The Permanent Revolution in Europe: 1848

Donate | Marxist Literature | Subscribe to the In Defence of Marxism magazine

In February 1848 the Communist Manifesto declared, “The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win.” Only days later, the workers of Paris overthrew their king and ignited a revolutionary inferno that scorched the whole of Europe. In just a couple of months, the old absolutist powers of Europe buckled under the pressure of the masses. Universal male suffrage, national liberation and the end to the last vestiges of feudal oppression were fought for heroically by the masses and even won, for a time.

In all countries, the working class formed the most determined fighting force of the revolution, but in France the workers went so far as to challenge directly for power in the great June insurrection: “the most colossal event in the history of European civil wars”. But trembling at this first bold attempt at a “Communistic revolution”, the ruling classes in every country ran directly into the arms of military and clerical repression, and carried out a vicious counter-revolution which destroyed even the most basic democratic gains of the revolutions of 1848.

To understand these titanic events, Marx and Engels had to grapple with questions that still confront revolutionaries today, and the conclusions they drew, on the permanent revolution, the national question, the dictatorship of the proletariat and more, still provide us with an inexhaustible armoury of lessons. In this session we will draw out these lessons in the context of 1848, and discuss the impact of these events on the future class struggle, and on Marxism itself.

Transcription

Josh: 1848 was one of the most revolutionary years in history. From France in the west, to Hungary and Poland in the east, almost the entire continent of Europe was swept with a wave of revolutions that threatened to topple centuries-old monarchies and forge new nation states. But when we look back at 1848 today, it seems less like a dawn of a new era, and more like a missed opportunity, because every single one of the revolutions of 1848 failed, and the counter-revolution went so far, that in 1852, Marx commented that “society seems to have retreated behind its starting point”.

Nevertheless, the revolutions of 1848 still hold a great significance. Not only did they draw the outlines of modern Europe; more important still, they laid the basis of the modern socialist revolution. Marx and Engels followed the events of 1848 very closely, and even participated in them themselves. The lessons they drew from their experiences shaped their ideas and had a profound effect on the Marxism that we know and defend today. Sadly, with the time available, I won't be able to cover the events in detail, but I hope to draw out the fundamental processes at play and answer three main questions. One: why did revolution break out simultaneously in Europe in 1848? Two: why did those revolutions fail? And three: what lessons do the revolutions of 1848 hold for today?

Now, to understand why revolution broke out in Europe it is necessary to look at European society up until 1848. The first thing we would notice is how different the political landscape looked in the first half of the 19th Century. First of all, Germany, and Italy, two of the most important countries in modern Europe, did not exist as nation states. Germany was made up of 39 different states, of which the most powerful were Prussia in the north and Austria in the south. As for Italy, the country was split between the Austrian-Hapsburg empire, the Kingdom of Sardinia, the Papal States and finally the Bourbon Kingdom of the Two Sicilies of the south.

Not only were the borders of Europe very different to today, so were the political regimes. Absolutism remained the most common form of governance. During the French revolutionary wars, many of the monarchies and empires of Europe were overthrown and replaced by sister republics.

But after the defeat of Napoleon in 1814-15, the victorious reactionary powers of Russia, Austria, Prussia, and Britain set out not only to restore the old borders of Europe, but restore the old monarchies as well. In France, the Bourbons returned to power; but the social basis of absolutism had been swept away by the revolution, and no force on earth could resurrect it. The old Bourbon dynasty itself was swept away in a revolution in 1838. This produced not a republic, however, but a new monarchy under the younger branch of the bourbon dynasty, King Louis-Philippe. The king granted his subjects a charter – making some concessions, but crucially, he still picked the government. The franchise, meanwhile, was so restricted that even a section of the bourgeoisie didn't have the vote – and an even larger section of the bourgeoisie couldn't run for parliament. The freedom of press and the right to assembly was also very heavily restricted.

So we see that everywhere on the continent, in order to guard against revolution and disorder, the existing states had attempted to fix social relations in place—effectively for all time. But here we have an interesting demonstration of historical materialism, because while the rulers of Europe were trying to fix Europe in place, economic development at the base of society was rendering that impossible.

Europe in 1848 was still largely rural, and in some countries traces of feudalism and serfdom were still present. Capitalist industry was still beginning to develop and was increasingly coming into conflict with the semi-feudal political setup that had been rigidly maintained since 1814. Under pressure from more advanced countries like England, countries like Germany had slowly begun to industrialise, introducing things such as steam power, and railways. This is an example of what Trotsky would define as ‘combined and uneven development’. And this development served to strengthen the bourgeoisie who started to demand a greater share in the governing of the country, and it also laid down a base of national unification by improving transport and communication. But perhaps even more significant, the beginnings of the industrial development created a young working class which was also beginning to develop its own class outlook. The large majority of the European working class at this time did not work in factories, and most workers were craftsmen in one form or another. They were working in small workshops of only a few people. In Germany for example, many workers were still organised in guilds. Nevertheless, socialist ideas were beginning to circulate, especially in France where they became very influential in the young worker’s organisations.

So what we can see from this brief survey, is that European society was riven with contradictions on the eve of 1848; and the attempt of the rulers of Europe to consciously suppress those contradictions, which was designed to prevent another European-wide revolution, eventually turned into its opposite in conditions of deep economic and social crisis.

Now the prelude to the revolution begins with the potato famine in Ireland in 1846, which was followed by a poor grain harvest in 1847 and a sharp economic crisis caused by overproduction in Britain in particular. In some areas grain prices doubled, while wages stayed the same. Some of this will likely feel familiar today when workers are facing a similar crisis.

And it is in this context, worth mentioning that Lenin pointed out that revolution actually tended to start at the top of society, and not at the bottom. In Prussia for example, the king desperately needed to raise taxes, but in order to do that he needed to convene a diet, or parliament. But when he did this, the lesser nobles, and the bourgeois representatives, refused to vote for any taxes or loans unless he convened a regular parliament and granted a constitution. Meanwhile in France, the liberal opposition wanted to introduce a modest extension of the franchise — and so they began a campaign of banquets, which were essentially political rallies, which called for reform. But as we often see in history, when these cracks at the top begin to emerge, that is when the masses begin to burst through. And in France, these banquets were quickly taken over by democrats and workers, who started doing things like refusing to toast to the king's heath, and crucially, demanding for universal suffrage; and from that point, the liberals already had begun to run their own movement.

On New Year’s Day, 1848, the people of Milan began a boycott of tobacco, and all other products, in order to deprive the Austrian empire of its much needed tax income. That move was brutally suppressed by the army, but this was only the beginning. On the 12th of July, the people of Palermo rose up in revolt, and the absolutist king of Sicily, was so terrified, he immediately agreed to grant a constitution. These were like the earthquakes that precede a Vesuvian eruption, and at the end of January the liberal Alexis de Tocqueville stood up in the French parliament, where he was a deputy and member of parliament, and said the following: “This, gentlemen, is my profound conviction: I believe that we are at this moment, sleeping on a volcano.” He later admitted he didn’t know how right he was. The volcano erupted on February 22, only days after the publication of the Communist Manifesto. In fact, by the time the French translation arrived in Paris the barricades were already being cleared away.

From the picture I’ve painted of Europe in 1848, it's quite clear that in all countries, the task of the coming revolution was bourgeois in character. By that, I mean they would promote the development of the capital and political rule of the bourgeoisie. Some of the conquests we would associate with the bourgeois revolution are things like national unification, or independence, or the establishment of the parliamentary, constitutional rule, and the extension of democratic rights, like the freedom of the press, by which they mean of course the freedom of the bourgeoisie press, but also clearing away the last vestiges of pre-capitalist forms of land ownership and exploitation, such as serfdom, which is an essential precursor to the full development of capitalist industry. Nowhere in Europe had all of these tasks been achieved, except for in Britain, and arguably the low countries.

Throughout the Austrian Empire for example, peasants were still compelled to give a kind of labour rent called robot. Even in France, where two bourgeois revolutions had already created a capitalist state, the industrial bourgeoisie was effectively excluded from power. That this was going to be a bourgeois and therefore not a socialist revolution, was also believed by Marx and Engels — especially in relation to Germany, where they believed, the perspective was to help the bourgeoise establish its own political rule whilst preparing to immediately fight against it once the rule had been secured. As Trotsky would explain years later, “The general sociological term, ‘bourgeois revolution’, by no means solved the politico-tactical problems, contradictions and difficulties which the mechanics of the given bourgeois revolution throw up.” What would become clear in 1848, was that most of these revolutions were not carried out by the bourgeoisie at all. The February revolution in France was carried out by the Parisian working class, and at every step the liberal bourgeois tried to stop it, and the radical republicans constantly tried to limit its demands. First the liberals tried to cancel the last banquet which was to be in Paris, but when they called it off, the workers came onto the street anyway. When the authorities tried to clear the streets by force, the masses simply dispersed to all corners of the city and built over one-and-a-half thousand barricades in the space of hours. The king tried to pacify them, by firing his hated minister Guizot, who gets a mention in the Communist Manifesto, but that only encouraged the workers, who then marched to Guizot’s office, carrying a massive red flag and when this demonstration reached a line of infantry, eventually the troop opened fire, killing 52 people. The workers put the bodies of the killed on cots and carried them through the city all night with torches shouting vengeance.

But the next day, the whole city was completely under the control of the armed working class. At this point, the liberals obtained an abdication from the king. They hoped to replace the king with his 9 year old grandson. But when they went to announce the regency in parliament, the workers invaded the assembly, sat in the deputy's seat, read out their own list of names for the Provisional Government, and then went to the Hôtel de Ville, the city hall, to announce it to the people. In that moment, all of the power, all of the resources, all of the arms of the state, meant nothing — but things went even further than that. Even the new Provisional Government did not want to proclaim the republic. While they were talking amongst themselves about what to do, some workers on a balcony behind them unfurled a massive red banner with the following written on it in charcoal: “The republic, one and indivisible, is proclaimed”. In other words, all of the factions of the bourgeoisie tried to prevent and hold back the revolution, and the republic was founded by workers, who at that point were the power in society. It was a bourgeois revolution carried out by the working class. An almost identical process took place in 1917, even down to the abdication of the king, or Tsar.

And as the news of the revolution in Paris travelled through Europe, it sparked insurrections all over the continent. In Vienna, Berlin, not to mention other German cities, Milan, Venice, Naples, and later Rome. Everywhere the masses rose up, and the working class, even though they were small, played a leading role, while in most places, the bourgeoisie gave up the fight in the very beginning. In Berlin, the king tried to get ahead of the revolution, by offering concessions, like a regular parliament. This satisfied the bourgeoisie, but not the masses, who were encouraged to demand even more. In Paris, the troops fired on the crowd, and the masses immediately built barricades throughout the city. And after a night of fierce fighting, in which it was the workers who gave their lives, the king removed the army from the city, and effectively surrendered. The working class in Germany was substantially weaker than in France, let alone in England. But an indication of the power of the workers in that moment is elucidated in this example: after the battle, the group of workers wanted to bring some of the killed, some of the dead, to the king, so that he could come out, and see them, and effectively apologise. So, they brought over the bodies along with some demands, and they demanded that he come out of his palace and see them. When they were told that the king was in bed, they said: “bring him out, then!” That doesn’t usually happen. And out he came and gave in to all of their demands. Two days later, he was out marching in the streets wearing the black, red and gold, wearing the colours of German unification. In Vienna, arguably, the workers’ movement was even less developed, and the workers effectively fought under the leadership of the radical students, who formed the most radical democratic wing of the movement. But without the intervention of the working class the temporary victory of the revolution would not have occurred. But in spite of this, the people put in power by these revolutions were not the workers, or their representatives; they were liberals, or bourgeois republicans. Trotsky referred to this phenomenon in his history of the Russian revolution, as the paradox of February. He was of course referring to February 1917, but the same could be said about the February of 1848.

The only exception to this was Hungary, where the bourgeois and the petty bourgeois nationalists took the lead from the beginning, and Lajos Kossuth, the main leader of the revolution, made great strides forward under the blows of the counterrevolution. He even declared independence (from the Austrian empire) and turned the country into a republic in 1849. Engels compared him to Danton, of the great French revolution, and he stands out in a European revolution which produced almost no notable leaders whatsoever. The reason for this was not only the role of the national question, which temporarily gave the illusion of class unity (the Italian bourgeois for example, did not play a progressive role), but the real reason for this lies with the workers, in a negative form, because there was no real working class at all in Hungary at the time. It was a negligible factor, similar to France in 1789. What we see when the bourgeois, or a section of it, feels itself at the head of the whole nation, against either the foreign oppressor, or the feudal aristocracy, is that it acts with confidence and advances. The Hungarian nationalists felt this confidence, because the rest of the Magyar population were all property owners in one degree or the other. Whether they were nobles, bourgeois, petty bourgeoisie, or peasants. The bourgeois really stood at the head of the nation and, by that, the Magyar population. The oppressed Slavic and Romanian peasants, who also lived in the region of Hungary, had less reason to support the revolution. And this ethnic division would later prove to be a useful weapon in the hands of the Austrian emperor.

Back in France, behind the French bourgeois in 1848, was not a great nation, but a class of propertyless workers who used any democratic gain to threaten bourgeois property. Accordingly, the whole bourgeois felt a hostage in its own revolution and played a reactionary role in the very beginning. Likewise, the German, Austrian and Italian bourgeois saw in France a picture of their future. So even though the working class in those countries were weaker, they deliberately curtailed their demands and betrayed their own revolution to absolutist reaction. They considered it a lesser evil than being left alone with their own workers. But this meant that the revolution was going backwards as soon as the last barricades were cleared. The primary concern of the bourgeois leaders was to restore order as soon as possible. And this meant disarming the workers and pacifying the masses in one way or another.

In Italy, the revolution in the north meant nothing more than war with Austria. And if the Austrians were beaten in Lombardy and Venetia, then the liberation of all of Italy became a real prospect. Thousands of poor peasants flocked to the cities of Lombardy as soon as the revolution broke out. One Austrian officer in Milan described the peasants as ‘rolling down the hills, firing at the soldiers as they ran’. No wonder the Austrians retreated. But rather than recruiting these peasants into the army to pursue the retreating Austrians, the leaders turned them away. This only makes sense when you look at it from a class point of view. The bourgeois saw that to arm the masses was to further threaten revolution at home. Instead, they turned to the King of Sardinia, Charles Albert, himself an absolute monarch, to lead the fight against Austria, with his army. Charles Albert accepted, perhaps because he feared what would happen if he didn’t, but he did nothing to build up his forces and spread the revolution, which was the only guarantee of success. Giuseppe Garibaldi even offered to go up into the Italian lakes and fight a guerrilla war against the Austrians, and he was ignored. Without supplies and support, his attempt ultimately failed. Charles Albert, unsurprisingly, did not want to fight a revolutionary war. He hoped that French support and diplomatic intervention would force some sort of agreement with Austria. In the end, the Austrian army was given time to regroup, plan a new offensive, and advance so quickly that it took the Italians by surprise, and the Italian army was defeated at Custoza, on the 25th of July 1848. This result was not predetermined. The Austrians actually lost more troops in that battle, and even after the defeat the revolution could have progressed further and driven the Austrians out. Instead, Charles Albert fled back to Turin and from this point the Austrian empire was effectively back in control of the north.

In Germany after the revolution, universal suffrage was formally recognised, but in practice, the application of the rules were left to the pre-existing German monarchies, which meant that everywhere the workers were excluded from the franchise. They were unable to vote for the German assembly that they had created. This betrayal was indicative of the short life of the Frankfurt assembly. They called themselves the parliament of the new German nation, but it didn’t have an armed force of its own. So every one of the decisions of this sovereign parliament depended on the consent of the pre-existing, reactionary monarchs of Germany, especially Prussia. In spite of these betrayals, the workers still initially greeted the gains of their revolution with enthusiasm. But the workers did not fight for the democratic gains purely for their own sake, they saw them as a means to improve their social conditions, and in all countries the workers immediately started putting forward social, class demands. In Germany, there was a wave of strikes, forcing bosses to raise wages and limit hours. Workers founded new organisations, new national trade union organisations independent of the guild, and sent thousands of petitions to the Frankfurt assembly, only to be ignored.

In France, the workers were so powerful in February, that they could effectively impose their will on the government. The day after the Provisional Government had been formed, a detachment of armed workers marched straight into the city hall where the government was faced, their leaders banged the butt of their rifles on the floor and said three words: “Droit au travail” (right to work). Now the right to work meant that the unemployed should be given useful work at decent wages, and the state should organise production in order to ensure that was achieved. It was in essence a demand for the state to start planning the economy, and the government wrote and passed a decree on the spot with the workers watching over their shoulders, establishing national workshops, to provide work for anybody who needed it. But this was still not the workers' government, and the moment the workers left the building, the Provisional Government started conspiring against them. The national workshops were not an embryo of the socialist planned economy; Marx described them as ‘English workhouses in the open’, pointless work, such as breaking rocks for a pittance. The workers quickly became disillusioned, and turned to their own strength for the seizure of power. They founded hundreds of revolutionary clubs and newspapers. These clubs were basically workers assemblies, where every night workers would come down to debate the issues of the day, and even listen to lectures on science, economics, and socialism. These weren’t small, fringe clubs. One historian estimates that more than 100,000 were subs-paying members of these clubs.

Eventually over a hundred of these clubs united in a loose federation, which they imaginatively called the club of clubs. Instinctively, the workers were building their own revolutionary party. Marx described the clubs as the “centres of the revolutionary proletariat”, and he even called them the “formation of the workers state against the bourgeois state”. Considering what would happen later in the Paris Commune in 1871, these words can be taken as extremely significant. And just as in Russia, in the spring of 1917, a debate started in the club movement, as to what position they should take in relation to the Provisional Government. Should they support it, how critically should they support it, should they overthrow it…? And almost all the club leaders decided to support it, albeit critically, but unfortunately, that support was not reciprocated. However, after the elections in April, the republican bourgeois were greatly strengthened, and the workers were isolated. The masses in the towns and the countryside had elected people who seemed to support the republic. The distinction between the bourgeois republic and the workers’ republic, was obviously not clear at this point. Almost immediately after the results were known, the most advanced section of the working class drew the conclusion that there needed to be a second revolution to overthrow the republic, and install a workers’ republic; although their idea of what that would look like, was not clear. Even a revolutionary like Blanqui, who was in favour of overthrowing the republic by the clubs, saw it more like the Jacobin revelation of 1793.

Meanwhile, the bourgeoisie republic moved on the offensive. The government announced in June 1848 that the national workshops were to be closed and that they were to be drafted into the army. The workers responded to this provocation with an insurrection which saw at least 50,000 workers seize control of half of the city. And these fighters undoubtedly had the support of many thousands more. It took four days of ferocious fighting in which artillery was used against workers' homes, and thousands were killed to quell the revolt. In Engels’ words, the workers fought with an indescribable defiance of death, but crucially, they fought alone. The majority of the petty bourgeois in Paris, which was the majority of the population in the cities, and the peasants in the countryside, fought against the workers, and volunteered to fight in the army against the workers. Later, an important section of the petty bourgeois and the peasants would actually move to the left, in the direction of the working class, but by then it was too late. Marx and Engels immediately grasped the significance of the June Days, as they were called. Marx called it the ‘first decisive battle of the proletariat’, and ‘the greatest revolution that had taken place, the revolution of the proletariat, against the bourgeoisie.’ But they also considered the defeat of the workers a fundamental turning point in the entire European revolution. If the workers had won, even temporarily, it would have weakened reaction everywhere, and would have given a fresh impetus across Europe. But defeat had the opposite effect. After June, the reaction gained its confidence. They saw it was, after all, possible to beat the workers. The Prussian state began to step up its oppression in the summer, but the Frankfurt assembly did nothing. From that disappointment, many workers had drawn the conclusion that they had to form their own national organisations to achieve their aims.

The Austrian imperial court also moved onto the offensive. They sent the governor of Croatia, Jelačić, with an army to crush the Hungarian revolution, but when they attempted to send troops in Vienna, the students and workers were outraged. They rose up, murdered the minister of war, and seized control of the city. The workers and students in Vienna had instinctively grasped the link between the revolution in Hungary and their own. This is something that Engels emphasised when he wrote that Germany would liberate itself to the extent to which it sets free neighbouring nations. At all points, Marx and Engels considered each of the revolutions and national movements in 1848 in relation to the European revolution as a whole. They placed the working class at the forefront of that struggle. Marx wrote, that Hungary should not be free, nor the Pole, nor the Italian, as long as the worker remains a slave. The Hungarians succeeded in pushing back Jelačić, and could have pursued him all the way back to Vienna. But sadly, the military leaders did not want to overstep the bounds of legality by crossing over the border, and in effect attacking an emperor who would have attacked them. The Viennese were eventually slaughtered. And when the German workers found out that their brothers in Vienna were being crushed without support from Berlin or Frankfurt, they too began to draw revolutionary conclusions.

At a democratic congress in Berlin, they called not only for unification, but a republic. Here we see that conscience rapidly developed on the basis of experience. And no experience is more educational than a revolution. With this in mind, Marx wrote that revolutions are locomotives of history. In October, armed clashes took place between the workers and the national guard militia in Berlin. In November, king Frederick William II, carried out a coup - he dispersed the Prussian constituent assembly that he had granted during the revolution, and imposed martial law in Berlin for six months. All over Europe, the workers had been defeated. Their forces were small, their organisations were only just coming into being, and they were learning lessons for the very first time. But if the workers could not save the revolution, could any other class in society? Afterall, the most radical layers of the great French revolution had been led by the radical petty bourgeois, the sans-culottes. But unfortunately, the experience of 1848-49 demonstrated that the entry of the working class onto the stage of history had infected the radicals with the same disease as the liberals. In France, where the workers were the strongest, the so-called petty bourgeoisie supported every attack on the workers. Not a single member of parliament supported the workers in June for example, not even the socialist deputies, not even Proudhon, the so-called anarchist. These radicals saw themselves as above the class struggle and what they defended was an abstract republic, which was supposed to meet the needs of all classes. So, when the workers threatened this republic, which in reality was a bourgeois republic, even the most radical democrats sided with the state, as they always do. But having helped pacify, demoralise and disarm the working class, the French democrats later tried to save their republic by calling their own insurrection on the 13th of June 1849, a new June Days, one might think. But unlike the workers in June 1848, they called it with no preparation, no weapons and no slogans, except for “long live the constitution”. The worker’s insurrection lasted 4 days, the insurrection of the petty bourgeois lasted 4 minutes.

An almost identical, and even more pathetic process took place in Germany. Having hitched itself to the Prussian monarchy, the democrats in the Frankfurt assembly were shocked when the king refused to ratify the constitution that they had written for him. This made the conflict between the old, real state, and the new, fictitious state break out into an inevitable civil war. The conservative deputies all left the assemblies, which put the parliament entirely in the hands of the radical democrats. In many parts of Germany, workers, artisans, and peasants rose up, and took up arms to defend the republic and the constitution. Engels went over and fought himself. But each local rising was left to be mopped up by the well trained forces and the army of the monarchy. Faced with a choice between submitting and fighting, the assembly chose to do neither, which was the worst option of them all. Engels accused them of ‘cowardly imbecility’. And on the basis of this experience, Marx and Engels concluded that the class of the petty bourgeois was the least capable of carrying out the tasks of the revolution. By the autumn of 1849, almost all of the gains of the revolution of 1848, had been lost. Even in France, which had overthrown the regime, first universal suffrage, and then the republic itself, was abolished in the years to come. Only the abolition of labour rent in the Austrian empire, and the abolition of slavery in the French colonies were retained. Even the most ferocious counterrevolution could not bring back those dead, defunct relations.

Trotsky described the revolution of 1848 as having happened too early and too late. Too late for the bourgeois to play a progressive role, but too early for the truly progressive class, the workers, to seize power. Marx said that the social revolution had been decreed, but not realised. The revolution also came too early for Marx and the Communist League, which was too small to make an impact on the events. As Engels put it, it was necessary to begin again. Marx himself was expelled from Paris where he was living in August 1849 and moved to London as a refugee with his wife and children. There, they lived in such poverty, that when one of their children died, they couldn’t not even afford a coffin. I think we sometimes forget it takes a lot to begin again. But begin he did, and he began with ideas. From the defeat of 1848, Marx drew a number of conclusions for the future of the revolutionary movement, which he set these out in an address to the Communist League in 1850. These were the most important of his conclusions:

The liberal bourgeois would not carry out any of the tasks of the bourgeois revolution.
A future revolution would bring the petty bourgeois democracy to power first.
The workers would have to fight alongside the petty bourgeois democracy against their mutual enemies but must not prop up or participate in the government, instead, the workers must retain their arms, and “simultaneously establish their own revolutionary workers’ government, either in the form of local executive committees such as councils, or through workers clubs and committees”. He insisted that formation and the independence of the proletarian party must be achieved at all costs, and that the consolidation of the bourgeois regime must be prevented, and the revolutionary turmoil prolonged, until the workers are able to overthrow the government and install their own, which Marx called the dictatorship of the proletariat.

Finally, he added that the revelation cannot succeed in the borders of any single nation. It must spread to the rest of Europe, and to England in particular, as the most advanced capitalist country. He concluded that the workers’ battle-cry must be the “permanent revolution”. In this, he discovered the logic, the dialectic, of the modern revolution. His genius lies in the fact that he discovered it before it could be realised. But it would have enormous significance in the revelations of the 20th century, and still has today. It was precisely this logic that Trotsky applied to the Russian Revolution of 1905, and it was this programme, almost to the letter, that the Bolsheviks took up from April 1917, under Lenin’s leadership. And it was this that brought the workers to power in 1917. Therefore, it is fair to say that without the tragedy of 1848, there might not have been the triumph of 1917. But both Trotsky and Lenin warned that if the socialist revelation did not spread to Europe and to other developed capitalist countries, it would fail, and would go down in defeat. But all of these lessons were abandoned by the Stalinist leadership in the 1920s. However, due to lack of time, this is beyond the scope of this discussion. Today, the volcano of revolution is ready to erupt again. But today, the working class has never been stronger, and the worldwide socialist revolution has never been more achievable. The fate of the world rests on the shoulders of the working class and its leadership. But if it comes to power, it needs a world-wide revolutionary party of the proletariat. Let us take up the task of building that party, and carry out the revolution decreed by the heroic workers of 1848.

INTERVENTIONS

Rob S: I would like to concentrate on Marx’s lessons of the 1848 revolutions, which Josh explained. Marx and Engels wrote, in 1850, a very important document – called the Address of the Central Committee to the Communist League. I agree with Josh that it is recommended to be read, as it is full of lessons for today. Both Engels and Marx were leading members of the Communist League, who fully participated in the 1848 revolution. While the famous Communist Manifesto outlined the fundamentals of scientific socialism, this new document, written after the great upheavals in Europe, provided a political balance sheet of these events from the point of view of the working class. And although it is less known, this address, from the point of view of the tactics and the strategies of the socialist revolution, provides both historical and theoretical lessons of equal importance.

As Josh quoted, Marx said that revolutions are the locomotives of history. At the beginning of 1848, Marx and Engels both recognised that the main struggle was with absolutism, and they expected that the rising German capitalist class would take the initiative with the bourgeois revolution. Now, in the Communist Manifesto they wrote that the communists would never cease, for a single moment, to instil the working class with the clearest possible recognition of the hostile antagonisms between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat. But at the same time, they said that they must also mobilise the workers to fight with the bourgeoisie, whenever it acts, in a revolutionary way, against the absolute monarchy and feudal squirearchy. They would support the bourgeoisie in that struggle. But of course, while the events took place, it became clear that the bourgeoisie were terrified of the workers’ movement, and this pushed the bourgeoisie in the direction of counterrevolution – in particular during the June Days in Paris, which for the first time in history raised the spectre of proletarian revolution, this drove all the exploited classes of Germany over to the side of reaction. The various democratic assemblies which were established in Germany at the beginning of the year were ignominiously abandoned by the liberal bourgeoisie and the remaining forces of the revolution were quickly routed by the reaction. And from this very experience, Marx and Engels drew new theoretical and tactical conclusions. They always envisaged that in Germany the proletariat revolution would follow very quickly after the bourgeois revolution, but now it was clear that the bourgeoisie were playing a counterrevolution role and could not destroy feudalism and absolutism. Thus, the task fell to the working class and its allies to carry out. Therefore, Marx concluded that the bourgeois revolution would merge into the first stages of the socialist revolution.

Thus, in this address to the Communist League, Marx and Engels first formulated the idea of permanent revolution, out of the experiences of 1848-49. And while they fully expected the petty bourgeoisie democrats to take the initiative in the next revolution, Marx and Engels heavily stressed that the working class needed its own independent leadership and put forth its own class demand in the revolution. So, they thought that the socialist revolution was imminent in Germany at that time. Unfortunately, they were proved wrong. And with the benefit of hindsight, Engels wrote in 1895, that “history has proved us wrong”. He made it clear that the state of economic development on the continent at that time was not right for the elimination of capitalist production. In the year 1848, therefore, capitalist production still had a great capacity to expand. But this mistake was one of fact, rather than of the method of Marxism. This mistake about tempo does not in the least detract from the validity of the strategy and the tactics laid down. And as Josh explained, the ideas continued in this address were a brilliant anticipation of the policies adopted by Lenin and the Bolsheviks. It is clear that the ideas of this address were the theoretical basis of Leon Trotsky’s idea of permanent revolution!

It is noticeable today, however, that the ideas of the address were insistent on a careful class analysis of every situation, called for the complete political and organisational independence of the working class, and stressed the need of the working class to energetically fight for its own needs and interests. This provides a devastating criticism of Stalinism, which is based on the ideas of class collaboration and the theory of stages, which have been a disaster over the last hundred years.

In sum, I would say that our examination of the events of 1848 is not a dry, academic exercise, but on the contrary is an important and vital contribution to tactics and strategy, with which we need to arm ourselves for the struggles that are opening up. This is not dry theory, this is the reality of the class struggle today.

Jacopo: The revolution of 1848 in Italy has certain peculiarities. Amongst those without doubt, the question of bringing together in the revolutionary process, the national question and the social question. In these years, the Italian peninsula was divided into eight states that were formally independent but came under the hegemony of the great powers of Europe. One of those was the state of the church, which was governed by the Pope, who was the spiritual leader and also the king. The development of Italian capitalism had only just begun. But even in Italy we can see the first movements of the working class in the Five Days of Milan, in March of 1848. Which was an insurrection in which the city was temporarily liberated from the Austrians. Unfortunately, I don’t have time to go into detail about the events of 1848 in Italy, and instead I’m going to focus on what I consider to be the high point of the process – the Roman Republic of 1849.

The history of the papacy has lived through great and extraordinary events. But in 1849 the Pope escaped from Rome in fear of a popular uprising. Pius IX had been elected Pope in June 1846 succeeding a reactionary Pope, who had severely suppressed all democratic and liberal tendencies and governed with the sword. The election of a new Pope was received with great popular support, which increased thanks to a series of popular reforms that he conceded. Amongst these were, amnesty, more freedom of the press, and in March, a statute that conceded major democratic freedoms. As Engels said “the man who occupies the most reactionary position in Europe and represents the fossilised ideology of the middle ages, the Pope, has placed himself at the head of the liberal movement”.

These reforms mainly benefited the bourgeoisie, which gained more influence in public administration whilst the role of the nobility was reduced. The liberal Pope fostered illusions amongst the layers of the bourgeoisie as well as the layers of the popular classes to the point where Mazzini wrote him a letter asking him to direct the process towards national unity, and Garibaldi declared himself available to work for him. But the conditions of the masses were of growing poverty and this increased their hatred towards the nobles, the prelates and the parasitic sectors of society. Ahead of the growth of the democratic movement, Pius IX, took a few steps back, abandoning the national cause, and opening a phase of political crisis. On November 24, terrorized by the poplar mobilisation, he fled Rome and sought refuge in the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies, under the protection of the Bourbons. On February 9 was declared the Republic of Rome. The Republic established the constituent assembly with universal male suffrage. Political activity came alive with rallies and protests.

An authentic explosion of political participation is typical in all revolutions. But some of the reforms explain the progressive character of this experience: the expropriation of the possessions of the church, the forced imposition of loans on rich families, commercial businesses, and also the land owning class, the abolition of the inquisition, and distribution of the church land to the peasants. They established a system of popular petitions in order to expose complaints directly brought in front of the assembly. But the response from reaction did not wait long. As well as the excommunication of the Pope, they formed a secret alliance to restore the canons of the papal order and nobility. France, Austria, Spain and the Bourbons united forces to crush the insurgence. But the revolutionaries came to the defence of the republic from all over the world. The days of the French siege of the city were characterised not only by the heroism of the fightback against reaction, but also by an important popular participation.

For the first time, red flags appeared on the barricades. But also in the five months of the life of the Roman Republic, we also saw the rising up of all political tendencies and all the limitations that would lead to an inevitable defeat. The leadership of Mazzini was impregnated with interclassist theories. His theory was bourgeois democratic in nature, according to which the bourgeois democracy should offer political rights to the workers in order to preserve the social privileges of the upper and middle classes. Garibaldi was prepared to provide support to the conservative monarch of Piedmont, whilst the socialist currents were still weak. But the forces of reaction understood more clearly than anyone else, the risks that they were running. It is not accidental that Pius IX declared an encyclical against the dangerous ideas of communism and socialism. The Republic is an example of how the bourgeois leadership of Mazzini was incapable of carrying forward the process of national unity on a revolutionary basis. But from the ashes of this experience we can see the first Italian socialist tendencies. And the first of those being Carlo Pisacane, who, through the experience of this class struggle, arrived at socialist ideas. And the memory of these revolutionary events would continue on in future struggles and in the minds of future revolutionaries.

Rob L: Marx and Trotsky both commented on the insignificant scope of the 1848 revolutions. At first glance this might seem strange, because the 1848 revolutions remain the most widespread revolutions in European history, and as Marxists, we often speak of the historic significance of the French and Russian revolutions. This is because in these revolutions, a whole new dominant class emerged, the old order was smashed, and a new society was proclaimed, but this was not the case in 1848. In every country where revolution erupted, they were defeated, and the old order was saved, and in the French Revolution of 1789, capitalist society was still emerging, the class relations of capitalism were just beginning to coalesce, and in 1789, the French bourgeoisie could stand at the head of the nation and proclaim to the other classes ‘we will free you from feudalism’. And this was more or less the truth – the other classes, especially the working class, which was more of a proto-working class, were not yet ready to counterpose their own class interests to that of the bourgeoisie. As Marx said, “the proletariat and the non-bourgeois strata of the middle class, had not yet evolved interests which were different from those of the bourgeoisie, or they did not yet constitute independent classes or class divisions. Therefore, where they opposed the bourgeoisie, as they did in France in 1793 and 1794, they fought only for the attainment of the aims of the bourgeoisie, although, in a non-bourgeois manner”. But by 1848 the situation was quite different – capitalism and its class relations were developing everywhere, the working class was growing, beginning to organise, forming trade unions, and was transforming from a class in itself into a class for itself, and in Europe, the bourgeoisie was becoming the dominant class economically. But everywhere it was running into roadblocks of the old feudal aristocracy who largely maintained political power. The capitalist economic base of European society was colliding with the old, semi-feudal political superstructure and when the revolutions of 1848 broke out, the bourgeoisie saw an opportunity to wage a struggle against these feudal restraints.

But with the outbreak of revolution what happened was that the bourgeoisie saw that they could no longer stand at the head of the nation, the other classes did not fall in line and supported them as they had done in 1789, and in 1848, the working class had started to counterpose their own interests against those of the capitalists. But the proletariat was too young and inexperienced. It lacked its own revolutionary organisations that could achieve its objective political interests. And so the working class could not stand as the head of the nation. Neither the bourgeoisie nor the working class could play this role. This is why the bourgeoisie recoiled in horror at the 1848 revolutions; the masses did not support them but opposed them. The bourgeoisie’s private ownership of the means of production was under threat. So the bourgeoisie turned its back on the revolution and joined the counter-revolution. It sought compromise with the old feudal forces of the past, and the bourgeoisie did not seek political rule, but only to share political rule with the forces of reaction.

From the perspective of the bourgeoisie this was the main achievement of the 1848 revolutions, but the growth of the production and capitalist markets revolted against the parochial feudal-political structure. Capitalism needed national markets, politically embodied in nation states, and this main task of capitalism remained unachieved across much of Europe. Had the revolutions of 1848 been successful, it would have been possible to solve this national problem by democratic means. In Germany, the solution of the national question required only one thing, which was unification. And after the defeat of 1848, Germany remained divided into states and principalities, which was a major obstacle to the free development of capitalism, and therefore the working class. Unification was a progressive demand, but the question of who would unite Germany and by what means, was of central importance. Marx thought that the task of unification would start from below, by the working class, though revolutionary means, but this was not to be. Since the proletariat had failed at this task in 1848, it was solved by feudal Prussian means, under Bismarck. Germany was united through a series of wars, but German unification was in itself a progressive thing, even though it was achieved through feudal means. Unification allowed the development of capital in Germany, which was the basis of the economic boom in the 1860s and 70s, and the rapid development of economic growth across Europe. The problem of national unification was solved on this basis in Germany and Italy, but it also allowed the unity and development of the working class. And this becomes clear with the Paris Commune.

Twenty years after 1848, the working class developed enormously, and in the Paris Commune, the working class was not only able to oppose the interests of the bourgeoisie clearly, it was able to overthrow the bourgeoisie. In 1848, the working class was young and inexperienced in the politics of revolution, but they had gained experience and learned. But the Paris Commune also suffered a counter revolution, and this taught the working class one more lesson – in order to succeed in revolution, in order to conquer power and hold it, the working class needs a revolutionary party, and this lesson was again learned in 1905 in Russia. Russia in 1905 was in many ways similar to European countries in 1848, capitalism was growing under the political influence of the aristocracy and feudalism, but as Trotsky said, the 19th century had not passed in vain. Capitalism had changed, the proletariat through its revolutionary leadership had learned these lessons of history, the working class fought with a new weapon: the soviets, the instruments of workers' democracy. And these historical lessons learned by the proletariat were put into practice in 1917. Where, with the revolutionary party at its head, the working class had succeeded in conquering power with the Russian Revolution. Today, many of these lessons are lost, or forgotten, but as the revolutionary wing of the working class, the Marxists, we remember these lessons. Our task is now to retie the knot of history and help the working class relearn these lessons, and fight for the long overdue, world socialist revolution.

Gernot: After the French revolution of the Napoleonic wars, the Austrian empire was the main reactionary power in Europe. The conservative statesman Prince Metternich, who is mentioned in the first paragraph of the Communist Manifesto, had established a kind of police and military dictatorship to prevent any opposition against the existing order. Having been afraid of revolutionary upheaval for many years, the Hapsburg government did not allow the setting up of factories in Vienna, the capital of the empire. But, sooner or later, capitalist development could not be stopped anymore from above. Engels wrote in 1847 on the growth of the former empire, that the Austrian empire could withstand the revolution in France, but it could not withstand the steam engine. The same year, the Austrian economy was hit by a severe economic crisis; more factories closed, workers became unemployed, and production stopped. At the beginning of 1848, there was no bread anymore in the suburbs of Vienna. On March 13, following the revolution in France, Vienna also rose up against the monarchy. Students and bourgeois democrats called for an end to censorship, demanded a constitution, and organised an armed national guard based on property and education which meant excluding the workers. But when the news spread to the working class suburbs, a new element emerged in the revolution. Spontaneously the workers linked the democratic struggle with their own class demands, the mass of unemployed workers started to burn the hated tax-collecting offices, marched to the factories and started destroying the new machinery. There was a ring of flames around Vienna. This was the moment when Metternich had to resign and leave the country. The emperor conceded the rights for free speech and free press, and he promised a constitution with a democratically elected parliament.

So it was the working-class protest which gave the first victory to the bourgeois revolution. But on the same night, the first day of the Viennese revolution, the bourgeois national guard marched to the suburbs and smashed the workers' uprising. Around 60 people were killed that night, mostly male and female workers from the suburbs. Their funeral became a mass demonstration of the workers and bourgeoisie for the revolution. It was the first time that in this city of counterreformation and antisemitism, Catholics and Jews came together for a joint funeral celebration. The funeral was also a show of unity between the revolutionary movement in Vienna and the struggles for independence in Italy and Hungary. But the banners of the bourgeois at this funeral were a very clear warning to the workers – they called for a constitution, freedom, law and order, or martial law against robbery and arson. When the government proposed a new constitution which would have denied the right to vote to the masses, revolution erupted once again.

The so-called Night of the Barricades led to a situation of dual power in Vienna, and from now on the revolutionary movement split into 2 camps – the bourgeois forces who feared further turmoil, and on the other side, the students, and the workers. From then on, there was militant class struggle in which all sectors of the working class demanded higher wages and better working conditions. Under these conditions, the bulk of the bourgeoisie called for law and order and an end to the revolution. And it was the minister of labour, a liberal, who launched the offensive against the workers. He ordered a cut in the wages of female workers and thought he could split the movement. But the female workers responded with a spontaneous strike movement, which got the immediate support of their male workmates. But once again, many workers were killed in this event by the bourgeois national guard. In the days after, Marx came to Vienna to hold discussions with most radical elements of the democratic and proletarian organisations. From his point of view, Vienna was the key to a successful revolution all over Germany. But he warned that the revolution was facing defeat because of the mistrust, and the open betrayal of the bourgeoisie against the working class. In Vienna, Karl Marx did not only speak on theory, but intervened in the movement, laying the foundations of a revolutionary programme and method within the Austrian labour movement. From then on, the counterrevolution tried to smash the revolution in Vienna. In October, the decisive battle started. The emperor and the court left Vienna, followed not only by the aristocrats, but also by the majority of bourgeois politicians. In this situation, the revolutionary forces were reduced to the left of the democratic movement, the students and the workers. The workers refused to print reactionary papers, built barricades and finally armed themselves to defend the city. After days of heavy fighting, the counter-revolution took Vienna and smashed the revolution with brutal force. For nearly 20 years, the Viennese workers’ movement was dead, but the tradition of 1848 lived on, became an important point of reference for the labour movement during the 19th century and is still part of our revolutionary heritage.

Jorge: The Communist League, to which Marx and Engels belonged, had in 1848 only been established recently. The ink wasn’t even dry on the Communist Manifesto when the revolution started. And what does the Communist Manifesto say about Germany and the tactics of the communists? It says that “in Germany [the communist party] fights with the bourgeoisie, whenever it acts in a revolutionary way”. But experience was to prove that not even in Germany did the bourgeoisie act in a revolutionary way. When Marx moved to Cologne, the local branch of Communist League was composed of extremely confused elements which toyed with anti-political ideas and so Marx couldn’t work though that organisation, even though he had authority over the Central Committee of the League. Therefore, he threw himself into the work of the newspaper that he had created – Die neue Rheinische Zeitung – which described itself as the organ of democracy. So, clearly Marx acted in the revolution as the extreme left wing of the democratic party. And so what was the relationship between the workers’ movement that Marx wanted to represent and the petty bourgeoisie democrats, who had betrayed the revolution? In the address to the Central Committee of 1850 that has been mentioned, Marx says the following: “The relationship of the revolutionary workers’ party to the petty-bourgeois democrats is this: it cooperates with them against the party which they aim to overthrow; it opposes them wherever they wish to secure their own position”. And this had really been the position of Marx throughout these events. That is, to support the petty bourgeois democrats in as much as they took positive steps forward, as a united front against reaction, but at the same time to maintain the political independence of the working class, insisting on mistrust towards the petty bourgeois democrats, which, he said, “want to bring the revolution to an end as quickly as possible”. And as had been proved throughout, the main characteristic of the petty bourgeois was their hesitation, and the fact that they were infatuated with constitutional phrase mongering, as opposed to real action.

In his address, Marx also said the following: “in the coming struggle also, the petty bourgeoisie, to a man, will hesitate as long as possible and remain fearful, irresolute and inactive; but when victory is certain it will claim it for itself and will call upon the workers to behave in an orderly fashion, to return to work and to prevent so-called excesses”. The last time I read Marx and Engels’ writings on the 1848 revolution, it was immediately after the Catalan referendum of 2017. And in reality, the criticism that Marx and Engels made of the petty bourgeois democrats in 1848, fits precisely to the petty bourgeois democrats that led the Catalan movement in 2017, down to every detail. And what does Marx advise the workers to do in relation to this hesitancy and the treacherous role of the petty bourgeoisie? He says “they must check in every way and as far as is possible the victory euphoria and enthusiasm for the new situation which follow every successful street battle, with a cool and cold-blooded analysis of the situation and with undisguised mistrust of the new government”. These lines apply today to the revolutionary movements we have seen in the recent period, where the masses have overthrown the old regime, for instance, in Sudan, Egypt, Tunisia, but only for the petty bourgeoisie to take over.

“What needs to be done?” asks Marx, and he says: “Alongside the new official governments they must simultaneously establish their own revolutionary workers’ governments, either in the form of local executive committees and councils or through workers’ clubs or committees, so that the bourgeois-democratic governments not only immediately lost the support of the workers but find themselves from the very beginning supervised and threatened by authorities behind which stand the whole mass of the workers. In a word, from the very moment of victory the workers’ suspicion must be directed no longer against the defeated reactionary party but against their former ally”.

This applies to the situation in these countries. And the whole experience of the 1848 revolution pushed Marx to draw this main conclusion. The need for the political independence of the working class, to combat any illusions in the petty bourgeois democrats, to organise the workers along their own separate lines even within the common movement. Finally, after the peak of the movement had passed, Marx and Engels for a very short period joined a communist organisation with Blanqui, but immediately broke with him because they understood that a new movement of the workers would only develop when the period of economic growth that had already started, had come to an end. That is, the change in objective conditions would provoke a new revolutionary wave, as opposed to the idea of Blanqui, that the will of revolutionaries can create, artificially, regardless of the conditions, a new revolution. By the time a new movement was to start, Marx and Engels had already advanced the work for the creation of the International Working Men’s Association.

SUM UP

Josh: I found Jordi’s intervention extremely interesting. I’m pleased that he was able to flesh out the really important tactical points between the working class and the petty bourgeoisie which is still a live issue, even today. What I want to add to that, for which I didn’t have time in the lead off, relates to what Marx had to say about what he called “social democracy”. In France, after the June defeat, the remaining worker clubs and socialist societies entered an alliance with the radical democratic faction in parliament. This effectively formed a mass parliamentary party of the working class in France at the time. And it called itself social democratic or democratic socialist. At its high point in 1849, it not only had the support of the working class, but also had won a large minority of the votes of the peasantry, and even those in the army. But it remained at all times under the leadership of the radical petty bourgeoisie. I already talked about where this led in June 1849.

But again in 1851, the social democrats had mass support. Louis Bonaparte, had made it clear that he was going to lead a coup to put an end to ‘communism’, as he put it, and the social democratic leaders spent the year preaching calm to the masses and telling them to look forward to the day where they can march to the ballot boxes and vote Louis Bonaparte out. Unfortunately, Bonaparte and the French ruling class had seen that one coming, and so he threw them all in jail. And from this, Marx was able to get to the heart of reformism, of social democratic politics, as early as 1852, after the first ever experiment with it. He said that the peculiar nature of social democracy is that the socialist point is broken off the demands of the working class and adapted to bourgeois democracy. Effectively, the workers’ demands are bent and adapted to the class outlook of the petty bourgeoisie. And he added in his address in 1850, that the proletariat must not lose its hard-won independent position and be reduced to a mere appendage of bourgeois democracy. That doesn’t rule out participating in such a party, but it does rule out lowering our banners and withdrawing the class independence of the working class in favour of the petty bourgeoisie.

The task at all times is to expose the prevaricating, cowardly petty bourgeois leaders, and replace them with clear sighted, revolutionary, proletarian leadership. And I think you can see the petty bourgeois nature of social democracy very clearly today, but I should move on.

I completely agree with what Rob says that this is not an academic pursuit; if you want to understand the Egyptian revolution of 2012, the Sudanese revolution of 2020, the ongoing Lebanese revolution, then study 1848. Obviously don’t just study 1848 but also the countries involved, but as I said, the logic of modern revolution is contained in the Marxist analysis of the 1848 revolution, which is why it is so stunning and so despicable when Marxists wilfully ignore and forget the profound lessons written down and presented to us. Kautsky, the ‘Pope of Marxism’, during the German revolution started talking about combining soviets with a bourgeois democratic republic, under a bourgeois revolution. This shows that being a Marxist is not just about reading Marx, but you need to be a revolutionary as well; which is not just a question of theory, but of will. One has to be prepared to be a minority of one sometimes, to stand up to the fury of the entire establishment, and be prepared to suffer and put yourself at risk, which is what Marx did.

I am grateful to Jacopo, for his intervention on the Roman Republic, and the treacherous role of the so-called “liberal” Pope Pius IX. I wonder what will happen today to the “liberal” Pope. It may be that he too will unleash forces beyond his control; I look forward to finding out. But what Jacopo’s intervention also pointed out was the hypocritical and the treacherous role of the French so called “Republic”, and this gives us another useful comparison between the position of the French bourgeoisie in 1848 and in 1792. On 19 November 1792, the Jacobin convention issued a declaration promising that the new French Republic would “grant fraternity and assistance to all peoples who wish to recover their liberty”, and they backed it up as well. What did the Second Republic have to say to the peoples of Europe? Lamartine, the head of the Provisional Government, also a famous poet, issued a declaration of alliance and friendship to all nations. He explained that under the Second Republic there are no distinct and unequal classes, and therefore the Republic will not commence war against any state, even Tsarist Russia. And to Italy in particular, Lamartine issued the following statement: “if the independent states of Italy were to be invaded, if limits or obstacles should be imposed in their internal changes, if there should be any armed interference with their right of allying themselves together for consolidating a unified nation, the French Republic would think itself to be entitled to take up arms in defence of the legitimate movements towards the improvement and nationhood of states”. Entitled that is, not obliged. In the end, the French Republic did take up arms and send them to Italy, but by that time Lamartine was long gone. The Republic was now ruled by Louis Bonaparte, and the reactionary Party of Order, and they sent an army to Rome, not to defend the republic, but to crush the revolution and restore the Pope. Again, on the face of it, one republic sending an army to crush another republic and replace it with the medieval regime of the Pope does not make sense. However, from a class point of view, it makes sense. De Tocqueville, the famous liberal, was the foreign minister at the time and he said the following: “it was not possible to support them [the Romans] abroad without falling beneath their blows at home. The contact of their passions and doctrines would have put all of France in flame”. This perfectly sums up the reactionary role played by the French bourgeoisie in 1848. And it completely confirms that Marx said, that neither the Hungarian, nor the Pole, nor Italian will be free as long as the worker is a slave. Only a victory of the working class in France could have sent the foreign support that the Roman Republic needed, and tragically that was not possible at the time. Perhaps the temporary victory was not possible at the time, but it was not forthcoming.

I found Gernot’s intervention on Austria very interesting, and it shows the important role of the working class, even when it is very tiny. The working class was even more backward than the rest of Germany and in the detail that Gernot gave us, we can flesh out the interesting relationship that developed between the radical students in Vienna, and the working class. At least at the beginning of the revolution, the workers looked to the students as their leaders. At one opening, when the government moved against the students, the railway workers went on strike and started pulling up the rails. In October 1849, the workers and students fought side by side. But even in this positive example, you can see the split and the need for permanent revolution. Whenever the workers put forward their own demands like asking for higher wages, often the students would lecture them on how all classes need to make sacrifices for the revolution. And like Mazzini in Rome, they saw their role as combining the interests of the bourgeoisie, who hated the revolution, and the workers, without whom there would be no revolution. It is likely that, had the revolution survived the October attack, the students would have turned their back onto the workers. Just as the French students abandoned the workers in June 1848. Medical students even refused to treat injured workers at that battle. Today I still seem to encounter student activists who have a similar attitude in telling the workers what to do, and these people are much less courageous than the Viennese students in 1848. As we saw in May 68, it should be the workers, and not the students, who should lead the movement today.

Rob L. made a number of important points. There was one that I want to repeat, but will not have time to develop, that when a historically necessary task is not carried out by the revolution, it can still be carried out by the reaction. But the conquest of that historic task by the reaction intensifies the contradictions in that country. Germany was unified not by the workers or the bourgeoisie, but by the Junkers. And the contradictions at the heart of this regime laid the basis for the German Revolution. Today, the unification of the whole of Europe is a historic necessity. Trotsky hoped that it would be achieved by the United Soviet States of Europe. Unification has been attempted by European finance capital, and look how well that is going. It is making a Europe-wide revolution like 1848 more and more likely. But the most important point that Rob made in my opinion, was about the need for an independent party of the working class.

What I hope has come out of the discussion, particularly in relation to France, is that different layers of the working class and different layers of society move at different speeds. A party is needed to ensure that the vanguard does not become separated and destroyed before the reserves arrive. Look at Blanqui in the clubs; he was without question, the most outstanding of the French proletariat. He understood the need to overthrow the Provisional Government in a second revolution, and he had a revolutionary club with thousands of members, and a lot of authority. But this was no Bolshevik party, and on 15 May 1848, they got arrested for launching an ill-timed, isolated insurrection. What a waste! The leader of the French proletariat spent the decisive June insurrection in jail. And he made exactly the same mistake again in October 1870. To defend his own revolutionary prestige, he got swept up in an isolated, unprepared insurrection, and spent the Paris Commune in jail. Incorrigible! The truth is the workers in 1848 did not have the time to build a disciplined, centralised party of the proletariat. What they did achieve in that time was miraculous, but not enough. We do have the time to build this party, and we are laying the foundations now. Future revolutions will throw up similar processes. Even with a strong marxist tendency in the movement, the entire working class will not grasp the need to dismantle the bourgeois state. This takes time over the course of the struggle. But if the masses are forced to learn the same lesson from scratch again and again, then they will be defeated. The revolutionary party is the memory of the working class. We must learn the lessons of 1848, 1871, and 1917 in particular, to resist the enormous opportunist and ultra-left pressures which will eventually apply throughout the movement.

But it is not enough to have a correct policy. Marx and Engels had the correct policy in relation to France, but their organisation was too small a lever. Archimedes apparently said “give me a lever and a place to stand and I will move the world”. Comrades, with these ideas and perspectives, we know where to stand. And this organisation, the International Marxist Tendency, is our lever. But it's not big enough. We need a big lever, if we are going to move the world. Let us turn the 7000 registered to this event to 70,000 marxist cadres and more, and with it, we will move the world.