18th Burmaire-I

17Oct08

p. 15

Men make their own history, but they do not make it just as they please; they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves, but under circumstances directly encountered, given and transmitted from the past.

p. 15-16
In like manner a beginner who has learnt a new language always translates it back into his mother tongue, but he has assimilated the spirit of the new language and can freely express himself in it only when he finds his way in it without recalling the old and forgets his native tongue in the use of the new.

p. 16
…the heroes as well as the parties and the masses of the old French Revolution, performed the task of their time in Roman costume and with Roman phrases, the task of unchaining and setting up modern bourgeois society….But unheroic as bourgeois society is, it nevertheless took heroism, sacrifice, terror, civil war and battles of peoples to bring it into being.

p. 18
The social revolution of the nineteeth century cannot draw its poetry from the past, but only form the future.

The February Revolution was a surprise attack, a taking of old society unawares, and the people proclaimed this unexpected stroke as a deed of world importance, ushering in a new epoch….Instead of society having conquered a new content for itself, it seems that the state only returned to its oldest form, to the shamelessly simple domination of the sabre and the cowl.

p. 19
Bourgeois revolutions, like those of the eighteenth century, storm swiftly from success to success; their dramatic effects outdo each other; men and things seem set in sparkling brilliants; ecstasy in the everyday spirit; but they are short-lived; soon they have attained their zenith, and a long crapulent depression lays hold of society before it learns soberly to assimilate th results of its storm-and-stress period. One the other hand, proletarian revolutions, like those of the nineteenth century, criticize themselves constantly, interrupt themselves continually in their own course, come back to the apparently accomplished in order to begin it afresh, deride with unmerciful thoroughness the inadequacies, weaknesses and paltrinesses of their first attempts, seem to throw down their adversary only in order that he may draw new strength from the earth and rise again, more gigantic, before them, recoil ever and non form the indefinite prodigiousness of their own aims, until a situation has been created whihc makes all turnign back impossible, and the themselves cry out:
His Rhodus, hic salta!
Here is the rose, here dance!

p. 20
[comparing the Democrats to the Chiliasts]…fancied the enemy overcome when he was only conjured away in imagination, and it lost all understanding of the present in passive glorifcation of the future that was in store for it and of the deeds it had in petto but which it merely did not want to carry out as yet.

p. 24-25
[on the defeat on the June insurgents] It had proved that in countries with an old civilization, with a deployed formation of classes, with modern conditions of production and with an intellectual consciousness in which all traditional ideas have been dissolved by the work of centuries, the republic signifies in general only the political form if revolution of bourgeois society and not its conservative form of life, as, for example, in the United States of North America, where, though classes already exist, they have not yet become fixed, but continually change and interchange their elements in constant flux, where the modern means of production instead of coinciding with a stagnant surplus population, rather compensate for the relative deficiency of head and hands, and where, finally, the feverish, youthful movement of material production, which has to make a new world its own, has left neither time nor opportunity for abolishing the old spirit world.

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