The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte

[Catmatic Leftist]

I'm reading Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, and I'm completely confused. Am I missing something? Is there anything that I should read as a prerequisite before tackling it? Perhaps some readings on the French Revolution that you can recommend?

[Commissar Rykov]

It isn't discussing the French Revolution so much as it is discussing Louis Bonaparte's rise to power via the Lumpenproletariat all while the Bourgeois Legislature tears itself apart into becoming an impotent body all after the Proletariat had been crushed in a concentrated effort. There are some references to the French Revolution but it is mostly about the situation in France during the middle of the 19th Century where Louis Bonaparte dismantles the Republic in order to make it an Empire under him.

[S.Artesian]

Read Class Struggles in France, 1848-1850.

Marx continues that analysis in Brumaire, showing how the bourgeoisie, terrified of the working, class submits itself to the Bonapartist coup, which itself appeals to the conservative peasantry, and the military as the guardians of "order," that is to say, private property.

Brumaire shows that the origin of Bonapartism is in the defeat of revolution, in the organization of a "counter-revolution" even at the expense of the forms of bourgeois republicanism.

[graymouser]

Verso has reprinted the excellent Political Writings of Karl Marx series. Get the volume Surveys from Exile (http://www.amazon.com/Surveys-Exile-Political-Writings-Marxs/dp/1844676072/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1317144898&sr=8-1), which includes Class Struggles in France and The Eighteenth Brumaire. You need to read the former first for the full effect of the latter.

Between the two books, these really represent for the first time Marx's historical materialism in application, to an ongoing revolution. Marx is tearing aside the veil of ideology over politics and laying bare the class interests beneath it. It's an analysis that leads to a difficult and dynamic understanding of class struggle, because we see different classes in action and a simplistic "workers good, bosses bad" approach melts away in favor of seeing how the balance of class forces act in history.

It doesn't hurt to acquaint yourself with the 1848 revolution in France on the internet either, or in a good general history book.

[blake 3:17]

I discussed it yesterday, while admitting I hadn't really read it. It was written as journalism, not as writing for the ages, so the tone & style are very different from most Marx's major writings.

[graymouser]

I discussed it yesterday, while admitting I hadn't really read it. It was written as journalism, not as writing for the ages, so the tone & style are very different from most Marx's major writings.
This is a light-minded and dreadfully wrong approach to the Eighteenth Brumaire. If you treat Class Struggles in France and Eighteenth Brumaire as a unit, they form one of the most solid in-depth discussions of actual political history that Marx would do in his career (the other being The Civil War in France, a shorter work but with more theoretical implications).

These two books are when Marx's theoretical framework of historical materialism met with its subject in full force. You had really the first thorough application of historical materialism not in the theoretical terms of the German Ideology or the Communist Manifesto, but as it applied to class conflicts in the actual sphere of politics. Marx carefully examines the economic relations hiding behind each political turn and lays out the implications. He roots the crisis that leads to Louis Bonaparte's coup firmly in the split between the Legitimist and Orleanist bourgeoisie and the inability of the parliamentary democracy to move left because of the specter of the proletariat and the radical democratic petty bourgeoisie, which it had previously suppressed.

Much subsequent Marxist analysis of current events is patterned on the Eighteenth Brumaire to the point where I would say, because of its timeliness, it became a document for the ages. Marx transcends his journalism (much of which did not go anywhere near as deep as Class Struggles / Eighteenth Brumaire) and creates a revolutionary class understanding of history as it is happening.

As a side note, I find them devastating rhetorically. From the very first line about history repeating once as tragedy and then as farce, he lays into his opponents with a rhetorical edge that most of his followers only wish they had.

[S.Artesian]

Agree with the Graymouser-- the two books are the most vivid, focused, incisive examples of historical materialism ever written, exceeding IMO, Trotsky's History of the Russian Revolution, as the best expression of Marxist analysis of class struggle.

The two by Marx certainly stand with A Contribution to the Critique Of Political Economy, and vol 1 of Capital as works critical to the apprehension of conflicts and contradictions that are not just at the core of capital, but are the core of capital.