La disfatta di giugno 1848 e le forme politiche della società borghese

“The defeat of the June insurgents certainly prepared and flattened the ground on which the bourgeois republic could be founded and erected, but at the same time it showed that there are other issues at stake in Europe besides that of ‘republic or monarchy’. It revealed that the bourgeois republic signified here only the unrestricted despotism of one class over other classes. It proved that in the older civilized countries, with their highly developed class formation, modern conditions of production, and their intellectual consciousness in which all traditional ideas have been dissolved through the work of centuries, ‘the republic is generally only the political form for the revolutionizing of bourgeois society’, and not its ‘conservative form of existence’, as for example in the United States of America. There, although classes already exist, they have not yet become fixed, but rather continually alter and mutually exchange their component parts; the modern means of production make up for the relative scarcity of heads and hands instead of coinciding with a stagnant surplus population; finally, the feverish and youthful movement of a material production which has to appropriate a new world has left neither time nor opportunity for the abolition of the old spiritual world.” [Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte] [in Karl Marx, a cura di David FERNBACH, Surveys from Exile. Political Writings. Volume 2, 1973]