Hello everybody and welcome back to Red Menace.

On today's episode of Red Menace is our long-awaited episode on the 18th Brumair of Louis Bonaparte by Carl Marks.

It is something that we've been talking about doing for a while.

We got caught up with obviously the current events and whatnot for the last month or two,

but we finally got to it.

And we're going to get into it today.

Now, the first thing I want to say up front is that

this was sort of a surprising, surprisingly difficult text. I didn't necessarily know what to expect

with the 18th Premier. Of course, I was vaguely sort of familiar with it. I hadn't actually read it

myself, hadn't actually tackled it myself. I knew sort of its role that it played within

Marx's overall work and some of the main ideas that, myself, had it actually tackled it myself. I knew sort of its role that it played within

Marx's overall work and some of the main ideas that sort of came out of it. But the first thing

you'll realize very quickly upon diving into this text is that it really is in some ways a blow-by-blow

historical account of French politics at this time. So on its face, it seems like a sort of

summary of events, if you will, of this really tumultuous time in France. But of course, by way of

that summary, Marx, you know, infuses his analysis with core Marxian concepts and generates certain ideas and concepts that are

still within Marxism today. So it is an important text for that reason. But a lot of our older

texts that we've done, we really have done a sort of summary approach where we spend the first 30,

45 minutes, sometimes even longer, summarizing the text.

And we thought that would be, we wanted to move away from that in general because we think

that is kind of sometimes the drier parts of our episode, but specifically in this text,

we thought it was worth getting away from because it would be in some sense a summary of a

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