WHAT'S LEFT
OF EUROPE?

Dafür, dass Lassalle gerade einmal ein Jahr darauf aufwendete die Partei aufzubauen bevor er starb,  wird ihm ein unglaublich großer Einfluss auf die  weitere Geschichte der Partei und eigentlich der Welt zugeschrieben. Für die einen ein Gegensatz zum "autoritären" Marx, für die anderen der Schuldige am Scheitern der Weltrevolution oder gar der Wegbereiter des Nationalsozialismus, der die Sozialdemokratie verunreinigte und ohne Verlust aus der Geschichte getilgt werden könne. Rosa Luxemburg und Lenin sahen das anders und Franz Mehring lobte ihn gar in den Himmel. 

Warum bewerteten die revolutionären Marxisten der II. Internationale Lassalle so fundamental anders als es jene tun, die sie in ihrem Marxismus beerben wollten? Was hat es mit Lassalle nun tatsächlich auf sich? Und in welchem Verhältnis steht der Marxismus zu ihm?

After Marx's death, Marxism took on the character of a mass political movement that spread throughout the world with the rapid growth of the labor movement and the emergence of the Second International. There are numerous traces of this history in Leipzig, which we would like to discover together with you. Marxism and its development had a decisive influence on the world of the 19th and 20th centuries and continues to leave its mark on the present day. Bring along any questions you have always wanted to ask about Marxism.

In 1786, the French revolutionary Condorcet stated that the American Declaration of Independence had given the French Revolution a “simple and sublime” example of the reconstitution of human rights, whose spirit would later permeate the 1789 Déclaration des Droits de l’Homme et du Citoyen.

In 1865, Marx declared in his letter to Lincoln, in the name of the entire First International, that “the workingmen of Europe felt instinctively that the star-spangled banner carried the destiny of their class.” The Civil War was a struggle against the counterrevolution for slavery, fought in the very country “where hardly a century ago the idea of one great democratic republic had first sprung up, whence the first Declaration of the Rights of Man was issued, and the first impulse given to the European revolution of the eighteenth century.”

The historical Left once saw the American Revolution as an essential moment of the broader bourgeois and socialist revolutions. Yet the 20th century seemed to draw an iron curtain between a European Jacobinism and an American Thermidorianism.

Today, as Europe and the world continue to be transformed through the United States, the question returns with urgency: what is the significance of the American Revolution for a European Left? And why is it still necessary to ask this question at all?

Thomas Jefferson wrote in regard to the Jacobin Terror, that he would rather see half the earth desolated than see the Revolution fail. On the one hand it seems self-evident that the Left stands in the tradition of the French Revolution. On the other hand, the Jacobins left the limelight of the world-historical stage and their meaning for a Left today is highly unclear. Marxism once sought to go beyond bourgeois right. Nowadays even bourgeois rights seem too radical.

Why did the Left emerge during the French Revolution? What does it mean to say that the French Revolution was a ‘bourgeois revolution’ and how does it compare to the American Revolution? What is the legacy of the French Revolution and how does it task us today?

Speakers:

• Dominique Pagani (author of Féminité et communauté chez Hegel)

• Mike Macnair (Communist Party of Great Britain, author of Revolutionary Strategy)

• Richard Rubin (founding member of Platypus Affiliated Society)

• tba

The founding of Marxism, the definitive emergence of the ideological and organizational orientation of Marxism, flows from the experience of 1848. That is to say, it flows from the experience of defeat. From that, Marx and Engels came to espouse independent organization of the working class to engage the battle of democracy to transform the necessity of the state under conditions of capital — from that of imperialism suffusing and stifling society to the seizure of power by the proletariat, smashing the imperial state, allowing for the working through of society’s self-contradiction, and presiding over the withering away of the state itself. This orientation grew out of Marx and Engels’s entire experience of the revolution and finds unmistakable crystallization in The Class Struggle in France (1850) and, above all, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (1852). These writings concentrate on the French experience as expressing the core dynamics of the 1848 Revolution. However, what is little understood is that Marx was not simply describing the regime that emerged from the collapse of the Second Republic in France. 

Imperialism was not a category for grasping a particular — illiberal, national — form of the capitalist state. Rather, it was the form of emerging international state order adequate to international capital. This becomes abundantly clear when we turn to the immense but remarkably neglected body of Marx’s journalism written from 1851 to 1862, work that equals in sheer scale the entire project of the critique of political economy, though this latter is, especially as regards his post-1848 corpus, the near exclusive preoccupation of Marx scholars. This neglect stands in marked contrast to the original editor of the Marx-Engels Gesamtausgabe (MEGA), David Riazanov, who was first attracted to his task through an engagement with the journalism of the 1850s. This talk will present in brief my reflections on its significance (and the significance of its neglect) now that I am completing the third and final volume of a conceptually-driven selection of Marx’s journalism. 

Books:

• Spencer A. Leonard (ed.): Marx and Engels on Bonapartism. Selected Journalism, 1851–59, Lanham/Boulder/New York/London 2023.

• Spencer A. Leonard (ed.): Marx and Engels on Imperialism. Selected Journalism, 1856–62, Lanham/Boulder/New York/London 2023.

As part of our conference, we also offer workshops by other leftist groups and authors in order to get into conversation with them.

The workshops are:

Licht und Luft
at Haus 1 Turm, T-1001 

Ingar Solty on his book series Marxismen
at Haus 1 Turm, T-1003 

Books: 

• Ingar Solty: Edition Marxismen. Zweihundert Jahre Systemkritik für systematische Weltverbesserer, Berlin 2025.

tba
at Haus 1 Turm, T-1004 / Haus 1 Turm, T-1006 

A decade ago, at the height of the European debt crisis, the critique of the EU – the discovery of possibilities for its transformation or overcoming – seemed to be the central task of the Left. This was forcefully expressed by the emergence of the populist electoral formations SYRIZA and Podemos, but after their failure and collapse critique increasingly came from the strengthening populist Right, pushing the Left into a defence of the status quo, often in the name of “anti-fascism”.

This rearguard manoeuvre has been expedited by the second election of Donald Trump as president of the United States. Trump’s ambition to renegotiate the terms of global capitalism, seemingly ushering in the end of the neoliberal configuration, has provoked a desire in the European establishment for the military and economic independence of “the last liberal stronghold” – a desire which is not without sympathy on the Left.

This raises not only the question of the EU, but of Europe in general as an “American invention” since the end of the Second World War – an ambiguous fate conditioned by the prior failure of the international working class to make socialism, and in so doing honour the radical tradition of the eighteenth century, when the dream of a cosmopolitan Europe in a state of “lasting peace” that would lead the world to freedom was articulated by such thinkers as l’abbé de Saint Pierre, Rousseau, and Kant.

Today, in 2025, the political horizon for the Left in Europe is unclear. So we ask our panellists:

What is Europe to the Left today – and what was it in the past? Is there a Leftist vision for Europe? Is there even a European Left?

How should the Left in Europe relate to the “post-neoliberal” transformation of capitalism? Does what is new provide a potential for a Leftist politics?

What is the meaning of the European Left’s activities in the 2000s and 2010s for the next generation? If a verdict of failure is self-evident, what potentialities were missed? If “gains” were made – if the Left has been strengthened by its experience – how is this the case?

Does the world revolution still rest on the fate of Europe? This was once impossible to deny. If it is no longer the case, what is the purpose of Left politics in Europe today?

Speaker

• Dominique Pagani (author of Féminité et communauté chez Hegel)

• Ingar Solty (Rosa-Luxemburg-Stiftung, author of Marxismen)

• Ruth Kinna (co-founder of Anarchism Research Group)

• Johannes Fehr (MERA25)