KARL MARX

t
ILH KARL MARX: A BIOGRAPHY
captured the imagination of the peasants. To the proletariat his election
meant the dismissal of bourgeois republicanism and revenge for the June
defeat; to the petty bourgeoisie it meant the rule of the debtor over the
creditor; while to big business Napoleon presented the opportunity of
ridding itself of its forced alliance with potentially progressive elements.
'Thus it happened', said Marx, 'that the most simple-minded man in
France acquired the most multifarious significance. Just because he was
nothing, he could signify everything save himself.' 36
The third and last article, written in March about the same time as
the March Address and the creation of the London alliance with the
Blanquists, analysed the different elements in the opposition party. Here
Marx was concerned to emphasise the difference between 'petit-bourgeois'
or 'doctrinaire' socialism (he had Proudhon particularly in mind) and the
revolutionary socialism of Blanqui:
While this Utopian, doctrinaire socialism, which subordinates the total
movement to one of its moments, which puts in place of common,
social production the brainwork of individual pedants and, above all, in
fantasy does away with the revolutionary struggle of the classes and its
requirements by small conjurers' tricks or great sentimentality; while
this doctrinaire socialism, which at bottom only idealises present society,
takes a picture of it without shadows and wants to achieve its ideal
athwart the realities of present society; while the proletariat surrenders
this socialism to the petty bourgeoisie; while the struggle of the different
socialist leaders among themselves sets forth each of the so-called systems
as a pretentious adherence to one of the transit points of the
social revolution as against another - the proletariat rallies more and
more round revolutionary socialism, round communism, for which the
bourgeoisie has itself invented the name of Blanqui. This socialism is
the declaration of the permanence of the revolution, the class dictatorship
of the proletariat as the necessary transit point to the abolition
of class distinction generally, to the abolition of all the relations of
production on which they rest, to the abolition of all the social relations
that correspond to these relations of production, to the revolutionising
of all the ideas that result from these social relations. 37
The article ended on a characteristically optimistic note by declaring
the reactionary bourgeois republic to have been merely 'the hothouse of
revolution'. 38
This optimism was also reflected in the extended comments on current
affairs written by Marx and Engels for the Revue during the first months
of 1850. In France 'the strength of the revolutionary party naturally grows
in proportion to the progress of reaction' and 'a hitherto politically dead
class, the peasants, has been won for the revolution'. 39 As for Britain, the