Two phrases enter the Marxist vocabulary in this short book, and the history of the twentieth century turns on both. The first is "the dictatorship of the proletariat"; the second is "the permanence of the revolution." Marx set them down almost in passing, in a run of 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. The Class Struggles in France, 1848 to 1850 is the record of that reckoning. It is, as Engels wrote when he collected the articles for a separate edition 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.
Marx wrote the four articles for the Neue Rheinische Zeitung. Politisch-oekonomische Revue (the New Rhenish Gazette. Political-Economic Review), the London-based monthly he ran after the Prussian authorities shut his newspaper. The present text is the Progress Publishers edition prepared in Moscow and carried in the Selected Works; it is the standard English translation. Its most valuable feature is that it 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. That Introduction, and the way this edition frames it, is where the argument of these pages has to be made, because the story of what was done to Engels's last essay is the story of what would be done to the whole tradition.
Take first what the book itself does supremely. 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" (the "ragged" underclass) at the top of bourgeois society — and shows how each turn of the business cycle moved the ground under the parties. Out of that analysis 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 two peaks of the book he names what the workers' movement is for. In the depths of the June defeat, "in place of its demands, exuberant in form, but petty and even bourgeois still in content," there appeared, he writes, "the bold slogan of revolutionary struggle: Overthrow of the bourgeoisie! Dictatorship of the working class!" And in the third article, in a single dense sentence, he sets out the whole strategy: "This Socialism is the declaration of the permanence of the revolution, the class dictatorship of the proletariat as the necessary transit point to the abolition of class distinctions generally." The "dictatorship" he means is not a dictatorship over the workers but the rule of the working class as a majority, the transitional power he would later find embodied in the Paris Commune — the self-government of the associated producers, not a police state. The internationalism is just as bracing: the coming revolution, he insists, "is forced to leave its national soil forthwith and conquer the European terrain, on which alone the social revolution of the nineteenth century can be accomplished." And the book ends on the note that gives it its nerve: "The revolution is dead!—Long live the revolution!"
Not everything in it has worn equally well, and Marx was the first to say so. Written in the trough of defeat, the articles expect the next revolutionary wave to arrive almost at once, on the next turn of the economic cycle. Marx ties the two together mechanically — a new rising will come, he assumes, with the next slump — and by the autumn of 1850 he had corrected himself, breaking with those in the exile leadership who mistook wish for prospect and warning that "a new revolution is possible only in consequence of a new crisis." The prophecy of an immediate European upheaval was wrong; the tempo was the young theory's weakness, not its foundation. But the analysis of why the revolution failed — the isolation of the Paris proletariat, the treachery of the petty-bourgeois democrats, the counter-revolution of the peasant vote — is permanent, and it is what makes the book live.
Now the question this edition, for all its scholarship, does not put to itself. Engels's 1895 Introduction was mutilated before it ever appeared. Fearing the renewal of the anti-socialist laws, the Executive of the German Social-Democratic Party pressed the dying Engels to soften the essay, and — as this edition's own note frankly records — "under pressure from the Executive Engels was compelled to delete some passages in the proofs and change some formulations." The cuts fell on exactly the militant passages; what was left made Engels sound like a convert to pure legality. The famous line survived — the workers should turn the enemy's own weapon against him, so that with Odilon Barrot the reaction would wail "legality is the death of us," "whereas we, under this legality, get firm muscles and rosy cheeks and look like life eternal." Torn from its setting, that irony could be read as a renunciation of revolution, and it duly was: "some leaders of Social-Democracy," the note continues, "made an attempt to present Engels as a defender only of a peaceful assumption of power by the working class… as a worshipper of 'legality quand même'" — legality at any price. Engels, "filled with indignation," fought to have the full text printed, and the Progress edition restores it, first published complete in the Soviet Union in 1930, with the deletions given in the footnotes. On its own terms this is exemplary editing, and the note deserves credit: it catches the opportunists in the act and hands the reader the evidence.
And here the reflexivity fails, exactly where it matters. The doctrine could see, with perfect clarity, a party leadership in 1895 bending Engels toward parliamentarism and passing off the tactician of "non-peaceful forms… when the ruling reactionary classes resort to violence" as a worshipper of legality at any price. It could not see itself doing the identical thing. From the Twentieth Congress of 1956, "the peaceful, parliamentary road to socialism" and "peaceful coexistence" became the official line of the world Communist movement, the strategy pressed on the Western parties — the very caricature of the late Engels that this edition's own note holds up to scorn. Read the note's summary again with that in mind: Engels, it says approvingly, "underlines the necessity of revolutionary utilisation of all the legal means" and of "subordinating" the democratic struggle to the socialist one — the emphasis quietly shifted onto the legal, the gradual, the safely staged. The apparatus that exposed the German bowdlerisers had become their heir. And the deeper inversion runs through the book's own coinage: the "dictatorship of the working class" that Marx first named here as the rule of the majority had been turned, in the state that reprinted it, into the dictatorship of an apparatus over the workers in whose name it spoke — the Commune stood on its head.
What, then, is The Class Struggles in France worth today, beyond the two phrases it gave the language? Its value is the value of a method and of an honesty the tradition later mislaid. The method is the reading of politics through the economic conjuncture without ever dissolving human agency into it — the model Trotsky would extend when he took Marx's "permanence of the revolution" and built from it the theory of permanent revolution, the argument that in a backward country the workers cannot stop at a "bourgeois" stage but must carry the revolution through and outward or lose it. The honesty is Engels's real one, once the cuts are read back in: that revolutionary strategy must change its forms with the times — that the barricade of 1848 was "today obsolete in every respect," that the movement must win the majority through the fullest use of every legal opening — without ever pretending that a ruling class will surrender its power to a ballot. That is the argument against both of the readings that buried it: against the reformism, of Bernstein's day and of Eurocommunism's, that made Engels a prophet of the parliamentary road; and against the Stalinism that kept the word "dictatorship of the proletariat" while emptying it of the workers' democracy that was its whole content. Restored to itself, the book is what Marx wrote it to be — not a quarry for slogans about permanence and dictatorship, but a demonstration that the class struggle can be read even in a defeat, and a standard against which every custodian of the phrase, including the one that printed this edition, can be measured.