, in Rome and Jerusalem: The Last Nationality Question, from 1862, for the establishment of a Jewish socialist commonwealth in Palestine as the expression of Jewish national identity.
The events of 1848–49 caused Marx to change his position that nationalism is basically a pre-modern phenomenon, due to disappear under the impact of the world market. From his perch as editor of the NRZ in Cologne, he followed closely developments all over Europe and witnessed the forces of nationalism in Germany, Poland, Hungary, and the Czech lands. It turned out that the power of nationalism appeared in many cases stronger than Marx initially imagined, and much more decisive than the forces of the working class or of class conflict: insurrections in Prague and Budapest were fueled by national sentiments, not proletarian class consciousness. Moreover, nationalist consciousness trumped proletarian solidarity, and the statement in the Manifesto that “the proletarians have no homeland” turned out to be rather hollow.
Marx never stated explicitly that all this called for a reassessment. But his post-1848 positions on national independence and the movements for German and Italian unification showed a clear transformation. He obviously held to his position that the more capitalist and industrialized society became, the stronger the proletariat became; yet now a further dimension was added. If industrial capitalist development in regions like Germany and Italy was hampered by the existence of numerous small, separate states, each with its own separate laws, currency, and customs regulation, it would be critical to set up larger unitary markets in Germany and Italy that would do away with these impediments—and only political unification could bring this about. Large political entities—a unified Germany, a unified Italy—are therefore necessary for industrial capitalist development that would lead to the rise of a strong proletariat, enhancing the chances of a socialist revolution. Far from being a pre-modern phenomenon, national unification came to be viewed by Marx as part of modernity and a necessary condition for a future socialist society.
But there were of course nuances: nationalism was viewed by Marx not on its own intrinsic historical or cultural merits, but merely instrumentally, as the condition for creating large economic spaces. This meant that he tended to support the emergence of large national states—Germany, Italy—while being skeptical about the claims of smaller nations like the Czechs or some Balkan lands. This sometimes put Marx in the position of supporting large national claims, such as Germany’s, while disregarding the attempts of smaller nations for self-determination: a problematic public and even moral stance. Some critics went so far as to label Marx a German nationalist, which is obviously nonsense. But one cannot avoid realizing that this position continued to haunt the socialist movement for decades and led to such divergent attempts to combine socialism and nationalism as Austro-Marxism, Leninism, and socialist Zionism.
Be this as it may, Marx no longer saw nationalism as a pre-modern phenomenon doomed to disappear before the juggernaut of what we would today call globalization. Without ever admitting it, Marx took a position on this issue that was closer to that of Moses Hess, though without recognizing—as Hess did—the value of the cultural dimensions of national movements as such. But realizing that nationalism is not just a pre-modern relic shows that Marx did internalize the lessons of 1848.
ON INDIA AND THE “ASIATIC MODE OF PRODUCTION”
Marx wrote for the New York Daily Tribune more than two dozen articles on British rule in India, some in the wake of the Indian Revolt of 1857, and some before it. Most are straightforward reports about current affairs, including scathing critiques of the brutality of the British suppression of the revolt. But two articles preceding the revolt stand out in addressing fundamental historical issues: “The British Rule in India” (published on 25th June 1853) and “The Future Results of British Rule in India” (8th August 1853). On these two occasions, Marx was able to integrate reporting on current affairs with his general views of world history.
It appears that Marx had very little sympathy with the immediate causes of the revolt: it was precipitated by the refusal of Hindu and Muslim soldiers in the British East India Company’s army to open ammunition cartridges wrapped in animal fat by having to bite them with their teeth—an expression for him of the retrograde state of Indian society. For all of Marx’s harsh criticism of British commercial and financial interests and policies in India, the revolt was not “The First Indian War of Independence,” as later claimed by both the Communist movement and Indian nationalists: Marx viewed it through the dialectical prism of his general view of history, and if the upshot is somewhat paradoxical, it adds to the depth of his approach to historical developments.
Like many other aspects of his thought, Marx’s views on India—and the non-European world in general—draw clearly on Hegel. In his Philosophy of History, Hegel referred to what he called “the Oriental Realm,” which included not only ancient Egypt, Assyria, and Babylonia, but also contemporary India and China. According to Hegel, these “Oriental despotisms” are static societies, without internal mechanisms of change and hence, in a most fundamental way, outside the realm of history that Hegel identified as the march toward the consciousness of freedom. Such views, quite common among European thinkers since the writings of the seventeenth-century French traveler François Bernier, who is quoted frequently by Marx, were integrated by him into a wider philosophy of history that allots a unique dialectical role to European imperialism, economic and political.
In the two articles on India, Marx adds a socioeconomic dimension to what previous thinkers have called the static and stagnant nature of Asian societies. While all other forms of society—slaveholding, feudal, and capitalist—carry according to Marx their own economic and social internal dynamism of change, the static nature of Indian society precludes this. He even goes to the extreme, stating that “Indian society has no known history. What we call its history is but the history of the successive intruders who founded their empires on the passive basis of that unresisting and unchanging society.”
The reason, according to Marx, for this unchanging nature of India—and Asian society in general—had already been identified by Bernier: “the absence of private property in land.” The need to control water resources in extensive river valleys creates the unique nature of the “Asiatic mode of production.”
Marx elaborates:
There have been in Asia, from immemorial times, but three departments of Government: that of Finance, or the plunder of the interior; that of War, or plunder of the exterior; and, finally, the department of Public Works. Climate and territorial conditions, especially in the vast tracts of desert, extending from the Sahara, through Arabia, Persia, India and Tartary … constituted artificial irrigation by canals and waterworks the basis of Oriental economy.
This prime necessity of an economical and common use of water, which, in the Occident, drove private enterprise to voluntary association as in Flanders and Italy, necessitated in the Orient where civilization was too low and the territorial extent too vast to call into life voluntary associations, the interference of the centralizing power of Government. Hence an economical function developed upon all Asiatic Governments, the function of providing public works.
This to Marx is the economic basis of what emerged as Oriental despotism, based on village communities totally dependent on centralized government, which necessarily puts all land under its control.
Unlike many other European liberals and socialists—then and now—Marx shows no sympathy for the indigenous village communities of India being destroyed by the impact of English commercial and industrial activity. “I share not the opinion of those who believe in a golden age of Hindoostan,” he said; against the idealizing picture sometimes painted by Western romantics, he gives a scathing account of the Indian village communities. The language is among the harshest used by a European observer:
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