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MARX, ENGELS, AND MARXISMS
History and the

Formation of Marxism
Bertel Nygaard
Marx, Engels, and Marxisms
Series Editors
Marcello Musto, York University, Toronto, ON, Canada
Terrell Carver, University of Bristol, Bristol, UK
The Marx renaissance is underway on a global scale. Wherever the critique
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Bertel Nygaard
History
and the Formation
of Marxism
Bertel Nygaard
History and Classical Studies
Aarhus University
Aarhus, Denmark
ISSN 2524-7123 ISSN 2524-7131 (electronic)

Marx, Engels, and Marxisms
ISBN 978-3-031-09654-9 ISBN 978-3-031-09655-6 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-09655-6
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Acknowledgements
My colleague at Aarhus University, Professor Mikkel Thorup, has kindly

read and commented initial drafts of the first chapters. Some sections
of the following chapters began their lives long ago as small parts of
my Ph.D. dissertation from 2007. Though hardly a sentence from that
dissertation has survived in this book, my approach to these matters still
benefits from discussions back then, particularly with my Ph.D. super-
visor, former lektor Steen Busck and the assessment committee consisting
of Professor Jan Ifversen, Aarhus University, lektor Uffe Jakobsen, Univer-
sity of Copenhagen, and the late Professor Thomas Krogh, University of
Oslo. My writings on political theory, social revolution and utopianism
since that time have carried such reflections on in continuous dialogue
with far too many people to mention here. I am grateful to them all.
However, as always, the greatest assistance in writing this book has
been the patience and enduring love of my closest family: Sonja, Rosa
and Helene. Though they may never actually read this book, I dedicate it
to them.
Aarhus, May 2022 Bertel Nygaard
xiii
Contents
1 Historicizing Marxism 1
A Double Historicization 3
2 Revolution and the Surplus of History 9
A Bourgeois Revolution 10
Embryonic Anticapitalism 14
Remembering for the Future 17
The Surplus Meanings of History 20
3 Marx, Engels and Revolutionary History 25
Historical Categories 26
German Thought, the French Revolution and the Modern
State 29
Political and Social Temporalities 34
A Heroic Bourgeoisie? 37
Norm and Deviation 39
Two Kinds of Poetry 45
Bonapartism, State Autonomy and the Revolution as Process 49
Revolution and the State in Marx’s Critique of Political
Economy 53
Russian Times 58
Historiography as Dialectical Abstractions 60
xv
xvi CONTENTS
4 Marxism in Paris, 1889 71

The Transnational Formation of Marxism—and Its
German Centre 74
Between Abstract Categories and Historical Studies 78
German Marxism and the French Revolution 80
Karl Kautsky Against Verflachung 85
States and Classes in the Revolution 88
The Agency of the Lower Classes 91
Russia Between East and West 95
Scandinavian Marxism and the Centenary 100
A Marxist Marat in Malmö 109
Ambiguities of Second International Marxism 113
5 Revisionist Synchronizations 129
Revolutionary History and Eduard Bernstein’s Revisionism 130
Modern History from Liberalism to Socialism 133
Expectations and Wagers 134
Revolutions Between Democracy and Blanquism 138
A Socialist History Between Orthodoxy and Revisionism 142
Jaurès, Socialism and Marxism 145
The Histoire Socialiste 148
Bernstein for Jaurès 150
Marxists Against Jaurés 153
Scandinavia: Revisionism, Jauresianism and the French
Revolution 157
Revisionism and History 164
6 French Past, Russian Future 173
Jacobin Bolshevism: Lenin 175
Trotsky, Permanent Revolution and Revolutionary History 179
Kautsky and the Actuality of Revolution 183
Rosa Luxemburg and the Traditions of Proletarian
Revolution 190
Revolutionary Revisions 194
7 Reconfigurations 201
8 Appendix: Genealogies of ‘Bourgeois Revolution’ 207
Bourgeois Historians and Their Revolution 209
Enlightenment Theories 212
Beyond the Bourgeois Predecessors 214
CONTENTS xvii
Bibliography 223
Index 247
CHAPTER 1
Historicizing Marxism
In a brief article for the revolutionary journal Die Rote Fahne on 18

November 1918, Rosa Luxemburg recalled the emotional intensity of
studying the history of the French Revolution. It was, she wrote, “like a
Beethoven symphony intensified into gigantic proportions, a raging storm
on the organ of the times, great and splendid both in its errors and its
successes, in victory and in defeat.”1 With a pounding heart, the mind
ablaze and her breath bated, she had followed the dramatic events of
the past until “the last chords of the huge event” faded away. Even the
dry account by the nineteenth-century liberal historian François-Auguste
Mignet could not quell the excitement of revolutionary history.2
The significance of these passionate remarks is only heightened by the
fact that the prominent Marxist theorist made them in the middle of the
November Revolution. The German Empire had fallen, the First World
War had ended, and powerful workers’ and soldiers’ councils had been set
up in one German city after another—all within slightly more than a week
before the article was published. Yet, even in this situation of rapid social
change, the French Revolution of the late eighteenth century appeared
to her not just as a bygone event. It was still a source of inspiration,
courage and lessons for the present and future. It contained a surplus of
unfinished projects and surprises—a surplus resisting neat categorization
or calculation.
© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 1

Switzerland AG 2022
B. Nygaard, History and the Formation of Marxism, Marx, Engels,
and Marxisms, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-09655-6_1
2 B. NYGAARD
So, to convey these complexities, Luxemburg turned to metaphors.

Not visual metaphors of definite images or perceivable horizons, but
metaphors of sound and music; passing sound waves carrying mean-
ings and affects far beyond their tangible presence. Ernst Bloch, the
great thinker of utopian impulses, held that music constitutes one of the
supreme carriers of what we cannot yet be fully conscious; it is, in his
words, “a vice-regent for an articulation which goes much further than
anything so far known.”3 Thus, metaphors of music can convey transcen-
dence of the here-and-now towards what is not yet quite thinkable, in
social history no less than religious terms. And even sounds of the past
may still anticipate future possibilities.
To Rosa Luxemburg, the voices from the old revolution emanating
from Mignet’s book sounded like anthems of the revolutionary spirit,
intonating the music of the future in dissonant combinations with
the well-known tunes of tradition. This was not the organ of time
in the singular, signalling a linear, orderly development of humanity
from medieval darkness to modern enlightenment or from feudalism via
capitalism to socialism. No, it was the organ of times —in the plural:
polyphonic and polyrhythmic, yet united in symphony as a unity of differ-
ences. To her, this revolutionary symphony provided a grandiose, poetic
and creative contrast with the present revolution which appeared to her
far too “German,” too “prosaic and pedantic […], lacking in verve, in
lustre, in greatness.”4
Germanness, here, implied a propensity to orderliness and obeyance at
odds with her conception of true revolution, the spirit of revolution. And
yet, of course, the great Beethoven and his symphonies had been German.
Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels were Germans too, not to mention
Ferdinand Freiligrath. In an oft-cited poem from 1851, reflecting the
experience of defeat following the triumphant revolutions of 1848, he
had allowed the revolution to speak for itself, as if personified. Rosa
Luxemburg would quote the words of Freiligrath’s revolution herself at
the conclusion to her very last article, published only a day before her
assassination on 15 January 1919: “I am, I was, I shall be!”5
Once more, a plurality of times within the revolution: past, present and
future, united in the same passing moment of making and reconceiving
history.
Of course, it would be easy to dismiss Luxemburg’s sonic metaphors
and poetic expressions as mere rhetorical flourish with little consequence
for her Marxist theory or political strategies. But such a dismissal would
1 HISTORICIZING MARXISM 3
be mistaken too. Rhetoric is not just an external form imposed on the

significant substance. It is the substantial significance of the form; a mode
of thinking and acting upon the world. And in Luxemburg’s case her
rhetoric and metaphors expressed a crucial attempt to grasp, and act
upon, the yet inconceivable by reflecting on unfinished legacies of the
past. Thinking, writing, sensing and acting upon the past was crucial to
her conception of Marxism.
And not only hers. History—a complex category comprising a trinity
of meanings: past events; present discourse on the past; a basic sense
of the historicity of the world—was a key aspect of the formation of
Marxism during the latter half of the nineteenth century and into the
early twentieth century.
Consequently, the intellectual history and legacy of Marxism should be
studied not only for theoretical categories and political practice but also
for its concrete analyses and uses of history. This is the overall message of
this book. The following chapters will convey and elaborate this message
by studying Marxist approaches to the French Revolution before the First
World War. This focal point is far from arbitrary. Not only was the French
Revolution widely conceived, by Marxists along with so many others, as a
rich hub of socio-economic and political transformation—as Rosa Luxem-
burg already indicated above. The Revolution was also one of the most
defining and hotly debated events of modern history.
A Double Historicization
At first glance, the above claims for the importance of history in Marxism
might not appear all that controversial or pertinent. After all, few accounts
of Marxism are unconcerned with history. The forces and relations of
production, base and superstructure, the role of the class struggle, the
transitions from one mode of production to another, the subsumption
of ever more aspects of life to capital accumulation—such conceptions
of driving forces and processes of history are practically unavoidable in
discussions of Marxism.
However, such discussions tend to focus on the coherence or applica-
bility of Marxism as a theory of social development, conceived as a set of
abstract and general categories of analysis. Often this theory is studied in
conjunction with a conception of Marxism as a transformative practice,
that is, as a project of making history, reflecting Marxist commitments to
the unity of theory and practice.6
4 B. NYGAARD
This way of framing discussions tends to bypass history in two specific,

important respects. Firstly, it conceives of Marxism as a set of categories
of analysis defined by their logical coherence or empirical applicability,
rather than as a set of historical concepts shaped by, and in turn affecting,
specific historical contexts. Secondly, such discussions often disregard the
extensive interpretations of concrete history throughout the writings of
Marx, Engels and many of their later followers.
Of course, a number of important contributions to the intellectual
history of Marxism have taken significant steps to historicize their topic
in the first sense.7 But despite the variety of approaches here, and despite
the commitment to a materialist conception of history among many of
their authors, such accounts have tended to reproduce what the German
historian Rolf Reichardt has aptly termed the “pinnacle walk” (Gipfel-
wanderung ) of traditional idealist intellectual history: interested only in
‘high thought’, great men with great ideas; roundly ignoring the ‘lower’
bulk of the intellectual landscape.8 And being concerned with theories
and categories rather than concrete analyses, such intellectual histories of
Marxism have rarely attempted to historicize Marxism in the second sense
mentioned above.
By contrast, historicization of Marxism in the second sense has been
the concern of a series of much more specialized studies of Marx’s
and Engels’ historical studies or later Marxist historiography, particularly
twentieth-century academic Marxism.9 Closer to the concerns of this
book are a small number of detailed studies of the use of the history
of the French Revolution among German-speaking socialists during the
nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, particularly the wealth of mate-
rial recently presented by the French historian Jean-Numa Ducange.10
The latter group of studies focus on what the German historian Jörn
Rüsen has termed ‘historical culture’ (transgressing conventional bound-
aries between historiography proper and various other uses of history)
within a distinct political culture.11 Or perhaps more precisely, we might
categorize the resulting field of study as the historico-political culture of
socialist labour movements committed to Marxism.
However, much work remains to be done in this field. Further empir-
ical studies can broaden the scope of our knowledge of this topic, of
course. But perhaps even more importantly, this calls for discussions of
the general implications of the role of concrete historical interpretation in
the intellectual history of Marxism.
Thus, combining empirical studies and overall reflections, this book

seeks to contribute to what we may, at the risk of sounding pretentious,
term a double historicization of Marxism: approaching Marxism not as
a fixed theory, but as a piece of intellectual history studied in specific,
concrete situations; and approaching the intellectual history of Marxism
through its own interpretations of history.
More specifically, I will argue that such approaches to history among
Marx, Engels and the early Marxists did not just reflect preconceived
theories. Nor did they merely serve to legitimize strategic concerns. Far
from being reduced to either theory or political strategy, history was a key
sphere of reflection in its own right. In effect, history can be conceived
here as one pole in a triangular relationship characteristic of ‘classic’
Marxism, with theory and strategy constituting the other poles. Within
this relationship, history interacted with the other two, yet inevitably also
contained a surplus of meanings beyond theory and strategy. Rather than
being a mere proxy for theory and strategy, history challenged the other
two and mediated between them.
In other words, interpretations of the past provided Marx, Engels and
the Marxists with a sphere of experimental reflection in which highly
general categories of analysis and the specificity of social contexts could
be played out against each other. This provided for multiple encoun-
ters between past, present and future; between concrete content and the
development of abstract concepts; and between interpreting and changing
the world—often occurring in texts resembling historiographical speech-
acts rather than conventional academic historiography. Studying these
encounters and performative modes of history-writing involves crucial
questions of structure, agency and temporality also relevant beyond this
particular context, and beyond the field of Marxism too.
These points will be argued and elaborated throughout the following
chapters. Chapter 2 introduces the basic conceptual problematics and
some significant debates through a close reading of a text by the Danish
Marxist historian Gustav Bang. Chapter 3 discusses Marx’s and Engels’
complex reflections on the French Revolution. The ensuing chapters focus
on different aspects of Marxism as it developed in the labour movements
from the 1880s until the First World War, starting with studies of different
Marxist responses to the centenary of the French Revolution in 1889
(Chapter 4), then proceeding to the role of that revolution in the revi-
sionist critique of Marxism around 1900 (Chapter 5) and the Russian
revolution of 1905 (Chapter 6).
6 B. NYGAARD
As the European labour movements remained the little-contested

centre of Marxist thought during these decades, it is difficult to avoid
some degree of Eurocentrism in this book too. But rather than repro-
ducing the hierarchies of authority by only studying the most prominent
figures and geographical centres of Marxist thought, I will strive towards
a more critical sense of the spatial dynamics of intellectual history by also
including examples of slightly more peripheral Marxism within Europe—
mainly in the Scandinavian countries, where the relevant source material
is readily available to me.
But enough of these abstract introductory considerations. Let’s histori-
cize! And to remain true to the spirit of historicization, we should start
not from some stipulated point of origin, nor at the highest pinnacles of
development, but in medias res. So please allow me to introduce what
might initially seem a quite insignificant Danish pamphlet from 1909.
Notes
1. Rosa Luxemburg, ‘Eine Ehrenpflicht’ (1918), idem, Gesammelte Werke,
7 vols., Berlin: Dietz, 1974–2017, vol. 4, pp. 404–406, here
p. 406. English translation: https://www.marxists.org/archive/luxemb
urg/1918/11/18c.htm. Apparently, she was casually referring to her
specific studies of Mignet’s account and other historiography of the French
Revolution in 1908. See Rosa Luxemburg to Kostya Zetkin 26 May 1908,
idem, Gesammelte Briefe, 6 vols., Berlin: Dietz, 1982–93, vol. 2, p. 343.
Throughout this book I use double quotations marks for direct quotes,
single quotation marks for titles and paraphrases. Here, and wherever
possible, I check existing English translations against the original. In some
cases, I will alter and discuss existing translations to emphasize certain
aspects of meaning. Where no existing translation is cited, translations
from non-English sources are my own.
2. Luxemburg, ‘Eine Ehrenpflicht’, p. 406.
3. Ernst Bloch, The Principle of Hope, 3 vols., Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press,
1996 [1959], p. 1069.
4. Luxemburg, ‘Eine Ehrenpflicht’, p. 405.
5. Rosa Luxemburg, ‘Die Ordnung herrscht in Berlin’ (14 January 1919),
Luxemburg, Gesammelte, vol. 4, pp. 533–8, quote p. 538. English trans-
lation: https://www.marxists.org/archive/luxemburg/1919/01/14.htm.
6. To name but a few of the more notable studies of Marxism as a theory of
history: G.A. Cohen, Karl Marx’s Theory of History: A Defence, Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1978; Alex Callinicos, Making History: Agency, Struc-
ture and Change in Social Theory, Cambridge: Polity, 1987; S.H. Rigby,
Marxism and History: A Critical Introduction, Manchester: Manchester

University Press, 1998.
7. See, for a variety of approaches, Perry Anderson, Considerations on Western
Marxism, London: New Left Books, 1976; Storia del marxismo, 3 vols.,
ed. by E.J. Hobsbawm, Torino: Giulio Einaudi, 1978–81; Predrag Vran-
icki, Geschichte des Marxismus, 2 vols., Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp,
1972; George Lichtheim, Marxism. An Historical and Critical Study,
London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1961; Eric Hobsbawm, How to
Change the World: Tales of Marx and Marxism, London: Abacus, 2013;
Jan Hoff, Marx Worldwide: On the Development of the International
Discourse on Marx since 1965, Leiden: Brill, 2017; Leszek Kolakowski,
Main Currents of Marxism, 3 vols., Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978; Paolo
Favilli, The History of Italian Marxism from Its Origins to the Great War,
Leiden: Brill, 2016.
8. Rolf Reichardt, quoted in Melvin Richter, The History of Political and
Social Concepts: A Critical Introduction, Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1995, p. 88. Reichardt directed this criticism at the approach
to the history of concepts in Reinhart Koselleck and the encyclopaedia
Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe, but it is an apt characterization of many other
strands of intellectual history too.
9. See, e.g., Leonard Krieger, ‘Marx and Engels as Historians’, Journal of
the History of Ideas 14:3 (1953), pp. 381–403; Eric Hobsbawm, ‘Marx
and History’, New Left Review I/143 (1984), pp. 39–50; Hans-Peter
Jaeck, Die französische bürgerliche Revolution von 1789 im Frühwerk von
Karl Marx (1843–1846), Vaduz: Topos, 1979; Michael Krätke, ‘Marx
and World History’, International Review of Social History 63 (2015),
pp. 91–125; Claude Mazauric, Albert Soboul: Un historien de son temps,
Narosse: d’Albret, 2004; Harvey J. Kaye, The British Marxist Historians,
Cambridge: Polity, 1984; Marxist Historiographies: A Global Perspective,
ed. by Georg G. Iggers, and Q. Edward Wang, London and New York:
Routledge, 2016. Quite different, though also relevant in this context,
is Paolo Favilli, Marxism and Historiography: Contesting Theory and
Remaking History in Twentieth-Century Italy, Cham: Palgrave Macmillan,
2022.
10. Jean-Numa Ducange, The French Revolution and Social Democracy: The
Transmission of History and Its Political Uses in Germany and Austria,
1889–1934, Leiden: Brill, 2018. Other important contributions to this
field are Beatrix Bouvier, Französische Revolution und deutsche Arbeiter-
bewegung. die Rezeption des revolutionären Frankreich in der deutschen
sozialistischen Arbeiterbewegung von der 1830er Jahre bis 1905, Bonn:
Verlag Neue Gesellschaft, 1982; Große Französische Revolution und
8 B. NYGAARD
revolutionäre Arbeiterbewegung: Geschichte, Gesellschaftstheorie und revolu-

tionärer Kampf , ed. by Walter Schmidt, Wolfgang Küttler and Gustav
Seeber, Vaduz: Topos, 1989. A comparable study of Russian examples is
Tamara Kondrateiva, Bolcheviks et Jacobins. Itinéraire des analogies, Paris:
Les belles lettres, 2017.
11. See, e.g., Jörn Rüsen, ‘Geschichtskultur’, in Handbuch der Geschichstdi-
daktik, ed. by Klaus Bergmann et al., Seelze-Velber: Kallmeyer, 1999,
pp. 38–41.
CHAPTER 2
Revolution and the Surplus of History
In the year 1789 the great French Revolution broke out. It was the bour-
geoisie which unfurled the banner of revolt for the purpose of acquiring
full political power and of using it as a means to further the transformation
of society in a capitalist direction. As in our days it is the class interests of
the workers which furnish the revolutionary motive power in the whole
political movement, so it was then the class interests of the capitalists which
started the revolutionary upheaval.1
This was the essence of the French Revolution, as presented by the Danish
Marxist Gustav Bang in 1909. A diligent 38-year-old historian holding a
doctoral degree from the University of Copenhagen, he had found himself
marginalized among academics from the mid-1890s when he publicly
declared his socialist views and joined the Social Democratic party. By
1909, this party had 38 years on its back and was progressing steadily
with tens of thousands of members, increasing parliamentary representa-
tion and a well-developed party press. In the parliamentary election of
1909, Social Democracy became the biggest Danish party in terms of the
number of votes. Even though the first-past-the-post electoral system still
prevented this from translating into a parliamentary representation of a
similar size, the party did begin to make its influence felt in political insti-
tutions, at the municipal level as well as nationally. For the first time, it
now directly supported a Social Liberal government, thus manifesting a
pragmatic policy of reform and class collaboration.2

Switzerland AG 2022
10 B. NYGAARD
Yet, the principles and much of the discourse of Social Democracy still
signalled its commitment to a doctrine of revolution and class struggle.
Led by a core of skilled workers, the party had integrated core elements of
Marxism in its outlook since the mid-1880s, closely following the German
Social Democratic Party.3 Bang became the first traditional intellectual
to achieve general respect within the Danish labour movement and a
key position in its leadership as a Marxist theorist and educator. From
the turn of the century until his early death in 1915, he was the most
prominent and authoritative Marxist intellectual in Denmark. In a steady
stream of books, pamphlets and articles in the party newspapers he popu-
larized Marxist thought and demonstrated its relevance in social analyses
of a broad range of past and present topics, belying Eric Hobsbawm’s
later contention that the Scandinavian labour movements “produced no
theorists of note.”4
His brief 12-page account of the French Revolution was a part of
his educative endeavours. It concluded his pamphlet Crises in Euro-
pean History, published by the party press and aimed at schooling
workers in socialist thought. It was not a particularly innovative text.
Rather, its significance lies in its neat summary of the main outlines
of an already established Marxist interpretation of that event, reflecting
widespread Marxist approaches to history among the mass socialist move-
ments emerging around Europe in these decades, united in the Second
International. In that respect, Bang’s account can allow us to elaborate
the purpose and contexts of the present book a bit further.
A Bourgeois Revolution
We may begin by drawing out some implications of Bang’s overall
summary of the French Revolution, as quoted at the beginning of this
chapter.
According to him, the French Revolution was, first and foremost,
a bourgeois revolution. This implied that it was rapid and deep-seated
transformation of the political superstructure (that is, the state) as a
necessary part of a longer-term social transition from feudalism to capi-
talism. To Bang, this further implied that the French Revolution was
bourgeois and capitalist not only in its effects but also in its precondi-
tions and its main agency. Society had been developing in a capitalist
direction before the Revolution, breeding a capitalist bourgeoisie, but
the further development of capitalism—and the interests of this capitalist
2 REVOLUTION AND THE SURPLUS OF HISTORY 11
bourgeoisie—required an overthrow of the old state. Thus, the gradual

evolution of capitalism could appear to provide also the necessary revolu-
tionary agency: the bourgeoisie, spurred to action through its own class
interests that, at this point in the past, corresponded to the requirements
of historical progress.
So far, everything here pointed in one direction: the establishment
of capitalism. In Bang’s words: “It was the capitalists who secured the
power. The liberation of capitalism from the remnants of feudalism was
the historical problem which had to be and was solved.”5
Posterity has not been kind to this functionalist discourse of histo-
ry’s ‘tasks’ being ‘solved’ basically because they had to be solved.
To that extent, Bang’s way of presenting things may already confirm
well-established suspicions against Marxist conceptions of history—and
the Marxism of the Second International in particular—as a mecha-
nistic conception of history driven forward by abstract forces of the
socio-economic base (productive forces, modes of production) somehow
capable of conjuring up social classes agents and political ruptures to serve
its needs for progress.
To many commentators, this association would suffice to dismiss
Bang out of hand. Followers of Karl Popper’s influential critique of
Marxism, for example, would find in Bang’s reasoning a paradigmatic
example of ‘historicism’ in the sense of a hypostatized conception of
a totality determining all of its parts, based on unscientific verifica-
tionism.6 Others seeking to defend Marxism against such indiscriminate
rejection frame Second International Marxism as a distortion of true
Marxism. To mention but one example, even Matt Perry’s recent, gener-
ally informative and discerning survey of Marxist historiography disposes
of the entire tradition of Second International Marxism in less than four
lines. Branding it “a biologically or technologically determinist version of
historical materialism,” Perry skips several decades of Marxist historiog-
raphy between Marx’s and Engels’ writings and Leon Trotsky’s History of
the Russian Revolution from the early 1930s.7
Such cherry-picking of one’s favourite Marxists side-steps the question
of what provided the background for Trotsky’s brilliant historiography,
apart from his undeniable intellectual giftedness. After all, Trotsky was
only slightly younger than Bang (eight years, to be exact) and shared
the latter’s background in the Second International from the 1890s until
the First World War. Of course, stemming from a well-off family of
Ukrainian-Jewish farmers and growing up to be a persecuted and exiled
12 B. NYGAARD
revolutionary was a very different life experience from that of the rural
Danish preacher’s son peacefully completing his university studies and
then becoming a socialist theorist and writer in Copenhagen. Trotsky’s
subsequent experience of becoming a key figure of the October Revolu-
tion, and later the revolutionary arch enemy of the Stalinist regime, also
contributed to shaping his approach to history around 1930. But both
men shared a common Marxist outlook and discourse, rooted in pre-
war international socialism, even if their perspectives and accents differed.
Rather than expressing a case of miraculous individual talent, Trotsky’s
achievements in historiography reflected his continuation and refinement
of key aspects of Second International Marxism beyond its elements of
mechanistic materialism, fatalism and other weaknesses ritually evoked by
later critics. A lot of the present book will be concerned with what those
aspects of Marxism were.
Bang’s Marxist interpretation of the French Revolution as a bourgeois
revolution for capitalism may also ring another bell—or sound another
alarm. Traditional Marxist interpretations of the French Revolution have
long been singled out for severe criticism.8
Already during the 1950s the British historian Alfred Cobban chal-
lenged the association of the French Revolution with a distinctly capitalist
bourgeoisie. There was no clear economic demarcation between nobility
and bourgeoisie in pre-revolutionary France, he emphasized. Rather,
both groups strove before the Revolution to introduce modern business
methods into agriculture, provoking the peasants to defend old customs.9
In this respect, the French Revolution was “to an important extent one
against and not for the rising forces of capitalism.”10 This applied also to
its consequences, other historians added. William Doyle emphasized how
the economic turmoil of the Revolution “reinforced the preference of the
rich for investing in land rather than industry without doing anything to
improve the quality of the agriculture.”11
Of course, Marxists might object that such critiques—swiftly dubbed
‘revisionist’ in the heated debates of historians—were one-sided or that
they reflected imprecise conceptions of capitalism, or at least conceptions
different from the Marxist ones. But then again, Bang did not see it neces-
sary to clarify his Marxist conception of capitalism in his 1909 account of
the Revolution.
During the 1960s, some revisionist historians concluded that the
French Revolution should be conceived in political, rather than social,
terms. According to George Taylor, the French Revolution was “essen-

tially a political revolution with social consequences and not a social
revolution with political consequences.”12 This conception of the primacy
of politics was carried further by François Furet and Denis Richet, first
in their interpretation of the Revolution as a struggle about political
privileges among fractions of the cultural and political elite, then in
Furet’s more innovative and polemically anti-Marxist interpretation of
the course of the revolution as determined by a totalitarian discourse
of the ‘people’ intimately connected with the alleged totalitarianism of
Marxist discourse.13 These critiques, and the fierce responses to them,
made it clear that both sides of the debate considered the French Revo-
lution a test case for Marxism tout court and, even more generally, the
prospect of a future beyond capitalism. Furet’s polemical reinterpreta-
tion was particularly pointed in the latter respect, theorizing an end to
the revolutionary rift between state and society in much the same terms
as Francis Fukuyama would later discuss the end of history in liberal
democracy at the demise of the Soviet Union.
Even among Marxists, the very explanatory model of a bourgeois
revolution as a necessary link in the transition to capitalism has been
criticized as based on a petitio principii: prior capitalist development
presented as the explanation of a capitalist revolution leading to even
more capitalist development. As Robert Brenner has put it, such an expla-
nation begs the question of “how one type of society is transformed into
another.” Specifically, “since bourgeois society self-develops and dissolves
feudalism, the bourgeois revolution can hardly claim a necessary role.”14
Following Brenner, the school of so-called ‘political Marxists’ has devel-
oped reinterpretations of the French Revolution and the transition to
capitalism, rejecting any connection between the two.15 Other Marxists
have defended more sophisticated versions of the conception of bour-
geois revolution in order to explain the overall political preconditions for
capitalist development.16
The stakes are high in these debates, not least for those seeking to
salvage more or less of Marxism from the contested legacies of the
Second and Third Internationals as well as cold-war and postmodern
anti-Marxism. But most participants in such reconsiderations of Marxism
have been quite willing to sacrifice the Second International Marxism that
Bang represented.
However, we do not have to dismiss these critiques of the explanatory
powers of the concept of ‘bourgeois revolution’ to acknowledge that they
14 B. NYGAARD
might miss the point of Bang’s text, possibly also many of its counter-
parts within Second International Marxism. Perhaps he did not purport
to actually explain the French Revolution here, but simply presumed
its bourgeois-capitalist character in order to emphasize other things?
Perhaps there was more to his Marxism than what is conventionally
acknowledged?
Embryonic Anticapitalism
Reading Bang’s text on its own terms and situating it in its historical
context, we may discover more in it than faulty functionalist explana-
tions, dated evolutionism or the mere conception of a revolution carried
out for and by a capitalist bourgeoisie. Even in the few brief lines of
summary quoted at the beginning of this chapter, Bang went beyond
these elements.
Introducing the workers as the agent of social transformation in the
present, Bang indicated that the bourgeois revolution, in furthering the
transformation of capitalism, had also furthered the negation of capi-
talism: the impending socialist emancipation of humanity. As he stated
a few pages later:
[T]he revolutionary bourgeoisie of the great French Revolution – without

its own knowledge or will – cleared the road for the proletariat. For now
that the obstructions which the bourgeoisie formerly met with had been
removed and the capitalist method of production could develop itself to an
ever greater extent, the conditions were created which made it possible for
the proletariat to develop and gain strength for its own emancipation.17
And not only had the French Revolution been a “prelude to the mighty
class struggle of our time.”18 Class struggle between the bourgeoisie
and the lower classes, particularly the proletariat, had already shaped the
history of the French Revolution itself. Bang emphasized how the bour-
geoisie had not won revolutionary victory on its own, but by utilizing the
force of the lower classes for its own class purposes. To that extent, lower-
class agency in the French Revolution had been, in effect, a non-bourgeois
means to a bourgeois end.
However, Bang emphasized that there was more to this agency. It had
also stimulated already burgeoning class conflicts between the bourgeoisie
and the lower classes. For fear of the proletariat, the bourgeoisie had
restricted suffrage and barred workers from seeking to improve their own
conditions. Thus, even if the proletariat, at this point, was still “too weak,
too few in numbers, and too heterogeneous in its composition to start
an independent class war leading to victory,” the French Revolution had
contained the class contrasts of capitalism in an “embryonic condition.”19
The forces of present-day socialist emancipation had already been present
during the transition to capitalism—too early, so to speak; playing the
music of the future.
These emphases on embryonic, premature proletarian negations of
bourgeois society within the overall framework of the bourgeois revo-
lution can reveal significant tensions in Bang’s view of the French
Revolution.
On the one hand, he often characterized social crises and revolu-
tion as implying little more than the speeding up of qualitative changes
already slowly underway, adding up to a shift from one state of affairs to
another. As he emphasized in the introduction to his pamphlet on crises
in European history:
[Crises] do not come as a bolt from a clear sky; a close observation of the
movement in the preceding epoch will show how the revolutionary periods
are gradually formed, how new forces appear and gain in strength until
they finally burst the existing social relations. It is further seen how each
revolutionary crisis itself forms the beginning of a new period of evolution,
which again in the future leads to new catastrophes. The historical process
of society is thus effected by a change of epochs with an even and steady
development, and scenes of a violent and stormy character – but these two
forms of evolution do not stand in opposition to each other any more than
the ‘revolutionary’ act of childbirth is in opposition to the slow growth of
the embryo in the mother’s womb.20
Here, a tellingly biological metaphor of slow embryonic growth and

dramatic birth presented revolution as evolution accelerated and carried
through by other means, demarcating historical eras neatly from one
another. In other words, this passage attempted a synchronization of
history in a specific sense recently defined by the cultural historian Helge
Jordheim: a discursive ordering of temporalities in neatly separated eras of
history; the era of bourgeois revolution as distinct from the era of prole-
tarian revolution within a unilinear periodization of history according to
distinct stages of development—what later Marxist critics of such unilinear
reductionism have referred to as a ‘stagist’ conception of history.21 In
16 B. NYGAARD
this sense, synchronization is a specific mode of periodization, an act

of making history conform to a determining principle within each era
defined, thus overcoming or obliterating difference in history in favour
of essential identity—or what the philosopher Peter Osborne, drawing on
Søren Kierkegaard, has characterized as a “notion of an active production
of sametimeness.”22
On the other hand, some of Bang’s characterizations of the lower
classes in the French Revolution stretched the metaphor of embryonic
growth and birth to its limits—or even beyond them. His imagery implied
that the embryo of proletarian anti-capitalism had been present during
the revolutionary birth of its bourgeois predecessor, thus defying the
usual biological order of things. And if Bang’s metaphor tended to break
down, it was perhaps not only due to a debatable choice of illustra-
tive example. He himself emphasized elements of history transgressing
the simple synchronizing periodization of the French Revolution as a
revolution of the capitalist bourgeoisie.
In effect, Bang’s acknowledgement of the historical reach of lower-class
agency in the French Revolution implied a sense of multiple temporal-
ities. Even if Bang, significantly, did not conceptualize this implication
in theoretical terms, his interpretive practice veered towards what the
heterodox Marxist Ernst Bloch later famously termed contemporaneity
of the non-contemporaneous, that is, the co-existence of characteristics of
different eras within the same moment in time.23 Furthermore, Bang
highlighted the non-contemporaneity of proletarian anti-capitalist agency
in the French Revolution as necessary, not only to the achievements of
the bourgeois revolution but, even more importantly, to his own time in
which the transition to socialism was on the agenda.
These elements implied a less smooth or one-directional sense of
development: even if the defeat of the proletarian aspirations had been
unavoidable in late eighteenth-century conditions, their heroic defiance
of such conditions had itself prepared the ground for their later vindica-
tion. In that sense, the core Marxist category of historical necessity could
not just pertain to the development of capitalism through the French
Revolution, but also to an early anti-capitalist agency.
In other words, Bang was obviously not just concerned here with
the past for its own sake or with lineages of the present. Rather, he
was locating a key to an emancipatory future in the unfinishedness of
a specific chapter of the past, saturated with contradictions and possibil-
ities. Indeed, this prospect of emancipation provided the raison d’être of
the entire pamphlet. This was a history of the past written in anticipation
of great things to come. And such anticipation of the future made for
new perspectives on the past too.
Remembering for the Future

To that extent, Bang’s pamphlet can be regarded as an expression of what
Enzo Traverso has recently noted as a Marxist memory culture during the
late nineteenth century and most of the twentieth century:
History writing and memory were interwoven and reciprocally nourished

themselves. In other words, memory was a memory for the future, insofar
as it announced the battles to come. The remembrance of the past revo-
lutions was not circumscribed to the existing moment of emancipation
experienced as a collective action; it could also bear the tragedies of their
defeats.24
As Traverso emphasizes, we can see this Marxist mode of anticipatory and

preparatory recollection in innumerable guises within the socialist labour
movement: briefly evoked in agitational writings; speeches, pictures,
gestures or songs; hotly debated in extensive polemics on the proper
interpretation of historical events; thoroughly studied in tomes of histo-
riography; or somewhere in between, as in the case of Bang’s pamphlet.
Of course, Marxists were far from alone in integrating a sense of
historical development into political projects during the nineteenth and
twentieth centuries. As numerous studies of modern historical conscious-
ness and collective memory have demonstrated in detail, remembering for
the future can be regarded as a general and defining feature of modern
politics and senses of time, at least under what François Hartog has
termed the futurist regime of historicity arguably dominating Western
narratives of history for most of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.25
Yet, Marxism may very well be regarded as the most explicit and
ambitious case of such futurist uses of the past.
Marxists also approached the encounter between history and utopian
impulses in their own way. Bang significantly did not merely seek to
subordinate the past to a preconceived utopian blueprint vision of a
better future reflecting a specific moral ideal. Like his fellow Marxists
in the rapidly progressing labour parties of this time, he distinguished
sharply between “the old utopian socialism floating in thin air,” projecting
18 B. NYGAARD
arbitrary ideals from the present into the future, and modern socialism
that “merely seeks to comprehend and follow the main lines of the
development that is.”26
This distinction could be read as a shielding off of what is from what
is not, implying a reduction of what could come into being to what could
be deduced from premises already known; banishing fantasy and creative
projections completely from Marxism. In later discussions of the rela-
tionship between Marxism and utopianism, the ‘classic’ labour movement
Marxists have often been criticized for associating any vision of a better
society with the specific tradition of ahistorical projections of certain
moral ideas into blueprints for the future. This way of thinking had the
unfortunate result of making Marxists prone to deny their own invest-
ment in anticipations of what had not yet materialized and did not follow
directly from already known movements, thus limiting the scope of their
imaginative possibilities.27
It is undeniable that such anti-utopian lines of thought featured promi-
nently in much Marxist writing of the late nineteenth and early twentieth
centuries. But we should also acknowledge that the sharp distinctions
between utopianism and Marxism were prompted by specific conjunc-
tures of left-wing political culture and polemics, overshadowing important
nuances or ambiguities in Marxist thought on this matter. The first gener-
ations of Marxists rejected utopianism not just to distinguish Marxian
socialism from earlier visions of socialist perfection in the writings of
Charles Fourier or Etienne Cabet. More urgently, they strove to counter
the idealist moralism of anarchist left-wing opposition as well as an
influential wave of latter-day utopians rivalling Marxist outlooks during
the late nineteenth century, the most influential example being Edward
Bellamy’s novel Looking Backward from 1888.28
Furthermore, the results of such polemical distinctions were
ambiguous rather than purely detrimental. They produced not only
denials of the utopian impulses within Marxism, but also emphases on
the importance of history and of democratic participation in the making
of history. The problem with blueprint utopianism, according to the
Marxists, was not so much the fact that it envisioned the future. The
problem was that such visions inevitably projected ideological elements
of the present onto the future. Insofar as such visions of the future were
really taken as blueprints, they would tend to confine conceptions of
future possibilities to the limitations of the present situation, depriving
the founders and inhabitants of such a future society of their agency in
shaping it. In other words, blueprint utopias would not only ‘freeze’
history but also undermine democratic participation in the making of
future society.
This was implied in Gustav Bang’s critique of anarchist utopianism as
seeking “arbitrarily to construct a future society” from ideals based on an
ahistorical conception of “human nature as absolute.” Thus, according to
him, the historicity of human nature was a key message of Marxism.29
Bang’s main role model, the German Marxist Karl Kautsky, explained the
Marxist approach to blueprint utopianism more comprehensively:
‘The future state’ is not the realization of this or that utopia. It is nothing
other than the political rule of the proletariat. What the proletariat will
do with this power is not determined by the prescriptions of some social
wonder doctor caught in the old blind faith of utopianism. It depends
on the level of economic and political development we will have achieved
by then. It depends on the peculiar circumstances in which this polit-
ical upheaval will occur. It depends, finally, on the knowledge, force,
determinedness, in a word: the maturity of the proletariat.30
In this way, Kautsky left socialist visions of the future more or less ‘empty’,
apart from the rule of the proletariat on the basis of the socialization of
the means of production, in order to leave room for the openness of
yet-undetermined future possibilities.
It would certainly be justified to object to Bang’s or Kautsky’s anti-
utopianism that a near-abstinence of imaginative powers did not neces-
sarily follow from such premises. In addition, it could be argued that
bolder Marxist imaginaries at this point in history might have served as
counterweights to the later authoritarian disfigurations of the Marxist
project. But Marxist critiques of utopia also served to reinforce their
commitment to historicization of social thought—and thus of utopia.
Borrowing terms from Ernst Bloch once again, we could say that the
Marxist rejection of the abstract utopia (that is, the blueprint vision of
social perfection detached from history) was an important aspect of their
working towards a sense of concrete utopia: a sense of the potentials of the
world that transcend immediate conceptions of feasibility while still being
rooted in real historical tendencies and latencies as the precondition of a
genuine future beyond present predictability, a true novum.31
Marxists were not merely utopianizing history. They were also seeking
to historicize and democratize utopian impulses, in effect developing a
20 B. NYGAARD
distinctly Marxist, yet under-conceptualized politics of temporality. Bang’s

account of the French Revolution was a small contribution to this grander
project.
The Surplus Meanings of History

The Marxist commitment to history went beyond general principles to
study specific historical events. Though most later accounts of Marxist
social theory and its intellectual history tend to ignore or belittle this
aspect, Marx, Engels and the early Marxists wrote much on concrete
historical developments. Engels’ study of the Peasant War in Germany
and Marx’s instant histories of the French Second Republic and the Paris
Commune of 1871 are just the tip of the iceberg in this respect. As Enzo
Traverso correctly noted, history was a key part of the political culture
and outlooks of Marx, Engels and the labour movement Marxists.
The history of social crises, conflicts and revolutions had pride of place
in these approaches to the past. Characteristically, Gustav Bang presented
the French Revolution at the conclusion of a sweeping account of two
previous ruptures in history: first, the rise of Christianity as a communist
protest of the oppressed against slave society, then, the Protestant Refor-
mation of the early sixteenth century as a sign of the decline of Feudal
society. The French Revolution was a part of grand socialist narratives
of world history—counternarratives to those of bourgeois historiography
and politics—but it was often also the most prominent and defining
chapter within such narratives of social progress, heroic struggles and
tragic defeats.
And even in this brief popularizing summary, Bang confronted much
that did not necessarily fit easily into his overall narratives and concep-
tions. He emphasized the complexity of social relations, transcending
preconceived social theories in favour of the rich, often contradictory
content of empirical history. Echoing Kautsky’s account of the French
Revolution (to which I will return in a later chapter), Bang stated that
“[i]t was a motley mixture of elements which flocked together in the
struggle against the higher estates.” The bourgeoisie was “not a homo-
geneous mass with mutual interests,” but “embraced factions of various
shades.” Financiers, manufacturers and retailers each had their own special
interests. Among the lower classes, guild artisans and ‘free masters’ had
conflicting interests, journeymen aspiring to be masters differed greatly
from factory workers deprived of the means of production, impoverished
intellectuals were at the forefront of the revolution while the lackeys of the
rich pulled in the opposite direction, etc.32 Similarly, he stressed how the
unfolding events of the Revolution itself had prompted particular types
of reaction in different parts of society.
In sum, while strongly conceptualizing history in terms of its meaning
and direction—or rather, as we saw above, its meanings and directions, in
the plural—Bang also described certain limits to conceptualizations. By
implication, he was emphasizing the irreducibility of history to its concep-
tual abstractions. Something more, a surplus of concrete historical reality,
would inevitably remain beyond conceptualization, challenging it, urging
it to proceed further. Theodor Adorno later termed this core aspect
of dialectical epistemology the ‘ontic residuum’.33 Marxists of Gustav
Bang’s generation tended to either avoid such philosophical discourse or
to philosophize along different lines. As a consequence, they did not have
a very well-developed theory of such aspects of thought. But this did not
hold them from acknowledging this in their social analyses and political
practice.
In these fields, they drew on important aspects of the writings of Karl
Marx and Friedrich Engels as well as others, though leaving out many
of the arguably most original interpretive elements within these writings.
To work towards a balanced sense of what Second International Marx-
ists borrowed from their ‘founding fathers’, and what they left behind as
roads not taken, we should have a look at how Marx and Engels construed
revolutionary history.
Notes
1. Gustav Bang, Crises in European History (1909) http://slp.org/pdf/oth
ers/crises_bang.pdf (accessed 21 February 2022), p. 37. Original version:
Brydningstider i Evropas Historie, Rønne 1910 (Socialistisk Bibliothek, vol.
1, no. 1).
2. A useful Anglophone survey of the first decades of the Danish labour
movement is Gerd Callesen, ‘Denmark’, The Formation of Labour Move-
ments 1870–1914: An International Perspective, ed. by Marcel van der
Linden and Jürgen Rojahn, Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1990, pp. 131–60. I am
unaware of any non-Danish studies of Gustav Bang’s Marxism, but the
most thorough analysis in Danish is Mogens Rüdiger, Gustav Bang:
Historiker og socialdemokrat, Copenhagen: SFAH, 1987. A closer study
of the Danish labour movement during the same era is Claus Bryld, Den
22 B. NYGAARD
demokratiske socialismes gennembrudsår: Studier i udformningen af arbe-

jderbevægelsens politiske ideologi i Danmark 1884–1916 på den nationale og
internationale baggrund, Copenhagen: SFAH, 1992.
3. Gerd Callesen, ‘Det danske socialdemokrati – et marxistisk masseparti?’,
in Den danske arbejderbevægelses programmatiske dokumenter og love (1871
til 1913), ed. by Gerd Callesen and Hans-Norbert Lahme, Odense:
Odense Universitetsforlag, 1978, pp. 130–48; Bertel Nygaard, ‘Kapitalen
i Danmark gennem 150 år’, in Kapitalen på dansk: Marx-læsninger
gennem 150 år, ed. by Magnus Møller Ziegler, Bertel Nygaard, Jakob
Bek-Thomsen, and Anne Engelst Nørgaard, Aarhus: Slagmark, 2022,
pp. 13–70, esp. pp. 14–28.
4. Eric Hobsbawm, ‘The Influence of Marxism 1880–1914’, in idem, How
to Change the World: Tales of Marx and Marxism, London: Abacus, 2013,
pp. 211–60, quote p. 225.
5. Bang, Crises, p. 45.
6. Karl Popper, The Poverty of Historicism, London: Routledge & Kegan
Paul, 1957, p. 3. See also, Karl Popper, Conjectures and Refutations: The
Growth of Scientific Knowledge, New York: Harper & Row, 1962.
7. Matt Perry, Marxism and History, Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2021,
p. 23.
8. For surveys, reflections and exemplary documents, see Jean-Numa
Ducange, La Révolution française et l’histoire du monde: deux siècles de
débats historiques et politiques, 1815–1991, Paris: A. Colin, 2014; Olivier
Bétourné and Aglaia I. Hartig, Penser l’histoire de la Révolution: deux
siècles de passion française, Paris: La Découverte, 1989; Eric J. Hobsbawm,
Echoes of the Marseillaise: Two Centuries Look Back on the French Revolu-
tion, London & New York: Verso, 1990; The French Revolution—Recent
Debates and New Controversies, ed. by Gary Kates, London & New York:
Routledge, 1998.
9. Alfred Cobban, The Social Interpretation of the French Revolution,
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1964, pp. 52–53.
10. Cobban, Social Interpretation, p. 168.
11. William Doyle, The Old European Order, 1660–1800, Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1978, p. 365.
12. George V. Taylor, ‘Noncapitalist Wealth and the Origins of the French
Revolution’, American Historical Review 72:2 (1967), pp. 469–96, quote
p. 491.
13. François Furet and Denis Richet, La révolution française, Paris: Pluriel,
1973 [1965], esp. p. 101; Denis Richet, ‘Autour des origines idéologiques
lointaines de la Révolution française: Élites et despotisme’, Annales.
Économies – sociétés – civilisations 24:1 (1969), pp. 1–23; François Furet,
Penser la Révolution française, Paris: Gallimard, 1989 [1978].
14. Robert Brenner, ‘Bourgeois Revolution and Transition to Capitalism’, in

The First Modern Society: Essays in English History in Honour of Lawrence
Stone, ed. by A.L. Meier et al., Cambridge: The Past and Present Society,
pp. 271–304, quote p. 280.
15. George Comninel, Rethinking the French Revolution: Marxism and the
Revisionist Challenge, London: Verso, 1987; Ellen Meiksins Wood, The
Origin of Capitalism, London & New York: Verso, 2004.
16. Colin Mooers, The Making of Bourgeois Europe, London: Verso, 1991;
Alex Callinicos, ‘Bourgeois Revolutions and Historical Materialism’, Inter-
national Socialism no. 43 (1989), pp. 113–71; Henry Heller, The Bour-
geois Revolution in France, 1789–1815, New York: Berghahn, 2006; Neil
Davidson, How Revolutionary Were the Bourgeois Revolutions? Chicago:
Haymarket Books, 2012.
17. Bang, Crises, p. 45.
18. Ibid., p. 46.
19. Ibid., pp. 45 and 41.
20. Ibid., p. 8.
21. Helge Jordheim, ‘Multiple Temporalities and the Work of Synchroniza-
tion’, History & Theory 53:4 (2014), pp. 498–518; Helge Jordheim, ‘Syn-
chronizing the World: Synchronism as Historiographical Practice, Then
And Now’, History of the Present 7:1 (2017), pp. 59–95. On stagism,
see Michael Löwy, The Politics of Combined and Uneven Development: The
Theory of Permanent Revolution, London: Verso, 1981.
22. Peter Osborne, ‘Out of Sync: Tomba’s Marx and the Problem of a Multi-
Layered Temporal Dialectic’, Historical Materialism 23:4 (2015), pp. 39–
48, quote p. 44.
23. Ernst Bloch, The Heritage of Our Times, Oxford: Polity, 1991 [1935].
24. Enzo Traverso, Left-Wing Melancholia: Marxism, History, and Memory,
New York: Columbia University Press, 2016, p. 59. See also Vincent
Geoghegan, ‘Remembering the Future’, Not Yet: Reconsidering Ernst
Bloch, ed. by Jamie Owen Daniel and Tom Moylan, London & New York:
Verso, 1997, pp. 15–32.
25. François Hartog, Regimes of Historicity: Presentism and Experiences of
Time. New York: Columbia University Press, 2015.
26. Gustav Bang, ‘Fra Kapitalisme til Socialisme’ (1902), in Den material-
istiske historieopfattelse i Danmark før 1945, I , ed. By Uffe Østergård,
Aarhus: Modtryk, 1973, pp. 235–44, quote p. 244.
27. See, in particular, Vincent Geoghegan, Utopianism and Marxism,
Oxford & Bern: Peter Lang, 2008; Ruth Levitas, The Concept of Utopia,
Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1990, pp. 35–82; but also the lucid
discussion of between Ernst Bloch and Theodor W. Adorno, ‘Etwas
fehlt… Über die Widersprüche der utopischen Sehnsucht’ (1964), in Ernst
24 B. NYGAARD
Bloch, Tendenz – Latenz – Utopie, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1978,

pp. 350–68.
28. See, e.g., Matthew Beaumont, Utopia Ltd: Ideologies of Social Dreaming
in England 1870–1900, Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2006; Csaba Toth,
‘Resisting Bellamy: How Kautsky and Bebel Read Looking Backward’,
Utopian Studies 23:1 (2012), pp. 57–78.
29. Gustav Bang, ‘Socialisme og Anarkisme’, in Bang, Arbejderklassens Liv og
dens Kamp, 2 vols., Copenhagen: Fremad, 1916, vol. 2, pp. 87–94, quote
p. 89.
30. Karl Kautsky, ‘Zukunftsstaaaten der Vergangenheit’, Die Neue Zeit 11:1
(1892–93), pp. 653–63 and 684–96, quote p. 695.
31. Ernst Bloch, The Principle of Hope, 3 vols., Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press,
1996 [1959]. For good introductions to Bloch’s thoughts and discus-
sions of their relevance, see, e.g., Not Yet; Jack Zipes, Ernst Bloch: The
Pugnacious Philosopher of Hope, Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019; Vincent
Geoghegan, Ernst Bloch, London: Routledge, 1996.
32. Bang, Crises, pp. 41–3, quotes from p. 41.
33. Theodor W. Adorno, Negative Dialektik, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp,
1973 [1966], p. 142.
CHAPTER 3
Marx, Engels and Revolutionary History
“[H]ere as always, the bourgeois were too cowardly to stand up for their
own interests.”1 Reflecting on the French Revolution of 1789 during its
centenary in 1889, the 68-year-old Friedrich Engels offered very little
praise for the bourgeoisie, even in what was frequently proclaimed as the
most heroic moment of its past ascent to power.
His remark was made in a private letter to Karl Kautsky, criticizing
the latter’s recent account of the Revolution. Not only did the younger
Marxist give the bourgeoisie more than its historical due. He also
generalized far too much, applying Marxist categories schematically and
mechanically. According to Engels, a “yawning gap” divided Kautsky’s
characterization of the “mode of production” from “the facts you adduce
and, thus out of context, it appears as a pure abstraction which, far
from throwing light on the subject, renders it still more obscure.”2 And
Engels proceeded to spell out how proper historical sources, archives and
specialized historiography could aid Kautsky in achieving a better sense of
absolutist monarchy, the various factions of nobility and bourgeoisie, the
military significance of the Terror, etc.
This letter of critique certainly did not amount to a full reinterpre-
tation of the French Revolution. Nor, perhaps, was Engels completely
fair in assessing Kautsky’s account. As I will argue in Chapter 4, Kaut-
sky’s text was actually an attempt to add historical nuance to Marxist
conceptions, and in other cases Engels proved much more overbearing

Switzerland AG 2022
26 B. NYGAARD
towards such attempts.3 And perhaps this one-sidedness had something

to do with a private disagreement between the two—Kautsky being in
the process of a bitter divorce from his wife; Engels siding with the wife.4
Nevertheless, the content of Engels’ critique reveals much about both
Engels’ interest in the history of the French Revolution and his criteria
for a proper historiography of such developments.
Far from preaching what was later considered the standard Marxist
doctrine of the French Revolution, Engels’ letter can urge us to recon-
sider his and Marx’s views of the French Revolution as a key aspect of
their approach to history in general. This is the purpose of this chapter.
After introductory remarks on Marx’s and Engels’ historical approach to
theoretical concepts, I will study Marx’s early critique of the modern state
from 1843 to 45; his and Engels’ oft-quoted conceptualizations of the
Revolution as an instance of bourgeois revolution; the roots of the latter
conception in pre-Marxian social thought; and finally the reconsiderations
of the key problems of the modern state and developmental patterns
in their later writings, including Marx’s critique of political economy.
Through these reflections on states, classes, social forms and revolutions
emerged complex senses of spatiotemporal dynamics and the interplay
between structure and agency.
Historical Categories
Engels’ letter to Kautsky was significant in demanding that Marxist
historiography should not be an application of a priori categories of anal-
ysis, but should express the multiplicities, contradictions and nuances
of concrete historical realities. At the same time, the detailed critique
expressed in the letter reflects the importance of the French Revolution
to Friedrich Engels, not only as a thinker in his own right, but also as
the main curator of the intellectual legacy of his closest friend and collab-
orator, Karl Marx, who had passed six years earlier. For his part, Marx
had studied the history of the Revolution closely, even more so than
Engels. Judging from Marx’s notes and scattered writings on the subject,
it is fair to assume that he would have agreed with his friend’s critique
of abstract theoretical reductions in this field. As the Frankfurt philoso-
pher Alfred Schmidt emphasized, “the founders of Marxism were proven
historians (and authorities on the important bourgeois historiography of
their century).”5 What Schmidt added about Marx the historian was also
reflected in Engels’ basic approach:
3 MARX, ENGELS AND REVOLUTIONARY HISTORY 27
Marx the historian was not outwitted by Marx the historical theorist or
politician. He combines an intellectual breadth, which keeps him away
from surface description, with a respect for facts, which are often first
established as facts per se only on the basis of theory.6
The latter remark can also reveal further implications of Engels’ critique
of Kautsky’s account of the French Revolution. What Engels demanded
as opposed to pure theoretical abstraction was not mere empiricism or
an infinity of pure facts. It was a complex of theoretical determinations
mediated through concrete history and thus, at the same time, closer to
the concrete conditions of making history by changing society.
Demands for such historical mediation of concepts or categories of
analysis appear in varying guises and contexts throughout Marx’s and
Engels’ writings. In his early critique of G.W.F. Hegel’s philosophy
of the state, written in 1843, the 25-year-old Marx emphasized that
“comprehending does not consist […] in recognising the features of the
logical concept everywhere, but in grasping the specific logic of the
specific object.”7 Marx’s and Engels’ mid-to-late 1840s writings such as
The Holy Family, The German Ideology, The Poverty of Philosophy and
Manifesto of the Communist Party have often been interpreted quite
differently, as enunciations of a theoretical system of categories applicable
to all historical contexts. But even if such texts did contain sweeping
generalizations on history and society, they were also explicitly framed
as tentative expressions of a basically historical approach to categories.
The Poverty of Philosophy, for example, was an extended polemic against
Pierre-Joseph Proudhon’s superficially Hegelian doctrine of “eternal prin-
ciples.”8 The German Ideology, a series of critiques of contemporary
idealist thought written collaboratively by Marx and Engels, claimed
at the outset that in replacing the claims of speculative philosophy
to universal validity, a materialist approach to history as the “practical
activity” of human beings cannot result in yet another philosophy of
history:
At the best its place can only be taken by a summing-up of the most general
results, abstractions which are derived from the observation of the historical
development of human beings. These abstractions in themselves, divorced
from real history, have no value whatsoever. They can only serve to facili-
tate the arrangement of historical material, to indicate the sequence of its
separate strata. But they by no means afford a recipe or schema, as does
philosophy, for neatly trimming the epochs of history. On the contrary, the
28 B. NYGAARD
difficulties begin only when one sets about the examination and arrange-
ment of the material—whether of a past epoch or of the present—and
its actual presentation. The removal of these difficulties is governed by
premises which certainly cannot be stated here, but which only the study
of the actual life-process and the activity of the individuals of each epoch
will make evident.9
In other words, any rigid complex of categories with claims to supra-

historical validity would only result in yet another idealist construction.
Similarly, in his and Engels’ The Holy Family, written in 1844, Marx had
stated against the metaphysical conceptions of history developed among
contemporary German thinkers:
History does nothing, it ‘possesses no immense wealth’, it ‘wages no

battles’. It is human beings, real, living human beings who do all that,
who possess and fight; ‘history’ is not, as it were, a person apart, using a
human being as a means to achieve its own aims; history is nothing but
the activity of human beings pursuing their aims.10
Marx expanded on this point in his writings on political economy during

the 1850s and 1860s, explaining that a properly dialectical investigation
should begin and end in the diversity of concrete reality, proceeding from
the initial “chaotic” infinity of empirical reality through abstracting its
determining relations and patterns of development and, finally, ascending
towards “an intellectual concrete” (ein geistig Konkretes ). Thus, a prop-
erly dialectical category should be concrete in the sense of being “a
synthesis of many determinations, thus a unity of the diverse.”11 As
Otto Morf remarked, this implied that, in Marx’s approach to political
economy, “the logical categories are historical categories, categories of
reality.”12 The quotes from Marx’s and Engels’ earlier writings above
would suggest that this was true not only of the critique of political
economy in Marx’s Capital and his enormous economic manuscripts of
the 1850s and 1860s, but also a core aspect of the intentions behind their
earlier writings on theory and philosophy.
And even if Engels often tended to simplify matters in propagan-
dizing his and Marx’s thoughts and explaining them to new generations
of socialists during the 1880s and early 1890s, he also reiterated the
message of historical concreteness. Thus, in his widely-read polemics
against the rival socialist thinker Eugen Dühring in the late 1870s, he
stressed that “the principles are not the starting-point of the investigation,
3 MARX, ENGELS AND REVOLUTIONARY HISTORY 29
but its final result; they are not applied to nature and human history, but
abstracted from them.”13 Or, in more general terms, in his late defence
of Marx’s approach in Capital: “[W]here things and their interrelations
are conceived, not as fixed, but as changing, their reflections in thought,
the concepts, are likewise subject to change and transformation; and they
are not encapsulated in rigid definitions, but are developed in their histor-
ical or logical process of formation.”14 This was also what he reiterated in
his 1889 letter to Kautsky, criticizing conceptions of social theory as an a
priori construction to be applied to concrete historical reality.
Marx and Engels often criticized Hegel and Hegelian idealist philos-
ophy for ontologizing concepts. Yet, their criteria for concepts basically
echoed Hegel’s own point that concepts should be the result of concrete
determinations, expressing the historically finite and definite content of
the research object itself, as studied from a particular perspective and at a
specific level of abstraction. “The examination of knowledge can only be
carried out by an act of knowledge,” Hegel emphasized.15 By contrast, a
priori, formal universal concepts, as defended by Immanuel Kant’s influ-
ential epistemology (and basic to innumerable later approaches to social
theory), would become arbitrary, purely subjective constructions beside
the object.16 Accordingly, in his Science of Logic, Hegel presented the
development of the idea from “a state of knowledge that is undeveloped
and devoid of content [to] one full of content and truly grounded.”17
Once again, this implied that even his highly philosophical approach to
history as the successive development of reason had to start from history
“as it is” and “proceed historically — empirically.”18 Thus, in effect Marx
and Engels argued that Hegel and many of his proselytes were simply not
Hegelian enough in this sense, since they tended to ontologize concepts
and ideas.
German Thought, the French

Revolution and the Modern State
As educated young men associated with liberal and increasingly radical
circles in urban Germany during the 1830s and 1840s, it is no wonder
that Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels were strongly interested in the
French Revolution. European political culture was saturated with the
conflicting legacies of the Revolution—between conservative damnation,
radical enthusiasm and liberal middle positions. German intellectuals in
particular had incorporated such elements in idealist philosophy.19 In
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XI LUKU.
Karjankierroksen jälkeen.
Karjankierroksen kulkiessa yli seudun kuluivat kesän viimeiset

päivät ja lähestyvän talven ensimmäiset merkit näyttäytyivät.
Päivänkukkien kulta varisi ruskeana ja kuihtuneena, ja laidunten
vehmas ruoho kävi kuivaksi ja auringon polttamaksi. Ensimmäisen
pakkasyön jälkeen muuttuivat maisemat päivä päivältä
harmaammiksi ja alakuloisemmiksi, ja syksyinen tuuli varisti lehdet
Rovastin pähkinäpuista.
Sitten oli karjankierros ja pestauspäivä ohitse — ja talvi peitti

maan.
Taivaanrannasta toiseen oli koko maailma valkoinen, paitsi

tummat petäjät vuorien rinteillä, vaaleammat setrit ja
tammipensaikko, joka kaiken muun peittyessä lumeen antoi karjalle
talvisen ravinnon.
Kesän ja syksyn väistyessä talven tieltä tunsi Kitty enemmän kuin

ennen kaipaavansa vilkkaaseen kaupunkilaiselämään, joka oli
vieroittanut hänet kodista ja syntymämaasta. Hänen ystävyytensä
Patchesiin — jota Baldwinien ilmeinen kiintymys heidän uusimpaan
»poikaansa» oli omiaan ylläpitämään — veresti muistoja niiltä ajoilta,
jotka hän oli viettänyt tässä maailmassa, ja nämä muistot eivät
suinkaan tehneet häntä tyytyväisemmäksi Williamson Valleyn
oloihin.
Philiä kohtaan Kitty oli entisellään. Toisinaan hänen sydämensä

tunsi niin syvää kiintymystä mieheen, että hän toivoi, ettei
milloinkaan olisi oppinut tuntemaan muuta maailmaa kuin sen, missä
he molemmat olivat syntyneet. Jos hän ei olisi viettänyt noita vuosia
poissa kotoa, olisi kaikki ollut toisin. Hän olisi saattanut olla
onnellinen Philin kanssa, hyvin onnellinen, jos hän vain olisi jäänyt
hänen maailmaansa. Mutta nyt — nyt hän pelkäsi sekä Philiä että
itseään. Hänen ystävyytensä Patchesiin oli monella tavoin uudelleen
tuonut mieleen kaiken sen, mikä oli hänen ja sen miehen välillä,
jonka hän ilman kouluvuosiaan iloiten olisi hyväksynyt
elämäntoverikseen.
Usein, kun he kolmisin ratsastivat ja Kitty oli johtanut keskustelun

kauas siitä elämästä, joka Philille oli tuttu ja kotoinen, teki hän
tahtomattaankin vertailuja miesten välillä. Kitty ei ymmärtänyt, että
Philin, joka oli tottumaton lausumaan ajatuksensa muusta kuin siitä,
mikä kuului hänen ammattiinsa, kävi vaikeaksi paljastaa
ajatusmaailmansa rikkautta. Kitty oli valmis olettamaan, ettei Phil
tiennyt mitään siitä, mikä ei koskenut karjanhoitoa ja hevosia. Mutta
Patches, jolle Phil oli tottunut puhumaan vapaammin, ymmärsi
hänet. Ja tietäen, että tyttö omien olettamuksiensa varaan rakensi
muurin itsensä ja rakastettunsa välille, hän teki parhaansa
opettaakseen Kittyä paremmin tuntemaan miehen, jonka tämä jo
luuli tunteneensa lapsuudesta saakka.
Sitten tuli kevät.
Lumi suli, tuli sadeaika ja rinteet ja selänteet ja niityt heräsivät

uuteen vihreyteen, ja uusi elämä puhkesi puissa ja viidakoissa, ja
aidoilta ja pensaikosta ja vastapuhjenneista puista ilmoitti lintujen
laulu niiden palanneen.
Ja nuori kevät sai nähdä uuden vieraan saapuvan Risti-Kolmio-

Kartanoon.
Patches oli ollut tarkastamassa juoksuaitaa, ja palatessaan kotiin

keväisenä iltana hän näytti toiselta mieheltä kuin se Patches, jonka
Kitty kuukausia sitten samoilla main oli pelastanut pahasta
nöyryytyksestä.
Jo se tosiseikka, että hän ratsasti Muukalaisella, suurella tummalla

oriilla, ilmaisi parhaiten muutoksen, mikä hänessä oli tapahtunut. Ei
ainoakaan paimen olisi enää voinut tuntea häntä samaksi kalpeaksi,
hyvinpukeutuneeksi herrasmieheksi, jonka Phil oli tavannut
Metsärajalla. Kuukausia kestänyt ulkoilmaelämä oli antanut hänen
vartalolleen voiman ja liikkeilleen jäntevyyttä, ja aurinko ja tuuli olivat
painaneet hänen ihoonsa tummanruskean värin, joka on niiden
miesten tuntomerkki, jotka aina saavat olla valmiina kestämään
luonnonvoimien pahimpaakin riehuntaa.
Ratsastaen kappaleen matkaa selänteen harjaa, joka muodostaa

laakson länsirajan, Patches katsahti kotikartanon punaisiin kalloihin
ja hymyili kuin ajatellen mieluisaa iltaa päivätyön jälkeen. Rovasti ja
Stella ja pikku Billy ja Phil, kaikki olivat käyneet rakkaiksi tälle
muukalaiselle, josta he eivät vieläkään tienneet juuri mitään. Yhtä
suuri kuin hänen ulkonaisessa asussaan ja ryhdissään tapahtunut
muutos oli kehitys, joka oli tapahtunut hänen sielussaan. Honourable
Patches ei ollut saavuttanut vain nimen ja asemaa, hän oli
saavuttanut muutakin, joka hänelle itselleen oli vielä paljon
arvokkaampaa. Ja siitä hän oli kiitollinen niille, jotka olivat luottaneet
häneen ja siten auttaneet häntä enemmän kuin itse osasivat
aavistaakaan.
Hän oli jättänyt selänteen ja oli puolitiessä laaksoa kotiveräjälle,

kun pikku Billy kannustaen epätoivoisen vimmatusti vanhaa
Sheepiään, karautti häntä vastaan.
Pojan lähestyessä ja tervehtiessä suurta ystäväänsä kimein

poikamaisin huudoin, joihin tämä vastasi aito paimenen vihellyksellä,
nousi Muukalainen takajaloilleen ja hyppelehti ja tanssi vanhan
Sheepin edessä. Pikku Billy ulvoi ihastuksesta. »Taltuta se, Patches!
Taltuta se!» hän huusi niin, että Muukalainen sai hänen kimeästä
äänestään yhä enemmän intoa kirmailulleen.
Patches hillitsi hevosensa nauraen. »Mitä oikeastaan tarkoitat,

kumppani?» hän kysyi hyväntuulisena Muukalaisen vihdoin
suostuessa pitämään jalkansa maassa, »aiotko saada minut
putoamaan satulasta?»
»Älä turhia!» vastasi poika ihaillen. »Enpä luule sinun olevan noin
vain pudotettavissa. Tulin kertomaan sinulle, että olemme saaneet
vieraan», hän lisäsi heidän ratsastaessaan rinnatusten kotia kohden.
Patches hämmästyi. »Vieraan?» hän huudahti.
Pikku Billy hymyili tyytyväisenä. »Niin juuri. Erään miehen — hän

on jostakin kaukaa idästä. Will-setä toi hänet mukanaan
kaupungista. Luulen, ettei hän eläessään ole nähnyt karjakartanoa.
Voi! se tulee olemaan hirveän hauskaa!»
Patchesin kasvot synkkenivät. »Mistä tiedät hänen olevan
idästä?» hän kysyi yrittäen salata uteliaisuuttaan.
»Kuulin Will-sedän sanovan Philille ja Kittylle.»
»Kitty on siis myös talossa?»
»Hän ja Phil ovat olleet ratsastamassa melkein koko päivän ja

tulivat kotiin hetki sitten. He juttelivat vieraan kanssa juuri minun
lähtiessäni sinua vastaan.»
Phil ja Kitty olivat parhaillaan tulossa hevostensa luo, jotka

seisoivat veräjän vieressä, Patchesin ja Billyn ratsastaessa pihaan.
Poika hypähti satulasta, jätti hevosensa toisten hoidettavaksi ja

juoksi sisälle kertoakseen Stella-tädille Patchesin tulleen. Pikku
Billyn suurin suru oli, ettei hän vielä ollut tarpeeksi pitkä
satuloidakseen ja riisuakseen hevosensa. Kartanon miehillä oli
tapana pitää huolta siitä, että hänen hevosensa aamulla satuloitiin ja
illalla riisuttiin ja vietiin talliin.
Patches pysähdytti hevosensa ja tervehti ystäviään istuen yhä

satulassa. »Ette suinkaan ole lähdössä?» hän sanoi Kittylle kuin
moittien. »En ole tavannut teitä kokonaiseen viikkoon. Phil ei tee
kauniisti käyttäessään tilaisuutta hyväkseen ja lähettäessään minut
yksinäni jonnekin sillä aikaa, kun itse ratsastaa teidän seurassanne
maita mantereita.»
He hymyilivät hänelle hänen istuessaan oriin selässä hattu

kädessä ja silmäillen heidän kohotettuja kasvojaan hyväntahtoisesti
kuin ainakin vanhempi veli.
Patches huomasi, että Kittyn silmät loistivat ilosta ja että Philin
silmissä oli vallaton väike.
»Minun täytyy lähteä, Patches», sanoi tyttö. »Minun olisi pitänyt

lähteä jo kaksi tuntia sitten, mutta minulla oli niin hauskaa, että aika
kului huomaamattani.»
»Olemme saaneet vieraan», selitti Phil katsahtaen Patchesiin ja

sulkien toisen silmänsä — sen, jota Kitty ei saattanut nähdä.
»Hienon vieraan, totta toisen kerran. Minä lainaan sinulle puhtaan
paidan illalliseksi, siinä tapauksessa nimittäin, että äiti päästää sinut
samaan pöytään kuin hänet.»
»Phil, kuinka saatat», torui Kitty.
Miehet nauroivat, mutta Phil oli huomaavinaan Patchesin äänessä

levottomuutta hänen virkkaessaan: »Pikku Billy kertoi minulle. Kuka
hän on?»
»Prescottin tuomarin ystäviä», vastasi Phil. »Tuomari pyysi Will-

setää ottamaan hänet joksikin aikaa kartanoon. Hän ja tuomari olivat
—»
Kitty keskeytti hänet innokkaana: »Hän on professori Parkhill,

Patches, kuuluisa estetiikan professori, tiedättehän: Everard Charles
Parkhill. Ja hän aikoo viettää kesänsä Williamson Valleyssa. Eikö se
ole suurenmoista!»
Phil näki Patchesin katseen kirkastuvan helpotuksesta hänen

vastatessaan: »On varmasti suuriarvoista varsinkin teille, neiti Reid,
että saatte niin kuuluisan tiedemiehen naapuriksenne. Tuleeko
professori Parkhill Arizonaan terveydellisistä syistä?»
Jokin Patchesin äänensävyssä sai Philin nopeasti kääntymään
poispäin.
Miettien, miten mainiosti Patches ymmärsi hänet, Kitty ei

huomannut hänen syvässä äänessään muuta kuin tavallisen
kohteliaan sävyn.
»Osaksi terveytensäkin vuoksi», hän vastasi, »mutta sain sen

käsityksen, että hän aikoo täällä valmistaa erään luentosarjan. Hän
sanoo, että tässä autiossa ja raivaamattomassa —»
»Tuolla hän tulee», keskeytti Phil kuuluisan vieraan lähestyessä

heitä.
Professori Everard Charles Parkhill oli mainio esimerkki

liikasivistyneiden vanhempien pojasta. Hänellä oli kapeat hartiat,
sisäänpainunut rinta ja heikot jalat. Hänen laihoilla, värittömillä
kasvoillaan asusti juhlallinen ja tärkeä ilme, aivan kuin hän tietoisena
suuresta elämäntehtävästään ei olisi sallinut ainoankaan
kevytmielisen ajatuksen solahtaa suureen, kuvunmuotoiseen
päähänsä. Hänet nähdessään tunsi vaistomaisesti, ettei hän
neljänäkymmenenäviitenä tai viitenäkymmenenä elinvuotenaan ollut
sallinut ainoankaan tieteellisesti erittelemättömän elämyksen tai
riemun saastuttaa esteettistä sieluaan.
Tullessaan veräjää kohden hän tuijotti komean oriin selässä

istuvaa miestä kiinnostuneena, kuten olisi tarkastellut oliota, joka
tuskin saattoi kuulua ihmisrotuun.
»Professori Parkhill», virkkoi Phil tyynesti, »sanoitte, ettette

koskaan ollut nähnyt oikeata paimenta oikeassa asussaan. Sallikaa
minun esittää teille tyypillinen paimen, herra Honourable Patches.
Patches, tämä on professori Parkhill.»
»Phil», kuiskasi Kitty, »kuinka sinä saatat?»
Professori tuijotti Patchesiin kuin kivettyneenä. Ja vakavana kuin

puusta veistetty intiaani Patches tuijotti professoriin maalaispojan
tavoin, suu auki ja silmät selällään, niin että Phil vääntelehti naurusta
ja Kittyn oli pakko kääntyä poispäin salatakseen hymynsä.
»Päivää! Mukava tehdä tuttavuutta, herra!» huusi tämä 'tyypillinen

paimen'. Ja sitten, aivan kuin äkkiä muistaen kohteliaisuuden
vaatimukset hän hypähti satulasta ja täyttäsi eteenpäin ojentaen
toisen kätensä tervehdykseen ja pidellen toisella Muukalaista
ohjaksista, hevosen hyppiessä hurjana hänen takanaan vähääkään
välittämättä herransa kohteliaasta tarkoituksesta.
Professori peräytyi kauhistuneena peloittavan hevosen ja sen yhtä

peloittavan ratsastajan tieltä. Se sai Patchesin osoittamaan
Muukalais-raukalle kokonaisen haukkumasanojen ryöpyn.
»Ptruu! Senkin kirottu pölkkypää, vinosilmä, kierokinttuinen vanha

kaakki! Ptruu, kuuletko! Etkö näe, että aion pudistaa herran kättä,
jonka isäntäni on minulle esittänyt?»
Phil oli räjähtämäisillään nauruun. Kitty ei saanut sanaakaan

suustaan. He eivät tienneet Patchesin olevan halkeamaisillaan ilosta
huomatessaan, ettei koskaan ennen ollut tavannut professori
Parkhillia.
»Katsokaas, herra», hän selitti vakavana saaden professorin aivan

suunniltaan, »tää hevonen ei ole tottunut vieraisiin eikä ollenkaan
sellaisiin, jotka eivät näytä luonnollisilta, jos niin saan sanoa.» Hän
lopetti typerästi nauraa virnistäen ja tarttui vieraan pehmeään
pieneen käteen ravistaen sitä miehen ottein. Tuijottaen sitten
korkean sivistyksen hienostuneeseen edustajaan hän luonnonlapsen
tavoin kysyi ihmetellen: »Oletteko siis ihan oikea professori? Onhan
noista kuultu puhuttavan, mutta en ole koskaan omin silmin nähnyt
niin korkeaa herraa.»
Pieni mies vastasi nopeasti, mutta hieman ylpeästi: »Kyllä, olen

kyllä.»
»Vai olette te professori!» huudahti paimen aivan kuin suunniltaan

tällaisen suuruuden läheisyydessä. »Anteeksi, että uskallan kysyä,
mutta sanoisitteko mulle — minkä professori te sitten olette?»
Vieras vastasi rohkeammin, aivan kuin saisi jokaisesta sanasta

vahvistusta sielulleen: »Estetiikan.»
Paimenen naama piteni, hänen suunsa aukeni ihmetyksestä ja

hän katsoi professorista Philiin ja Philistä Kittyyn ikäänkuin kutsuen
heitä tämän mullistavan uutisen todistajiksi. »Älkäähän hulluja!» hän
viimein mutisi nöyrän ihailun vallassa. »Kuka voisi uskoa sitä
teidänlaisestanne rääpäleestä? Mutta mitä peeveliä sitten sellainen
istetiikka on, jonka professori te olette — jos saan kysyä?»
Hienostunut tiedemies vastasi viipymättä parhaalla

katederisävyllään: »Oppi kauneuden olemuksesta ja
tunnusmerkeistä sekä taiteen ilmenemismuodoista.»
Samassa Muukalainen karkasi takajaloilleen ja professori Parkhill

katsoi parhaaksi vetäytyä turvaan Philin selän taakse.
»Anteeksi, herra»; sanoi Patches. »Tule nyt, senkin
kiusankappale!
Sinulla ei ole sen enempää älliä kuin preeriasudella!»
Kuuluisa estetiikan professori jäi Philin ja Kittyn kanssa

katselemaan, kun Patches riisui satulan riuhtovan oriin selästä ja vei
sen suuresta veräjästä laitumelle.
»Pyydän anteeksi», mutisi vieras vienolla äänellään, »mutta minkä

sanoittekaan tuon miehen nimeksi?»
»Patches, Honourable Patches», vastasi Phil.
»Kuinka kummallista! Erittäin kummallista! Olisipa mielenkiintoista

tutkia tämän miehen sukua ja jos mahdollista päästä selville tällaisen
nimen alkuperästä.»
Phil kauhistui professorin halua ja vastasi: »Herran tähden, älkää

virkkako sanaakaan hänen nimestään, ei ainakaan hänen
kuullensa.»
»Hän — hän on vaarallinen, sitäkö tarkoitatte?»
»Niin on, jos luulee jonkun laskevan leikkiä nimestään. Kysykää

pojillamme, he tietävät sen kokemuksesta.»
»Mutta minä — minä vakuutan teille, herra Acton, että en lainkaan

pitänyt sitä naurettavana — kaukana siitä! Oi, hyvin kaukana siitä!»
Nyt Kittyn oli pakko kääntyä pois. Veräjällä hän tapasi Patchesin,
joka palasi laitumelta.
»Saisitte hävetä», hän torui. Mutta siitä huolimatta hänen silmänsä
nauroivat.
»Kyllä, neiti», sanoi Patches nöyrästi.
»Kuinka saatoitte tehdä sellaista?» kysyi tyttö.
»Kuinka olisin saattanut olla tekemättä?»
»Kuinka muka olisitte saattanut olla tekemättä?»
»Niin juuri! Näittehän, millä silmin hän katseli minua. Totta puhuen,
neiti Reid, enhän voinut tuottaa hänelle niin suurta pettymystä. Enkö
ollut juuri sellainen kuin hän toivoi minun olevan? Luulin teidän
kiittävän minua! Enkö tehnyt sitä sangen hyvin?»
»Mutta hänhän luulee nyt, että te olette aivan tavallinen paimen!»

väitti tyttö vastaan.
»Mainiota!» vastasi Patches siekailematta. »Kiitos, neiti Reid, se

on paras kohteliaisuus, minkä koskaan olen kuullut.»
»Nyt teette pilaa minusta», sanoi Kitty hämmästyneenä hänen

äänensävystään.
»En tee. Olen vakavissani», selitti Patches. »Mutta tuolta hän

tulee taas. Teidän suosiollisella luvallanne laittaudun tieheni. Mutta
älkää selittäkö mitään professorille. Se nöyryyttäisi minua, ja
ajatelkaahan kuinka pettynyt hän olisi.»
Nostaen satulansa maasta ja lähtien edelleen hän lisäsi

äänekkäämmin: »Ei, en mää unohra, Kitty neiti. Saatte sanoa
papallenne, että hänen iso sonninsa on meirän isossa laitumessa.
Mää näin sen tänään.»
Ensimmäistä tutustumista seuraavina päivinä Kitty vietti useita

hetkiä professorin seurassa. Phil poikineen valmisteli kevätkierrosta,
rouva Baldwinilla oli yllin kyllin hommaa taloudessaan, ja Rovasti,
niin ystävällinen ja kohtelias kuin olikin vieraalleen, keksi aina jotakin
tärkeätä tehtävää tämän yrittäessä houkutella hänet pitempään
keskusteluun, sillä hän tunsi tämän pitävän häntä sivistymättömänä
olentona, joka älynsä puolesta ei kohonnut härkiensä ja
vasikoittensa tasoa paljoakaan korkeammalle. Niinpä olikin Kitty
ainoa, jolla riitti sekä aikaa että kärsivällisyyttä tähän seurusteluun.
Ja omituista kyllä hän näytti pitävän siitä.
Karjankierroksen viimeisinä päivinä Phil ratsasti kotiin

neuvotellakseen Rovastin kanssa karjan kuljettamisesta. Patches ja
muut paimenet jäivät vartioimaan laumaa, joka seuraavana päivänä
oli määrä toimittaa rautatielle. Seuraava aamu valkeni, ja miehet
olivat parhaillaan lopettamassa aamiaistaan, kun heidän
päällysmiehensä palasi. Jo ennen kuin hän oli virkkanut sanaakaan,
tiesi Patches, että jotakin oli tapahtunut. Miesten hilpeästi
tervehtiessä häntä ei hymyn häivettäkään näkynyt hänen kasvoillaan
eikä hän edes vastannut, ennen kuin tullessaan aivan heidän
viereensä nuotiotulelle. Siinä hän laskeutui satulasta lausuen
lyhyesti »huomenta, pojat» ja jäi seisomaan suitset kädessään.
»Ei aamiaista, Sam», virkkoi hän kiinalaiselle kokille, joka riensi

tarjoamaan ruokaa, »vain kupillinen kahvia.» Ja kääntyen miesten
puoleen: »Satuloikaa hevosenne ja pankaa karja liikkeelle. Me
viemme sen Skull Valleyhin.»
»Hiisi vieköön!» ihmetteli Curly hetkistä myöhemmin
satuloidessaan hevostaan Patchesin vieressä, »mikähän Philiä
vaivaa? Ei suinkaan hän ole riidellyt Rovastin kanssa kotona
käydessään, vai mitä arvelet? Luuletko Rovastin moittineen häntä
jostakin?»
Patches pudisti päätään: »Mistäpä minä sen tietäisin, kumppani»,

ja kääntyi hevoseensa päin.
Koko päivän Phil pysytteli yksinään, puhutellen tovereitaan vain

silloin, kun hänen oli pakko ja silloinkin mahdollisimman lyhyesti.
Illalla hän lähti toisten seurasta heti syötyään illallisensa ja Patches
kuuli hänen painuvan vuoteelleen kauan sen jälkeen, kun toiset jo
olivat vaipuneet uneen. Ja seuraavana päivänä, kun raskain työ,
karjan lastaaminen rautatievaunuihin suoritettiin, oli Phil niin
muuttunut, että jolleivät miehet olisi olleet hänen vanhoja ystäviään
ja tovereitaan, olisivat he varmasti nousseet kapinaan vaativaista
päällysmiestään vastaan.
Ilta oli jo kulunut pitkälle, kun viimeinen eläin oli saatu junaan.
Curlyn ja Bobin oli määrä seurata karjan mukana. Toisten tuli jäädä
Skull Valleyhin seuraavaan aamuun hajaantuakseen sitten eri
suunnille
koteihinsa. Phil ilmoitti lähtevänsä kotimatkalle vielä samana iltana.
»Sinä voit palata johonkin aikaan huomenna, Patches», virkkoi

Phil lyhyesti hyvästeltyään miehiä, joiden kanssa oli elänyt hyvässä
toveruudessa karjankierroksen pitkät viikot. Hän nykäisi puhuessaan
hevostaan suitsista.
Risti-Kolmion päällysmies oli jo ehtinyt kappaleen matkaa

tovereittensa luota, kun Patches saavutti hänet, »Saanko ratsastaa
kanssasi Risti-Kolmioon jo tänä iltana, Phil?» hän kysyi tyynesti.
Phil pysähdytti hevosensa ja katsoi ystäväänsä hetkisen

vastaamatta hänen kysymykseensä. Sitten hän sanoi
ystävällisemmällä äänellä kuin näinä päivinä oli käyttänyt: »Sinun
olisi parempi jäädä tänne poikien kanssa ja nukkua yösi rauhassa,
Patches. Levosta ei karjankierroksen aikana ole ollut puhettakaan,
eivätkä eilinen ja tämä päivä olleet niinkään helppoja. Lastaaminen
on kauheata silloinkin, kun kaikki ovat hyvällä tuulella», hän lisäsi
lyhyesti naurahtaen.
»Jos sallit, niin tulen kernaasti mukaasi», sanoi Patches

yksinkertaisesti.
»Mutta hevosesi on yhtä väsynyt kuin sinäkin», intti Phil.
»Minähän ratsastan Muukalaisella», vastasi Patches.
Siihen Phil sanoi päättävästi: »Siis matkaan.»
Niin he ratsastivat läpi yön, hämärän laskeutuessa autioille

lakeuksille ja hiljaisuuden levitessä yli maan. Heidän ratsastaessaan
kosketti toinen jalustin väliin toiseen, mutta kumpikin oli omiin
ajatuksiinsa vaipuneena. Phil oli vieläkin synkän mielialan vallassa ja
hautoi alakuloisena huoliaan. Myötätuntoisena Patches mietti, mikä
hänen toveriaan saattoi vaivata, ja toivoi voivansa auttaa.
On hetkiä, jolloin miehen sielu pakottaa hänet etsimään toverin

ymmärtämystä ja tukea. Kahden kesken yön pimeässä miehen
kanssa, joka ensi hetkestä oli herättänyt hänen mielenkiintoaan ja
myötätuntoaan, unohti Phil kaiken, mikä aika ajoin oli saanut hänet
epäilemään tuon miehen rehtiyttä ja rehellisyyttä. Hän unohti
olevansa Risti-Kolmio-Kartanon vastuunalainen päällysmies. Tässä
vaikenevassa, autiossa maailmassa ei ollut muita kuin hän, Phil
Acton suruineen, ja hänen ystävänsä.
Ja niin kävi, että nuori mies vähitellen kertoi Patchesille

unelmansa ja miten se nyt oli murskautunut sirpaleiksi.
Toisinaan katkerasti, aivan kuin tuntien suuren vääryyden

tapahtuneen, toisinaan melkein tylysti, kuin häveten heikkouttaan
hän yritti katkonaisin lausein kuvata suunnitelmiaan kotitalonsa
uudelleen rakentamisesta ja uuden karjakannan perustamisesta.
Tämä oli ollut hänen unelmansa varhaisimmasta lapsuudesta
saakka ja hän oli ponnistanut ja raatanut voidakseen sen toteuttaa.
Hän kertoi rakkaudestaan Kittyyn, joka oli ollut hänen unelmiensa
päämäärä. Ja mies, joka ratsasti hänen rinnallaan, kuunteli häntä
osoittaen suurempaa myötätuntoa ja ymmärtämystä kuin Phil saattoi
aavistaakaan.
»Ja nyt», päätti Phil toivottomana, »nyt on kaikki lopussa. Reid on

päättänyt myydä kartanonsa ja muuttaa pois. Will-setä kertoi siitä
minulle käydessäni toissayönä kotona neuvottelemassa karjan
lastauksesta.»
»Aikooko Reid myydä kartanonsa!» huudahti Patches, ja hänen

äänessään oli hilpeä sävy, jota Phil ei huomannut? Hän ei liioin
pimeässä saattanut nähdä toverinsa hymyilevän itsekseen.
»Se on tuo kirottu professori Parkhill, joka on saanut sen aikaan»,

jatkoi paimen katkerana. »Siitä lähtien kun Kitty palasi koulusta, on
hän ollut kyllästynyt ja tyytymätön karjakartanoelämään. Minä
kelpasin hänelle hänen lähtiessään, mutta kun hän palasi, olin minä
vain tavallinen härkäpaimen. Mutta hän on ollut hyvin rehellinen. Hän
on koettanut jälleen muuttua siksi, mikä oli lähtiessään, ja minä luulin
voivani aikaa myöten voittaa hänet takaisin. Sinä olet nähnyt,
millaista se on ollut. Ja sinä olet nähnyt, kuinka hän on kaivannut
tuohon elämään, jonka hän oppi tuntemaan ollessaan poissa täältä
— elämään, josta sinä tulet, Patches. Ja minä olen iloinen teidän
ystävyydestänne, sillä ajattelin, että sinä voisit opettaa hänelle, että
mies, jolla on kaikkea, mikä siinä elämässä on omistamisen arvoisia,
kuitenkin voisi olla onnellinen ja tyytyväinen elämään täällä. Ja sen
hän olisi sinulta oppinut, sen tiedän. Mutta sitten tuli tuo kirottu hullu,
joka ei tiedä miehen työstä enempää kuin minä tiedän hänen
ammatistaan, ja pilasi kaiken.»
»Mutta Phil, en ymmärrä, mitä professori Parkhillilla on tekemistä

Jim
Reidin talonmyynnin kanssa?»
»Etkö ymmärrä?» Phil käännähti kiihkeästi. »Hänhän on

hienostuneen sivistyksen korkein edustaja. Etkö muista, kuinka Kitty
alusta alkaen on ihaillut ja kunnioittanut häntä?»
»Ihaillut ja kunnioittanut hänen esteettistä sivistystään, tarkoitat

kai?» korjasi Patches rauhallisesti.
»Olkoonpa vaikka niinkin», vastasi Phil jurosti. »Will-setä sanoi

joka tapauksessa, että he ovat viimeisen kolmen kuukauden aikana
olleet miltei joka päivä yhdessä ja että puolet ajasta he ovat
viettäneet Kittyn kotona. Professori sanoo huomanneensa, että
Kittyllä on aivan harvinainen ja ihmeellinen kyky käsittää
korkeamman älyllisen elämän totuuksia ja että hän ymmärtää pitää
arvossa niitä elämänihanteita, jotka ovat paljon korkeammalla
tavallisten ihmisten eläimellisiä harrastuksia ja pyyteitä.»
»Lempo soikoon!» mutisi Patches.
»Niin minäkin sanoin Will-sedälle. Ja hän on niin kauan vetänyt

samasta köydestä ja lorunnut niin paljon Kittyn isälle ja äidille tytön
suurenmoisista lahjoista ja kuinka sääli ja mikä vahinko koko
maailmalle on pitää häntä haudattuna tällaiseen sielua kuolettavaan
ympäristöön, että he lopulta ovat ruvenneet uskomaan hänen
jaarituksiaan. Ymmärräthän, Kitty itse on vähitellen saanut heidät
tottumaan siihen ajatukseen, että Williamson Valley ei kelpaa juuri
mihinkään ja että suuressa maailmassa ei karjanhoitajaa pidetä
ihmisenä eikä minään. Sitä varten on Jim nyt päättänyt myydä
kartanonsa ja muuttaa itään, jotta Kitty saisi kehittyä ja jotta hänen
pojistaan tulisi parempia kuin tavallisia härkäpaimenia, kuten sinä ja
minä.»
»Kiitos, Phil», keskeytti Patches tyynesti.
»Mistä hyvästä?»
»Siitä, että lasket minut omaan luokkaasi. Minä pidän sitä

kohteliaisuutena ja», hän lisäsi hiukan ivallisesti, »luulenpa tietäväni
mitä sanon — paremmin kuin tuo miesrahjus tietää, mitä hän
sanoo.»
»Kenties», vastasi Phil alakuloisesti, »mutta yhtä kaikki on minulta

nyt toivo mennyttä. Professori on sen murskannut.»
»Kenties, kenties ei», vastasi Patches. »Eihän Reid kai vielä ole
saanut ostajaa kartanolleen?»
»Ei vielä, mutta pian hän saa. Pata-Koukku-S on tunnettu hyväksi

kartanoksi.»
Seuraavana päivänä Phil näytti jälleen muuttuneen suhteessaan
Patchesiin. Hän oli jälleen Risti-Kolmio-Kartanon vaitelias
päällysmies, ja Patches ymmärsi, että ovi, jonka hänen ystävänsä oli
avannut yön hiljaisina hetkinä ratsastaessaan hänen rinnallaan,
jälleen oli sulkeutunut. Hän ei yrittänytkään sitä uudelleen avata,
mutta näytti jostakin syystä olevan erittäin hyvällä tuulella, kulkien
vihellellen ja laulaen kartanon ja laidunten väliä, näköjään erittäin
tyytyväisenä sekä itseensä että muuhun maailmaan.
Seuraava päivä oli sunnuntai. Patches kuljeskeli iltapäivällä

toimetonna kartanolla, turvallisen välimatkan päässä pähkinäpuista,
joiden alla Rovasti ja professori istuivat keskustelemassa. Phil oli
lähtenyt jonnekin ollakseen yksinään, ja rouva Baldwin luki ääneen
pikku Billylle. Honourable Patches tunsi olonsa hiukan yksinäiseksi.
Pienen kukkulan laella lähellä kartanon veräjää hän loi silmäyksen

laitumen yli naapurikartanoon päin. Hän näki jonkun ratsastavan
sieltä ja kiiruhti satuloimaan hevosensa — Risti-Kolmiossa oli tapana
sunnuntaisinkin pitää jokin hevosista kotona — ja muutamien
minuuttien kuluttua hän oli matkalla Simmonsille laakson
länsirinnettä johtavaa tietä. Tuntia myöhemmin hän tapasi Kitty
Reidin, joka oli matkalla Risti-Kolmioon.
Tyttö ilostui ilmeisesti hänet nähdessään.
»Mutta tehän olitte matkalla Simmonsille?» hän kysyi Patchesin

kääntäessä hevosensa hänen ratsunsa rinnalle.
»Totta puhuen olisin ollut matkalla Simmonsille, jos olisin tavannut

jonkun muun tai jollen olisi tavannut teitä», vastasi hän. Tytön
katsahtaessa hämmästyneenä häneen hän selitti: »Näin jonkun
ratsastavan kartanoltanne ja arvasin, että te se olitte. Arvasin
myöskin teidän ratsastavan tätä tietä.»
»Ja lähditte varta vasten tapaamaan minua?»
»Varta vasten», hymyili Patches.
He rupattelivat hetkisen karjankierroksesta ja laakson kuulumisista

— heidän viime tapaamisestaan oli kulunut useita viikkoja — ja
saapuivat viimeiselle selänteelle ennen Risti-Kolmioon saapumista.
Sitten Patches kysyi: »Emmekö ratsastaisi tuonne rinteelle ja
istuutuisi vanhan puun varjoon jutellaksemme hiukan. Kello ei ole
vielä paljon, ja siitä on pitkä aika, kun viimeksi tapasimme.»
Tultuaan Patchesin osoittamalle paikalle he laskeutuivat satulasta

ja istuutuivat mukavasti nurmikkoon, mistä oli laaja näköala
ympäröivien laidunten ja niittyjen yli.
»Ja nyt», virkkoi Kitty katsahtaen häneen, »mistä tahdoitte puhua

minulle?»
»Teistä», vastasi Patches vakavasti.
»Minusta?»
»Teidän viehättävästä persoonastanne», vastasi Patches.
»Mutta, hyvä herra, mitä minä olen tehnyt? Tai pikemminkin, mitä
olen jättänyt tekemättä?»
»Tai niitä kenties aiotte tehdä.»
»Oh!»
»Neiti Reid, aion pyytää teillä suosionosoitusta — oikein suurta
suosionosoitusta.»
»Niinkö?»
»Te olette nyt tuntenut minut miltei kokonaisen vuoden.»
»Niin.»
»Ja itse asiassa ette lainkaan tunne minua.»
Tyttö ei vastannut, vaan katsoi häneen kiinteästi.
»Ja se tekee oikeastaan minulle helpoksi pyytää teiltä tätä

suosionosoitusta, se on, jos tunnette voivanne luottaa minuun —
tarkoitan, jos voitte uskoa, että olen vilpitön.»
»Tiedän, että olette vilpitön, Patches», vastasi Kitty vakavasti.
»Kiitos», vastasi tämä. »Pyydän teitä antamaan minun sekaantua

asiaan, joka oikeastaan ei vähääkään liikuta minua. Pyydän saada
tehdä teille epähienoja kysymyksiä. Pyydän teitä antamaan minun
puhua teille», hän empi hetkisen, mutta päätti sitten merkitsevästi,
»tulevaisuudestanne.»
Kitty tunsi hänen vakavuutensa ja ymmärsi olla kiitollinen siitä

lämmöstä, joka säteili miehen sanoista.
»No mutta Patches», hän huudahti, »meidän monikuukautisen

ystävyytemme jälkeen, joka on minulle merkinnyt kovin paljon, en
pitäisi mitään kysymystänne epähienona. Kuinka voitte luulla
minusta sellaista?»

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History and the Formation of Marxism

1st ed. 2022 Edition Bertel Nygaard

History and the

ISSN 2524-7123 ISSN 2524-7131 (electronic)

Cover image: © INTERFOTO/Alamy Stock Photo

1. Terrell Carver & Daniel Blank, A Political History of the Editions

31. Kevin B. Anderson, Kieran Durkin & Heather Brown (Eds.),

50. Levy del Aguila Marchena, Communism, Political Power and

Vesa Oittinen, Marx’s Russian Moment

Marie-Cecile Bouju, A Political History of the Publishing Houses of

Emanuela Conversano, Capital from Afar: Anthropology and

My colleague at Aarhus University, Professor Mikkel Thorup, has kindly

Aarhus, May 2022 Bertel Nygaard

4 Marxism in Paris, 1889 71

In a brief article for the revolutionary journal Die Rote Fahne on 18

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 1

So, to convey these complexities, Luxemburg turned to metaphors.

be mistaken too. Rhetoric is not just an external form imposed on the

This way of framing discussions tends to bypass history in two specific,

Thus, combining empirical studies and overall reflections, this book

As the European labour movements remained the little-contested

Marxism and History: A Critical Introduction, Manchester: Manchester

revolutionäre Arbeiterbewegung: Geschichte, Gesellschaftstheorie und revolu-

Revolution and the Surplus of History

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 9

bourgeoisie—required an overthrow of the old state. Thus, the gradual

terms. According to George Taylor, the French Revolution was “essen-

[T]he revolutionary bourgeoisie of the great French Revolution – without

Here, a tellingly biological metaphor of slow embryonic growth and

this sense, synchronization is a specific mode of periodization, an act

Remembering for the Future

History writing and memory were interwoven and reciprocally nourished

As Traverso emphasizes, we can see this Marxist mode of anticipatory and

distinctly Marxist, yet under-conceptualized politics of temporality. Bang’s

The Surplus Meanings of History

demokratiske socialismes gennembrudsår: Studier i udformningen af arbe-

14. Robert Brenner, ‘Bourgeois Revolution and Transition to Capitalism’, in

Bloch, Tendenz – Latenz – Utopie, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1978,

Marx, Engels and Revolutionary History

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 25

towards such attempts.3 And perhaps this one-sidedness had something

In other words, any rigid complex of categories with claims to supra-

History does nothing, it ‘possesses no immense wealth’, it ‘wages no

Marx expanded on this point in his writings on political economy during

German Thought, the French

Karjankierroksen kulkiessa yli seudun kuluivat kesän viimeiset

Sitten oli karjankierros ja pestauspäivä ohitse — ja talvi peitti

Taivaanrannasta toiseen oli koko maailma valkoinen, paitsi

Kesän ja syksyn väistyessä talven tieltä tunsi Kitty enemmän kuin

Philiä kohtaan Kitty oli entisellään. Toisinaan hänen sydämensä

Usein, kun he kolmisin ratsastivat ja Kitty oli johtanut keskustelun

Lumi suli, tuli sadeaika ja rinteet ja selänteet ja niityt heräsivät

Ja nuori kevät sai nähdä uuden vieraan saapuvan Risti-Kolmio-

Patches oli ollut tarkastamassa juoksuaitaa, ja palatessaan kotiin

Jo se tosiseikka, että hän ratsasti Muukalaisella, suurella tummalla

Ratsastaen kappaleen matkaa selänteen harjaa, joka muodostaa

Hän oli jättänyt selänteen ja oli puolitiessä laaksoa kotiveräjälle,

Pojan lähestyessä ja tervehtiessä suurta ystäväänsä kimein

Patches hillitsi hevosensa nauraen. »Mitä oikeastaan tarkoitat,

Patches hämmästyi. »Vieraan?» hän huudahti.

Pikku Billy hymyili tyytyväisenä. »Niin juuri. Erään miehen — hän

»Kuulin Will-sedän sanovan Philille ja Kittylle.»

»Kitty on siis myös talossa?»