Translator’s note. Mainstream historians typically focus on the human cost of revolution in the form of violence, terror, lost lives, economic disorganization, the rise of dictatorships, etc. In this piece, Marxist economist Ernest Mandel describes the far greater costs to humanity of a revolution that did not succeed.

The “Human Cost” of Revolutions that Never Happened

Today, May 5, is also, of course, Cinco de Mayo, the holiday celebrated by Americans that recognizes the victory over the French colonialist army by a rag-tag army of Mexican peasants in 1862, in the Mexican state of Puebla--truly a people's victory.

But May 5 is Karl Marx's birthday as well; Marx was born on this date in 1818 in Trier, Germany. Marx's family had a long lineage of rabbis, but Karl's father converted to Lutheranism the year before his birth--a comon "assimilationist" strategy among Jews to avoid persecution and discrimination because they were Jewish. For now they were Christians!

Karl Marx began his active political life after he received his Ph.D. in 1842, becoming the editor of the Rheinisische Zeitung, a liberal newspaper shut down soon thereafter by the authorities. It was also in 1842 that he met Frederick Engels, and their lifelong friendship and political collaboration began in earnest in 1844.