Marx 8/13 Seminar: Marx's Eighteenth Brumaire, Herbert Marcuse and the Counterrevolution

Bernard E. Harcourt and guests, W.J.T. Mitchell, Kendall Thomas, Michaela Soyer, and others, read and discuss Marx's The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte and Engels' Revolution and Counter-Revolution in Germany 1848, in conversation with Herbert Marcuse's Counterrevolution and Revolt (1972) @Columbia. Read more here: https://marx1313.law.columbia.edu/8-13/ Wednesday, February 12, 2025 at Columbia University in the City of New York. The full length introduction to Marx 7/13 is here: https://tinyurl.com/IntroMarx813 Information about Marx 13/13: https://marx1313.law.columbia.edu/ Information on the 13/13 series: https://cccct.law.columbia.edu/content/13-13 ******* We are witnessing today a new and radical offensive in the American Counterrevolution. We are, right now, in the demolition phase of this new offensive. In the first few weeks of his mandate, President Trump is taking a bulldozer to the existing federal government and wrecking its foundations, in an effort to eradicate the federal regulatory state and replace it with an oligarchic-theological, fealty-based cult with an authoritarian grip. The times could not be more urgent to critically analyze and understand this moment. Few texts are more important to do that than Engel’s Revolution and Counter-Revolution in Germany 1848 and Marx’s Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon. So we turn to those texts at our seminar, Marx 8/13, in the context of our own Counterrevolution. And to enrich our understanding, we will place these texts in conversation with Herbert Marcuse’s book, Counterrevolution and Revolt, published in 1972, at the time of a previous triumphal offensive of counterrevolution in the wake of the Civil Rights movement and during the Vietnam War protests. This is the full seminar Marx 8/13. Welcome to Marx 8/13!