And then.

The 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 Marx.

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

premiere. 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 sort of came out of it but the first thing you 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 marks you know infuses his analysis with core Marxian

concepts and generates certain you know ideas and concepts that are still

within Marxism today.

So it is an important text for that reason.

But a lot of our older text 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

...