The revolution swerved to the left. It was now that a new human right was proclaimed by the revolutionary left. To those which had already been established during the revolutionary years of 1789 to 1794, the right to work was added. It was a social right, if anything, and as such was something new. Marx had always had a sceptical attitude towards declarations of rights, which in his opinion easily became empty rhetoric in a class society. But, he added, behind the demand for the right to work lay another, larger, demand: power over capital, and thereby the appropriation (Aneignung) of the means of production. Another programmatic point was progressive taxation – but, Marx said, progressive taxation was fully compatible with a bourgeois political system. It was even the most cherished alternative of the petty bourgeoisie.
Marx must have been arguing that the radical demand for the right to work was being watered down by the other demand – higher taxes for those who earned or owned more. (On the other hand, progressive taxation was also a demand in the Manifesto.) The right to work was shrunk in its parliamentary treatment to a right to relief. In a historical perspective, this radical demand is still the most important contribution the revolution of 1848–49 left to the future.
In all the developments that followed, a tug-of-war dominated between parliament on the one hand and Louis Bonaparte, who after many strange turns – but with a large majority – had been elected President of the Republic, on the other.
Election reforms deprived a large part of the impoverished male population of the right to vote for a time. The consequences were that parliament came to be dominated by petty and big bourgeois forces who considered themselves as standing for law and order (women were still excluded entirely). ‘The party of Order’ again favoured the finance aristocracy, as well as the industrial bourgeoisie and the large landowners – groups that could agree on common politics in relation to the other classes. Many urban citizens with more modest economic conditions also adopted the demands of the bourgeoisie in the hope of being able to improve their own situation.
But ‘the party of Order’ had a powerful opponent in Louis Bonaparte. The president knew he was a man of the people. Above all, he had the farmers on his side; the freeholders constituted the great majority – two-thirds, Marx claimed – of the population of France. When the majority of parliament voted through a tax on wine, their discontent reached boiling point.
When Marx was writing his article, the struggle for power was in full swing. He did not yet know its outcome. He was only trying to find fixed points in an unceasing flow of current events.
There are a few elements on the class struggle in the article that deserve mention. Marx compared France with Great Britain, pointing out that the stock exchange aristocracy in the latter was the subject of sharp, effective attacks from the leaders of industry, naming once again Richard Cobden and John Bright, the most colourful among the Manchester liberals, whose clarity and consistency he most reluctantly admired. The schism was due to the fact that Great Britain was a country that had managed to go farther in its capitalist development, he pointed out. Implicitly understood was that the representatives of productive capital had a stronger position.10
It is also worth noting that his conviction that the revolutions were natural features of this historical development remained unshaken. More than that: they drove history forward. Or, as he said with a typical metaphor that would be repeated among many of his more militant followers: ‘Revolutions are the locomotives of history.’11 It was a conviction built on the experiences of 1789, 1830, and 1848. Rebellions that knocked sitting regimes out of the saddle were inevitable features of the development of modern society.
One term that, on the other hand, was given a new and much more important role in the article on the class struggles in France was interests. But it would be scrutinized in connection with another work: Marx’s real test of strength from the early 1850s, namely The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte. Before this comes up for discussion, something must be said about the concluding texts in Neue Rheinische Zeitung. These are made up of reviews of newly published literature that Marx and Engels wrote, more or less together. They are often rather detailed examinations of books, with a shifting character – everything from a two-volume work on religion in the new era to François Guizot’s attempt to explain why England had succeeded with its revolution in the seventeenth century, but not France with its corresponding political revolutions much later. Guizot had himself become the leading politician after the July Revolution of 1830, but he had no more than anyone else managed to create a stable constitutional monarchy of the British type.
It is hardly surprising that Marx and Engels found Guizot’s explanations insufficient. Guizot only had an eye for the political game, and saw in Great Britain a congenial interplay between Whigs and Tories, liberals and conservatives. He did not see that the political stability had its foundations in a great alliance between the bourgeoisie and the large landowners, and above all he did not see the dramatic developments that occurred in society while the governments shifted. The manufacturers had developed to the degree that they burst their own frames asunder and made a place for industry that through steam machinery had become ‘gigantic factories’. A successful bourgeoisie had conquered the world market. But the development had also created a rapidly growing proletariat that threatened the peaceful game of governmental power that Guizot praised so lyrically. In France, on the other hand, the bourgeois class had had enough problems to cope with after the revolutions that they themselves had more or less been the architects of, but had time and again slipped out of their hands.12
The review is one example of materialist historical writing as Marx and Engels imagined it. But the example has its limitations. Guizot chose them, not his critics. A crucial part – perhaps the crucial part, in fact – of the journal was to have been a ‘Review’ in which neither books nor the February Revolution would be debated, but where the crucial events of the recent period would be scrutinized. Certain parts of the text that were to cover the first months of 1850 were certainly written by Marx, even if the author’s name is missing. Only he, and not Engels, could have come up with the idea of comparing the ambition of the Prussian king Wilhelm Friedrich IV to fortify his sovereign power with the Greek poem Batrachomyomachia (The Battle between the Frogs and the Mice), a ruthless and comical parody of classic depictions of war in the style of the Iliad that was composed sometime between 500 and 300 BCE.13 But it is neither Germany, nor Austria, Russia, Turkey, England, or France that made the deepest impression on the author of the article but the United States – more specifically, the discovery of gold in California. This was more important than the February Revolution – in fact, it was said, perhaps even more important than the discovery of America itself. Eighteen months after the discovery there was already a railroad, a major highway, and a canal in the state. Trade changed direction, and San Francisco developed as a new centre of world trade. A long coast – one of the most beautiful and fertile in the world – would contribute further to rapid development. World trade would soon get a new centre in California, and American traffic would soon not only be heading eastward to Europe but westward as well. People of all types would gather in this new earthly paradise, from Yankees to Chinese, from Blacks to Indians to Malays, from creole and mestizo to European, and the most recalcitrant peoples would be pulled into world trade, Marx maintained.
It is a sure prophecy of the time when the Pacific Ocean would become more important for trade than the Atlantic. Above all, it is a spectacular picture of the globalization that the forgetful 1980s gladly saw as something entirely new.
Marx also maintained (more or less without support from Engels) that Europe’s only possibility of holding its own in stiffening competition was a social revolution that transformed the relations of production in such a way that they could interact with modern productive forces. On the other hand, nothing was said about the need for a similar revolution in the United States. But was the Uni
ted States of the 1850s not a country where capitalism reigned? Certainly it was.14
The reviews that followed do not have the same powerful content. What is interesting, however, is an appreciative and critical report of Thomas Carlyle’s recent Latter-Day Pamphlets (published in 1850). Carlyle attacked contemporary society from a conservative position, but there are elements in his criticism reminiscent of those Marx and Engels formulated. The book was praised for that reason, but was criticized for its author’s veneration of the Middle Ages.15
One powerful contribution in the double issue of the journal dated May–October 1850 is Engels’s more than eighty-page article on the German Peasant Wars of the sixteenth century. It may seem like an odd deviation from the orientation on the contemporary era that characterizes everything else in the journal. But at the beginning and the end, Engels connected with the current situation. Even Germany has a revolutionary tradition, he said by way of introduction, and he concluded by assuring his readers that the final defeat of the peasant wars would not be repeated in nineteenth-century Europe: the future beyond the rebellion was bright.16
In the concluding issue of the journal, it was noted that the project was nearing its end; it had not become what Marx and Engels had hoped. Somewhat discouraged, they printed parts of the Communist Manifesto, and in the extensive ‘Review’ on the events from May to October 1850 they were compelled in the introduction to observe that revolutionary forces everywhere had been pushed back. The overview went on to deal with railroad construction and the accompanying speculation on the stock exchange, the potato blight of the 1840s, and problems with raw materials in the cotton industry where Engels was soon to serve. But the United States and its rapid development soon came into focus again, and the growing significance of the Pacific Ocean for trade and shipping was emphasized as it had been before. More, however, dealt with the disintegration of the Chartist movement in Great Britain and on the tug-of-war in France between Louis Bonaparte and parliament. The entire article was an attempt to catch the period in flight. The text has a journalistic drift, but lacks structure. It would be Marx’s and Engels’s last contribution to the journal, which went to its grave with this text.17
A Little Masterpiece That Brought in ‘Less than Nothing’
A few years ago, one of the leading German newspapers of our time, Die Zeit, selected the hundred greatest literary works of world history. Thomas Mann’s Buddenbrooks is there, as is Heinrich Mann’s Der Undertan (The Loyal Subject) and Alfred Döblin’s Berlin Alexanderplatz. August Strindberg’s Miss Julie is among those selected, but the list also contains a surprise: Marx’s The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte.
Of course, Marx’s book is a masterpiece. The first pages in particular are among those in Marx’s works that are never to be forgotten, on a level with the very best he wrote. It belongs to the tradition of world literature.
The book (or booklet) came into being over an astoundingly brief period. Marx began the work in December 1851 and was finished in March 1852. The year that had passed since Neue Rheinische Zeitung was shut down had been full of problems, of which familial and financial were far from the only ones. The schisms within the still young and limited German workers’ movement had deepened. Among those who were still active in German territory, Marx had good support for his tactic of waiting for a spontaneous proletarian uprising before the Bund der Kommunisten would go into action. In October 1850, Hermann Wilhelm Haupt wrote from Hamburg that their opponents, Willich and Schapper, did not stand a chance. Opinion was unanimous in Hamburg, likewise in Frankfurt and Wiesbaden. The zealous supporters of revolution in London were asses if they thought they could get any support in Germany.18
In London, on the other hand, where the German refugees were like dogs fighting over a bone, the polemics continued tirelessly, and both Marx and Engels devoted a seemingly unreasonable attention to the conflicts. The communists quarrelled internally, and outside their circles there were other refugees who were socialists, more indeterminate democrats, republicans, or something else, and the differences in opinion gave rise to endless controversies. Marx and Engels took part wholeheartedly. As we know, Marx had been subjected to shameful slander among these people, but neither he nor Engels were slow to give as good as they got. Marx wrote the brief, unpublished text mentioned earlier, ‘Skizzen über die deutsche kleinbürgerliche Emigration in London im Sommer 1851’ (Sketches of German petty-bourgeois emigration of London in the summer of 1851) in which some of his most detested opponents, Arnold Ruge among them, were castigated. But that was just the beginning. He and Engels soon pulled themselves together for a joint attack on all their opponents in the pamphlet The Great Men of the Exile.
A great deal of work lay behind it, consisting of an intense collection of material in which Jenny Marx also took part – as did Ernst Dronke, who at that point was one of Marx’s and Engels’s loyal followers (but would soon give up both communism and political activity and become a tradesman). The pamphlet was sent by courier to Germany where it was to be printed, but the courier was a police spy and delivered it to the police authority in Prussia instead. It was never printed during Marx’s or Engels’s lifetime, and no great damage was done with it. It is a text partly in the same style as The Holy Family or The German Ideology, but it does not have the same intellectual scope. There is only one phrase that really stands out, and it is certainly Marx’s creation: ‘character mask’. The inspiration came from a satirical poem by Heinrich Heine, in which someone was said to lack talent but was still a character (kein Talent, doch ein Character). Briefly put, he could play the game without understanding what it was about. The phrase ‘character mask’ itself, however, provides further and more interesting associations with classical Greek drama and its masks. The word would return in Marx’s later production, and that with a crucial significance for his fundamental theory.19
It is not Marx, however, who inspired those who use the phrase ‘character mask’ in current English. On the Internet, a character mask is a mask portraying a politician or other celebrity, like Barack Obama or Michael Jackson.
But enough about that. The manuscript on the great men in exile came into being in a great hurry in May and June 1852. A lot had already happened by then. The Communist League had dissolved, and a visible organizational boundary had thereby been erased between Marx and Engels on the one side and men such as Ruge and his ilk on the other.
The death blow for the League was dealt, as we have already seen, by Prussia and through the trials of communists in Cologne. When its most important representatives in the German states were locked up in houses of correction, the organization no longer meaningfully existed.
It is easy to see how quickly the mood shifted. In March 1850, Marx and Engels had written an optimistic address in the name of the League. The predictions in the Manifesto had come true to the letter. The death of Joseph Moll was a hard blow, it is true, but now it was only a matter of waiting for the proletariat to rise under its own power, or also for the Holy Alliance to attack ‘the revolutionary Babylon’. Faced with these prospects, the workers had to arm themselves, and Marx and Engels even hoped for an alliance between the proletariat and the lumpenproletariat – the same lumpenproletariat that had been castigated in the Manifesto and other writings.
The optimism in those pages did not have much support in reality. No rebellions shook ‘the revolutionary Babylon’. The trials of communists in Cologne did not arouse the protests of the masses, only their fear.20
As always, the dark clouds got Marx to take up his pen. The most important result is his book about Napoleon III’s path to power. It was his friend Joseph Weydemeyer who let the text fill an entire booklet of the newly founded journal Die Revolution. Weydemeyer had, prudently enough, left Germany and moved to the United States, and it was there he published his journal. Obviously, Jenny and Karl had hoped for a certain financial dividend for such an excellent text. But no, it brought in ‘weniger als nichts’ – less than not
hing, Jenny wrote. In general, the little book remained a black sheep of the family. Even in a letter from 1869 to her sister Jenny, Laura complained that there would be no French translation, despite its continued topicality.21 Only posterity has been able to appreciate the work according to its merits.
The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte22 contains not only a vivid portrayal of the course of events that ultimately made it possible for Napoleon’s nephew to become emperor after a coup. It also contains fundamentally important arguments that cast light on Marx’s view of history; in the first pages in particular, Marx formulates a few brilliant aphorisms that often appear in collections of familiar quotations.
We will begin with the bit of French history between 1848 and 1850. Marx had already depicted the start of this process in his article on the class struggles in France. But he was then compelled to bring it to an end in the middle of a flow of events whose continued direction lay hidden. Now, his depiction reached the definitive end of the revolution, when an entirely different history began: that of the Second Empire.
In the classical style, Marx divides the course of events into three parts. First, a prologue. The ruling finance aristocracy of the July monarchy was to be overthrown, but the rebellion soon took on greater proportions. The common folk mounted the barricades, demanding more than a political revolution: social conditions must also be transformed. But during the second phase, the leaders of the new bourgeois republic tried to stop developments that threatened their own position. This led to open rebellion, which cost many lives.
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