Marx and Engels on Imperialism: Selected Journalism, 1856–62

For a little over a decade after the ignominious collapse of the Revolution of 1848, Karl Marx worked as a professional journalist. Writing from London for newspapers in America and, eventually, on the Continent, he continued while living in exile the analysis of the crisis of revolution that he first began in direct engagement with revolutionary events, most notably in The Class Struggles in France of 1850 and The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte of 1852. In what became a vast body of material, through this journalistic work Marx elaborated the critical concept of “bonapartism” first abumbrated in the latter book. Continuing his effort to learn the lesson of 1848, Marx concentrated on the crisis of modern society and the new mass democratic state that emerged, in the absence of the dictatorship of the proletariat, to meet that crisis. Together with ‘Marx and Engels on Imperialism’, this is the first book to select and bring together Marx’s journalism around a conceptual theme, rather than a mere topic. Whatever the subject — the emergence of a new capitalist politics or the new unionism in Britain, post-1848 Chartism, the East India Company, European nationalisms, or the Taiping Rebellion in China — Marx and Engels’ journalism is shown to constellate around “bonapartism,” a concept that Marx critically appropriated from liberals distressed at the post-1848 order.