The meaning of class struggle: Marx and the 1848 june days

Bruno Leipold

LSE Research Online Documents on Economics from London School of Economics and Political Science, LSE Library

Abstract: Karl Marx characterized the 1848 June Days uprising as a class struggle between proletarians and the bourgeoisie. But modern investigations have shown that the insurgents actually consisted primarily of artisans and not proletarians. They have also undermined Marx’s claim that one of the primary forces used to defeat the insur-gency, the Mobile Guard, was recruited from the lumpenproletariat, when in fact they shared the same social background as the insurgents. As a result of these findings, crit-ics have questioned the adequacy of Marx’s class analysis and concluded that he was wrong to describe the June Days as a class struggle. I argue that the empirical findings represent serious shortcomings in Marx’s account and need to be properly incorpo-rated into our understanding of the uprising. However, I challenge the characterisation of Marx’s class analysis and show that though the June Days were not the class struggle that Marx presented, they were still a class struggle in his understanding of what class struggle means.

Keywords: 1848 french revolution; artisans; class; class struggle; Journées de juin; June days; Karl Marx; lumpenproletariat; mobile guard; petty bourgeoisie; proletarians (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: B14 B24 P2 P3 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 36 pages
Date: 2021-07-01
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-his, nep-hme, nep-hpe and nep-pke
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Published in History of Political Thought, 1, July, 2021, 42(3), pp. 464 - 499. ISSN: 0143-781X

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