The Class Struggles in France, 1848 to 1850

Two phrases enter the Marxist vocabulary in this short book, and the history of the twentieth century turns on both: "the dictatorship of the proletariat" and "the permanence of the revolution".

Marx set them down almost in passing, in newspaper articles written in the first months of 1850, while the defeat of the 1848 revolution was still fresh and he was trying to understand why the workers of Paris, who in June 1848 had "held in check for five days the army, the Mobile Guard, the Paris National Guard, and the National Guard that streamed in from the provinces", had nonetheless been crushed. It is, as Engels wrote when he collected the articles in 1895, "Marx's first attempt to explain a section of contemporary history by means of his materialist conception, on the basis of the given economic situation" - the method of Capital tried out, for the first time, on events still warm.

It reads politics off economics without ever making politics a puppet. Marx begins from the world market and the commercial crisis, traces the rule of the "finance aristocracy" - which he skewers as "nothing but the rebirth of the lumpenproletariat" at the top of bourgeois society - and shows how each turn of the business cycle moved the ground under the parties. Out of that he dissects the classes of France with a precision no one had matched: the split between finance and industrial capital, the wavering of the petty bourgeoisie, the weight of the conservative peasantry. And at the peak of the book, in the depths of the June defeat, he names what the workers' movement is for: in place of demands "exuberant in form, but petty and even bourgeois still in content" there appeared "the bold slogan of revolutionary struggle: Overthrow of the bourgeoisie! Dictatorship of the working class!"

The Progress Publishers edition prints, in front of Marx's articles, Engels's Introduction of 1895 - written in the last months of his life and often called his political testament, and itself one of the most fought-over documents in the tradition.

New critical introduction by Dmitry Chasovennikov.