(From "Introduction to Karl Marx's The Class Struggles in France 1848 to 1850" F. Engels.) When the February Revolution broke out, all of us, as far as our conceptions of the conditions and the course of revolutionary movements were concerned, were under the spell of previous historical experience, particularly that of France. It was, indeed, the latter which had dominated the whole of European history since 1789, and from which now once again the signal had gone forth for general revolutionary change. It was, therefore, natural and unavoidable that our conceptions of the nature and the course of the "social" revolution proclaimed in Paris in February 1848, of the revolution of the proletariat, should be strongly coloured by memories of the prototypes of 1789 and 1830. . . . . . . .. But history has shown us too to have been wrong, has revealed our point of view at that time as an illusion. It has done even more; it has not merely dispelled the erroneous notions we then held; it has also completely transformed the conditions under which the proletariat has to fight. The mode of struggle of 1848 is today obsolete in every respect, and this is a point which deserves closer examination on the present occasion. ……… History has proved us wrong, and all who thought like us. It has made it clear that the state of economic development on the Continent at that time was not, by a long way, ripe for the elimination of capitalist production; it has proved this by the economic revolution which, since 1848, has seized the whole of the Continent, and has caused big industry to take real root in France, Austria, Hungary, Poland and, recently, in Russia, while it has made Germany positively an industrial country of the first rank - all on a capitalist basis, which in the year 1848, therefore, still had a great capacity for expansion. But it is precisely this industrial revolution which has everywhere produced clarity in class relations, has removed a number of intermediate forms handed down from the period of manufacture and in Eastern Europe even from guild handicraft, has created a genuine bourgeois and a genuine large-scale industrial proletariat and has pushed them into the foreground of social development. However, owing to this, the struggle between these two great classes, a struggle which, outside England, existed in 1848 only in Paris and, at the most, in a few big industrial centres, has spread over the whole of Europe and reached an intensity still inconceivable in 1848. At that time the many obscure gospels of the sects, with their panaceas; today the single generally recognised, crystal-clear theory of Marx, sharply formulating the ultimate aims of the struggle. . .. . .. . . . (end) Engels "Introduction to Karl Marx's The Class Struggles in France 1848 to 1850" is a must read. It is the model of self critique created by Marx and Engels. While not ignoring the subjective or deep political aspects of the proletariat's development, at all times Engels starting point is riveted to changes in the productive forces and its social consequence on the social organization of labor and consciousness in the CONTEXT of the passing from one distinct era of the proletarian movement to a new period. _http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1895/03/06.htm_ (http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1895/03/06.htm) WL.
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