Marx and Engels on Bonapartism and Imperialism (Book Talk, Leipzig, 15.11.2025)

Speaker: Spencer Leonard

The founding of Marxism, the definitive emergence of the ideological and organizational orientation of Marxism, flows from the experience of 1848. That is to say, it flows from the experience of defeat. From that, Marx and Engels came to espouse independent organization of the working class to engage the battle of democracy to transform the necessity of the state under conditions of capital — from that of imperialism suffusing and stifling society to the seizure of power by the proletariat, smashing the imperial state, allowing for the working through of society’s self-contradiction, and presiding over the withering away of the state itself. This orientation grew out of Marx and Engels’s entire experience of the revolution and finds unmistakable crystallization in The Class Struggle in France (1850) and, above all, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (1852). These writings concentrate on the French experience as expressing the core dynamics of the 1848 Revolution. However, what is little understood is that Marx was not simply describing the regime that emerged from the collapse of the Second Republic in France.

Imperialism was not a category for grasping a particular — illiberal, national — form of the capitalist state. Rather, it was the form of emerging international state order adequate to international capital. This becomes abundantly clear when we turn to the immense but remarkably neglected body of Marx’s journalism written from 1851 to 1862, work that equals in sheer scale the entire project of the critique of political economy, though this latter is, especially as regards his post-1848 corpus, the near exclusive preoccupation of Marx scholars. This neglect stands in marked contrast to the original editor of the Marx-Engels Gesamtausgabe (MEGA), David Riazanov, who was first attracted to his task through an engagement with the journalism of the 1850s. This talk will present in brief my reflections on its significance (and the significance of its neglect) now that I am completing the third and final volume of a conceptually-driven selection of Marx’s journalism.

Books:

Spencer A. Leonard (ed.): Marx and Engels on Bonapartism. Selected Journalism, 1851–59, Lanham/Boulder/New York/London 2023.

Spencer A. Leonard (ed.): Marx and Engels on Imperialism. Selected Journalism, 1856–62, Lanham/Boulder/New York/London 2023.