Abstract
The concluding chapter sums up the theoretical outcome and the political effects of the pre-communist Marxian theory of democracy. I confirm the hypothesis that the young ‘citizen Marx’ did not confuse the end of the state with the end of politics, while admitting the influence on Marx’s theory of democracy exerted by the ‘paradigm’ of the Athenian polis or the Rousseauist model of the participatory or anti-parliamentarian republic, and taking into account the works of major political thinkers of our time such as Arendt and Castoriadis. Applying the Aristotelian distinction between ‘poiesis’ and ‘praxis’, I conclude that Marxian politics goes far beyond the horizon of the state. In the context of Marx’s ‘true democracy’, politics is a life process and is an end in itself, leading to the formation of a society in which, as the communist Marx would soon argue, ‘the free development of each’ will not be a limit to but ‘the condition for the free development of all’.
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Notes
- 1.
Abensour (2011, pp. 47–8).
- 2.
Jean Hyppolite (1969, pp. 120–5) focuses on this precise point, recognising the fact that, for Marx, the people is not an ‘abstract Idea’ but the ‘living source of any real constitution’. However, for Hyppolite, Marx fails to solve historically a problem that is indeed an existential one—that is, the ‘contradiction of the human condition’, since a human being remains at the same time both object and subject of his own life.
- 3.
Guilhaumou (2001, especially pp. 81–8) also follows this direction.
- 4.
Patricia Springborg (1986, p. 194) attributes to the Aristotelian Marx a ‘highly romanticized view of public-spiritedness in the polis hardly consistent with the facts’. In contrast, Castoriadis (2003 [1993], p. 320), as a thinker of our times who was inspired by the Athenian democracy without idealising it, and despite his critical differences with Marxian thought, recognises in Marx a clear knowledge of the economic and social basis of ancient Greek democratic politics. Unfortunately, however, in his effort to focus on and criticise the objectivist/determinist element of Marx’s thinking, Castoriadis bypasses the Marx of democracy and his ‘true democracy’ as a philosophical prelude to a communist self-legislated society. On this issue, see Castoriadis (1987, Chap. 1; 2011 [1992]).
- 5.
Thucydides (1972, Book II, 40, p. 147).
- 6.
See, among others, Hunt (1975, vol. I, pp. 82–4).
- 7.
Ibid., p. 84.
- 8.
- 9.
As Sitton (1989, pp. 36–7) characteristically points out:
[Marx] put forth the argument that the only real answer to the political problems of modern society is the overcoming of the separation of state and civil society. The name Marx gave to this project is ‘democracy’. … Marx’s general concern in using the term ‘democracy’ was not with such issues as better representation (which he would not think would work), free elections, civil liberties, etc., that is procedural questions. ‘Democracy’ for Marx is nothing less than a demand for the end of the alienation of state and society. It is a call for their identity.
- 10.
As Dupré reminds us (1966, p. 107):
the French Revolution has not succeeded in restoring the harmony of the Ancient State: instead the complete levelling of all citizens in the political State caused a break with the existing social structures. Marx correctly concludes that this has led to an increasing individualism: the State has become an empty organism and the civil society has lost its social reality.
- 11.
According to Abensour (2011, p. 48), ‘true democracy—by which is to be understood democracy that has reached its truth as a form of politeia—is politics par excellence, the blossoming of the political principle, its apotheosis’.
- 12.
In the same vein, see works by Abensour (ibid., pp. 47–8) and Mercier-Josa (1999, pp. 18–19).
- 13.
A similar argument is developed by Screpanti (2011, pp. 94–6), who is influenced by the theory of the multitude of Antonio Negri, a thinker who draws in turn on Spinoza’s political theory.
- 14.
Isabelle Garo (2001, p. 102) similarly argues that Marx pays attention to the separation between politics and the state and aims at a ‘reinteriorization of politics within the social, which is less the disappearance [of politics] than its reappropriation by the social individuals’.
- 15.
There is a misconception that Marx overestimated the significance of universal suffrage (see Sitton 1989, p. 40). This is the consequence of a misunderstanding of the fact that Marx deemed the demand for universal suffrage as equivalent to that for the dissolution of the relation between civil society and the state. Marx never supported this equivalence, which has also been wrongly argued by Avineri (1968, pp. 36–7). On the same issue, see also Leopold’ s interesting comments (2007, pp. 258–9).
- 16.
Focusing on the difference between an anarchist and a Marxian approach to politics and democracy, Sitton (1989, p. 41) correctly argues at this point that Marx’s ‘true democracy’ ‘is a correction of “anarchist” thought. From the beginning Marx’s conception is distinct from the anarchists. “Democracy” is not anarchy; it is the end of the “representative” state, an institution standing in a superior relation to society as the embodiment of unity, community, and universality.’
- 17.
From a different point of view, Gottfried (1978) argues as follows:
In place of the Aristotelian distinction between poiesis and praxis, Marx spoke of the basic equality of all human work and experience. By the same token, Marxian praxis was derived from an ungraded heap of ‘essential powers and activities’ to which were assigned the metaphysical label, ‘human essence.’ Marx refused, moreover, to apply to this activity moral criteria of any kind, aside from its conduciveness to revolution. Ethical values were considered mere ‘emanations’ of material situations and, in any case, were extraneous to the highly individual character of each man’s activities.
- 18.
Abensour (2011, p. 54). Depew (1992) rightly recalls that ‘Marx is working from Aristotle’s definition of political animal in History of Animals : “Political are those [animals] for whom something one and common comes to be the work of all” through the social division of labour (488a8–10). Marx, like Aristotle, contrasts political to herding.’
- 19.
Aristotle , Politics , especially 1293b–1294a.
- 20.
In the context of his own analysis, Furet (1986, p. 24), argues:
In Marx, as in Benjamin Constant, whom he read with pen in hand, or in Tocqueville, whom he dealt with more superficially, the private individual is the invention, par excellence, of modern civilization, a monad enclosed within its interests, its calculations and enjoyments, separated by its similars and alien even to the idea of community.
- 21.
Let us recall Rousseau (1997, p. 114): ‘The English people thinks it is free; it is greatly mistaken, it is free only during the election of Members of Parliament; as soon as they are elected, it is enslaved, it is nothing. The use it makes of its freedom during the brief moments it has it fully warrants its losing it.’ Similarly, the communist Marx in his The Civil War in France (Marx–Engels, Collected Works, vol. 22, p. 333) writes with reference to the Paris Commune:
Instead of deciding once in three or six years which member of the ruling class was to misrepresent the people in Parliament, universal suffrage was to serve the people, constituted in Communes, as individual suffrage serves every other employer in the search for the workmen and managers in his business.
- 22.
In regard to the anthropological parameters of modern bureaucratic capitalism, see the interesting remarks of Castoriadis in his ‘What Democracy?’ (2005 [1990], pp. 221ff.).
- 23.
Although he constantly ignores the Marxian ‘true democracy’, Cornelius Castoriadis moves in a similar direction through his analysis of the ‘liberal oligarchies’ of the twentieth century. See, for example, his essay ‘What Democracy?’ (ibid., in particular pp. 205ff.). From his point of view, Howard, while distinguishing—under the influence of Lefort— between totalitarianism and totalitarian ideology (2002, pp. 117–18), draws the conclusion that ‘totalitarianism represents an antipolitics in the same way that the unilateral domination of economy does; both are antidemocratic in denying the differences among power, knowledge, and law’ (ibid., p. 131). It is worth stressing, however, that, according to Howard, Marx himself is guilty of contributing to a totalitarian ideology (ibid., p. 117, 131).
- 24.
It is worth reading here C. B. Macpherson’s well-known monograph The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism: Hobbes to Locke (1964, especially Part V).
- 25.
This is the case with Kant’s normative legal theory as well, since, according to the principles dictated by reason, independence in terms of property ownership is an a priori principle for a lawful state. Kant (1991, p. 78) states:
The only qualification required by a citizen is that he must be his own master (sui iuris), and must have some property (which can include any skill, trade, fine art or science) to support himself. In cases where he must earn his living from others, he must earn it only by selling that which is his, and not by allowing others to make use of him … . The number of those entitled to vote on matters of legislation must be calculated purely from the number of property owners, not from the size of their properties.
- 26.
As Bensaïd (2007, p. 79) points out, the pre-communist Marxian approach to the question of poverty as a precondition for the establishment of a democratic polity is also linked with those radical ideas about property advanced in seventeenth-century England by the Levellers.
To be fair, however, these ideas are related to the extended notion of property Locke himself had theorised, according to which a person is a proprietor not just of material goods that he appropriates with his labour, but also of his personality. Nevertheless, we should not downgrade the critical issue that the notion of citizenship in the full sense of the word, according to Locke’s classical liberalism, corresponds exclusively to proprietors in the strict—that is, the material—sense of the term.
- 27.
Rousseau (1997, p. 78n).
- 28.
Hegel (1991, §207, Addition).
- 29.
Ibid., §244.
- 30.
Ibid., §258 (Addition).
- 31.
Sitton (1989, p. 39) also shows this clearly in relation to the right to vote in the Marxian polity: ‘For Marx “suffrage” is not merely voting and then a return to one’s civil concerns. Marx argued that to be a member of the state is to take a genuine interest in deliberating on matters of common concern, to regard the universal interest as one’s particular interest.’
- 32.
Marx, Contribution to Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Law. Introduction, in Marx–Engels, Collected Works, vol. 3, p. 186.
- 33.
This is, for example, Thomas’ s (1994, pp. 40–9) analytical perspective. According to Thomas , the Marxian view of the poor is pre-Hegelian and romantic, falling behind the Jacobin one, as long as it expresses a deification of the poor and their social condition, whereas the Jacobins insisted on the need for education.
- 34.
Isabelle Garo (2001, pp. 95–9), while analysing Marx’s approach to civil society, draws attention to a strange absence; following Garo, discussion of the question of poverty is in fact missing from the pages of the 1843 Manuscript.
- 35.
As we are correctly reminded by Lubasz (1976, p. 31), according to the Marxian critique of the existing order of things, ‘as outsiders to civil society the poor have been deprived not only of property rights, but of social and political rights as well’.
- 36.
Arendt (1977, p. 62).
- 37.
Ibid., p. 62.
- 38.
See also Book II, Chap. XI of Rousseau’s Du Contrat Social (1997, p. 78).
- 39.
Arendt (1977, p. 62).
- 40.
Hannah Arendt, by juxtaposing schematically freedom and abundance as aims of revolution, misses the point of the dialectical relation between the social and political question as posed especially in Marx’s theory of revolution and politics. Arendt (1977, p. 64) argues as follows:
Thus the role of revolution was no longer to liberate men from the oppression of their fellow men, let alone to found freedom, but to liberate the life process of society from the fetters of scarcity so that it could swell into a stream of abundance. Not freedom but abundance became now the aim of revolution.
- 41.
Sitton (1989, pp. 41–2) is accurate here:
There is a specter haunting the Critique, the specter of Aristotle. … In the Critique Marx agreed with Aristotle that the life proper to a human being, the life in which his essence is realized, is political life, which for Marx meant participation in the universality of the state.
In a similar vein, though without specific reference to the Marxian ‘true democracy’, D. J. Depew (1992, p. 61) emphasises the impact of direct participatory democracy on Marx’s theory of the state as presented in the 1843 Manuscript:
Marx certainly does anticipate a modern state that is the heir of ancient participatory democracy … . Direct democracy – he argues – rather than Hegel’s elaborate pastiche is indeed the essence (Wesen) of the state precisely because it is not something separable from the lives of the citizens.
- 42.
Garo (2001, p. 103).
- 43.
Focusing on the ‘institutional dimensions of future society’ as suggested by the young Marx, Leopold (2007, pp. 245–54) highlights participation in political life, administration by the people and not by a privileged group (bureaucracy), and the approval of some sort of ‘popular delegacy’.
- 44.
‘Open-ended’ does not mean indeterminate. Castoriadis (2013 [1994], p. 34) correctly notes at this point, while commenting on Athenian democracy, that ‘democracy [is] not indeterminacy; it’s explicit self-institution. It’s the act of saying, as the Athenians said, edoxe tē boulē kai tō dēmō: “It appeared to be good to the Council and to the Assembly of the people,” or, as is said in some modern Constitutions, “sovereignty belongs to the people”.’
For his part, and within his own conceptual frame of reference, Lefort defends indeterminacy as the fundamental feature of democracy in its opposition to totalitarianism (1988, especially pp. 16–20). According to Lefort, ‘the important point is that democracy is instituted and sustained by the dissolution of the markers of certainty. It inaugurates a history in which people experience a fundamental indeterminacy as to the basis of power, law and knowledge, and as to the basis of relation between self and other, at every level of social life’ (ibid., p. 19).
- 45.
At this point it is worth quoting the following comment on autonomy by Castoriadis (1991 [1988], p. 164):
Autonomy does not consist in acting according to a law discovered in an immutable Reason and given once and for all. It is the unlimited self-questioning about the law and its foundations as well as the capacity, in light of this interrogation, to make, to do and to institute (therefore also, to say). Autonomy is the reflective activity of a reason creating itself in an endless movement, both as individual and social Reason.
- 46.
The stimulating analysis by Paul Thomas (1994, especially pp. 6–17, 51–85) moves in a similar direction. As Henri Lefebvre (1982, p. 138) put it:
According to Marx, there is no such thing as ‘true democracy’. To him the sense of democracy is that it discloses the truth of politics. He sees it not as a system but as a process which comes down essentially to a struggle for democracy. The latter is never completed because democracy can always be carried forward or forced back. The purpose of the struggle is to go beyond democracy and beyond the democratic state, to build a society without state power.
- 47.
In my view, there is no doubt that Marx is conscious of the fact that, as Castoriadis correctly recalled and pointed out in our times (1997 [1983], p. 277), ‘the Greek polis is not a “State” in the modern sense’. For the Marx of democracy, the polis of the Athenian demos should be considered a political community and not a mere state power mechanism.
- 48.
This is the (mis)interpretation of the Marxian theory of politics and democracy that we get, for example, from Megill (2002, pp. 57–9). Taking for granted that ‘Marx called for and predicted the disappearance of politics and of what he called “political state”’ (ibid., p. 57), Megill also admits that ‘in some sense politics remains’ in the Marx of the early 1840s. He finally reaches the confusing conclusion that ‘we are left not quite knowing what Marx’s position concerning politics and the state actually was in 1843’ (ibid., p. 101)! On the same issue, Colletti (1975, p. 44) clearly refuses to make a substantial distinction between state and politics and argues as follows: ‘It is wholly appropriate that this should be the conclusion of Marx’s argument in the Critique: the suppression of politics and the extinction of the state.’
- 49.
See the interesting analysis by Lacharrière (1963, pp. 177–80).
- 50.
Sitton (1989, p. 41) accurately notes: ‘From the beginning Marx’s conception [of democracy] is distinct from the anarchists. “Democracy” is not anarchy; it is the end of the “representative” state, an institution standing in a superior relation to society as the embodiment of unity, community, and universality.’ Cornelius Castoriadis (2013 [1994], p. 7) refers critically to and distances himself from the ‘bad anarcho-Marxist utopia [in terms of which] one day individuals will act spontaneously in a social way, [as] there will be no need for coercion, etc., and there will not even be a need to make collective decisions’.
- 51.
Abensour (2011, in particular pp. 62ff.).
- 52.
Castoriadis analyses this issue in a similar vein, while referring to the Greek polis: ‘Did the Greek politai create the polis or the polis the politai? This is a meaningless question precisely because the polis could only have been created by the action of human beings who were by the same token transforming themselves into politai’ (2005 [1996], p. 186).
- 53.
Arendt (1998, pp. 44–5).
- 54.
Engels, Socialism: Utopian and Scientific, in Marx–Engels, Collected Works, vol. 24, p. 292.
- 55.
Sitton (1989, pp. 13–22) tends to the opposite of what I argue here, when he says: ‘As is universally acknowledged, Marx’s notion of the transcendence of the state originated in the work of Saint-Simon.’ However, he also notes: ‘The exact relation between Saint-Simon’s political perspective and the ideas of Marx has been rarely explored’ (ibid., p. 13). However, according to Levine (1988, pp. 240, 243–8), Marx was a Rousseauist and not a Saint-Simonist or a Babouvist, as was the case, in Levine’s view, with Engels and Lenin. Levine argues that Marx does not support the replacement of politics with the administration of things; rooted in the democratic tradition, Marx’s theory of politics ‘was an attempt to extend the notion of citizenship over socially necessary labor’ (ibid., p. 247).
- 56.
See Renault’s comment (2001, p. 31) in Balibar and Raulet (2001). Renault makes a distinction between the suppression and the immersion of the state in society, pointing out that, according to Marx, ‘true democracy’ denotes not the suppression but the immersion [Untergehen] of the state in society, where the law as the self-legislated will of the people exists and rules. On the same issue, Kain (1991, p. 37), ignoring the difference between politics and political state—in other words, equating politics and political state—is led to the incorrect conclusion that, according to Marx, ‘the political state must be aufgehoben, transcended and preserved, not simply negated’.
- 57.
I emphasise the word struggle, without ignoring the following remark made by Castoriadis (2013 [1994], p. 33):
I don’t believe that there is a natural bent of human societies toward heteronomy, not toward democracy. There is a natural bent to seek an origin and a guarantee for meaning elsewhere than in people’s activity: in transcendent sources or in the ancestors, or – the Friedrich von Hayek version – in the divine operation of Darwinism through the market … .
- 58.
Aristotle , Nicomachean Ethics , 1140a1–22.
- 59.
Arendt (1998, p. 230).
- 60.
Aristotle, Eudemian Ethics, 1216b17–19.
- 61.
Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, 1094a25ff.
- 62.
Ibid., 1095a15ff., 1097a15ff.
- 63.
At this point it is worth recalling that, following Castoriadis (2003 [1996], pp. 353–4), the true end of politics is not happiness (eudaimonia), a strictly private affair, but common good, which is freedom in the sense of individual and collective autonomy.
- 64.
From her point of view, Arendt (1998, p. 60), argues that, in continuity with Christian morality, which considered that ‘political responsibility constituted first of all a burden’, Marx was looking forward to the abolition of the public sphere. Arendt argues:
It is surprising that this attitude should have survived into the secular modern age to such an extent that Karl Marx, who in this as in other respects only summed up, conceptualized, and transformed into a program the underlying assumptions of two hundred years of modernity, could eventually predict and hope for the ‘withering away’ of the whole public realm.
- 65.
Aristotle , Nicomachean Ethics , 1099b30–33.
- 66.
Marx and Engels, The German Ideology, in Marx–Engels, Collected Works, vol. 5, p. 49.
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Chrysis, A. (2018). Theoretical Conclusions and Political Perspectives. In: ‘True Democracy’ as a Prelude to Communism. Political Philosophy and Public Purpose. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-57541-4_6
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