A World to Win

by Sven-Eric Liedman

  Marx provided a split (to say the least) image of the efforts of the proletariat. On the one hand, they raised demands that were nothing more than ‘utopian nonsense’ (utopische Flausen); on the other, the June uprising was ‘the most colossal event in the history of European civil wars’.23 The bourgeoisie won, and stabilized their power. The proletariat was forced back onto the revolutionary stage (Marx gladly used metaphors from the theatre in the presence of dramatic events), and their ever more questionable leaders devoted themselves to diverse experiments marked by the conviction that the desired changes to society would occur ‘in private fashion’ through anticapitalist banks, workers’ associations, and so on. It was Pierre-Joseph Proudhon and his followers that, without naming names, Marx was criticizing. In Marx’s opinion, the social revolution cannot be realized through gradual measures that undermine the power of the capitalists. This can only happen in open battle. The bourgeois republic means pure class despotism.

  The third period, which ended with the coup of 18 Brumaire (2 December), was characterized by the power struggle between parliament and the popularly elected president, Louis Bonaparte, whom Marx had already depicted in his article on the class struggles. Legislation and taxation was in the hands of parliament; the majority of the people (the farmers) embraced the president, and the latter also succeeded in winning the loose elements of society – its outcasts, the lumpenproletariat – by providing them with food, wine, and weapons. When Bonaparte’s term as president was nearing its end and he could not be re-elected according to the constitution, he staged a coup d’état, entrenching himself at the top of a substantial imperial bureaucracy and a loyal army. The choice of date for the coup was not at random. 18 Brumaire was, according to the French Revolutionary calendar, the day in 1804 when the first Napoleon crowned himself emperor, and also the day a year later when he won his most famous victory: the Battle of the Three Emperors at Austerlitz.

  The interest and strength of Marx’s writing is not in the depiction of this series of events. It is brisk and skilful, but also arbitrary. The important thing is what he says about social classes, on the difference between saying and doing, on the history that marks people’s thinking and language, on historical patterns that are repeated, and especially on people’s freedom and lack of freedom.

  First, class. The freeholding farmers did not constitute a class, Marx said. Their conditions are homogeneous, it is true, and they are all affected by the same kinds of taxes. But they live and work independently of each other and constitute only a ‘vast mass’. Neither division of labour nor technological development based on contemporary science affects their labour yet. No one can really represent them; they exist one by one. Of course, there are revolutionary farmers, but they have been defeated. Conservative farmers are the ones Napoleon III could support himself on. It certainly looks like the new emperor’s state constituted its own independent power, but it has its essential support among the farmers.24

  The different layers of the bourgeoisie, on the other hand, are a class like the petty bourgeoisie and the workers. The French workers may have bad leaders, but they nonetheless constitute a class. The petty bourgeoisie believe themselves to be above class interests, but of course they are not. The stock exchange aristocracy, productive capitalists, and large landowners may often fight against each other; in the parliament of the revolutionary period they formed a common front against the president, who was on his way to making himself emperor.

  It is clear that Marx’s classes are not complete, closed entities as they are in a contemporary statistical overview of various occupational categories. It is not generally the term class that is in focus for him; it is, as French philosopher Louis Althusser pointed out, the class struggle. In other words, it is not the anatomy of society that occupies Marx, but its conflicts.25

  Here, there is a particular problem with the groups we would call intellectual – the people tasked with creating, developing, or conveying knowledge, values, and programmes of action. All democratic representatives are not shop owners, Marx pointed out. On the contrary, with their education and their positions as intellectuals, they may be far from them. But they will not cross the boundaries of the material interests of their class. The background, of course, is that many leading figures in various parties do not have their occupational experience in the various core activities of their parties but could be teachers, lawyers, doctors, authors, or journalists. How could they see society from the perspective of the petty or big bourgeois? And how could Karl Marx, with his lawyer’s education and his doctorate in philosophy, assume the standpoint of the waged labourers?

  The statement just expressed – that all intellectuals in politics are nevertheless limited by the class interests they represent – does not provide a satisfactory answer to the question. It is further brought to a head by the fact that many intellectuals, especially at that time, maintained that their opinions had the sanction of science. Marx himself was one of them. He claimed to be an innovative scientist. Questions of this kind will occupy us in due course. They are crucial for understanding Marx’s perceptions of society. But in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte they are still open, without answers.

  Another term that plays a central role in the same book is interest. Marx said: ‘And as in private life one differentiates between what a man thinks and says of himself and what he really is and does, so in historical struggles one must still more distinguish the language and the imaginary aspirations of parties from their real organism and real interests, their conception of themselves from their reality.’26

  The expression ‘real organism’ may seem strange today, but in the mid-nineteenth century it was not. The real organism was the party as it was, not as it wanted to appear. Through this quote, we come back to the most fundamental figure in Marx’s world of ideas ever since his early youth: the opposition between heaven and earth, head and feet, form and content – what through various turns of history would come to be cemented in the more rigid pair of base and superstructure in the textbooks. But here, as in the article on the class struggles, the term interest stands out. It is never again as important in Marx’s writing as it is in both these works.

  The root is in two Latin words, inter and esse, ‘between’ and ‘(to) be’. But interest is no classical Latin term. Marx came into contact with it chiefly through British philosophy. It is both a central psychological, perhaps even anthropological, term, and a narrower economic term having to do with dividends earned against a loan or investment. From the start, interest is the amount a capitalist pays to a landowner or property owner to be allowed to produce goods in a fixed location, perhaps in buildings that are not even their own. With the development of the stock exchange, the word interest gains additional content; speculation picks up momentum.

  The psychological term has a certain relationship with the idea of homo oeconomicus, ‘economic man’, who knows exactly what favours them or is to their disadvantage. The unbiased person can navigate through existence in a way that, given the circumstances, makes their life better than if they had been guided by prejudices of various kinds. On a political plane, this means that if people’s interests become generally accepted in decision-making associations, they will also correspond to the prevailing interests in society.

  Marx was not unaffected by this discussion when he was writing his articles in the early 1850s. But the content was entirely different. Interest is set against conscious ideas, whatever those may be. Interest has nothing to do with what people ‘think and say’ but with what they are and what they do. Phrases and fancies may not be mixed together with real interests.

  The meaning is not uncomplicated. It conflicts with its daily use in sentences like ‘foreign languages and picking mushrooms are my main interests’. Rather, Marx is referring to the social forces operating under the surface on which our consciousness moves. It is not strange that the word in this sense fades away in Marx’s later writings and is replaced by other, more s
ophisticated ways of describing the play between conscious ideas and driving forces in society. But the content has stuck in common perceptions of Marx’s theories, which is perhaps why his writings on the eighteenth Brumaire are so widely read.

  Interest in the economic sense, as dividends earned, also plays a role in Marx’s writings, his later ones in particular. But there, it is embedded in his more central categories such as capital and surplus value.27

  It is not the comments on interest that made The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte so admired. It is rather the very first pages of the work, which contain a chain of sentences that are often quoted. First is the reference to Hegel, who said ‘somewhere’ that history always repeats itself. But Marx interjects that Hegel forgot to point out that the original course of events takes the form of a tragedy, to later be repeated as farce. Robespierre of the 1790s had his counterpart in Louis Blanc of the 1840s, and instead of the uncle came the nephew (that is, Napoleon III had to shoulder the role of Napoleon I).28

  But more interesting is what Marx immediately thereafter says about history. People make their own history, but they do not freely do so; they do so under immediately given circumstances. The past sets the framework for them. ‘The tradition of all the dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brain of the living.’ These lines are an interesting example of the often abused term dialectics. So much is settled in advance, but people are nevertheless creative. Marx was not, as is often asserted, determinist. On the other hand, he occupied himself intensely with what limited human action.

  The leading actors of history also themselves contributed to bringing the past to life. Luther dressed up as St Paul. The French Revolution of 1789 mirrored the Roman Republic, and Napoleon imperial Rome. The revolution of 1848 tried to follow in the footsteps of 1789. ‘In like manner a beginner who has learnt a new language always translates it back into his mother tongue,’ Marx said. Only someone who can move freely in the new language can create something independently.

  The comparison also applies to the social revolution that Marx hoped would soon break out. It was preceded by a series of bourgeois revolutions; the first was Oliver Cromwell’s in England in the mid-seventeenth century. The bourgeoisie in itself was unheroic but still needed heroism, sacrifice, terror and civil war to reach its goal. All revolutions bring the dead to life in order to endow their own battles with heroism. What happened in France between 1848 and 1851 meant that an entire people found itself transported to a past epoch.

  But it had to be different with the nineteenth-century social revolution! It ‘cannot draw its poetry from the past, but only from the future’, Marx said. It must let the dead bury their dead, and reach out to its own content. In other words, it should not dress up in the clothes of older times (their forms) but concentrate on what is the core of its task.29

  A social revolution is precisely a matter of content, that is, the material basis of society, while strictly political revolutions necessarily concentrate on form, which is politics. The line of thought is not difficult to understand, but it still raises questions that we had previously skirted. What did Marx mean about poetry in that quote? It can scarcely be the poetry he loved so much, from the ancient Greeks to Heinrich Heine. Rather, this poetry is the phrases and opinions that previous revolutionaries took from the past, whether it be Ancient Roman heroes or Robespierre or Napoleon I. As he often did, Marx depicted the future that he desired only in negative terms. The coming revolution will not be like the previous ones. It will not dig into the past. On the contrary, it will meet the future without being guided by ancient ideas.

  Marx’s work was published in a second German edition in 1869. In the preface, he observed that initial distribution of the book in Germany had been insignificant. In 1869, on the other hand, there was great interest in it.

  Marx compared his Eighteenth Brumaire with two other books on the same dramatic period: Victor Hugo’s Napoléon le petit (The Little Napoleon) and Pierre-Joseph Proudhon’s La révolution sociale démontrée par le coup d’état du 2 décembre (The Social Revolution Illuminated Through the Coup of 2 December), both of which were published in 1852, the same year as Marx’s work. Hugo, who Marx never held in particular regard, explained the course of events entirely with the person of Louis Napoleon himself. He turned up ‘like a bolt from the blue’, Marx said. But in that case, wouldn’t the main character of the book be great, and not little, if he could produce so much on his own initiative?

  For his part, Proudhon tried to see the coup as the result of historical development, but in his zeal to be an objective historian turned the retinue of putschists into heroes. Marx emphasized how the class struggle in France lifted up the bizarre Louis Bonaparte as the final solution to an otherwise unsolvable dilemma.

  He did not revise the work. If he had, it would have lost its distinctive colouring, he claimed.30

  Conquering the World with a Pen

  A large, important part of Marx’s journalism is composed of the articles he published in the New York Daily Tribune. The background is an interesting one. The paper’s managing editor, Charles Anderson Dana, took a trip around Europe in the late 1840s. In revolutionary Paris, he ran into Karl Marx, who made a strong impression on him through his uncompromising radicalism and his enormous wealth of knowledge. The idea of linking Marx to the Daily Tribune had stirred back then, but could not be realized immediately since Marx soon became occupied with his own newspaper in Cologne. When Marx arrived in London, destitute and in desperate need of money, it became that much more important for him to establish close contact with the newspaper on the other side of the Atlantic. The platform Dana and his editor-in-chief, Horace Greeley, could offer him was not just any platform: the paper was successful, respected, and had a broad circulation, especially among the lower classes of society.

  The Daily Tribune was as serious as it was radical, founded and managed by Horace Greeley. Greeley was a socialist, primarily a follower of Charles Fourier, and he conducted an involved struggle for workers and others forced to live on the margins of the economy. Back in the 1830s, he had emerged as one of the most important moulders of opinion against slavery.

  Charles A. Dana, long his right-hand man, had more direct experience of the socialist experiment. For five years, he had lived and worked in a small utopian society of which there were so many at the time. It was called Brook Farm, located in Massachusetts. Fourier was its guiding light, and its founder, George Ripley, at length became the literary editor at the Daily Tribune and thus a colleague of Dana’s. Brook Farm had come to nothing by then, by all appearances because the participants had not sufficiently mastered the art of either managing a farm or carrying out production on an industrial scale.

  Dana made for revolutionary Europe instead. There he met not only Marx, but also encountered the future Napoleon III. It is striking how much he agrees with Marx in his description of this remarkable man. Dana saw from his spectator’s seat how the future ruler captured everyone’s attention in parliament although he was an ordinary man with an unbecoming moustache and marked by a life of dissipation.

  It is not odd that Marx felt at home in the New York paper and that Dana, responsible for reporting from Europe, so generously prepared a place for his articles. And Marx was assiduous. Only the American Civil War put a stop to his collaboration. Strangely enough, the interruption coincided with Dana being fired from the paper in 1862, for reasons that are shrouded in mystery. For the Daily Tribune, it meant a setback, but Dana himself had a splendid career. He first became assistant secretary of war in Abraham Lincoln’s cabinet, and after the war he took over another New York paper, the Sun, which under his management achieved wide circulation and great influence.31

  But we are here concerned with Marx. Ostensibly, Marx’s debut in the paper was back in October 1851. But despite Marx being indicated as the author, it was Engels who wrote the debut articles dealing with revolution and counterrevolution in Germany. Marx was busy with something
else at the time, nor had his own English reached the level that it was good enough for newspaper prose (in Sperber’s words, it always remained ‘noticeably Teutonic’).32

  After that, Marx became that much more assiduous. Despite his poverty and despite the sorrows, he wrote a copious number of articles for the Daily Tribune. They are so many that, compiled into books, they extend over several thousand pages and constitute an important part – predominant, in fact – of the mass of text he sent to print. Posterity has forgotten that he stood out as a journalist in his time. After the revolutions in the late 1840s, it was not Europeans but Americans who got to acquaint themselves with the art of his writing. He himself saw the United States as an increasingly important recipient of radical ideas. Many Europeans had escaped the wave of counterrevolutions to the other side of the Atlantic. But above all, the United States was undergoing dramatically rapid industrial and economic development. It should have been a good breeding ground for radical ideas.

  The Daily Tribune was thus an important forum, and not just an insufficient though necessary contribution to supporting Marx’s family.

  But, despite everything, he also published a number of articles in Europe. At irregular intervals, he submitted contributions to the Chartist organ The People’s Paper, and in 1855 he devoted his main energies to a new radical German paper, Neue Oder-Zeitung, which in due course, however, was quickly banned by the authorities. In the early 1860s, he wrote a number of articles in Die Presse, a Viennese newspaper that opinion-wise suited him poorly and at times refused to publish what he had written. (Die Presse, which began publication in the revolutionary year of 1848, is otherwise still around, despite various interruptions to its publication.)