Class Struggles in France
In Course Four we continue to explore Marx and Engels analysis of 1848 and its aftermath. An analysis which serves as a paradigmatic example of the application of historical materialism to the investigation of the class struggle.
Session One: The 1895 Introduction
In this session we discuss the 1895 introduction written by Engels and often erroneously considered as a move towards a reformist strategy. We examine Engels’s view of electoral intervention-its value and its limits, what he means when he says the mode of struggle of 1848 is obsolete today, the importance of protracted educational work and the relation between legal and illegal, armed and unarmed political practice.
Readings: the full text of the 1895 Introduction.
Session Two: June 1848 to June 1849
In this session we ask what is a class faction, why classes are constituted politically and ideologically only through mediation, what is the relation between the financial aristocracy and lumpen proletariat, in what sense is bourgeois democracy a “terrain” and why the bourgeois revolution is national and the proletarian revolution international. We further discuss the political significance of credit and why the bourgeois rules only through division. We finally examine the national workshops as a prototype of working class conquests within capitalist society, the fraught relation of the petty bourgeois with bourgeois property, the antagonisms within universal suffrage and what the “life conditions” for bourgeois rule might be.
Readings: Parts I and II of Class Struggles in France.
Session Three: June 1849 to 1850
In this session we discuss the differences between the revolutionary proletariat and the democratic petty bourgeois, the crucial distinction between inclusion and determination by the general movement and determining and including the general movement, how different relations between factions of the bourgeois can affect politics, the relation between agrarian revolution and capitalist development and the convergence and antagonism between peasants and workers. We further discuss the different class factions of the bourgeois and the proletariat then and now and the distinction between petty bourgeois and proletarian socialism.
Readings: Parts III and IV of Class Struggles in France.
Further Reading for Course Four
Peter H. Amann, Jane Sherron De Hart: Revolution and Mass Democracy -The Paris Club Of 1848
J. Harsin: Barricades – The War of the Streets in Revolutionary Paris, 1830-1848
Mark Traugott: The Insurgent Barricade
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