SOCI370/The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte

The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte

Class Division: Nofar Lapidot

The concept of class distinction and struggle is central to the ideas presented by Marx for social change. The French revolution brought about the distinction between the classes and Marx applies his materialist concept to how each group organizes revolutions to accomplish their interests in social change. The two groups act differently, just as they experience the world differently. Bourgeoisie revolutions are large, dramatic or as Marx associates it with the spirit of ecstasy, and often successful but short lived. While the proletarian revolution, builds up slowly over time as tensions increase, accumulates strength through numbers with each obstacle or interruption. This is in line with the Bourgeoisie being the dominant, profit earning group and the proletariat having little to no power and whose interests are subordinate.

Centralization: Adriano Clemente

Marx explains that the first French Revolution had the task of breaking down all local, territorial, urban and provincial independent powers in order to create the “bourgeois unity” of the nation by the method of centralization (pg.40). The concept of centralization can still be applied to many countries today as seen in the United States. During the first French Revolution, Napoleon was the lead figure within the government like how a president is the central person within the concentration of authority. These individuals are able to maintain hegemony by collecting, institutionalizing and enforcing all of the state’s interests, thus, their interests become legitimized. According to Marx, Napoleon perfected this “state machinery” in developing the extent, the attributes and the agents of governmental authority (pg. 40).

Communism: Gisung Ha

Marx’s work in “The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte” should be applied as we continue to understand the concept of communism in practice that has become very influential in North Korea and Cuba. Marx states that “all great, world-historical facts and personages occur, as it were, twice… first time as tragedy, the second as farce” (pg.37). Marx’s remarks give foresight into communism in practice and upon historical evidence, most notably the communist revolution in the USSR, we can determine that communism in practice tends to follow an evident cycle of class struggles and oppression. In theory, Marx’s Communism aims to abolish the state in order to eliminate the competition among social classes, thus, creating a stateless society in which people can co-operate together and are equal. Although Marx’s view on communism (to a lesser degree) is a potential means of reinvigorating the disappearance of the middle class in modern society, it is evident by the results from the Communist Revolution in the former USSR as well as the ongoing communist practices in North Korea and Cuba, that it is better to learn from these occurrences and to resist future reoccurrences.

The Application of Marx Theory in Global Corporations: Miaoting Ma

In "The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte", Marx argues that new forms of power in our Capitalist society exercise power over people, resembling economic and political features of the past Feudal society (Lemert, 2016, p.37-38). Many global companies, such as Google and Facebook demonstrate this theory vividly. Users of Google and Facebook must obey rules these enterprises make including giving out personal information for "market purpose" to these companies and being forced to receive extensive amount of advertisements for news and products. Global companies, in this way, act similar to the way that ancient monarchies supervise and control their subjects. Nevertheless, Facebook and Google are products of the revolution of information technology in an affluent Capitalist world. Therefore, they should embrace the idea of freedom and keep away from restricting rights of users as it disobeys the rule of democracy.

Political Revolution: Sessen Stephanos

Karl Marx chronicalized uprisings between the bourgeois and the proletariat groups through a historical perspective. He argues that people have the agency to create their own history but not the agency to create the circumstances in which they find themselves. Rather, the “tradition of all the dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brain of the living”. This idea is reflected in the Egyptian Revolutions of 2011. Both the Muslim Brotherhood and rebel groups of students and intellectuals were fighting for the overthrow of secular leader Hosni Mubarak despite the fact that they were on opposite ends of the political spectrum. Shortly after the overthrow of Mubarak, students were protesting in more political uprisings due to military interventions. The longing of the working class Egyptians to create a difference in the political order cannot be analyzed without the history of the Muslim Brotherhood and the greater picture of Islam in Egypt; In many ways, these revolutions take on the ghosts of uprisings prior to them. According to Marx’s argument, it is impossible to separate these events from each other, for when people find themselves in revolutionary crisis they “anxiously conjure up the spirits of the past… borrowing from them names, battle slogans, and costumes to present the new scene of world history.” (p 2)