4/22/ 2026 The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte

Questions:

1. Vagabond/Peasant → What is the relation between the two

2. (614): “But the parody of imperialism was necessary” –What is the historiagraphical status of the appeals to necessity? Not just here, but throughout

3. (615): What does Marx mean by cause and effect in the context of Napoleon protecting material power?

4. (606): “But the revolution is thorough-going…” What does Marx mean by purgatory here, and what kind of method does Marx understand revolution to be?

5. Is “The Eighteenth Brumaire” historical materialism? How, why?

6. (597): “Society now seems to have fallen back behind its point of departure…” Again, how do passages like this instantiate a historical materialist method?

7. What relationship should the social revolutionary have to the past (597)?

Discussion:

On the social revolution drawing from the future question, maybe Marx is building on his initial reference to Hegel. The “phrase” and “content” meaning can be made visible in the Napoleanism of the past revolution, also maybe “form” distinction. 

• The proletarian revolution, as Marx envisages it, is perhaps more about the content of the revolution, rather than the form?

• So, is Marx, in saying that the content goes beyond the phrase, that there isn’t self-consciousness?

• The first french revolution conceived of itself as a Republican revolution, and thus was not aware of itself as a class revolution. For Marx, the form of this initial revolution in late 1700s was a class revolution, a revolution championed by the bourgeoisie as political dominance. 

• But, is Marx attributing full self-consciousness to the current (1848) revolutions? 

• (601) First full paragraph, seems that Marx is saying that class consciousness is stirring, but it is appropriated by bourgeois, leading to ever decreasing significance of results.

• “Bonapartism” = ideals or an ideology promulgated by the first Bonaparte (The Uncle) to exploit land.

On revolution:

• This text is interesting for many reasons, one being that revolutions cannot be “willed” or “forced” if certain conditions are not available. Revolution needs “real” ground, so this is against a “hyper-revolutionary” will to arms. Reality will impose itself, which isn’t just a question of consciousness.

• Emphasis on material conditions for revolution to take hold, otherwise there are so many partial or continuous revolutions that snowball. 

• C.P. the context of Russia that couldn’t bring about socialism in the same way that the material conditions prevented the realization of socialist possibilities 

• Okay, so what is the “scope” of “revolution,” for Marx?

• Is he just talking about the “flow of history,” or Proletarian revolution here?

• It seems that Marx is describing an “accelerationist point,” in reading the revolutions that proceed in the nineteenth century

• In another text by Marx, he describes the bourgeois dictatorship showing its ugly face in the sense of an executive power that mobilizes resistance.

• So, the preparatory work isn’t being done necessarily by a proletarian class, but instead by a determinism? (page 606) 

• Related to this historiographic question, what is the perspective of the social critic here? When Marx suggests that the content goes beyond the phrase, then how does one recognize or see it as such? 

• Marx is arguing that past revolutions understood themselves this way (as republican, etc), and there wasn’t a self-awareness of class struggle, but isn’t he just saying that the working class needs to detach from an antiquated Republic form and seize the means of production.

• But how does all that content emerge without being “phrased?”

• Now that there are social revolutions that go beyond the phrasing of political revolutions, where does the “social content come from? Is the content even articulable? It seems that Marx is setting up a temporal challenge: that this content is an epistemological problem. How do we articulate what we are trying to bring about if it has not already been brought about?

• Something cannot be so ontologically new that it cannot be seen as such, as what is being asked about. 

Status of the Peasantry:

• Not a class, not able to represent themselves, but in need of representation

• In need of authority 

• On the peasant/vagabond connection, seems to be a pretty sharp distinction from Foucault here on punitive society

• Nothing really changed after bourgeois revolution, but for Foucault there was massive change at the level of the microphysics of power through the figuration of the vagabond

• On Foucault’s account, the disciplinization of the vagabond IS a social revolution, so it’s telling that Marx accounts for the peasantry and lumpenproletariat in an entirely historically impotent way

• Normative versus descriptive stakes of situating the peasantry for Marxist’s account

On the Method:

• So what is the motor of this historical account? Doesn’e seem to be the will or consciousness of individual actors?

• “Men make their own history” shows that there is a sense of agency, but that historical conditions create concrete action. The problem seems to be in the crux between the two?

• (595): Marx as doing a critique and a warning, “and just when they seem engaged…” Marx is giving an account of fragments at play that would be overlooked in a history? –Possible view

• If Marx is arguing that agency is deterministically structured, then the futural conclusion can’t just help itself to an agency that doesn’t exist or has been possible in the past.

• Marx does seem to indicate a revolutionary point of departure, but we aren’t clear on what this means.