nm0088: the subject of today's lecture is Karl Marx's text Eighteenth Brumaire 
er next week namex will talk about Marxism after Marx look at what s-, w-, what 
happened to the Marxist legacy er after the eighteen-eighties er what i want to 
do today largely is concentrate er on the text itself which is a very 
complicated text and i think not a from slightly difficult text well i'll just 
begin by a a slight sort of er introduction when i arrived at namex er what 
seems like a lifetime ago but was only thirty-one years ago in nineteen-sixty-
eight er i would think probably about forty per cent of the members of staff 
were Marxists E P Thompson of course was the the doyen of the er of Marxist 
British Marxist historians and was was here in the social history centre and a 
straw poll conducted amongst er first year basic one students in a lecture in 
nineteen-sixty-nine revealed that something like forty per cent of the students 
er saw themselves as either Marxist or sympathetic to Marxism er times 
have obviously changed and n-, er now when Marx is brought up as a topic er i'm 
wheeled out as one of the surviving dinosaurs as it were in the department er 
most of the remaining Marxists either being dead or long departed or have 
become Liberal Democrats [laughter] or whatever er i conducted a similar sort 
of poll er last year in this this sort of er session and found that 
unsurprisingly nought per cent of historiography students er identified 
themselves as Marxists er i tried one with a postgraduate er historiography 
group the same year and found one out of thirty but he didn't count 'cause he 
was an Italian er er but er i could perhaps begin this lecture therefore with a 
sort of McCarthyite question are you now or have you ever been [laughter] a 
Marxist and the camera will pick you out [laugh] and er sort of [laughter] s-, 
sort of send your name 
straight to M-I-five [laughter] er clearly the world of the nineteen-seventies 
and eighties has been eighties and nineties has been singularly unkind both to 
Marxists linked social and political movements and also to Marxist modes of 
analysis the collapse of the Soviet system the sharp decline of socialist and 
trade union movements in the industrial West the apparent disintegration of the 
industrial heartlands of the er organized working class in Western Europe the 
apparent disintegration of any clear sense of class identity as being the sort 
of basic building block of one's er personality as it were the apparent triumph 
of free market globalized international capitalism has all clearly changed the 
world drastically but before writing the final obituary of Marxism one should 
perhaps ponder certain ironies noted by John Gray in a recent er Times Literary 
Supplement review of a series of er writings on the hundred-and-fiftieth 
anniversary of the Communist Manifesto which came last year John Gray is no 
Marxist he he was a Thatcherite for a while in the eighties he's now sort of 
New Labour i think but Gray insists that Marx clearly got all sorts of things 
wrong he's sub-, subsequent si-, subsequent experiences have clearly questioned 
the viability of large-scale planned economies as being more rational and 
efficient than market economies Marx was clearly blind to a whole series of 
ecological consequences of industrialization which have marked our own 
perceptions of the world in the last few years but Gray insists that one 
striking central paradox is that some of Marx's central predictions were in 
actua-, were have in fact been in a sense delayed b-, in their implementation 
by the intervening rise of Marxist and social democratic movements in the late 
nineteenth early twentieth century and Gray goes on to argue that now that 
Marxism and social democracy are clearly 
in d-, in retreat the global capitalism which Marx predicted is now at last in 
a sense coming into being the world described by Marx in the Communist 
Manifesto is Gray says recognizably the world we live in a hundred-and-fifty 
years later to take just one quote from the Communist Manifesto all old 
established national industries have been destroyed or daily are being 
destroyed they are being dislodged by new industries whose introduction becomes 
a life and death question for all civilized nations by industries that no 
longer work up indigenous raw materials but raw material drawn from the 
remotest zones industries whose products are consumed not only at home er but 
in every quarter of the globe in place of old wants satisfied by productions of 
the country we find new wants requiring for their satisfaction the products of 
distant lands and climes in place of the old local and national seclusion and 
self-sufficiency we have intercourse in every 
direction universal interdependence of nations moreover the long term impact of 
this as Marx predicted may well be in the twenty-first century not only the 
dominance of the world economy by a handful of capitalist multinational firms 
but a predatory capitalism read in tooth and claw from which the inhibitions of 
socialism and Marxist movements and trade unions and welfare states have been 
removed a polarization on a global scale between the affluent minority and the 
destitute majority of the world's population endless uncontrollable change and 
uncertainty and flux in technologies which makes the hopes for certainty and 
security futile even increasingly perhaps among broad strata of the middle 
class to quote the Communist Manifesto again constant revolutionizing of 
production uninterrupted disturbances of all social conditions everlasting 
uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all 
earlier ones all fixed fast frozen relations with their train of ancient and 
venerable prejudices and opinions are swept away all new formed ones become 
antiquated because before they can ossify all that sol-, is solid melts into 
air all that is holy is profaned and man is at last compelled to face with 
sober senses his real condition of life and his relations with his kind in 
nineteen-forty-eight in the the centenary of the Communist Manifesto Joseph 
Schumpeter again no Marxist but a leading sort of economic theorist claimed 
that capitalism left to itself and left unchecked would make intact 
civilization as Schumpeter called it impossible many conservatives in our own 
society believe in the need to restore family values traditional values but at 
the same time they espouse free markets this Gray insists is actually 
impossible combination it's quixotic to try and combine the two for global free 
markets are in the process of undermining not only families but local 
cultures car-, c-, whole career structures who today in the face of constant 
downsizing delayering technological change conte-, contemplate a stable career 
for life and very soon university lecturers will be replaced by [laugh] videos 
as it were of past lectures or interactive courses on on on on the web and so 
on and so forth u-, the university lecturer will be a thing of the past i'm too 
old to bother but those of you who are aspiring to be university lecturers er 
in the future er might have some cause for s-, concern there is in short Gray 
argues an acute contradiction between capitalism's promise of a liberal society 
and a good life and the actual realities lived in a globalized market society 
Gray's argument is that Marx's achievement despite all the errors that he made 
and there are there are countless Gray says his achievement was to identify the 
contradictions at the heart of liberal 
civilization to which no solution has yet been found 
nm0088: what i want to do now is to look er at Marx's the the wer-, the 
emergence of Marxism the relationship between Marxism and other paradigms of 
historical explanation which we look at this term and then look at the text 
itself this term in a sense we're dealing above all with perhaps three major 
historiographical paradigms which emerged in nineteenth century Europe we've 
done one of them s-, already the Rankean paradigm Ranke is clearly significant 
er for his insistence on professional standards his use of archives his 
scrutiny of evidence his insistence that historians should tr-, er try as far 
as possible to eliminate their own prejudices for claiming that the historian 
should seek to empathize with people who lived in the past verstehen to 
understand er what was going on inside their heads er in emphasizing the 
individual event and the individual historical actor great man great person 
that one should not move from the 
general to the particular but one should perhaps tentatively try to move from 
the particular to the general he rejected much of the Enlightenment emphasis on 
progress to a world of reason and peace arguing that wars between powers had 
always occurred and would always occur and the best one could hope for was a 
balance of power and b-, and he insisted that great states each represented in 
a sense an idea er America represents democracy and freedom the United st-, the 
U-S-S-R represented Soviet totalitarianism et cetera et cetera and he insisted 
that a strong state was necessary as a prerequisite for internal order and the 
freedom of man to worship now clearly ran-, the Rankean paradigm is still 
enormously powerful it's clearly informs the writings of people like Geoffrey 
Elton in Britain er er there's a whole school of neo-Rankean historians er in 
still in in in West in what was West Germany the second paradigm is a French 
school of positivist structuralist historians 
er we used to have a lecture at this stage in the course on either Comte or 
Durkheim both of these have been cast into the rubbish bin of history but you 
will fairly soon be doing the Annales who are in a sense the twentieth century 
heirs of this French positivist tradition and the key figure in the nineteenth 
century in this who is virtually a contemporary er of Ranke is a man called 
Auguste Comte the founder of the discip-, of the word and the discipline of 
sociology Ranke as you found out was a Prussian a Lutheran a monarchist a 
conservative hostile to the Enlightenment Comte is in a sense a reverse of 
Ranke he's a claddic classic product of the world of the French Revolution 
educated in the grande école set up by Napoleon after the French Revolution to 
train the post-revolutionary elite in France Comte viewed the Enlightenment as 
a stage on the path of humanity from the age of religion through the age of 
philosophy finally to the age of science the age of positivism er which he saw 
as emerging in the nineteenth century he therefore shared the Enlightenment 
French Revolution emphasis on progress which Ranke rejected but he was worried 
that the French Revolution er because of the social un-, er upheaval which was 
created would create instability therefore what the post-revolution world 
needed was Comte said a science of mankind I-E sociology in-, he in-, invented 
the term which would diagnose social problems and su-, suggest solutions Comte 
saw society as an entity it was a reality it was a thing and society could be 
studied using the methodology of natural sciences something which Ranke 
rejected and one could discern its laws there were laws of motion as it were of 
society which could be er worked out and Comte envisaged a world where experts 
economists sociologists demographers scientists technologists and so forth 
would uncover these social laws and utilize 
their knowledge of society to run society in a more efficient productive er way 
for for as it were a more productive er more prosperous future and the masses 
would not really understand this science but they would be taught to accept and 
welcome the rule of this technocratic elite now Marx is the figure clearly of a 
a third paradigm Marxism differs from Comtean positivism because positivists' 
approach emphasized understanding deep structures and the laws of motion in 
society in order that modern a sort of modern technocratic elite could manage 
and stabilize society and achieve social integration and harmony the 
positivists in sort er in short sought to control and eliminate social conflict 
Marxism was clearly more revolutionary in it it saw previous m-, mar-, Marx 
famously said that previous philosophers had sought to interpret the world that 
his task was to change it and he saw revolution as a sort of locomotive of 
history class conflict as what drove history forward 
subsequent Marxists er have often criticized the positivists ce-, Comte and his 
disciples for their overemphasis on social structures and laws saying this this 
was too deterministic er it undermined man's capacity to have an agency as it 
were i-, an input into how history moved but what it i think is important here 
to register is that for much of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century 
Marxism certainly shared or ki-, appeared to share many of the features of this 
positivist sociological approach indeed Karl Popper in another book that we 
used to do in historiography which has again been cast into the dustbin of 
history a book called the Poverty of Historicism er argued that er both Comte 
and Marx should be lumped together as believers in deterministic laws of 
history they both in a sense shared many features in common he asked and why 
was this confusion possible well first of all because Marxists and positivists 
both unlike Ranke appeared to share a common interest 
in society they weren't so concerned with individuals getting inside the heads 
of individual great people but they were concerned with society social 
structures econ-, economics er secondly Marx was clearly influenced if less 
directly by Comte himself certainly by Comte's great er teacher was a who's a 
rather eccentric French er aristocrat who actually espoused the the re-, French 
Revolution a man called Saint-Simon Saint-Simon was an eccentric genius he 
dreamed he in he in his m-, multitude of writings round about the turn of the 
century in the early eighteen er early early eighteen-hundreds he dreamed of 
for example the Panama and Suez canals it was actually one of his disciples de 
Lesseps who built the Suez Canal sixty years later but er er Saint-Simon 
dreamed of a single global market in order to have one one needed er these 
canals to link the oceans of the world he dreamed of the he said it was l-, 
logical that Europe should form a single [laugh] 
European market [laugh] and should have a single currency and all the er for 
those of you who are Europhobes and don't want want us to get out of Europe can 
blame Saint-Simon as being well as it were well the founder of the of the 
European idea and Saint-Simon divided history into economic stages from him 
Marx derived the idea of a sort of teleology of history progressing from 
slavery to feudalism to capitalism and so forth and also Saint-Simon was 
responsible in a sense for the er notion which is kind of central to sort of er 
subsequent labour movements of the distinction as it were between productive 
and parasitic er social groups there's a famous parable er by Saint-Simon in 
which he says imagine er a Europe in which all the crowned heads all the 
princes and princesses and bishops and so forth and aristocrats are s-, are 
called to a a wedding in Lisbon of a of a royal princess and they happen to be 
walking across a bridge one day er to go to the cathedral and the bridge 
collapses and they're all thrown into the river and drown what is the impact on 
Europe answer zilch er these people are totally useless they're unproductive 
they're parasitic if that bridge however contained scientists doctors er 
technologists managers er useful people [laugh] then it would indeed be serious 
those are in a sense the productive classes and it was Saint-Simon's er 
students in the grandes écoles who took part in the eighteen-thirty revolution 
in Paris which overthrew the returned Bourbons and some radical Saint-Simonians 
actually spread their ideas among the workers in Paris in the early eighteen-
thirties and some French workers got the er idea that actually they were the 
productive classes it was actually the workers [laugh] not the managers and the 
and the and the industrialists who were the 
the true who actually er as it were the tr-, were the truly productive class so 
much of Marx's er structure of thinking as it were er comes from the-, these 
sorts of Saint-Simonian influences moreover Marx was drawn into the what some 
have seen as a trap of seeking the laws of historical development in Das 
Kapital written in nine-, eighteen-sixty-seven Marx said that he was seeking 
the economic laws of motion of modern society and this led him certainly on 
occasions to appear to write as if society has moved inevitably inexorably from 
feudalism to capitalism and that capitalism too was inexorably doomed by 
certain internal contradictions and there were clearly problems with this many 
of Marx's liberal critics er Karl Popper for example er a leading philosopher 
of science er er argued in The Poverty of Historicism that Marx was wedded to 
what had become an outmoded nineteenth century notion of science a concept of 
scientific laws er whereas twentieth 
century science after er ei-, Einstein and relativity and so forth was much 
more operating on the grounds of provisional hypotheses as it were which could 
be tested and falsified and Isaiah Berlin who E H Carr er refers to 
occasionally in his pamphlet histor-, Historical Inevitability argued that 
Marx's deterministic model is a denial ultimately of human free will and human 
agency but certainly for a century or so after eighteen-fifty Marxist 
historiography one could argue i think was held back in some ways by this sort 
of positivist overlay and this was in part because Marx himself clearly wasn't 
in a technical sense a historian and wrote relatively little history he was 
known for much of the late nineteenth early twentieth century for two major 
writings as it were first the brief polemical Communist Manifesto written on 
the eve of the European revolutions of eighteen-forty-eight predicting them and 
setting out a strategy for them and secondly for Das Kapital 
written nearly twenty years later a huge attempt er er one of our great prime 
ministers Harold Wilson said he he gave up on page two er but er he b-, he b-, 
he'd done an economics degree at Oxford but a huge attempt to construct a model 
of the capitalist system conceived almost like a machine with a sort of central 
er sort of floor at er at its heart as it were E P Thompson's er book The 
Poverty of Theory which you'll look at next term in in conjunction with 
Thompson's other writing argues that er that there is something unsatisfactory 
about this rather mechanistic er version er of history which which which Marx 
gets drawn into he was trying to as it were refute the capitalist economi-, 
econ-, economists on their own ground er and there's something rather 
unsatisfactory about this particular er approach the result of this 
concentration on the Communist Manifesto on the one hand and kas-, Das Kapital 
on the other was that many of the insights available in Marx's other writings 
in other 
texts er where he does write some contemporary history and he does so in ways 
which are more suggestive of a less deterministic a-, approach er where he 
allows some room for agency for class consciousness for beliefs ideologies 
cultures and so forth er these texts were relatively neglected and it was only 
the rediscovery of such texts in the twentieth century er a-, as together with 
the works of the so-called young Marx in the eighteen f-, early eighteen-
forties which inspired the new Marxist new left of of the eighteen nineteen-
sixties of which E P Thompson in a sense wa-, was a part until then Marxist 
historiography often reflected a rather crude vulgar positivistic Marxism and 
it's i think also important to recognize that it's only very late as it were in 
the nineteen-sixties that Marxist historians get a s-, any sort of toehold on 
most European university systems er there is the odd maverick like Georges 
Lefebvre one of the c-, classic historians of the French 
Revolution who has a post at the Sorbonne in the nineteen-thirties but in 
Germany clearly of in in the era of i-, Wilhelmine Germany or Nazi Germany or 
even post-nineteen-forty-five west West Germany er Marxists were largely 
excluded from the entire university system Gramsci perhaps the greatest Marxist 
theorist of this century who namex will talk about next week died of course in 
one of Mussolini's prisons in the nineteen-thirties er British Marxists were 
very marginal George Rude one of the great British Marxist historians of the 
French Revolution never er suc-, succeeded in getting a job in a British 
university and had to go to Australia or some godforsaken place to [laugh] and 
actually r-, wrote a book about the the Tolpuddle martyrs and people being 
deported to Australia as it were er in order to find a job er e-, even E P 
Thompson of course had only about four or five years here in his entire career 
he he 
was a sort of lecturer in a sort of worker's education in in the West Riding of 
Yorkshire for most of his career he had three or four years here fell out with 
the Vice Chancellor wrote a famous book called Warwick University Limited 
[laugh] which i recommend you to read er it's all about how business interests 
control the the University of Warwick er an implausible thesis but er er and er 
and then of course left and and there's i-, i-, there wa-, there was therefore 
not very much space as it were for Marxist historiography to develop within the 
univer-, the university systems of Europe until till the nineteen-sixties but 
this vulgar Marxism as it were which was dominant was nevertheless in a sense 
quite powerful in that it argued Hobsbawn er suggests five major things in the 
last instan-, first of all in the last instance that economic factors were 
determining that hypothetically our world of the nineteen-nineties is being 
shaped by 
the globalization [laugh] of the world economy er and the spread of new 
technologies of to take one example as it were secondly a model of base and 
superstructure that the economic base of society the mode of production er 
determines in some sort of ways in the last instance the superstructure of 
politics ideas culture laws and so forth that these are in some some ways 
reflect er what is going on er as it were underneath thirdly a notion that 
class is central that each as it were mode of production develops a distinctive 
set of classes and class relations and that history's motor as it were is the 
relationship and conflict between these classes which is again as i say related 
to to the m-, the modes of production fourthly and i mentioned this already 
that there are in a sense certain historical laws which er e-, ensure that or 
which should suggest that his-, history er moves societies from stages from 
slavery to feudalism to 
capitalism and so forth and finally and this is quite significant for the 
Eighteenth Brumaire which is partly about this that the state is in some ways 
either directly or indirectly the instrument of the dominant economic class at 
a given moment in the Ancien Régime you had a feudal society with the feudal 
aristocracy as the dominant class in a capitalist society it's the capitalist 
bourgeoisie which are hegemonic er and y-, not only are they sort of were in 
control of the economics but also their ideas er are the ones that circulate 
most freely and are dominant within a given society in other words the state is 
not as Ranke seemed to think of it er necessarily good necessary needed to 
achieve s-, internal stability to fight wars nor is it the state as Comte and 
the positivists suggested an instrument w-, whereby disinterested experts and 
technocrats maximize efficiency and produc-, productivity and the public well-
being the state for Marx is the instrument 
ultimately of the dominant class er at a given moment now even this rather 
crude vulgar Marxism as it's sometimes known had an explosive impact on Rankean 
Rankeanism as it were wa-, was the dominant paradigm er eri-, Eric Hobsbawn in 
one of his essays in the nineteen-sixties said this even this sort of vulgar 
Marxism was a concentrated charge of intellectual dynamite which demolished the 
fortifications of traditional Rankean history this perhaps overstating it 
because Rankean history er is still with us as it were but er as it were there 
is a a certain element of truth in it many of the neo-Marxists of the twentieth 
century argued that the the real Marx as it were the fully fully sort of 
rounded Marx was actually more nuanced more subtle er if if more difficult to 
get at as it were that he was found only in brief texts such as The Eighteenth 
Brumaire er dealing with short specific periods that er many of the 
ideas from the as it were alternative Marx had to be teased out of incomplete 
texts er and there was an need therefore in the twentieth century for Marxists 
to read and reread these different sort of fragmented writings of Marx to to 
tease out as it were the the authentic voice of Marx and cle-, clearly a what a 
lot of the historiography of the s-, nineteen-sixties and seventies was about 
was Marxist historians attempting to find an alternative both t-, on the one 
hand to sort of the Rankean model of great men or the positivist model of 
determinism stressing er a world suggested in Marx's shorter texts where men 
make their own history but do so only under circumstances given and transmitted 
from the past but to turn to the text itself the Communist Manifesto was 
written on the eve of eighteen-forty-eight on the eve of the revolutions of 
eighteen-forty-eight and in it Marx appeared to claim that two or three main th-
, main things first of all that developments within European 
capitalism were already in well advanced in the process of polarizing society 
into a dominant capitalist bourgeoisie and a growing working class that the 
existing ruling elite therefore was increasingly capitalist and that therefore 
the coming revolutions which he predicted and which occurred within weeks 
almost of the publication of of the Communist Manifesto that the coming 
revolution which would sweep Europe would be dominated above all by a central 
conflict between capitalists and workers The Eighteenth Brumaire is written 
nearly four years later and it's written in a sense in defeat and it's written 
to explain why the revolutions did occur but also from unfortunately from a 
Marxist point of view why the workers had been defeated why the victor in 
France had been a new sort of authoritarian centralized Bonapartist state er er 
a sort of a second empire a sort of r-, r-, some some ways sort of repeating 
the the pattern of of er of Napoleon the 
First and what this new state signified in in class terms and to enquire 
whether his theories in the of the Communist Manifesto were completely wrong or 
whether one could as it were nuance them modify them use them to explain as it 
were what had happened the history of the text i think is significant it was 
written as i say in eighteen-fifty-two it wasn't actually f-, published until 
eighteen-sixty-nine and it was largely ignored for fifty years or so after that 
you might wish it had been ignored for [laugh] sort of a hundred-and-thirty 
years after that but it wasn't er it was taken up by Marxists in the nineteen-
twenties and thirties as they grappled with fresh defeats at the hands of not 
Bonapartism this time but fascism why did the Italian working class go down to 
feat defeat at the hands of Mussolini why did the German working class with a 
huge sort of communist party a huge socialist party a hu-, tens of m-, 
millions of of o-, unionized workers why had these movements gone down de-, 
defeat at the hands of of fascism and there's a quite interesting book on th-, 
theories of fascism by a man called Kitchen published in the nineteen-seventies 
very short book and the one of the very short chapters in this very short ch-, 
book is Fascism as a Bonapartism and what Kitchen does is use The Eighteenth 
Brumaire as a way of reflecting on th-, the nature of fascism er and the text 
certainly influenced the new er Gramsci in his sitting in Mussolini's jail 
reflecting on why the Italian left had been defeated by Mussolini er took an 
interest in in the sort of ideas that that Marx had put forward in this text 
now how does The Eighteenth Brumaire modify the Communist Manifesto well it 
does so in a number of ways first of all it argues that capitalism is actually 
only developing slowly gradually unevenly in the Europe of of mid-nineteenth 
century that older modes of 
production both in industry and with artisan producers and in the countryside 
with peasant farming are still there therefore one does have industrialists and 
one does have industrial workers but there is a much more diverse economy er 
with er m-, many more sort of different sort of s-, u-, subordinate social 
groups there is a class war that goes on in Paris and Lyon and Berlin and 
Cologne and so forth in Europe in eighteen-forty-eight between capitalists and 
workers but there are lots of other conflicts going on in Europe as well 
between other sort of social s-, social groups and because the co-, there is a 
very complex class structure and an unevenly developed economy er the social 
and political divisions of Europe in eighteen-forty-eight are much more 
complicated than Marx suggested in the Communist Manifesto at the level of 
elite politics it's difficult to form a single coherent conservative party 
because on the one hand one still has remnants of the old 
aristocracy er who still survive and are still yearning for some sort of return 
to the Ancien Régime still imperfectly assimilated into the new bourgeois 
world and the bourgeoisie itself Marx says is fragmented on all sorts of 
grounds between finance industry trade land er th-, th-, the professions 
politically between royalists Bonapartists republicans culturally between 
Catholics Jews Protestants Freemasons and Voltaireans and so forth in other 
words the the world of the elites is much more fragmented on all sorts in all 
sorts of grounds than Marx suggested in this notion of a sort of single 
capitalist ruling class and these intraclass divisions divisions as i say are 
within the leading classes make it difficult for the elites to achieve a united 
front even in the face of the threat of workers and peasants in the revolutions 
of eighteen-forty-eight and Marx concludes in the end these fragmented social 
elites in the er in the end need Bonapartism some sort 
of strong authoritarian military backed regime to come in to sort out their 
difficulties for them er to or as it were counteract the their own 
fragmentation just er er as later Marx has said as the German bourgeoisie which 
was squabbling over all sorts of things needed the Nazis [laugh] to come and 
save them from communism and the depression er in the early nineteen-thirties 
the title The Eighteenth Brumaire derives from Marx's ironic view of eighteen-
forty-eight a tragicomic replay of the heroic revolution of seventeen-eighty-
nine and the seventeen-nineties history repeating itself as farce er in place 
of as it were the great Napoleon one has Napoleon the Little er his his nephew 
er in place of a a heroic and successful bourgeois revolution in the seventeen-
nineties one has a stuttering and ultimately failed working class revolution in 
eighteen-forty-eight and this revolution fails Marx argues because the working 
class 
is still too small er er that er it's forced to ally with er other social 
groups artisans and peasants and petits bourgeois the style of the text i think 
is significant er Marx is in a sense a a one of the many things that makes him 
interesting to read but also often difficult to read is he is that he he i-, is 
enormously learned in world literature from Greece and Rome and nineteenth 
century literature and Cervantes and and everything else er and er he scatters 
the the text with all sorts of literary references to all sorts of different 
periods and i think when you read the text that perhaps it's useful to 
concentrate on the first third and perhaps the last fifteen pages or so i think 
there's the meat of the argument i-, is is there and the middle sec-, sections 
are rather complex overcomplex perhaps account of the int-, in-, internal 
squabblings of the various elites which may be fascinating if you're interested 
in right wing elite politics in France but probably fairly 
bewildering [laughter] er if you're not er and but much of the middle section 
has the the various actors er the various sort of aristocrats and different 
sections of the bourgeoisie and various sorts of bourgeois and aristocratic 
parties er he has them sort of dressing up they're endlessly putting on masks 
and [laugh] putting on costumes and [laugh] as it were d-, adopting er 
different sort of historical guises er adopting the roles and the postures of 
of previous historical epochs and the irony the savage irony the of the text 
derives from Marx's dialectical mode of argument his sense that his conviction 
that objective historical processes are in fact occurring in a sense despite 
not because of the actions of individuals parties classes unlike Ranke who says 
you understand history by getting inside the heads of people and finding out 
what they thought they were doing Marx says that's only part of the 
process because lots of times people do things which they think are going to 
have one sort of impact and in fact they have completely the opposite er er 
impact for example Marx says the newly enfranchised peasantry who've got the 
vote for the first time in eighteen-forty-eight in the midst o-, middle of a 
revolution in the middle of a huge agrarian crisis of indebtedness and and and 
so on and so forth er they feel threatened from all sides they feel worried 
about urban socialism er they're f-, worried about the ha-, hanging on to their 
small farms they're in debt the crops have failed cash prices are falling 
whatever they vote Louis napol-, er Marx says er in December eighteen-forty-
eight for Louis Napoleon as somebody as a sort of charismatic saviour who will 
come and rescue them from their their problems but Marx says and this is the 
the irony if you actually get a Bonapartist regime which stabilizes French 
capitalism the development of capitalism inexorably will in the long 
term destroy small-scale peasant agriculture [laugh] in other words the 
peasants vote for somebody who they think will save them but in the long term 
[laugh] the type of regime that Bonaparte er ism-, introduces by spreading 
agrarian capitalism will actually undermine small peasant agriculture er and er 
this sort of the the the certain sort of similar sort of arguments you make 
about the German petit bourgeoisie and Hitler or or indeed some-, some-, 
someone suggested to m-, Mrs Thatcher and small grocers in the er in the 
nineteen-eighties and nineteen-nineties the the sort of sign which i usually 
mention in my seminars which was painted on a bridge in namex in namex where i 
live in the early nineteen-eighties at the height of Thatcherism er you know 
Mrs Thatcher helps small businesses get smaller and smaller and the actual er 
sign was 
started off in very large letters [laugh] itself got smaller as er towards the 
end of the the sentence er now clearly one could say that in the long term the 
French peasantry have largely disappeared or well there are still some of them 
around blockading channel ports [laugh] yesterday if you've read your Daily 
Mail and your Sun you might might have noticed this er but that's this is the 
remem-, remnants of a er a once much larger class the the the peasantry has has 
steadily been eroded in Europe over the last hundred-and-fifty years but mar-, 
what Marx is is concentrating on is the contradiction between what men actually 
are and who they think they are what they are doing and what they think they're 
doing or what the im-, impact of what they're doing is mor-, er what they think 
that it's going to be and what what it actually is er for example er the 
aristocracy in the post- seventeen-eighty-nine world Marx says still see 
themselves as heirs of a long sort of aristocratic pedigree going back to the 
Middle Ages enemies therefore of the revolution and the and the bourgeoisie and 
yet Marx says really if you look at these people in eighteen-forty-eight they 
no longer have seigneurial privileges they no longer have aristocratic tax 
exemptions they've lost most of the things which actually distinguish them as a 
as a er class in the Ancien Régime they're still quite rich but their ri-, 
their income comes from land it comes from railway investments [laugh] shares 
in coal mines and so forth in all sorts of ways they are objectively p-, part 
of the part of the bourgeoisie their their income actually comes from the same 
sort of sources as that of the upper middle class they're really de facto part 
of the bourgeoisie and therefore they should in a sense share a common interest 
to defend property against socialism but subjectively Marx says some of them 
are still 
locked in the past subjectively s-, they're still locked in this sort of world 
of of hereditary privilege and and and and family heritage and so on and so 
forth and Marx sees them therefore as a sense schizophrenic er endlessly 
putting on and taking off costumes and masks posing one moment as sort of 
feudal seigneurs and the next moment as defenders of property against against 
working class socialism and er one recent criti-, er sort of er er sort of of 
study of The Eighteenth Brumaire by by chris-, Christopher Norris in the 
context of post-modernism which is something you'll come to next term suggested 
that eighteenth cent-, The Eighteenth Brumaire is in a sense the first as it 
were protopostmodernist text because one has these characters as it were 
endlessly changing identity changing costumes choosing identities one of the 
things that clearly distinguishes Marx's approach from from that of Ranke is 
his treatment as it were of great men er Marx has clearly no time at all 
for the notion that well then Ranke as as it were p-, p-, largely attributed 
the German Reformation to to Luther that Luther was the this great man who came 
along and thought in a different way about the about the church about er 
theology and so on and so forth the the in a sense the Reformation and indeed 
subsequent German national identity was conceived in the mind of this of this 
great man in in in the early sixteenth century Marx rejects the sort of Rankean 
emphasis on which whi-, whi-, w-, would it be possible as it were to write a 
Rankean account of the period that Marx is writing about in terms of Louis 
Napoleon as a great man who comes along and saves the state against chaos in 
and and and revolution and so forth and revives France's economic and political 
power in the eighteen-fifties after the crisis er but although Marx refuses to 
take that line he also says that the some of the lines taken by l-, Louis 
Napoleon's Republican critics people like the novelist Victor Hugo who 
wrote a pamphlet called Napoleon le Petit Napoleon the Little er which he sort 
of ridiculed Louis Napoleon as a complete idiot a nincompoop a sort of pale 
shadow of his uncle and so on and so forth Marx said that's not good enough 
either because if this man is such an idiot [laugh] er so incompetent and so 
forth how come he's managed just to seize power in one of the most powerful 
states [laugh] in Western Europe er Marx's answer to this if it is an answer 
and there are things wrong with it undoubtedly is that the significant reading 
of why Louis Napoleon and Bonapartism came to power in France in eighteen-fifty-
one is in terms of the a sort of paralysis in the class war as it were the the 
French elites are too divided as i've tried to describe to rule themselves the 
masses workers and peasants are too mobilized too angry too radicalized to 
allow the elites to rule but the masses 
are also soo-, too immature too unorganized er to actually seize power 
effectively themselves and it's in this sort of stalemate in a class war as it 
were which allows this er figure as it were w-, with various sorts of backers 
and various sorts of er thing to to to come to power what Marx is trying to do 
here is to constantly in a sense decode French politics in class terms he says 
you've got a variety of parties you've got Republicans Radicals Montaignards er 
Legitimist Royalists or Lyonist Royalists Bonapartists and so on and so forth 
these are the were the political labels who in class terms do these various 
parties represent and the bourgeois elites he says are fragmented er there is 
in a sense a ruling block rather than a single capitalist ruling class er er 
many of the as it were financiers and so forth have backed the Orleanist regime 
till eighteen-forty-eight the conservative wing of the er nobility are still 
yearning for the return of the Bourbons who've been 
displaced in eighteen-thirty er and there are all sorts of er divisions as it 
were within the the the the ruling elites er and er as i i tried to describe 
the er er the the aristocracy are sort of s-, schizophrenic about their 
identity er on the one hand they the aristocracy are as it were er objectively 
in terms of their income part of the bourgeoisie but nevertheless they're still 
swayed by family traditions dynastic loyalties family memories er they still 
obstinately feel themselves to be distinct from the bourgeoisie er and Marx 
goes on to say distinction is made in private life between what a man thinks 
and says of himself and what he really is and does in historical struggles one 
must make a still sharper distinction between th-, er between the phrases and 
fantasies of the parties involved and their real interests between their 
conceptions of themselves and what they really are and similarly er looking at 
the the f-, the left in France in eighteen-forty-eight 
which is trying to make a more popular egalitarian revolution of in the 
interests of the workers peasants artisans the lower classes of society Marx 
attributes their er you see he basically says that they are a sort of composite 
group they're an uneasy alliance of a certain number of sort of bourgeois 
radical leaders you know lawyers and doctors and journalists together with 
sections of the lower middle class sections of the skilled artisans sections of 
the peasantry and the new emerging working class er and Marx argues that it's 
precisely this preponderance within this popular coalition of petit producers 
you know small artisans small peasant proprietors which makes their ultimate 
strategy their ultimate ideology slow confused and ultimately Marx argues such 
a failure because what Marx argues and this is part of Marx's sort of 
historical ruthlessness is that much of this popular alliance actually 
represents people like small independent craftsmen and small 
peasants who are doomed to to disruption the capitalist process is too powerful 
to allow these sorts of intermediary groups to survive much longer their modes 
of production are archaic and one could argue and p-, certain historians have 
argued that Marx is here allowing his in a sense his teleological conviction of 
the long term cap-, you know in the long term these people are going to be 
defeated [laughter] therefore in a sense their struggles are doomed and 
therefore in a sense they're futile one could nevertheless argue that in the 
real world of the France of eighteen-forty-eight since there are millions of 
peasants and hundreds of thousands of small artisans and you know these people 
actually exist they're not actually factory workers er nevertheless they they 
will actually try to construct a world where where y-, wh-, based on you know 
cooperative credit and mutual aid societies and various sorts of mutua-, er er 
sort of er er institutions of this sort cooperative production 
which would actually try and prolong their existence and indeed Bernard Moss in 
quite an interesting article in the Socialist Register nineteen-ninety-eight 
which should be on the reading list and isn't er has argued that Marx himself a 
year or two earlier in eighteen-forty-eight forty-nine had actually urged in 
both France and Germany a sort of broad populist coalition in worker which 
workers allied with peasants and artisans and the petit bourgeoisie it's only 
when he comes to The Eighteenth Brumaire when when they when they've actually 
been defeated that he says well it's inevitable they would be defeated because 
they represent as it were the the forces of backwardness and the forces of the 
past 
nm0088: what i want to do finally if i've got time is to look briefly at the 
relationship between class and politics i-, in in in in in to summarize it as 
it were and then if i have time and if i don't have time then you've got it 
written down on the on the 
sheet i've give-, given you look a bit about the the role of the state first of 
all to summarize in a sense what i think Marx is trying to say er about the 
relationship between class and politics he's arguing i think that class doesn't 
in itself represent a category of absolute political unity there are endless 
squabbles within classes ideological cultural political and so forth if one 
thinks of our own period of the nineteen-eighties and nineties the the English 
bourgeoisie is divided between some who believe in a sort of libertarian 
[laugh] er moral code and some who believe in Christian family values er some 
believe you know bankers and financiers and people in the city in the London 
like interest rates to go up because they make their money through lending 
money on high rates of interests which are harmful to northern and midland 
industrialists er 
there are sections of the Tory Party that are in favour of the single European 
currency and the common market and there are sections of the Tory Party that 
are against it sections of British business which are take different lines the 
in other words the the bourgeoisie is is fragmented on all sorts of of lines 
but mar-, what is Marx is arguing is that ultimately class dictates a certain 
line of material interest beyond which no political fraction of the bourgeoisie 
will actually cross the bourg-, no bourgeois party will in the last instance 
attack private property or call call for the wholesale nationalization of the 
the banks or the city of London [laugh] or or the renationalization of the 
railway system or or whatever er but until that line is reached class fractions 
will f-, actually fight quite bitterly amongst themselves such squabbles might 
well be about religion if you one one looks at the British bourgeoisie in the 
nineteenth century the most bitter conflicts were often between the Church of 
England and non-conformists these were very real through a cultural and often 
politic-, you know the non-conformists tended to be Liberals er er Church of 
England tended to be Tories these are very real conflicts such ideas such 
conflicts actually exist in a certain plane er in in the superstructure as it 
were er but may be explained in the sense in that plane you don't need to 
constantly return to the mode of production or the underlying economic base to 
necessarily explain all these er er conflicts or some of them might be might be 
done that way the line of class therefore in a s-, in a sense establishes a 
ring around possible activities what goes on inside the ring can have non-
material causes can be conflicts about religion or whether or not one supports 
a particular dynasty or whatever and conflicts over such issues may be 
subjectively deeply felt er as deeply felt even more 
deeply felt than class divisions but such conflicts rarely in the last instance 
cross the line of certain common material interests Marx later insisted that it 
is not the consciousness of men which determines their s-, social existence but 
on the contrary their social existence which determines their consciousness and 
one of the complicated lessons i think of The Eighteenth Brumaire is that in 
the complicated transitional society of France of eighteen-forty-eight a world 
moving towards capitalism but in which peasants artisans petits bourgeois 
aristocrats all sorts of older social groups are still present then social 
existence is determined by in a sense a coexistence of the new capitalist mode 
of production but also with older modes of production and hence the 
superstructure of ideas ideologies consciousness reflects in the France of 
eighteen-forty-eight not a single dominant capitalist mode of production but 
also various subsidiary perhaps declining but 
still very powerful er as it were al-, alternative modes of production the idea 
moreover the study of the aristocracy suggests the ideas and attitudes 
generated by an earlier feudal society may in a sense have an afterlife the 
feudal system may have gone by seventeen-eighty-nine er but it still lives on 
in a sense in the consciousness of aristocratic families and may outlast might 
outla-, outlast the mode of production which gave rise to it 
nm0088: i'll just summarize the last bit very bries-, briefly Marx er Marx's 
final er focus was on the Bonapartist state er in a superb often quoted and i 
i'll link this with the analysis of the peasantry because he sees the peasantry 
as in some way the the mass base of the Bonapartist state in a superb and often 
quoted passage at the end towards the end about ten pages from the end Marx 
portrays the French peasantry as objectively a class there are millions of 
these smallholders and and sort of small tenant farmers and share croppers 
living 
in provincial rural France each of them farming a few acres er distinct clearly 
from other classes they are in a sense er you know clearly a c-, a a a a c-, 
they have a class with certain things in common but subjectively Marx says 
their level of class consciousness is very low they are not fully a class for 
itself as it were because they were geographically dispersed they have low 
lates of rates of literacy they don't meet each other very often in market 
centres they are too fragmented in all sorts of ways to act together as a class 
and therefore Marx argues they are unable to generate a level of class class 
organization er achieved by say even by urba-, urban workers or by urban 
bourgeois they are therefore unable Marx says to defend their own class 
interests in this crisis of eighteen-forty-eight and turn to a Bonapartist 
messiah er who will as Marx says send the rain to s-, and the sunshine from 
above in other words they turn to a charismatic figure to 
save them because they are too er unorganized to save themselves Marx says and 
this is a phrase which Edward Said uses in in the beginning of Orientalism 
which you'll be studying next term they cannot represent themselves they must 
be represented now Marx i think is actually aware that er the the peasantry of 
France in in in the eighteen-forty-eight er to eighteen-fifty-one is actually 
quite mobilized quite radicalized in some some areas er some of the peasants 
vote for Louis Napoleon in ei-, in December eighteen-forty-eight shouting 
aristocrats and usurers to the guillotine which is not the [laugh] the normal 
sort of conservative er sort of response er er that one might im-, imagine and 
he notes the the way that some peasants are actually attracted by the left er 
in in in in as the second republic er progresses but Marx is also almost 
wilfully myopic about er about the possibilities of peasant consciousness and 
peasant 
organization he talks elsewhere in his writings about the idiocy of rural life 
he sees peasants as almost irredeemably backward and ignorant doomed ultimately 
by the growth of agrarian capitalism it's only the workers gathered together in 
factories and cities who are capable of organizing as a potential radical 
revolutionary class er and i think he therefore largely ignores what was 
actually quite substantial peasant resistance to the Bonapartist coup d'état 
in December eighteen-fifty-one he talks about France being delivered 
unresisting into captivity and if one looks at if one looks at this more 
broadly er it's i think an interesting question to pose Marx says the history 
of societies is the history of class and class conflicts while the history of 
most er most people in Europe over a thousand years and more have actually been 
peasants well if peasants have such a low level of class consciousness what 
role i mean if you 
look at the German peasant revolt of fifteen-twenty-five or the French peasant 
revolt of seventeen-eighty-nine or the Russian peasant revolt of nineteen- five 
or nineteen-seventeen or the Chinese peasants are are peasants irredeemably 
backward incapable of of political consciousness and action this is a a 
question that that Marx er in a sense er poses and perhaps doesn't provide an 
entirely satisfactory answer to what i think Marx i-, is arguing is that all 
societies are divided into classes but the level of class consciousness varies 
widely and so does the capacity for effective class action the later Marxist 
theorist the er Hungarian Georg Lukacs argued that Marxists should be aware of 
three levels of class one is the objective class position as it were one's 
actual place in the social structure the second is the actual level of 
subjective class consciousness which Marx claims for the French peasants is 
fairly low and thirdly what Lukacs arg-, argues that Marxist 
historians should be aware of what he called ascribed class consciousness I-E 
what a class would think if it could perceive its interests more clearly er 
perhaps it's something a bit like Rousseau's general will as it were and he 
Lukacs argued that Marxists should be aware of this third er er as it were sort 
of category because the contrast between people's actual and their rational 
behaviour affects the historical effectiveness of their actions 
nm0088: Marx sees the peasant electors as a sort of mass passive base of the 
Bonapartist state the Bonapartism is strong in part because it's able to 
attract the support of at least a sizable proportion of France's mass rural er 
peasant electorate but Marx argues there's no necessary correlation between the 
interests of the peasantry and the longer term interests of the Bonapartist 
regime just as there's no necessary correlation later Marxists will argue 
between the interests of the German petit bourgeoisie who voted for the 
Nazis and the actual er sort of programmes and policies of the Nazi regime in 
power which are often more favourable to to I G Farben and German big business 
Marx sees the bourgeois elites in France as turning to Bonapartism again later 
Marxists would say like the bourgeoisie in Italy in the nineteen-twenties or 
the bourgeoisie in Germany in the nineteen-thirties because they grow impatient 
of the divisions and squabbles within their own political class because in the 
face of economic depression and p-, possible working class socialism or 
revolution er the bourgeoisie bourgeois politicians are squabbling among 
themselves the bourgeoisie say to hell with that lot [laugh] we're fed up with 
parliamentary government we're fed up with elections it's all too messy it's 
all too dangerous what we need is a strong man [laugh] who can restore law and 
order and and so forth and er and in a sense er therefore the the the the there 
are 
certain parallels i think er between er between Bonapartism fascism there and 
then there is the question that is the resultant state the Bonapartist state 
the fascist state a capitalist bourgeois state well yes and no and yes it's not 
because it is not directly run by the capitalists it's not actually financiers 
and industrialists and so forth who run the state machine in the in France in 
the eighteen-fifties or in Germany in the nineteen-thirties and to some degree 
the bourgeoisie relies on protection from the police and the bureaucracy and 
the army er er to in order to to to to preserve it its its wealth and its power 
and its investments but Marx argues that yes it is a you know capitalist 
bourgeois state it's not a state he says not a state suspended in a void 
because by suppressing the left by dismantling the workers' movement after 
eighteen-fifty-one just as the 
Nazis dismantled the communists and the trade unions after nineteen-thirty-
three er one allowed the capitalist regime to survive and to expand to make 
profits for the b-, for the bourgeoisie and that the state machine itself 
recruits from the elites the bureaucracy is actually recruited from the 
educated sons of the propertied elites and lives in a sense off the surplus 
value created by capitalism and by the taxation system and therefore what Marx 
is postulating is an idea of a state which is both on the one hand semi-
autonomous is it's not directly controlled by the capitalists they've in sense 
abandoned that but yet it's functioning in the long term to protect their their 
interests and as i say in that sense the analysis of fascism er er in nineteen-
twenties and thirties relied heavily on Marx's analysis of Bonapartism er in 
The Eighteenth Brumaire thank you very much