Karl Marx: A biography by David McLellan

t

ILH KARL MARX: A BIOGRAPHY

captured the imagination of the peasants. To the proletariat his election

meant the dismissal of bourgeois republicanism and revenge for the June

defeat; to the petty bourgeoisie it meant the rule of the debtor over the

creditor; while to big business Napoleon presented the opportunity of

ridding itself of its forced alliance with potentially progressive elements.

'Thus it happened', said Marx, 'that the most simple-minded man in

France acquired the most multifarious significance. Just because he was

nothing, he could signify everything save himself.'^36

The third and last article, written in March about the same time as

the March Address and the creation of the London alliance with the

Blanquists, analysed the different elements in the opposition party. Here

Marx was concerned to emphasise the difference between 'petit-bourgeois'

or 'doctrinaire' socialism (he had Proudhon particularly in mind) and the

revolutionary socialism of Blanqui:

While this Utopian, doctrinaire socialism, which subordinates the total

movement to one of its moments, which puts in place of common,

social production the brainwork of individual pedants and, above all, in

fantasy does away with the revolutionary struggle of the classes and its

requirements by small conjurers' tricks or great sentimentality; while

this doctrinaire socialism, which at bottom only idealises present society,

takes a picture of it without shadows and wants to achieve its ideal

athwart the realities of present society; while the proletariat surrenders

this socialism to the petty bourgeoisie; while the struggle of the different

socialist leaders among themselves sets forth each of the so-called sys-

tems as a pretentious adherence to one of the transit points of the

social revolution as against another - the proletariat rallies more and

more round revolutionary socialism, round communism, for which the

bourgeoisie has itself invented the name of Blanqui. This socialism is

the declaration of the permanence of the revolution, the class dictator-

ship of the proletariat as the necessary transit point to the abolition

of class distinction generally, to the abolition of all the relations of

production on which they rest, to the abolition of all the social relations

that correspond to these relations of production, to the revolutionising

of all the ideas that result from these social relations.^37

The article ended on a characteristically optimistic note by declaring
the reactionary bourgeois republic to have been merely 'the hothouse of
revolution'.^38
This optimism was also reflected in the extended comments on current
affairs written by Marx and Engels for the Revue during the first months
of 1850. In France 'the strength of the revolutionary party naturally grows
in proportion to the progress of reaction' and 'a hitherto politically dead
class, the peasants, has been won for the revolution'.^39 As for Britain, the