The recent populist uprising; the more recent “Debs Movement”; the thousand and one utopian and chimerical notions that are flaring up; the capitalist manoeuvres; the hopeless, helpless grasping after straws, that characterize the conduct of the bulk of the working class; all of these, together with the empty-headed, ominous figures that are springing into notoriety for a time and have their day, mark the present period of the Labor Movement in the nation a critical one. The best information acquirable, the best mental training obtainable are requisite to steer through the existing chaos that the death-tainted social system of to-day creates all around us. To aid in this needed information and mental training, this instructive work is now made accessible to English readers, and is commended to the serious study of the serious.

The teachings contained in this work are hung on an episode in recent French history. With some this fact may detract of its value. A pedantic, supercilious notion is extensively abroad among us that we are an “Anglo-Saxon” nation; and an equally pedantic, supercilious habit causes many to look to England for inspiration, as from a racial birthplace. Nevertheless, for weal or for woe, there is no such thing extant as “Anglo-Saxon”—of all nations, said to be “Anglo-Saxon,” in the United States least. What we still have from England, much as appearances may seem to point the other way, is not of our bone-and-marrow, so to speak, but rather partakes of the nature of “importations.” We are no more English on account of them than we are Chinese because we all drink tea.

Of all European nations, France is the one to which we come nearest. Besides its republican form of government,—the directness of its history, the unity of its actions, the sharpness that marks its internal development, are all characteristics that find their parallel here best, and vice versa.

Ω Ω Ω

Despite the inapplicableness to our own affairs of the political names and political leadership herein described, both these names and leaderships are to such an extent the products of an economic-social development that has here too taken place with even greater sharpness, and they have their present or threatened counterparts here so completely, that, by the light of this work of Marx’, we are best enabled to understand our own history, to know whence we come, whither we are going, and how to conduct ourselves.

—Daniel De Leon, September 12, 1897, translator’s preface to Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, (Chicago: John F. Higgins, 1907), 3‑5.