HEADS UP

The notes for this text were oddly added to Manifold as separate pages. If you need to find a particular note, feel free to use the link from the super-script note number. You can also simply click through these endnotes with the 'next' button at the bottom of each screen. Marx's notes tend to be very funny, so it could be fun to skim through these :)

Notes

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 This work, written on the basis of a concrete analysis of the revolutionary events in France from 1848 to 1851, is one of the most important Marxist writings. In it Marx gives a further elaboration of all the basic tenets of historical materialism-the theory of the class struggle and proletarian revolution, the state and the dictatorship of the proletariat. Of extremely great importance is the conclusion which Marx arrived at on the question of the attitude of the proletariat to the bourgeois state. He says, “All revolutions perfected this machine instead of smashing it.”. Lenin described it as one of the most important propositions in the Marxist teaching on the state.

In The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte Marx continued his analysis of the question of the peasantry, as a potential ally of the working class in the imminent revolution, outlined the role of the political parties in the life of society and exposed for what they were the essential features of Bonapartism.