Marx – The Class Struggles in France 1848 to 1850

Description

This body of work appeared first as a series of articles in the Neue Rheinische Zeitung between December 1849 and November 1850. Engels “repackaged” them into a more complete book in 1895, a dozen years after Marx’s passing.

In highlighting the importance of this work in the development of Marx’s thought, Engels wrote: “The work here republished was Marx’s first attempt to explain a section of contemporary history by means of his materialist conception, on the basis of the given economic situation. In the Communist Manifesto, the theory was applied in broad outline to the whole of modern history … Here, on the other hand, the question was to demonstrate the inner causal connection in the course of a development which extended over some years … to trace political events back to effects of what were, in the final analysis, economic causes.”