Marx and the Weight of Tradition, written by Eduardo Montagut

There is a text by Marx that reveals a reality we have observed in historical analysis about the weight of tradition, even when revolutions are undertaken, as if the attempt to build a new world always needed to justify itself with garments of the past.

We include the text for reflection. It was selected from a collection that the magazine Leviathan made of Marx’s texts in various issues from 1934 and 1935. The specific text is from the book on the 18th Brumaire, which was first published in 1852, though there are many editions available in Spanish, as it is a book, in our opinion, quite suggestive:

«Men make their own history, but not freely. They do not choose their own conditions, but work within directly inherited conditions, handed down by tradition. The tradition of the dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living. Even when they and things seem to be engaged in transforming and creating something unprecedented, precisely in those periods of revolutionary crisis, they anxiously conjure up the spirits of the past, borrowing their names, battle cries, and costumes, in order to appear on the new scene of History in a venerable disguise and with borrowed language. Thus, Luther donned the mask of the Apostle Paul; thus the Revolution of 1789-1814 draped itself alternately in the garb of the Roman Republic and the Roman Empire; the Revolution of 1848 knew nothing better than to parody 1789 and the revolutionary tradition from 1789 to 1814. Whoever learns a new language always translates it back into their mother tongue; however, the spirit of the new language is only assimilated and freely wielded when it is handled without reminiscence and the hereditary language is forgotten…”

In the Spanish case, we could apply these assertions to the Cortes of Cadiz and Spanish liberalism, which sought to link the changes discussed and approved there with the medieval period, supposedly subdued by later authoritarianism and absolutism.

Finally, Marx wanted this weight to be broken and this is how the social revolution should occur:

“The social revolution of the nineteenth century cannot draw its poetry from the past but only from the future. It cannot begin with itself without having first got rid of all the superstitions about the past. Previous revolutions required historical recollections to disguise their own content. The revolution of the nineteenth century must let the dead bury their dead to realize its own content. In the past, the phrase outstripped the content; today, the content outstrips the phrase.”