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Q. To what extent do you think the Southern secession can be framed as the exploited South gaining independence from the exploitive north? While it’s true that the Southern states relied on the brutal enslavement of Africans, was not the north equally as brutal in its system of wage slavery?

I think its true that, to a certain extent, the slave states had a colonial relationship to the industrializing North.

However, I don’t think it’s right to say that wage labor in the North was just as bad as, or even worse than, chattel slavery. Slaves could not form trade unions, vote, or go out on strike. Slavery also made the spread of anti-racist ideas amongst white workers all but impossible. Without defending the wage labor system in the North, I think we can say that it was historically progressive when compared to slavery.

Q. I’ve heard the argument that since slaves were treated as capital, they were not haphazardly destroyed (unless to make an example), since they were the owner’s property, whereas in the north children working for a barely livable wage in a factory were forced to work until loss of life or limb, as the factory owner could easily find a replacement. While this doesn’t justify the institution of slavery, it no doubt raises questions as to the altruism of the north. Any thoughts?

The argument isn’t about whether or not the North was altruistic. Some white northerners did have a genuine moral and ethical hatred toward slavery. Others opposed the institution for more mercenary or pragmatic reasons. Of course Black northerners, both free-born and fugitive slaves, had very good reasons to oppose slavery that had little to do with altruism.

Abolitionism was a revolutionary movement. We should study it, learn from it, and take inspiration from the heroic actions of militants like Harriet Tubman, John Brown, and Frederick Douglass.

I think we have to see the Civil War and Reconstruction as a revolution that completed the work begun in 1776. It cleared away some of the impediments to industrial development in the United States. In that context it’s certainly true that the Civil War strengthened the capitalist class. But it also made it clear that the real conflict in American society was now between bosses and workers. The presence of slavery had obscured that fact. So, as Marx realized at the time, the abolition of slavery was a prerequisite for the development of a mass socialist workers movement in this country.

Q. I have to disagree with your assertion that the Civil War and Reconstruction “completed” the work begun in 1776. Maybe I’m misunderstanding what you mean by “work begun in 1776.” By work, do you mean establishment of a government in which everyone’s represented?

When I talk about “completion,” I’m referring to what I would call America’s bourgeois revolution. It’s a term from Marxist theory signifying the revolutions beginning with the Dutch Revolt in the 16th century, passing through the English Revolution of the 1640s, the American War of Independence and the French and Haitian Revolutions of the 1790s, and ending with the upheavals of the mid-19th century.

Basically speaking the bourgeois revolutions overthrew (or at least severely dented) pre-capitalist social forms–feudalism in particular, but also chattel slavery–and cleared the way for industrial and commercial development. In many cases they also promoted national independence and the development of a national market, and introduced some form of representative government–the political forms most suitable to the rule of the bourgeoisie.

America’s bourgeois revolution took place in two acts–the first in the 1760s and 1770s, and the second a century later. The Civil War and Reconstruction “completed” the process by which industrialists, bankers, and merchants became the ruling class in the United States. The southern planters had been the last obstacle to the unimpeded hegemony of this class.

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N MARCH 1861, Alexander Stephens, vice president of the newly established Confederacy in the South, expressed a simple truth about secession. Slavery, Stephens noted, “was the immediate cause of the late rupture and present revolution.”

Referring to the new Confederate government, Stephens stated, “Its cornerstone rests upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery, subordination to the superior race, is his natural and normal condition. This, our new government, is the first, in the history of the world, based upon this great physical, philosophical, and moral truth.”

Stephens could hardly have been any clearer: slavery caused secession and war, and the Confederacy was built to defend white supremacy. Yet many Americans today continue to believe that the Civil War came about as a conflict over taxation, tariff policy or states’ rights.

In December 2010, a group of well-heeled South Carolinians gathered in Charleston for a “Secession Ball” to mark the sesquicentennial of their state’s exit from the union. As partygoers strutted around in period costume–Confederate gray for the men and hoop skirts for the women–one speechmaker announced that the South had seceded “not to preserve the institution of slavery, not for glory or riches or honor, but for freedom alone.”

Even prominent politicians engage in mythmaking about slavery and abolition. In the Tea Party response to President Obama’s State of the Union address in January, conservative darling Michele Bachmann announced that the framers of the American Constitution “worked tirelessly until slavery was no more in the United States.”

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FOR GENERATIONS after the abolition of slavery, the U.S. elite clung to a vision of the antebellum South that included mint julips on the veranda, southern belles and happy slaves. Although the civil rights movement dispelled the most racist aspects of this stereotype, the “romance” of the Old South maintains a hold over the popular imagination even today.

Of course, the Old South of Gone with the Wind had absolutely nothing in common with the reality of life under slavery. For the millions of African Americans who suffered under the lash of overseer, life in the South was a waking nightmare.

Slavery–the ownership and exploitation of one person by another–is one of the oldest social relationships in human history. Slave labor built the pyramids in Egypt; it was the basis for the wealth and prestige of ancient Greece and Rome. But the form of slavery that emerged in Europe’s American colonies was very different from any that had come before.

New World slavery emerged as part of the developing capitalist world economy. It was designed to produce raw materials and staple crops such as cotton, sugar and tobacco for export back to the markets of Europe.

Driven by the profit motive, American plantation owners used every means at their disposal to extract the maximum labor possible from their enslaved Black workers. As well as the whip, planters devised horrific forms of torture and intimidation to keep their slaves in line.

Bennett H. Barrow was a Louisiana planter who refused to employ an overseer due to their reputation for excessive cruelty toward the slaves. Nevertheless, the diary of even this “humane” master is full of occasions when he indulged in a “general whipping frollick,” beat “every hand in the field,” or attacked a particular slave and “cut him with a club in 3 places.”

If this direct and brutal violence weren’t bad enough, Black slaves had to deal with other horrors. Because they could be traded as property, many enslaved African Americans lived through the experience of having their loved ones sold away and never seen again. In order to maintain control, most slave states passed laws making it illegal for Black people to learn to read and write. Planters herded their slaves into white-run churches to hear sermons on how their enslavement was the will of God.

The first major crisis for the slave system came during the American Revolution. Not only did thousands of slaves use the chaos of the war against Britain to flee their masters, but many whites began to wonder whether a new nation supposedly built on liberty could tolerate the existence of slave labor within its borders.

Slavery had never really taken hold in the northern colonies, where climate and geography mitigated against the development of plantation agriculture. Most of these states gradually abolished slavery in the years after the revolution.

In the southern states, though, slavery was the basis of the power of the patriot leaders. Men like George Washington and Thomas Jefferson were major slave owners, and they made sure that the new government guaranteed their right to own and exploit other human beings.

Although slavery survived the crisis of the revolutionary years, economic and social changes in the new nation drove a wedge between the free North and the slave South. Free from the control of imperial authorities, the U.S. intensified its war against American Indians, and thousands of white colonists streamed westward to settle on land stolen from the indigenous people.

At the same time, independence gave a tremendous boost to the development of an industrial and commercial economy in the Northeastern states. Soon, textile mills, railroads, and canals were spreading across the free states.

Meanwhile, in the South, the genocide against the Indians allowed cotton plantations to spread from the Eastern seaboard to what we now think of as the Deep South–states like Alabama, Mississippi and Louisiana.

Southern planters were getting richer and stronger, but so too were those in the free states who resented slavery. Small farmers in the West feared the competition from slave labor. Northern industrialists complained that slavery impeded the spread of factories and mills, and argued with the planters over tariff policy.

Just as importantly, the Northern elite justified its own growing power with an ideology that celebrated the ability of ordinary people to rise through society and become prosperous farmers or businessmen. The South, where slaves were stuck in a perpetual state of poverty and exploitation, seemed to violate this free labor ideal.

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EVEN AS some Northerners began to question the legitimacy of slavery, African Americans in the South demonstrated that they longed to be free.

Resistance could be small-scale and informal. Slaves feigned illness or pregnancy to avoid labor in the fields, or broke tools to slow down the pace of work. Sometimes individual slaves fought back when confronted with the violence of an owner or an overseer.

In his autobiography, escaped slave turned abolitionist leader Frederick Douglass described how, sick of beatings at the hands of an overseer named Covey, he “resolved to fight.” Douglass remembered: “We were at it for nearly two hours. Covey at length let me go, puffing and blowing at a great rate, saying that if I had not resisted, he would not have whipped me half so much. The truth was that he had not whipped me at all.”

Enslaved African Americans also created a culture of resistance. In the fields, they sang work songs that expressed the desire to escape from bondage. At night, when the master was in bed, they gathered to develop their own form of Christianity.

The most spectacular manifestations of resistance were the mass slave revolts that sporadically erupted in the South.

In 1800, an enslaved blacksmith named Gabriel led a slave conspiracy and insurrection in Virginia. In 1811, hundreds of slaves rose up on the plantations along the lower Mississippi River and attempted to march on New Orleans. Most famously, a Black preacher named Nat Turner organized a violent revolt in Virginia in 1831. Four years later, an alliance of American Indians, fugitive slaves, plantation hands and free Blacks made war against the U.S. Army in Florida.

None of these revolts genuinely threatened the stability of slavery in the South. Whites were always a majority, and they could count on the power of the government to crush slave rebellions. But these insurrections demonstrated that African Americans rejected their enslavement and were waiting for the right moment to throw off their chains.

The failure of the major slave rebellions showed that southern Blacks would need powerful allies if they were to confront the planters. Starting in the 1830s, these allies began to emerge across the North in the form of abolitionist societies, the most active and militant of which were dedicated to the immediate destruction of slavery.

Runaway slaves and free Blacks formed the rank-and-file of the antislavery movement. In 1827, a group of African Americans in New York began to publish an antislavery newspaper called Freedom’s Journal. They pledged to complete the revolutionary process begun in 1776, and built a network of agents and distributors to agitate for Black rights.

Newspapers like Freedom’s Journal convinced radical whites to join the crusade against slavery. One such individual was William Lloyd Garrison, who founded the American Antislavery Society after coming under the influence of African American activists.

The abolitionist movement challenged many forms of oppression. The prominence of Black abolitionists such as Frederick Douglass forced many northerners to reconsider their deeply held racism. Female abolitionists who resented the persistence of sexism in the movement became the vanguard of the struggle for women’s suffrage.

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BEFORE THE 1850s, however, the abolitionists remained a despised and isolated minority in the North. Powerful business interests connected the Northern elite to the planter class, and racism remained nearly universal in the free states. Many abolitionists died at the hands of pro-slavery mobs or were forced to flee their homes.

But events in the 1850s gave the abolitionists a new audience for their ideas. A national controversy erupted over whether slavery should expand into the Western territories. The United States had stolen these lands from Mexico in the expansionist war of 1846. Northern farmers and investors hoped to spread the free labor system into the West, while planters knew that slavery must expand if it was to survive in the South.

The showdown came in Kansas. Thousands of antislavery New Englanders and proslavery Missourians flooded into Kansas after 1854. Violence erupted when proslavery thugs attacked the antislavery settlement at Lawrence. In retribution, an antislavery militant named John Brown ambushed proslavery settlers at Pottowatomie Creek, killing five.

Before the events in Kansas, the two-party system had largely kept the issue of slavery out of the political arena. The two main parties, the Whigs and Democrats, had conspired to keep the slavery controversy out of Congress as far as possible. But now the facade began to crack.

A new third party, the Republican Party, grew out of the mass movement that emerged in the North in response to the crisis in Kansas. The Republicans ran their first candidate for President in 1856–pledging to prevent the spread of slavery, they captured a third of the popular vote.

Most Republicans were not abolitionists. They did not launch an immediate attack on slavery. But they did hope that restricting the spread of slavery would, in the words of Abraham Lincoln, put the institution on “a course of ultimate extinction.”

Thus, when Lincoln won election as the first Republican president in 1860, the states of the Deep South had little hesitation in seceding from the Union. Even if the Republicans had pledged not to interfere with slavery directly, the planters knew their victory would encourage slave resistance and lead to the spread of abolitionist ideas in the South.

South Carolina left the Union in December 1860, and by the following June, it had been joined by 10 other southern states. As Alexander Stephens made clear, these states seceded not to defend abstract principles like states’ rights or “freedom,” but to preserve the brutal system of human slavery.

When the Civil War began in April 1861 with the Confederate bombardment of Union’s Fort Sumter in South Carolina, the issue of slavery again forced its way to the surface. Thousands of slaves fled to Northern lines and volunteered to fight against their former owners, and Lincoln came to realize that the North could not win without their aid. The process of war, emancipation and Reconstruction that followed would constitute the Second American Revolution.

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Classics of Marxism

Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte

The Revolutions of 1848 in Europe are a forgotten episode in radical history, particularly in the United States. While revolutionary turning points such as the signing of the Declaration of Independence in 1776, the Storming of the Bastille in 1789, the Emancipation Proclamation of 1863, or even the Paris Commune of 1871 retain some place in popular consciousness, the same cannot be said of the events of 1848-50: the uprising in Vienna, the June Days in Paris, the Siege of Rome, or the nationalist revolt in Hungary.

Particularly for Marxists, however, the Revolutions of 1848 have huge significance. For one thing, these upheavals represented the first examples of independent working-class political action in European history—they were the moment at which something resembling the modern socialist movement began to take shape. Secondly, the Revolutions of 1848 gave Karl Marx and Frederick Engels their first major opportunity to put their revolutionary theories into practice—both men participated as central actors in the German wing of the revolutionary movement. Finally, and most importantly for the purposes of this review, the Revolution of 1848 in France gave Marx his first chance to analyze and write about the development of the revolutionary movement using the method of historical materialism.

Marx wrote two short books on the Revolution of 1848: The Class Struggles in France and The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte. While this review will focus on the latter text, readers are strongly recommended to read the two books together.

The Origins of Revolution

Europe was experiencing major economic and social change in the middle of the nineteenth century. The great bourgeois revolutions—the Dutch Revolt of the sixteenth century, the English Revolution of the 1640s, the American War of Independence, and the French Revolution of the 1790s—had swept away the remnants of the feudal order and cleared the way for industrial and commercial development across the Atlantic World. The spread of factories and textile mills had transformed urban life in cities like London, Manchester, Paris, Lyon, New York, and Berlin. Millions of peasants and landless rural laborers poured into Europe’s new industrial cities. Technological innovations such as the railroad, the steamboat, and the canal had revolutionized transportation and created national markets for manufactured goods.

The industrialization of Europe also brought social dislocation and economic misery in its wake. Conditions were appalling in the working-class districts of the new industrial cities. The living standards of textile workers in Manchester, England, were so bad that a young Frederick Engels wrote The Condition of the Working Class in England to document the horrors in 1844.

Capitalism’s tendency to produce periodic crises exacerbated the terrible impact of industrialization. The potato blight, which first began to affect crops in 1845, created a devastating famine across Europe in 1847. Later that year, the end of the railroad boom created a major panic on the British financial markets, leading to a sharp recession and the closing of many factories and mills. The economic turbulence spread to Continental Europe and produced an epidemic of bankruptcies in major cities like Paris. Thousands of workers lost their jobs, with perhaps one in three Parisians facing unemployment.

The undemocratic character of many European governments magnified anger at the economic misery sweeping Europe. The bourgeois revolutions had left much of their work undone. Germany remained divided into a host of squabbling principalities and petty dukedoms. The Austrian Empire continued to rule over a multitude of oppressed nationalities, such as the Hungarians, in Central and Southern Europe. Even France, the epicenter of bourgeois radicalism in the eighteenth century, grumbled under the rule of a monarchy.

From Revolution to Reaction

Economic and political discontent came to a head in France in early 1848. Since the previous summer, French citizens had circumvented a ban on political demonstrations by organizing a series of banquets at which diners could voice their criticisms of the regime. Against the banqueters stood Louis Philippe, the so-called “July Monarch.” Louis Philippe had come to the throne as the result of a popular uprising in 1830, and presided over a constitutional monarchy for almost two decades. Despite the liberal aspirations of his supporters, Louis Philippe had turned out to be a staunch opponent of democracy, and had restricted the franchise so that it included just 1% of the French population by 1848. Faced with the growth of dissent, the “July Monarch” chose to ban the political banquets in February of 1848.

The revolution began on February 23. The spark came when French soldiers fired on a crowd of Parisian protesters, killing fifty-two. Citizens from all classes of Parisian society flooded into the streets and, in homage to the French revolutionary tradition, began to build barricades. When huge crowds began to approach the royal palace, Louis Philippe chose to abandon his throne and flee to England. The “July Monarchy” had fallen at the first serious challenge from below.

With the monarch gone, the liberal opposition came together to declare France’s Second Republic. With a major social and political crisis convulsing the nation, the Republic would have two central goals: expanding the democratic elements of the government, and providing aid to the thousands of unemployed workers. On March 2, the new government declared the advent of “universal suffrage,” adding 9 million French men to the voter rolls but continuing the exclusion of women from the right to vote. A relaxation of censorship and repression allowed for the flowering of a new political culture, with hundreds of newspapers and political clubs springing up all across France. The system of National Workshops, or government-run businesses, expanded to employ tens of thousands of French workers and guarantee the “Right to Work.”

But the Second Republic faced a growing polarization in French society. On the one hand, throughout the spring and early summer, the working classes of Paris mobilized to attempt to push the government of the Second Republic to the left. On the other hand, however, French business owners and farmers were coming to resent the increased taxation necessary for the National Workshops, and had begun to worry that the current government was incapable of restoring order. Conservative and moderate candidates triumphed in the elections of April 1848, and began to shift the government of the Republic along a more right-wing course.

On June 23, the government announced the closure of the National Workshops, and immediately deployed troops to the most rebellious working-class neighborhoods of Paris. The three days of fighting that followed came to be known as the “June Days.” Although workers and artisans resisted heroically, they fought without any allies and suffered defeat at the hands of the National Guard.

The defeat of the workers’ insurrection left what Marx called the “pure bourgeois Republicans,” or what we might think of as liberals, in charge, and they set to work drafting a new constitution through a Constituent Assembly. The overall trend in French politics remained to the right, however. In particular, the election of Louis Bonaparte as President in December of 1848 signaled the growing conservatism of the French bourgeoisie. The ensuing debate over the nature of the French Constitution led to a set of laws than were much more conservative than might have been expected—leaving the educational establishment in the hands of the Catholic clergy, for example.

In this context, the elections for the Legislative Assembly in May of 1849 gave a majority to the conservative Party of Order, albeit one that would face strong opposition from a sizable minority of radical Republican and Social-Democratic legislators, known as the Montagne faction. The struggle between the radicals and conservatives in the Legislative Assembly came to a head the following month, when representatives of the Montagne organized a peaceful demonstration, leading to the arrest and expulsion from the Assembly of their leaders.

Despite its victory over the Montagne, the Party of Order became increasingly subservient to Louis Bonaparte, and in November of 1849 the President felt strong enough to dismiss the royalist ministry and appoint a government of men loyal only to him. At this point the Party of Order might have attempted to mobilize all the pro-democracy forces against the growing executive power of President Bonaparte. In fact it did just the opposite. In March 1850, elections were held to replace the radical leaders who had been expelled from the Legislative Assembly the previous June. When Parisian voters handed a sweeping victory to the Montagne and Social Democrats, the Party of Order moved to abolish universal suffrage, disenfranchising 30% of the French electorate.

From this point on, then Party of Order began to collapse as a political force. Having lost its majority in the Legislative Assembly, it was forced to rely on a coalition with the radicals of the Montagne—the very force it had just been in conflict with. The weakness of the conservative parliamentarians allowed Louis Bonaparte to consolidate his power over the course of the summer and fall of 1850, wresting control of the army away from the Assembly and appointing an even more conservative and sycophantic ministry. In October, he undermined the Legislative Assembly still further by declaring his intention to restore universal male suffrage. Finally, on December 2, 1850, Bonaparte carried out a coup and dispersed the Legislative Assembly—he would soon go on to declare himself Emperor of France.

The Second Time as Farce

Marx wrote the Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte to explain how and why the Revolution of 1848 in France had led to Louis Bonaparte’s coup d’état in 1851. The very title of his book provides one important clue to his analysis of these events. Although the date “eighteenth of Brumaire” means virtually nothing today, in Marx’s day it was laden with symbolism for the revolutionary movement. During the first French Revolution, which began in 1789, the revolutionaries got rid of the Roman calendar and renamed the months of the year. Intended to symbolize a complete break with the old, pre-revolutionary way of doing things, the new names were in use from 1793—the most radical stage of the revolution—to 1805. The date “Eighteenth Brumaire” refers to November 9 in our calendar, and is significant because it was the day in 1799 on which Napoleon Bonaparte, uncle of Louis, overthrew the French government and established himself in a position of dictatorial power.

The significance of the date gives meaning to Marx’s famous statement, in the very first passage of work, “Hegel remarks somewhere that all facts and personages of great importance in world history occur, as it were, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second as farce.”[i] This gets to the heart of Marx’s explanation of the Revolution of 1848: it was a farcical attempt to re-enact the Great French Revolution of 50 years earlier. As he notes on the first page:

“Just when [people] seem engaged in revolutionizing themselves and things, in creating something that has never yet existed, precisely in such periods of revolutionary crisis they anxiously conjure up the spirits of the past to their service and borrow from them names, battle cries, and costumes in order to present the new scene of world history in this time-honored disguise and this borrowed language.”

He goes on:

“The revolution of 1848 knew nothing better to do than to parody, now 1789, now the revolutionary tradition of 1793 to 1795.”[ii]

Some of the main questions Marx asks in the Eighteenth Brumaire are: why was it impossible to re-enact the French Revolution 50 years on; what had changed in French society in the intervening years; why was any attempt to recreate 1789 fated to result in the dictatorship of a frankly rather buffoonish character, Louis Bonaparte?

The Politics of Social Classes

In order to answer these questions, Marx studied the events in question with a method he called historical materialism. From the mid-1840s, Marx and his collaborator Frederick Engels had been developing a theoretical framework for understanding the development of human societies. In contrast to Marx’s first mentor, Georg W. F. Hegel, they insisted that the material conditions of life, and not ideas, drove the development of human society; in contrast to the materialist philosophy of German thinkers such as Ludwig Feuerbach, they insisted that humans were capable of altering the world around them. Historical materialism began to emerge as a fully formed theory in works such as The Holy Family (1844) and The German Ideology (1846).

The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte was one of Marx’s first attempts to apply the method of historical materialism to the political events of the time. As Frederick Engels wrote in the 1890s:

“Marx…first discovered the great law of motion of history, the law according to which all historical struggles, whether they proceed in the political, religious, philosophical or some other ideological domain, are in fact only the more or less clear expression of struggles of social classes, and that the existence and thereby the collisions, too, between these classes are in turn conditioned by the degree of development of their economic position, by the mode of their production and of their exchange determined by it. This law, which has the same significance for history as the law of the transformation of energy has for natural science – this law gave him here, too, the key to an understanding of the history of the Second French Republic. He put his law to the test on these historical events, and even after thirty-three years we must still say that it has stood the test brilliantly.”[iii]

Marx’s method is absolutely essential for understanding the course of the revolution in France. On the face of it, the events of 1848-1851 can seem pretty confusing, especially for readers unfamiliar with the basic contours of French history. Marx’s account features a somewhat dizzying cast of characters: feuding royalist faction, pretenders to the throne, dissident generals, pure republicans, social democrats, secret societies, priests, schoolmasters, and so on.

Marx’s method, however, goes beneath the superficial appearance of events in order to find the social forces at work during the Revolution of 1848. For him, it isn’t sufficient to explain the revolution by saying, for example, that one faction of the Party of Order wanted this particular prince to become king, while another faction wanted a different prince on the throne. Marx wants to know the social and economic interests that these different factions, parties, and individuals represent, and how the conflicts between them reflect the struggles taking place at the base of society. Here’s how Marx explains this method in his own words:

“Upon the different forms of property, upon the social conditions of existence, rises an entire superstructure of distinct and peculiarly formed sentiments, illusions, modes of thought, and views of life. The entire class creates and forms them out of its material foundations and out of the corresponding social relations. The single individual, who derives them through tradition and upbringing, may imagine that they form the real motives and the starting point of his activity.”

Therefore: “In historical struggles one must distinguish…the phrases and fancies of parties from their real organism and their real interests, their conception of themselves from their reality.”[iv]

The French Bourgeoisie

The main protagonist of Eighteenth Brumaire is the French bourgeoisie. Marx had a love-hate relationship with this class. When he argued in the Communist Manifesto that “the bourgeoisie, historically, has played a most revolutionary part,”[v] he meant not only the role that the bourgeoisie had played in developing the means of production, but also the progressive role that the French bourgeoisie had played in the Great Revolution of 1789-1793 when, under the leadership of the Jacobins, it abolished the monarchy and instituted a democratic form of government.

The French bourgeoisie plays a much less revolutionary role in the Eighteenth Brumaire. One of the major goals of the book is to explain why the vanguard of the European bourgeoisie could, just a couple of generations after its heroic role in one revolution, do everything in its power to limit the spread and scope of another revolution.

Marx identifies three main factions within the French bourgeoisie: the big landlords; the industrialists; and the finance capitalists. Two of these factions, the landlords and industrialists, form antagonistic wings of the Party of Order—the landlords favoring a return to the Bourbon dynasty of Louis XVI and operating under the name of Legitimists, and the industrialists supporting the Orleans dynasty of Louis Philippe.

Despite being united in a single party, these two factions maintain a perpetual state of intrigue against one another, not because there was any real historical significance to which royal family had a legitimate claim to the throne, but because, in Marx’s words, “each of the two great interests into which the bourgeoisie is split – landed property and capital – sought to restore its own supremacy and the subordination of the other.”[vi] In fact, as Marx points out, their position as representatives of the bourgeoisie actually trumps the commitment of the Party of Order to the restoration of the monarchy.

For Marx, the political rule of the bourgeoisie is in a certain sense at its strongest and most secure under a democratic republic. He argues that the democratic republic allows the different factions of the capitalist class to work out their differences and disagreements in a peaceful fashion and to put the interests of the class as a whole above the sectional interests of any particular group of capitalists. “Only under this form [of the democratic republic],” Marx suggests, “could the two great divisions of the French bourgeoisie unite, and thus put the rule of their class instead of the regime of a privileged faction of it on the order of the day.”[vii]

Despite the utility of the democratic republic for bourgeois class rule, the bourgeoisie’s main political party, the Party of Order, “also insulted the republic and expressed their repugnance to it.”[viii] The republic played a contradictory role for the bourgeoisie: as well as providing a means for uniting the capitalists as a class, it formed an arena in which the bourgeoisie was forced to contend with the other classes in French society. Marx expresses this phenomenon with a neat dialectical formulation:

“The republic, true enough, makes their political rule complete, but at the same time undermines its social foundation, since they must now confront the subjugated classes and contend against them without mediation, without the concealment afforded by the crown, without being able to divert the national interest by their subordinate struggles among themselves and with the monarchy.”[ix]

This is the key to the different political role played by the bourgeoisie in 1848 as compared to 1789: the class struggle between the workers and the capitalists was now at a much more advanced stage than it had been fifty years ago, and the bourgeoisie had consequently become much more conservative.

Although the working class plays a relatively minor role in the series of events described in the Eighteenth Brumaire, Marx clearly sees the June uprising as one of the driving factors in the whole process leading up to Bonaparte’s coup. He puts it this way: “The social republic appeared as a phrase, as a prophecy, on the threshold of the February Revolution. In the June days of 1848, it was drowned in the blood of the Paris proletariat, but it haunts the subsequent acts of the drama like a ghost.”[x]

In other words, the capitalist class was so terrified about the independent political activity of the working class, so afraid of the emergence of the socialist ideal, that it was willing to sacrifice the parliamentary republic in order to maintain a state of social peace. According to Marx, this is why the bourgeoisie was willing to tolerate the dictatorship of Louis Bonaparte. All of its factions were worried than continuing political tumult would only disturb the conditions necessary for the serious business of business. As Marx put it, the conduct of the French bourgeoisie “proved that the struggle to maintain its public interests, its own class interests, its political power, only troubled and upset it, as it was a disturbance of private business.”[xi]

The petty bourgeoisie

If the bourgeoisie was too scared of working-class revolution to lead the struggle for democracy in France, then what of the other classes in society?

Between the capitalists and the workers sat the petty bourgeoisie, represented by the democratic republicans of the Montagne and the reformists of the Social Democrats. In Marx’s analysis, this class sees the struggle for democracy as a means for blunting the antagonisms in class society, of reconciling the bourgeoisie and the proletariat and allowing them to live together in peace. The political representative of the petty bourgeoisie thus “imagines himself elevated above class antagonism generally. The democrats concede that a privileged class confronts them, but they, along with all the rest of the nation, form the people. What they represent is the people’s rights; what interests them is the people’s interests.”[xii]

During the period from 1848 to 1851, this put the democratic petty bourgeoisie in a hopelessly contradictory position. On the one hand it had, through the National Guard, participated in the bloody repression of the working class in June 1848. On the other hand, it found itself locked in parliamentary struggle with the Party of Order and the bourgeoisie. Its answer to this conundrum was the futile semi-insurrection of June 1849, when the petty bourgeois elements of the National Guard staged protests against the government but neglected to take their weapons with them. Their movement was thus defeated without striking a blow.

Bonapartism

Thus the dictatorship of Louis Bonaparte did not represent the dictatorship of any of these classes—the bourgeoisie, petty bourgeoisie, or proletariat—but rather represented the fact that none of them were able to impose their rule on society. His rule represented the growing size and power of the state machinery in France and its apparent separation from, and domination over, all of French society.

Marx described the massive growth of the state, and in particular, the executive power, as a result of the historical development of French society. As feudalism began to decay and give way to capitalist social relations, powers and privileges that had once belonged to the aristocracy or the urban elites increasingly became vested in the absolutist state, transforming “the feudal dignitaries into paid officials and the conflicting pattern of conflicting medieval plenary powers into the regulated plan of a state authority whose work is divided and centralized as in a factory.”[xiii]

Under the openly capitalist governments of the post-Revolutionary period, the state continued to grow and evolve as an enormous and centralized power capable of exerting its authority over all local and particular interests, from the building of a bridge or schoolhouse to the arming and outfitting of a great army. Nevertheless, this great machine very clearly served the interests of a definite class—the rising bourgeoisie. The contending factions of this class came to see access to and control over the state machine as one of the most important spoils of victory in their political squabbles.

With the advent of Louis Bonaparte’s dictatorship, however, this situation seemed to have changed. As we have seen, the rising strength and militancy of the French working class, along with the deep economic crisis of the 1840s, had destroyed the bourgeoisie’s confidence in its own ability to rule. By acquiescing in the rise of Bonaparte, and surrendering the executive power to him with barely a fight, the French bourgeoisie had demonstrated that it was unfit to exercise its authority over society.

Indeed, Bonaparte’s dictatorship suggested that the state could step in and lead society when none of the contending classes proved capable of doing so. As Marx noted:

“Only under the second Bonaparte does the state seem to have made itself completely independent. The state machinery has so strengthened itself vis-à-vis civil society that the Chief of the Society of December 10 suffices for its head – an adventurer dropped in from abroad, raised on the shoulders of a drunken soldiery which he bought with whisky and sausages and to which he has to keep throwing more sausages.”[xiv]

The bureaucratic and military apparatus seemed to have become utterly independent of the will of any particular social group.

The Peasantry

Ultimately, however, Marx understood that Bonaparte did derive his support from a distinct class in French society—the smallholding peasantry. This class had come into being as a result of the first French revolution, when many of the great noble estates had been broken up and the land given to the peasants. Many peasants associated the glory days of their class with the rule of Louis Bonaparte’s uncle, Napoleon, and provided the main basis of support for the nephew’s conflict with the other classes in French society. But the class of freeholding peasants, which had been created by the bourgeois revolution, was, by 1848, being ruined by the hegemony of the bourgeoisie. Marx described how this process worked:

“In the course of the nineteenth century the urban usurer replaced the feudal one, the mortgage replaced the feudal obligation, bourgeois capital replaced aristocratic landed property. The peasant’s small holding is now only the pretext that allows the capitalist to draw profits, interest, and rent from the soil, while leaving it to the agriculturist himself to see to it how he can extract his wages.”[xv]

But despite the contradiction between the domination of the capitalists and the interests of the peasantry, the latter is fundamentally incapable of leading a struggle against the bourgeoisie. The social conditions of rural and village life prevent the peasants from coming to a collective awareness of their interests as a class. This is how Marx described the material conditions of the French peasantry:

“The small-holding peasants form an enormous mass whose members live in similar conditions but without entering into manifold relations with each other. Their mode of production isolates them from one another instead of bringing them into mutual intercourse. The isolation is furthered by France’s poor means of communication and the poverty of the peasants. Their field of production, the small holding, permits no division of labor in its cultivation, no application of science, and therefore no multifariousness of development, no diversity of talent, no wealth of social relationships. Each individual peasant family is almost self-sufficient, directly produces most of its consumer needs, and thus acquires its means of life more through an exchange with nature than in intercourse with society.”[xvi]

Through this analysis of rural society and the political limitations of peasant revolt, Marx is led to the conclusion that the peasantry could only challenge capitalism under the leadership of an urban class: “The interests of the peasants are no longer…in accord with, but are now in opposition to bourgeois interests, to capital,” Marx wrote. “Hence they find their natural ally and leader in the urban proletariat, whose task it is to overthrow the bourgeois order.”[xvii]

Conclusion: The Proletariat and Permanent Revolution

The idea that the peasantry can play a revolutionary anti-capitalist role only under the leadership of the urban working class is another example of the ways in which Marx’s Eighteenth Brumaire anticipated the development of the socialist movement in the years after 1851.

Most obviously, Marx had demonstrated that the growing strength of the working class, and its intensified struggle with the bourgeoisie, was the dominant feature of French society. The Eighteenth Brumaire had shown that the working class could now only play a revolutionary role when it acted independently of the bourgeoisie. Although the period after Bonaparte’s victory would be one of reaction, within a generation the French workers would be ready to reveal their strength once again. In 1871, the working people of Paris rose up, banished the existing state power from the city, and built the Commune to represent their interests. For Marx, the experience of the Paris Commune demonstrated that the working class could not build socialism through the bureaucratic and administrative power of the bourgeois state, but would need to smash that power and build a state of a totally different kind.

Moreover, several of the key themes in the Eighteenth Brumaire would become factors in the debate amongst Russian revolutionaries in the early twentieth century. While some Russian radicals maintained that the peasantry would lead any revolutionary movement in rural Russia, Lenin and other Marxists argued that leadership would have to come from an urban class. At the same time, while some Marxists thought that the coming Russian revolution would be a bourgeois revolution, and would therefore be led by the liberal bourgeoisie, Lenin and Trotsky insisted that Russian capitalists were far too timid and reactionary to play any such role. Only the small but militant Russian working class could lead the peasantry to victory over the autocracy.

Indeed, Leon Trotsky would draw on the lessons of 1848 when he came to elaborate his theory of Permanent Revolution. Having played a leading role in the Russian Revolution of 1905, Trotsky wanted to demonstrate that the Russian working class was destined to play the decisive leading role in the movement. To defend this position, Trotsky reminded his fellow revolutionaries “that already in the middle of the nineteenth century the problem of political emancipation could not be solved by the unanimous and concerted tactics of the pressure of the whole nation. Only the independent tactics of the proletariat, gathering strength for the struggle from its class position, and only from its class position, could have secured victory for the revolution.”[xviii]

Just as important as the particular strategic and political lessons it contains, however, Marx’s Eighteenth Brumaire is an invaluable example of the Marxist method. It provides one of the clearest early examples of historical materialism in action, and remains one of the most important models for Marxists attempting to the write the history of revolutions today.

The economic crisis, and the ruling class response to it, underlies everything. The jobs report for September underscores that fact: the private sector is barely growing, and public sector cuts are starting to arrive thick and fast. The American ruling class has, I believe, now made a decisive turn in favor of austerity. Projecting into the future a little, Obama will begin to announce plans for cuts and austerity measures after the midterm elections, at which point a largely Republican Congress will shift the debate even further to the right. The question will become not whether to cut, but where, when, and how deeply to cut.

Outside of mainstream politics, the economic crisis is having a different, but still contradictory, impact.

In the first instance it now seems pretty obvious that the opening for anti-capitalist politics has grown pretty significantly amongst American youth in particular. In the broad sense, this means that lots and lots of students and young workers–perhaps as many as one in three–think socialism is better than capitalism. More narrowly, a much smaller but still significant layer of people are turning to Marxism, oftentimes outside the orbit of existing or established revolutionary socialist groups.

With the partial exception of several universities in Northern California, however, this radicalization is largely taking place in the absence of sustained social struggle. Young people are radicalizing as a result of their experiences during the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression, but they are not becoming anti-capitalists as a result of their participation in the fightback.

In this context, I recently had a couple of very interesting conversations with a comrade in Chicago. He is fairly pessimistic about the overall political climate at the moment. At the risk of butchering his argument, this comrade was arguing that the working class and the social movements are not in a position to resist the ruling-class attacks that are about to go down, and that the task of revolutionaries in the coming period would be essentially educational and propagandistic.

I found this to be quite persuasive at first. The autumn had turned out to be less “hot” than I was hoping. The immigrant youth fighting for the DREAM Act suffered (what seems to me) a pretty serious setback when the movement first divided over whether to support DREAM as an amendment to the defense spending bill and then failed to get the amendment passed anyway. Anti-cuts organizing seemed much slower to get off the ground than it did at this time last year.

Two things have caused me to reevaluate these ideas. The first has been an interesting discussion on the Gathering Forces blog. I’ve been debating perspectives with the comrades from GF and Advance the Struggle for about 6 months, on and off. They’ve consistently argued that my own view of what’s possible right now is too conservative–that if anti-capitalists were more “daring” in this period we could mobilize a large radicalizing constituency of students and workers.

The second debate has centered on recent events at Berkeley. I don’t have every side of the story, but on the day of action to defend education on 10/7, several hundred people engaged in a sit-in at Doe Library. A General Assembly was held; some people wanted to maintain the sit-in as an occupation, but for some reason it didn’t happen and the action dispersed. Since then, the occupationist (for want of a better word) and anarcho-communist wing of the movement has attacked the GA as an obstacle to militant action.

See the first critique of the Berkeley GA here.

See JBC’s considered response to these arguments here.

I don’t really have a whole lot to add to JBC’s excellent intervention. I’ll only say a couple of things. I don’t see the critics of the Berkeley GA offering anything in the way of alternatives, beyond the same old call for “militant action.” I think this strategy played itself out in the early months of 2010–small groups would attempt to take radical action with no demands, no program, and no attempt to reach or dialogue with folks outside their narrow circles. These actions were easily broken up by the police or attracted so few participants that they didn’t take place at all. Unless there’s some kind of public balance sheet of this process I’m not inclined to take the critics of the GA all that seriously.

Having said that, I would very much like to hear more about what this wing of the movement thinks is possible right now. These folks played a very important role in radicalizing the movement last fall, in terms of both analysis and tactics. My impression was that they’d lost the faith a little bit, so any signs of life–even a pretty weak polemic like this–might be a good thing. Is the struggle ready for another escalation? This question is given added urgency by rumors that the Regents are set to raise tuition at the University of California by another 20% next month.

So I’m not coming to any conclusions here. At GF one commenter posed the question thusly: “how much is possible right now?” I think that’s the right question, but I haven’t heard any satisfactory answers yet. I want to hear more than “strikes are possible” or “we should occupy something.”

Sherry Wolf, “Too High a Price for Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell.”

Truthout, “Challenges…”

Raúl Al-qaraz Ochoa, “Letter to the DREAM Movement.”

Obviously these debates are just the latest installments in ongoing discussions on the left about DREAM and the repeal of DADT. Some activists have unequivocally opposed mobilization around both measures as representing unprincipled concessions to US militarism. My own organization, the ISO, recently came out in favor of critical support for the DREAM Act after a wide-ranging internal discussion.

Furthermore, we have to acknowledge that the political terrain is about to shift once again. It seems likely that the Republicans will capture control of at least the House of Representatives after the November midterm elections. This will present new challenges for both the immigrant rights and the LGBT movement and will undoubtedly spark fresh debates about the way forward.

UPDATE 9/23: This article appears on the Webzine section of Solidarity’s site: http://solidarity-us.org/current/node/3044

Honestly I’m really quite surprised that the comrades are taking this position in continued support of DREAM, although they probably don’t have a line as an organization and the article is likely to reflect the views of a single member or supporter. Suffice it to say that I don’t agree.

In any case, here’s my review of Paul Blackledge’s excellent book Reflections on the Marxist Theory of History. A slightly different version appeared in the latest issue of the International Socialist Review.

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The ongoing economic crisis is having an impact on all areas of American social, cultural, and intellectual life. With the prevailing postmodernist consensus unable to explain why capitalism went into crisis in 2008, many American scholars and intellectuals have begun to reconsider the value of Marxist theory as a method for understanding the world.

In this context, Paul Blackledge’s Reflections on the Marxist Theory of History is an important recent work. Published in 2006, this book provides a clear and concise synthesis of the best Marxist historical writing of the last 150 years.

Blackledge centers his argument on the misconception that the Marxist theory of history is the “archetypal form of economic reductionism.” He shows that the best practitioners of historical materialism, from Marx and Engels themselves to modern historians such as Perry Anderson and Neil Davidson, have developed a much more sophisticated and flexible method for investigating the past.

Blackledge makes his point through a number of case studies. Early chapters examine the historical writings of Marx and Engels and show how socialist intellectuals from the Second and Third Internationals built on and developed Marx’s historical method.

In the second half of the book, Blackledge looks at some of the most interesting and important debates in post-1945 Marxist historiography. In this context, he assesses the controversies over, for example, the origins of capitalism in England and the nature of bourgeois revolutions, and wades into more recent debates on the role of human agency in history.

While Blackledge’s work can certainly be approached as a series of discrete essays, a single major theme runs through the whole book: the question of the relationship between structure and agency in Marxist historical theory.

In this sense, and like so many radical historians before him, Blackledge is wrestling with Marx’s claim that “men make history, but not of their own free will; not under circumstance they themselves have chosen but under given and inherited circumstances with which they are directly confronted.”

The challenge for historians following Marx has been to determine the correct balance between the ability of individuals and social groups to change history, and the ways in which they are constrained by the existing structures of society.

First and foremost, as Blackledge clearly demonstrates, Marxism is a theory of human liberation. It is a method for understanding the world in order to change it. In this sense the charges of “economic determinism” so often leveled against Marxist historical writing makes little sense: why would Marx, Engels, Lenin, Trotsky and others have spent their lives as organizers if social change was an inevitable process with predetermined results?

On the contrary, the best Marxist historical writing has shown that the structures of a given society present individuals and social groups with numerous choices and avenues for political action. Particularly at moments of acute social crisis, the actions of even a single individual can have profound consequences for the course of history.

Blackledge does an admirable job of finding examples of this method in the most diverse works of Marxist historical writing. In chapter three, for example, he discusses some of the best works of historical materialism from the period of the Second International. While many commentators have written off the Marxism of this period as fatalistic and deterministic, Blackledge shows that the work of Labriola, Plekhanov, and Kautsky actually contains much that is valuable today.

This ability to find the kernel of insight in an otherwise flawed tradition is a particular strength of Blackledge’s work. Thus, while he criticizes the concept of “people’s history” as an imprecise and unscientific product of the Stalinist Popular Front, Blackledge simultaneously uncovers much that is useful in the works of its practitioners. He points to the work of Christopher Hill on the English Revolution and E.P. Thompson on the English working class as providing particularly inspiring accounts of the ways in which ordinary people have made history.

Ultimately, Blackledge finds the most satisfying synthesis of structure and agency in the work of Alasdair MacIntyre and Alex Callinicos—both of whom have recently been published by Haymarket Books. Blackledge notes that Callinicos in particular has been able to “outline a…model of historical materialism that escapes…fatalism, without succumbing to methodological individualism.”

If there is a weakness in Blackledge’s book it is a slight narrowness of vision in the later chapters. He tends to focus very closely on debates within British Marxism without always considering the contributions of other international writers. An assessment of the ways in which, for example, W.E.B. Du Bois and C.L.R. James used Marxism to understand Black history would have provided another rich case study for this work.

But this is a minor quibble. Blackledge’s book is an excellent starting point for anyone interested in using Marxism to understand history. For a work of theory it is remarkably concise and readable. Reflections on the Marxist Theory of History therefore has tremendous value not just for historians but for anyone who thinks the study of the past should inform our struggles to shape the future.

At the moment it’s too early to say whether Fall 2010 will match the levels of mobilization and militancy we saw last year. But the signs are encouraging.

For one thing, a number of other struggles have the potential to feed into and strengthen the movement against the cuts.

One of these is the revived struggle for immigrants’ rights. The fight against SB1070 in Arizona brought this movement back out into the streets in a major way and drew in a whole layer of new forces. In a parallel development, a number of campuses saw a spurt of activism around the DREAM Act, with undocumented students played a particularly important leading role. These actions–in which undocumented students proved their willingness to risk deportation by taking part in civil disobedience–culminated in the arrest of two dozen students in Washington, DC, in July of this year. My sense is that this issue will be an important part of the political terrain on the campuses this fall.

Another potential flashpoint may appear around Palestinian solidarity. The Israeli massacre of Freedom Flotilla activists this spring has given new life to the call to boycott, divest from, and sanction the apartheid state. Since many American universities invest heavily in Israel and corporations that do business there, I can see an obvious potential for solidarity between the pro-Palestinian and anti-cuts movements.

In California, at least, the justice for Oscar Grant campaign will be a crucial factor in fall organizing. The Bay Area longshoremen’s union ILWU Local 10 has already called a work stoppage/day of action for October 23, and the sentencing of Johannes Mehserle–the cop who shot Oscar and disgracefully got away with an involuntary manslaughter conviction–is due to take place in early November.

The Oscar Grant struggle could be particularly important. One of the key weaknesses of the ‘hot autumn’ was its failure to adequately address the racist nature of the attack on education. In the spring of this year we saw hints of what a more inclusive and anti-racist movement might look like when Black students rose up to protests a series of racist incidents at UC San Diego. For this reason I think the folks at Advance the Struggle are right to emphasize the potential connections between anti-racist organizing and the struggle to defend education.

There are a couple of wild cards on the table, too. One is the National March for Jobs and Justice in Washington DC on October 2. Organized by the NAACP and AFL-CIO, this is unlikely to display the same sort of militancy we saw on the campuses last fall. But these organizations are certainly capable of mobilizing thousands of people, even if they are likely to do so in a relatively top-down and bureaucratic way. It’s quite possible that the sign of official liberalism finally taking a stand against the Tea Party will contribute to an explosive mood in the autumn.

The other unknown is the antiwar movement. June and July were the two bloodiest months for American troops since the war in Afghanistan began almost 10 years ago and the recent leak of  official documents has created a sense that the war is senseless, cruel, and unwinnable. Clearly the spiralling costs of US occupation in the Middle East and Central Asia are highly pertinent to a movement to stop cuts in education, and I’m hearing rumblings of potential antiwar mobilizations in October. We’ll see where this goes…

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Another fresh wrinkle would be the spread of the anti-cuts movement beyond California. The Golden State is in the vanguard of austerity, mostly due to the bizarre and undemocratic nature of the regime in Sacramento. But other states are catching up pretty quick, and students across the country are starting to feel the same pain as their counterparts on the West Coast.

I just want to say a couple of things about how this process is unfolding in my new home state of Illinois.

Crucially, the reform movement CORE recently seized control of the Chicago Teachers Union (CTU) with a pledge to mobilize the 30,000-strong local against cuts and privatization. This could be a tremendously important development in the struggle against austerity and could have an impact on all levels of education.

On the campuses, unions representing graduate student teaching assistants have recently shown a willingness to organize and fight for their members. This new mood of militancy resulted in a successful strike at UIUC and a strong contract fight at UIC. These could be powerful forces in the anti-cuts movement in Illinois.

Finally, we have the real possibility of labor unrest on at least one Illinois campus. Workers in SEIU Local 73, which represents maintenance, technical and other campus employees at UIC, are in the middle of a strike vote. A walk-out by hundreds of campus workers early in the semester would give a powerful spur to further anti-cuts organizing.

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All of this feeds in to the National Strike and Day of Action to Defend Education on October 7. At this stage it’s impossible to say with any confidence what that will look like, although I do get the impression that solid local organizing is already underway in at least California and Illinois.

Perhaps the student movement is already a spent force. Some major splits and disagreements roiled the movement in the early part of 2010, and major political questions remain unresolved.

But the whole movement has taken inspiration from the recent student strike in Puerto Rico. The fight to defend education is becoming a national and international movement. I think there’s a very real chance we could be looking at another hot autumn on American campuses.

In case you don’t know the story, Troll 2 is a bizarre horror/fantasy movie from 1989. It’s widely regarded as one of the worst films ever made, but has accumulated something of a cult following. Best Worst Movie is a documentary in which the original cast reunites to try and understand why a new generation of young people has fallen in love with the movie.

The documentary was quite charming and funny. It mostly follows George Hardy, a dentist from rural Alabama who somehow ended up playing the male lead in Troll 2. A beloved figure in his local community, Hardy throws himself into the weird fanboy world of cult movies. He demonstrates an infectious enthusiasm for the project but also a refreshing awareness of the limits of film’s new popularity.

Many members of the original cast haven’t fared so well, however. Margo Prey, a professional actor who played George’s wife in Troll 2, is a reclusive shut-in who takes care of her disabled mother. Robert Ormsby, who plays Grandpa Seth, lives in pretty destitute retirement. Don Packard, a creepy storekeeper in the movie, was on release from a local mental hospital when he appeared in Troll 2 and clearly still lives on the margins of society.

In fact, without George Hardy’s relentless positivity, Best Worst Movie might have been a rather depressing film. Not only are some of the original cast having a pretty hard time of it, but the Italian director Claudio Fragasso clearly still thinks Troll 2 was a good movie and is uncomfortable with its cult status. There are some awkward scenes. Overall, though, the director shies away from any lingering sense of negativity and the tone is fairly upbeat throughout.

Troll 2 itself is of course hilariously bad. The main problem seems to have been the script, which was probably written in Italian and then translated. Some of the dialogue has to be heard to be believed, and the acting is atrocious. The plot makes no sense at all.

I did leave the theater feeling a little peculiar. About a month ago we went to the same place with more or less the same group of friends to see the re-release of Metropolis, Fritz Lang’s classic 1920s parable on the futility of revolution. On that occasion we were in a small screening room, and it was half empty. The group of us–all in our late 20s and 30s–brought the average age of the audience down quite perceptibly.

Last night, Best Worst Movie and Troll 2 played to a packed house in a big theater. We were amongst the oldest folks in the audience.

Probably it would be a mistake to read too much into this. But I couldn’t help wondering what was going on. Plenty has been said elsewhere about the postmodern condition and our generation’s inability to enjoy anything except through the medium of irony. It seemed to me that the real fans of Troll 2 had a couple of things going on: first, they were in love with the sense that they as individuals had discovered this cool underground thing that no one else knows about; second, they reveled in the collective experience of cultishness, the feeling of a shared language and collection of cultural symbols.

It felt a little forced to me. Maybe all cult movies feel like that to the uninitiated. Also, there was a lot of hooting and yelling from the audience during both movies, which I basically hate.

Both movies were a lot of fun. I would recommend them. But I can’t escape the feeling that they say something unflattering about the cultural sensibilities of the current generation.

I’m going to try and do more of this sort of thing in the future because I think American left bloggers need to support one another, even when we have political differences or are in different groups (or no group at all).

The British/Irish left blogging scene is much more developed than it is here in the US. Most days I check out Lenin’s Tomb, Socialist Unity, Liam Mac Uaid, Splintered Sunrise, David Osler, and one or two others.

Obviously there are some problems with left blogging in a period when the socialist and revolutionary movements remain fragmented and divided. The comments section can often degenerate into a sectarian swamp–this happens a lot at Socialist Unity and I witnessed it at first hand over at Advance the Struggle, when a promising discussion about anti-cuts organizing got derailed by one persistent ultra-left troll.

Nevertheless, I think Gathering Forces and Advance the Struggle both show that the left can use the blogosphere to establish a dynamic presence online, and we need more of this.

In that vein, here are a few of my favorite left blogs from the US, in no particular order:

My friend and comrade Baines Cannon always has insightful things to say at Cannon Fodder.

Another comrade has started what promises to be a very interesting project at Sex Under Capitalism.

Yet another new project is New Red Indian, which will cover events in South Asia from a left perspective.

Louis Proyect runs one of the few established and (relatively) high profile American left blogs at Unrepentant Marxist. I don’t much care for the comments section, but it’s worth a look.

If you like your blogging a bit more high-theory, I can recommend Socialism and/or Barbarism.

Finally, the student movement in California produced a slew of new blogs. Some of them espouse a nihilist/insurrectionist politics that’s not really my cup of tea. But Occupy California is an active site with good updates on the movement.

Please let me know if I’m missing anything from my blogroll.