marxist theory of democracy assignment

Chapter: 11th Political Science : Chapter 5 : Democracy

Marxist Theory of Democracy

The Marxist theory views the democracy in the social context of class analysis during the era of industrial revolution. Society was divided into two classes viz: capitalists or owners of the property are called as ‘bourgeois’ and the working class is called as ‘proletariat’. The Marxist theory of Democracy held the political position to always challenge the dominance of capitalists and against the exploitations of working class. The Marxist theory of democracy did not support electoral rights, but strongly supported economic rights and the creation of ‘socialist democracy’.

The Marxist theory of Democracy favoured the collapse of capitalism and calls for the revolutionary transformation of the society. It believes that political power is possible only through the ideals of ‘socialism’; and is based on the equal distribution of economic power against the unequal wealth and ownership of production. The Marxists democrats and socialists believe in the removal of class differences and privileges are the necessary step to freedom, equal status and democracy.

The socialists believed that with universal education people can govern themselves. The Marxist theory criticises the falseness of the liberal democracies are thus seen as ‘capitalist’ or ‘bourgeois’ democracies which are manipulated and controlled by the entrenched power of ruling class. The Marxist theory emphasises the importance of economic factor as the key factor for the class divisions and ownership and the control of the means of production. However the Marxists democrats in Europe support the strong role of electoral democracy to establish a peaceful, legal and democratic road to socialism.

Democratic Marxists view (a) State as an agency of anti-people crimes and considered the abolition of standing army and instituting a citizen’s militia, Implement the election of all officials subjecting them to recall, (c) Totally remove the political attribute of police, (d) Eliminate the monarchy.

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In This Article Expand or collapse the "in this article" section Marx's Political Thought

Introduction.

• Selections of Marx’s Early Writings
• Selections of Marx’s Mature Writings
• Biographies of Marx
• Introductory Overviews of Marx’s Thought
• More Substantial Studies of Marx’s Thought
• Classical Marxist Developments of Marxism
• The Present as a Historical Problem: Historical Materialism
• Studies of Marx’s Critique of Political Economy
• Applying Marx’s Critique of Political Economy
• Overviews of Marx’s Politics
• Marx’s Political Practice
• The State Form
• Social Class
• Environmental Politics
• Trade Unionism
• Engagements with Liberal Political Philosophy: Marx’s Ethics
• Freedom, Alienation, and Human Nature
• Imperialism and Colonialism
• Marxism and Nationalism
• Women’s Oppression: From Classical Marxism to Second Wave Feminism
• Marxism and Women’s Oppression: Contemporary Contributions
• Theorizing Racism
• Marxism and Religion
• Studies of Engels’s Thought
• Theorizing Stalinism

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• Aristotle's Political Thought
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Marx's Political Thought by Paul Blackledge LAST REVIEWED: 26 May 2016 LAST MODIFIED: 26 May 2016 DOI: 10.1093/obo/9780199756223-0171

Karl Marx (b. 1818–d. 1883) is undoubtedly one of the most important and influential thinkers of the modern period. Nevertheless, although much of what he wrote has been sedimented into contemporary culture, many of his ideas, especially his political ideas, are far too scandalous ever to be fully incorporated into academic common sense. Part of the reason for this is that his legacy has consistently been attacked and misrepresented by individuals and groups who are, so to speak, on the other side of the barricades. At a much more interesting level, however, academic incomprehension of Marx’s thought is rooted in a structural gap between his totalizing methodology and academia’s tendency to fragment along disciplinary and sub-disciplinary lines. It is because Marx’s thought marks a profound break with this standpoint that any serious attempt to map his ideas onto the categories of modern academic thought will be fraught with dangers. Indeed, the deeply historical and revolutionary character of Marx’s thought makes it almost unintelligible from the essentially static perspective of modern theory. It is not that modern theory does not recognize change; it is rather that it tends to conceive it in effectively reformist terms: change is fixed within boundaries set by more-or-less naturalized capitalist social relations. Any attempt to write a study of Marx’s supposed political theory must therefore confront the problem that his thought cannot be fully incorporated within this standpoint. He was neither an economist nor a sociologist nor a political theorist, but his revolutionary theory involves the sublation of these (and more) categories into a greater whole. Consequently, though Marx’s thought can be said to have economic, political, and sociological, etc., dimensions, it cannot be reduced to an amalgam of these approaches, and critics should be wary of Procrustean attempts to fit aspects of his work into one or other academic sub-discipline, or indeed to reduce his conception of totality to a form of inter- or multi-disciplinarity. Specifically, whereas modern political theory tends to treat politics as a universal characteristic of human communities, Marx insists that it is a historical science: states, ideology, and law are aspects of broader superstructural relations that function to fix and reproduce minority rule within class-divided societies. Politics, from this perspective, is best understood as an epiphenomenon of the relations of production by which one class maintains its control over humanity’s productive interaction with nature: it has a beginning with the emergence of class societies, hopefully an end with what Marx calls the communist closure of humanity’s “pre-history,” and can only properly be understood by those involved in the struggle to overcome the conditions of its existence.

There are numerous Marxist journals available in the Anglophone world, each catering in differing degrees to academic and activist audiences from perspectives rooted in Marx’s legacy. The oldest continuously published journal on the English-speaking Marxist left is Science and Society , which was launched at the height of the “Popular Front” in 1936. Just over a decade later Monthly Review was launched in much less propitious circumstances at the beginning of the Cold War—and its editors faced the wrath of McCarthyism in the 1950s. Both journals were and continue to be open and independent vehicles of debate and analysis on the Marxist left. New Left Review , International Socialism , New Politics and Socialist Register were launched at the time of the British and American New Lefts at the turn of the 1960s and have continued publication as distinctive voices on the left long after the collapse of the movement that gave them life. Critique and Capital and Class came into being more than a decade later to cater to a new audience of ex-students who had been radicalized in the 1960s and subsequently moved into the academy. As the left went on the defensive in the 1980s, new journals such Capitalism Nature Socialism , Rethinking Marxism , Socialism and Democracy , and Studies in Marxism were launched to response to the crisis of Marxism as both social democracy and Stalinism retreated before neoliberal capitalism. More recently, since its launch in 1997 Historical Materialism has become an important voice on the academic Marxist left.

Capital & Class .

Launched in 1977 by the Conference of Socialist Economists in the United Kingdom. The initial focus of Capital and Class was, as its title suggests, on economic issues. Subsequently, however, it has expanded its remit to include articles on all aspects of Marxist theory.

Capitalism Nature Socialism .

Launched in 1988 by academics and activists in California, Capitalism Nature Socialism reflected a growing awareness that the emerging environmental crisis was a capitalist phenomenon best understood in terms drawn from but also extending Marx’s critique of political economy.

Launched in 1973 by Hillel Ticktin and others around him at Glasgow University, Critique is renowned for its analysis of Stalinism as a new and dysfunctional form of class rule and capitalism as an endemically crisis-prone system.

Historical Materialism .

Launched in 1997 by British activists and academics many of whom were affiliated with the Socialist Workers Party, Historical Materialism was intended to be, and has largely succeeded in becoming, the leading Anglophone forum for debate and theoretical innovation on the academic Marxist left.

International Socialism .

Launched in 1960 International Socialism was initially associated with a heterodox Trotskyist attempt by Tony Cliff and Michael Kidron to reorient the revolutionary left to the new postwar realities through, most importantly, their writings on Soviet state capitalism, the permanent arms economy as an explanation for the postwar boom, and “deflected permanent revolution” in the Third World. It has subsequently continued its focus on raising theory to the level of revolutionary practice and is linked to the British Socialist Workers Party.

Monthly Review .

Launched in 1949 by independent Marxists in New York, Monthly Review became associated most importantly with the work on modern capitalism by Paul Baran and Paul Sweey and more recently with John Bellamy Foster’s contribution to a Marxist analysis of the environmental crisis.

New Left Review .

Launched in 1960 by the merger of the two British New Left journals, Universities and Left Review and New Reasoner, New Left Review was initially conceived as a forum for activist debate. Very quickly thereafter it morphed into an austere academic journal under the auspices of Perry Anderson, Tom Nairn, and Robin Blackburn and subsequently played a key role as gatekeeper of ideas from the Continental left to the Anglophone world. After a brief flirtation with Trotskyism in the 1970s, NLR has since become associated with Anderson’s pessimistic anti-capitalism.

New Politics .

Launched in 1961 by Julius and Phyllis Jacobson, New Politics is associated with Third Camp politics. This standpoint was most famously articulated in an essay first published in the journal in the journal in 1962: Hal Draper’s “The Two Souls of Socialism.” According to Draper, Marx’s ultra-democratic politics is best understood as a radical alternative to the statism of both Stalinism and social democracy which have more in common with each other than they do with his conception of socialism.

Rethinking Marxism .

Launched in 1988 by academics at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, Rethinking Marxism was intended to confront the crisis of the left in the 1980s by literally rethinking Marxism in light not only of the retreat of the left over the 1980s but also of subsequent theoretical innovations beyond Marxism.

Science and Society .

Launched in 1936 by left intellectuals close to or affiliated with the American Communist Party, Science and Society has nevertheless maintained itself as an independent and non-sectarian vehicle for debate on the Marxist left.

Socialism and Democracy .

Launched in 1985 by academics and activists linked to the City University of New York, the initial editorial of Socialism and Democracy framed its future orientation to act as an arena of debate around a dual problematic: if modernization was to mean developing society as a whole then it needed to be through some form of socialism; while socialism and democracy are best understood not as alternatives but rather as two aspects of the same thing.

Socialist Register .

Launched in 1964 on the basis of disagreements about the orientation of New Left Review , Socialist Register saw itself as continuing the socialist humanism associated with the New Reasoner tradition of the original New Left Review synthesis. It is an annual whose center of gravity has moved from England to Canada and the USA.

Studies in Marxism .

Launched in 1993, Studies in Marxism is the in-house journal of the Marxism Specialist Group of the British Political Studies Association.

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Marxism and Democracy

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Some of the more significant contributions to social theory in the sixties and seventies were made by Marxists who endeavored to “bring the state back in” to considerations of both the nature of the structure of social relations and to prospects for historical transformation. Following the large divisions of this period between structuralism, critical theory and “plain” Marxism (the approach according to which the economic infrastructure determined, in rough correspondence, the crucial institutions of the superstructure), the precise location of the state in social relations, its effectivity and its vulnerability to protest and reform were the crucial issues in dispute. Notwithstanding these differences, Marxist theory remained largely immune to some of the major debates that had animated the socialist and working-class movements of the nineteenth century, especially the question of democracy. No doubt this glaring omission can be ascribed in a significant measure to the certainties of the post-Bolshevik left which lingered throughout the postwar period, at least until the collapse of “Eurocommunism” in the late seventies. For social democrats the body of liberal democracy was to be incorporated into the new socialist societies.

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Norberto Bobbio, The Future of Democracy (London and Minneapolis: Polity Press and University of Minnesota Press, 1987); Which Socialism , loc. cit.

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Adam Przeworski, Capitalism and Social Democracy (London and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1985).

Book   Google Scholar  

Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy (London: Verso Books, 1986).

Louis Althusser, “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses” in Lenin and Philosophy (London: New Left Books, 1971)

Nicos Poulantzas, State, Power, Socialism (London, New Left Books, 1978).

Eduard Bernstein, Evolutionary Socialism (New York: Schocken Books, 1961).

Rosa Luxemburg, ‘Social Reform and Revolution’ in Dick Howard (ed.), Selected Political Writings (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1971).

Carl Schmitt, Crisis of Parliamentary Democracy , translated by Ellen Kennedy (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1988), p. 59–60.

For a classic statement of the Leninist fear of bureaucracy in the transitional state see Leon Trotsky, The New Course (1923).

For an excellent introduction to the left-communist tendency see Serge Bricanier (ed.), Pannakoek and the Workers Councils (St Louis: Telos Press, 1975).

John Maynard Keynes, The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1969).

See especially C. Wright Mills, “The New Left” in Power, Politics and People (New York: Oxford University Press, 1963).

SDS, The Port Huron Statement (New York, 1962)

James Miller, Democracy in the Streets (New York: Simon and Shuster, 1987). Hayden drafted the Statement, integrating sections written by others on the committee.

For a good summary of the politics of the European New Left, see George Kastiaficas, The Imagination of the New Left: A global analysis of 1968 (Boston: South End Press, 1987).

For the best account of the left critique of the PCI position and of the program of the radical workers’ movement in Italy, see Joann Barkan, Visions of Emancipation (New York: Praeger Publishers, 1984).

Andre Gorz, Strategy for Labor (Boston: Beacon Press, 1967)

Serge Mallet, The New Left (London: Spearman Press, 1975).

Jean Baudrillard, In the Shadow of Silent Majorities (New York: Secret Agents Series, Semio-Text, 1986).

See David Held, Models of Democracy (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 1987), Chapter 5.

See Ernst Bloch, Principle of Hope (3 volumes) (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1986), Volume 1.

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Aronowitz, S. (1990). Marxism and Democracy. In: The Crisis in Historical Materialism. Language, Discourse, Society. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-20696-4_9

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MIA   >  Archive   >  Draper

Marx on Democratic Forms of Government

From Socialist Register 1974 , pp. 101–124. The article is available in PDF format at Socialist Register Website . Starred [*] notes are footnotes, the others give sources. Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive . Proofread by Zdravko Saveski (June 2010).

THIS is one chapter in a work on Karl Marx’s Theory of Revolution which will be published in the near future. Many questions connected with the subject of this chapter and which are only briefly mentioned here are of course discussed in detail in other parts of the work.

In a general way, Marx’s socialism (communism) as a political programme may be most quickly defined, from the Marxist standpoint, as the complete democratization of society, not merely of political forms. [1*] But the democratic movement of the 19th century began by putting the struggle for advanced political forms in the forefront; and so did Marx, in a different programmatic context. For Marx, the fight for democratic forms of government – democratization in the state – was a leading edge of the socialist effort; not its be-all and end-all but an integral part of it all.

Throughout the history of the socialist/communist movements, one of the persistent problems has been to establish the relation, in theory and practice, between the struggle for socialism and for democracy (or democratic rights), between socialist issues and democratic issues. Every distinctive socialist current or school has had its own characteristic answer to this problem. On one extreme end of the spectrum is the view (held consciously in theory or expressed in practice) which puts the advocacy of democratic forms in the forefront, for their own sake, and subjoins the advocacy of socialistic ideas as an appurtenance. (From the Marxist standpoint, this is merely the leftmost wing of bourgeois-democratic liberalism extruding into the socialist spectrum.) On the other extreme is the type of radical ideology which counterposes socialistic ideas – in the sense of anti-capitalist views – against concern with democratic struggles, considering the latter as unimportant or harmful. Every conceivable mixture of the two approaches has cropped up too, but they all form a single family insofar as they are mixtures , (For example: in the tension between socialist aims and democratic means, is your concern 50–50, 60–40, 30–70, etc.?)

Marx’s approach is qualitatively different from this sort of eclecticism, and does not attempt to establish a sliding scale of concern with the two sides of the duality. For him, the task of theory is to integrate the two objectively. The characteristic answer to the problem emerging from Marx’s theory was already heralded in his notebook critique of Hegel’s philosophy of right [2] , where he sought to show that “true democracy” requires a new social content – socialism; and it will be rounded off with his analysis of the Paris commune, which showed that a state with a new social content entailed truly democratic forms. Marx's theory moves in the direction of defining consistent democracy in socialist terms, and consistent socialism in democratic terms . The task of theory, then, is not to adjudicate a clash between the two considerations (a hopeless job once the problem is seen in that light), but rather to grasp the social dynamics of the situation under which the apparent contradiction between the two is resolved.

Marx did not work this out simply within his skull; progress toward a solution came only in the course of the first historical experience which he went through in which this problem was concretely posed. This was the period of the 1848–9 revolution, when democratic demands and socialist aims seemed to be at swords’ point. One of the results was his so-called theory of permanent revolution: we will follow this process in some detail in a later part, and the problem will remain with us throughout.  

Against “The Old Thesis”

From the start there was the problem of self-styled radicals who held the same attitude of hostility and contempt for democratic forms that emanated from the old régime, though presumably from an opposite direction. This is an aspect of the almost unanimous anti-democracy of pre-Marxist socialism. [3] When Marx referred to it in The German Ideology , he already called it contemptuousIy “the old thesis”: “The old thesis, which has often been put forward both by revolutionaries and reactionaries, that in a democracy individuals only exercise their sovereignty for a moment, and then at once retreat from their rule ...” [4] (The polemic here is against the anarchoid Stirner.) This was only one favourite anti-democratic argument among many, one which flourishes today as lustily as two centuries ago. Marx gave them all short shrift, in the apparent belief (wrong, as it turned out) that they were simply vestiges of the past and had no future. [2*]

This rejection of anything connected with bourgeois democracy would later become associated mainly with ultra-left radicalism, but its beginnings were another matter. Engels described a case in a letter to Marx from Paris, where he was trying to work with one K.L. Bernays, an editor of the Paris Vorwärts , the German émigré paper. Bernays insists on writing anti-bourgeois articles for a Berlin paper which is anti-bourgeois from a reactionary (absolutist) standpoint.

“He writes in the Berliner Zeitungs-Halle and rejoices like a child to see his soi-disant communist expectorations against the bourgeoisie printed there. Naturally the editors and the censorship let stand whatever is simply against the bourgeois and strike out the few allusions that could be offensive to themselves too. He rails against the jury system, ‘bourgeois freedom of the press’, the representative system, etc. I explain to him that this means working literally pour le roi de Prusse and indirectly against our party ... I make clear that the Zeitungs-Halle is in the pay of the government ...” [6]

“Working pour le roi de Prusse [for the king of Prussia]” meant, in French idiom, working for nothing; but Engels argued that Bernays was unwittingly working for the Prussian regime literally, since publishing attacks on democratic institutions in absolutist Prussia only helped the regime discredit the democratic movement. But, continued Engels, Bernays, a-gush with sentimentality, could understand none of this; he could not comprehend, he said, an approach which went easy on people he had always hated, viz. the bourgeoisie. Engels added:

“I have read umpteen of these Paris-datelined articles [by Bernays]; they are on ne peut plus [to the fullest extent possible] in the interest of the government and in the style of True-Socialism.”

Marx and Engels’ approach to the question of democratic forms (rights, liberties, institutions, etc.) was completely different. The reason a type like Bernays could not comprehend their approach was that his socialism, such as it was, was merely anti-capitalist and not pro-proletarian; it was not a theory about a class movement but simply a predilection for a certain social reorganization. It had nothing to do with putting power in the hands of the masses of people, but rather looked to any men of good will who wanted to make the changes envisaged. For such a man, popular control over government could be a danger, since the Stupid Masses might well be more hostile to his schemes than enlightened souls.

Popular control over government: in the middle of the 19th century it was much clearer than it is today that the problem of democracy was the effective establishment of full popular control over government, for the simple reason that no government (except perhaps the American) pretended that this happy state of affairs already existed. It had not yet become necessary or fashionable to redefine democracy out of existence; it was therefore quite common, in those benighted days, for enemies of popular sovereignty to attack the democratic idea openly and forthrightly, instead of embracing it in a crushing vice. For the “democratic extremist,” popular control meant unlimited popular control, the elimination of all juridical, structural and socio-economic restraints on or distortions of popular control from below. For Marx, this is why popular control pointed to socialism.

But in a country which had not yet had its 1789, like Germany, the extension of popular control still had to pass through its bourgeois phase; under semi-feudal absolutism, the bourgeoisie was a part of the “popular masses” too, even if a limited and privileged part. For Marx, the problem resolved itself into this: how to pass through this phase – through and out – in such a way as to shift power to the underlying working strata of the population as expeditiously as possible. This is what will define the problem of the “permanent revolution”.

At any rate, from the standpoint of this theoretical approach Bernays’ inability to see more than his “hatred” of the bourgeois system did not mean that he hated the bourgeoisie more than Marx; it was a reflection of his non-class point of view. Marx did not have to weigh “hatred of the bourgeoisie” against the advantages of bourgeois democracy – an impossible calculus. It was rather a matter of making a class analysis of the elements of bourgeois democracy: sorting out what was specifically bourgeois (e.g. property qualifications for voting) from what furthered the widest extension of popular control. [3*]  

For Revolution and Democracy

The revolutions of 1848-9 temporarily established bourgeois-democratic governments in both France and Germany, the two countries with which Marx was mainly concerned. These governments were thoroughly bourgeois and more or less democratic as compared with the previous regimes; they therefore raised innumerable concrete problems of what political forms should clothe democratization. In the case of Germany, Marx and Engels’ articles in their Neue Rheinische Zeitung had to deal with many problems day by day, not merely in historical hindsight; hence they took up smaller-scale questions than are usually found in their synoptic analyses of the events in France.

The overall criterion is: what will maximize the influence exercised from below by the masses-in-movement, on the political forces above? These political forces were two above all: the monarchist regime and its government, which was still the executive, though now on the defensive; and the representatives of the people in the assemblies established by the revolutionary upsurge. The latter represented the potentiality of “popular sovereignty”, i.e. democratic control by the people. But when the National Assembly, elected from the various German states, met in Frankfurt on 18 May, it showed that the bourgeois-democratic delegates shrank from a clash with the monarchy. In the first issue of the Neue Rheinische Zeitung , on 1 June, Engels summarized the situation:

“Since two weeks ago, Germany has a national constituent assembly which is the product of a vote by the whole German people.

“The German people had won its sovereignty in the streets of almost all the big and little cities of the country, especially on the barricades of Vienna and Berlin. It had exercised this sovereignty in the elections for the National Assembly.

“The first act of the National Assembly had to be to proclaim this sovereignty of the German people loudly and publicly.

“Its second act had to be to work out a German constitution on the basis of the sovereignty of the people, and to get rid of everything in the actually existing state of affairs in Germany which contradicts the principle of the sovereignty of the people.

“All during its session it had to take the necessary measures to thwart all efforts by the reaction, to maintain the revolutionary grounds on which it stands, to secure the revolution’s conquest, the sovereignty of the people, against all attacks.

“The German National Assembly has now already held a dozen sessions and has done nothing of all this.” [7]

Instead, continued Engels, the authorities still violate the rights of citizens with impunity, while the Assembly pays more attention to its dinner hours than to its democratic tasks. [8]

As the year wore on, even the Frankfurt “Left”, the consciously liberal wing, showed what little stomach it had for a fight with the real state power headed by the Crown. In a later article on the assembly’s deliberations, Engels quotes the liberal deputy Ruge [4*] as an example of empty rhetoric: “We do not want to quarrel, gentlemen,” Ruge told the Assembly, “over whether we aim at a democratic monarchy, a democratized monarchy [!] or a pure democracy; on the whole we want the same thing , liberty, popular liberty, the rule of the people!” (The emphasis and interpolated exclamation are by Engels.) With much disgust Engels comments that this speaks volumes about a so-called Left which says it wants the same thing as the Right, and “Which forgets everything as soon as it hears a couple of hollow catchwords like ‘popular liberty’ and ‘rule of the people’.” [10]

The difference between hollow rhetoric about “liberty” and a real revolutionary-democratic struggle could only be spelled out in terms of concrete issues. One of the most elementary and basic was the issue that had been the first subject of Marx’s political pen, freedom of the the press. From the first number of the NRZ Marx and Engels made this a major battle-cry. [11]

The government, wrote Marx, is trying to apply the Penal Code provisions against so-called “slander” in order to prevent any criticism of the régime. Indeed, if a paper protests that the government is curbing freedom of the press, that is punishable as a “slander” even if it is true. [5*] This application of the Penal Code means

“the real, definitive finish-blow to the 19th of March [the revolution], to the clubs, and to freedom of the press! What is a club without freedom of speech? And what is freedom of speech with §§ 367, 368, 370 of the Penal Code? And what is the 19th of March without clubs and freedom of speech?” [13]

As this already indicates, freedom of the press could hardly be separated from freedom of expression in all its forms. The whole existence of the Neue Rheinische Zeitung was a battle for survival against government suppression. Haled into court, Marx, Engels and others of the group were acquitted by a Cologne jury, after defence speeches that were mainly political expositions; but when the counterrevolution gained confidence, the paper was suppressed by simple decree. In the court case – as Engels wrote much later – they attacked “the monstrous notion that anyone can place himself outside the common law by maintaining an opinion. This is the pure police-state ...” [14]

As the NRZ began its third week, Engels asked what the revolution had won, besides bringing the big bourgeoisie to governmental power: “It gave the people the weapon of freedom of the press without security-bonds, the right of organization [6*] , and partly at least also the material weapon, the musket,” he answered. [15] Marx and Engels saw freedom of the press as a barometer of governmental arbitrariness, among other things. When the Hansemann ministry submitted an “interim law” to regulate the press, i.e. to muzzle criticism, Marx wrote that “in short, we again meet the most classic monuments to the Napoleonic despotism over the press”, and –

“From the day this law goes into effect, government officials can with impunity commit any arbitrary act, any tyranny, any illegality; they can calmly administer or permit floggings, or make arrests, or hold without trial; the only effective control, the press, is rendered ineffectual. On the day this law goes into effect, the bureaucracy can hold a celebration: it becomes more powerful and unrestrained, stronger than it was before March.” [16]

As the government tried “to cheat the revolution of its democratic fruits” [17] , the NRZ was the loudest voice raised in Germany. In July the government suppressed the club movement in two cities; Engels warned:

“You believe you have finished with the police-state? Delusion! – You believe you possess the right of free assembly, freedom of the press, arming of the people, and other fine slogans that were shouted from the March barricades? Delusion, nothing but delusion!” [18]

As the government was in process of chopping off the “democratic fruits” of the revolution, a militia bill was proposed which would restrict the rights of its citizen members to nearly nothing. Marx asked: What does this mean for the citizen militiaman?

“The worthy man has gotten arms and uniform on the condition of renouncing above all his prime political rights, the right to organize, etc. His task of protecting ‘constitutional liberty’ will be fulfilled in accordance with the ‘spirit of his destiny’ when he blindly executes the orders of the authorities, when he exchanges the customary civil liberty that was tolerated even under the absolute monarchy for the passive, will-less and self-less obedience of the soldier. A fine school in which to bring up the republicans of the future! ... What has our citizen been made into? A thing somewhere between a Prussian gendarme and an English constable ... Instead of disbanding the army into the people, wasn’t it an original idea to disband the people into the army?

“It is truly a bizarre spectacle, this transformation of constitutional phrases into Prussian realities .” [19]

The NRZ carried on other campaigns for democratic rights against government pressure, including the Frankfurt Left’s programme for “immediate establishment, proclamation and guarantee of the fundamental rights of the German people against all possible attacks by the individual governments [of the German states]”. It criticized the Assembly liberals for being too vague on the issue of direct suffrage versus indirect suffrage, and denounced all anti-democratic forms of elections. [20]

For Marx and Engels, the right of assembly also meant the right of the people to exercise pressure against their “own” representatives. This came into question when the right-wing press denounced the pressure put on the Prussian Assembly in Berlin by the presence of thousands at its deliberations. Marx wrote:

“The right of the democratic mass of the people to exert a moral influence on the attitude of the constituent assembly is an old revolutionary right of the people which, since the English and French revolutions, could not be dispensed with in any period of stormy action. It is to this right that history owes almost all energetic steps taken by such assemblies. If ... the fainthearted and philistine friends of ‘freedom of deliberations’ wail against it, the only basis they have is that they don’t want any energetic decisions taken anyway.”

This alleged “freedom of deliberations” is infringed, argued Marx, on the one side by the pressures from the existing state and its army, courts, etc. And likewise “the ‘freedom of deliberations’ is infringed by freedom of the press, by freedom of assembly and speech, by the right of the people to bear arms” on the other side, since these too exercise unwanted pressure on the representatives. Between the two species of “intimidation”, the representatives have only this choice: “Intimidation by the unarmed people or intimidation by the armed soldiery: let the Assembly choose.” [21]  

The Maximization of Democratic Control

But should a government permit activities, even such as are sanctified by democratic rights, which may result in its own overthrow? Marx and Engels’ answer was: If the exercise of the people’s rights endangers the government, then so much the worse for the government. Governments have a habit of believing that activities dangerous to them are infringements on “liberty”:– namely, their own “liberty” to exist. Marx did not believe that the people were called on to sacrifice their own rights in order to relieve the government’s problem:

“The ‘ Ministry of Action’ [Hansemann ministry] seems to espouse peculiar oriental-mystical notions, a kind of Moloch cult . In order to protect the ‘constitutional liberty’ of presidents, burgomasters, police chiefs [a long list of government officials follows here] ... in order to protect the ‘constitutional liberty’ of this elite of the nation, all the rest of the nation must let its constitutional liberties, up to and including personal liberty, die a bloody death as a sacrifice on the altar of the fatherland. Pends-toi, Figaro! Tu n’aurais pas inventé cela! ” [7*] [22]

The next day’s NRZ had a similar comment by Engels on another issue. A motion by the left liberal deputy Jacoby had proposed that the Assembly’s decisions have the force of law without anyone else’s consent: a crucial issue of the revolution. Deputy Berg had denounced this as the attempt by a parliamentary minority to win outside support, an attempt whose consequences “must lead to civil war”. But, replied Engels, the “outsiders” who must not be appealed to – who were they? “The voters, i.e. the people who make the legislative body.”

“In a word: Herr Berg’s principle would lead to the abolition of all political agitation. Agitation is nothing more than the application of representatives’ immunity, freedom of the press, right to organize – i.e. the liberties now juridically in existence in Prussia. Whether these liberties do or do not lead to civil war is not our concern; it is enough that they exist, and we shall see where it ‘leads’ if the attack on them continues.” [23]

A week later, the question came up again, on an even more fateful issue. Local Democratic Associations were being suppressed by the governments, first in Stuttgart and Heidelberg, now in Baden; this made a mockery of the Assembly’s phrases about the right to organize. “The basic condition [wrote Engels] of the free right of organization is that no association or society can be dissolved or prohibited by the police, that this can take place only as a result of a judicial verdict establishing the illegality of the association or of its acts and aims and punishing the authors of these acts.” [24]

What was the government’s ground?

“The motivations given for this new act of police violence are extremely edifying. The Associations wanted to affiliate to the organization of Democratic Associations for all Germany, set up by the Democratic Congress at Frankfurt. This congress ‘set a democratic republic as its goal’ (as if that is forbidden!) ‘and the means envisaged to attain this goal flow, among other things, from the sympathy expressed in those resolutions in favour of the agitators’ (since when is ‘sympathy’ an illegal ‘means’?) ...

“According to Herr Mathy [liberal Baden politician], the Associations in Baden are therefore responsible for the resolutions of the Central Committee [of the Democratic Associations] even if they have not put them into practice .”

Mathy had argued further that it “seems inadmissible and pernicious for the foundation of the constitution to be undermined and thus the whole state structure shaken by the Associations’ power”. Engels commented:

“The right to organize, Herr Mathy, exists precisely so that one can ‘undermine’ the constitution with impunity – in legal form, of course. And if the Associations’ power is greater than that of the state, so much the worse for the state!” [25]

Another vital issue on which the NRZ hit hard was a corollary of the “sovereignty of the people”, viz. the sovereignty of the Assembly elected by the people, as against the power of the government set up by the Crown. The revolution had given rise to two lines of power which were diverging, wrote Engels:

“The results of the revolution were, on one hand, the arming of the people, the right of organization, the de facto achievement of popular sovereignty; on the other, the maintenance of the monarchy and the Camphausen-Hansemann ministry, i.e. the government of the representatives of the big bourgeoisie.

“The revolution thus had two series of results which necessarily had to diverge. The people had been victorious, they had won freedoms of a decisively democratic nature; but the immediate ruling power passed not into their hands but into the big bourgeoisie’s.

“In short, the revolution was not completed.” [26]

Marx and Engels’ line was strongly for all power to the Assembly as the representation of popular sovereignty, as against the Assembly majority’s goal of a deal with the Crown. The Jacoby motion, previously mentioned, that the Assembly’s decisions should have the force of law without further ado, was a sine qua non . It would be incredible to other peoples, wrote Engels, that the German assembly had to debate a motion asserting that it is sovereign with respect to the government. “But we are in the land of the oak and linden, and so we should not be easily astonished by anything.” The Assembly was “irresolute, flabby and lackadaisical”. [27]

Marx presented the revolutionary-democratic proposal in terms of the concentration of both legislative and governmental (executive) power in the hands of the people’s elected representatives. The Radical wing of the Assembly, he wrote, was calling for a governmental executive “elected for a period determined by the National Assembly and responsible to it”. But that was not enough. This executive power must be selected out of the ranks of the Assembly itself, as was demanded by the left-wingers among the Radicals. Since the National Assembly was a constituent body – i.e. no constitution as yet existed – there could be no government except the Assembly itself: “it is the National Assembly itself that must govern”. [28] Above all, it must take the initiative away from the governments of the German states:

“A national constituent assembly must above all be an activist , revolutionary-activist assembly. The assembly in Frankfurt does parliamentary school-exercises and lets the governments act. Supposing that this learned council succeeds after the maturest deliberations in figuring out the best agenda and the best constitution, what were the good of the best agenda and the constitution if in the meantime the governments put the bayonet on the agenda?” [29]

This course was driven home as the NRZ analysed the Assembly debates. [30] If the Assembly declined to take over all the powers of the state, if in particular it was even deprived of the right to exercise control over the executive through its commissions of inquiry, then this amounted to “a renunciation of the sovereignty of the people.” [31] The issue of the deputies’ immunity from arrest by the government was one very concrete aspect of the question of sovereignty: the NRZ campaigned for full and unabridged immunity with no loopholes. [32]

But in fact, instead of the Assembly’s taking over executive power, it was the governmental power that used every means to strengthen itself. Marx used the Militia Bill as an example: the idea of a popular militia was converted into a plan for a bureaucratic force.

“Prussian perspicacity has nosed out that every new constitutional institution offers a most interesting occasion for new penal laws, new regulations, new disciplinary measures, new surveillance, new chicanery, and a new bureaucracy.” [33]

This reflects a leitmotiv of Marx’s attitude toward the problems of democratization: minimization of the executive power, the state bureaucracy – maximization of the weight in the governmental structure of the representative system. And not only in the period of revolution.  

Analysis of a Constitution

It was in the decade following the defeat of the 1848-9 revolutions that Marx wrote most extensively on specific problems of constitutional democratic forms. What emerged particularly was this principle: one of the chief marks of a truly democratic constitution was the degree to which it limited and restrained the independent scope of the executive power .

This follows naturally from the view that democracy is genuine insofar as it means popular control from below. Let us see how the point is made in a number of rather detailed criticisms which Marx made of particular constitutions.

The first such constitutional analysis by Marx, written in 1851, dealt with The Constitution of the French Republic Adopted November 4, 1848 . [8*] The main fraud in this constitution, repeatedly pointed out by Marx, is that it leaves room for its alleged democratic guarantees to be nullified by subsequent laws put through by the governmental power.

Here is his first example of the type of provision which pretends to establish a democratic right but vitiates itself by allowing for “exceptions made by law”.

“‘§ 3. The residence of everyone on French territory is inviolable – and it is not allowed to enter it otherwise than in the forms prescribed by law.’

“Observe here and throughout that the French constitution guarantees liberty, but always with the proviso of exceptions made by law , or which may STILL BE MADE!” [35]

Another provision ensures freedom of association, opinion, press, etc. but it adds, “The enjoyment of these rights has no other limit, than the equal rights of others, and the public safety”. Marx points to the last phrase as the joker:

“That the limitation made by the ‘public safety’, takes away the enjoyment of the right altogether, is clearly shewn by the following facts ... [Marx then cites what actually happened in France.]”

Again, the constitution says “The right of tuition is free.”

“Here the old joke is repeated. ‘Tuition is free’, but ‘under the conditions fixed by law’, and these are precisely the conditions that take away the freedom altogether.” [36]

And so on. Marx sums up the character of this constitution:

“... from beginning to end it is a mass of fine words, hiding a most treacherous design. From its very wording, it is rendered impossible to violate it, for every one of its provisions contains its own antithesis – utterly nullifies itself. For instance: ‘the vote is direct and universal’ – ‘excepting those cases which the law shall determine’.”

The repeated formula is that this or that freedom shall be determined by an “organic law” to be adopted – “and these ‘organic laws’ ‘determine’ the promised freedom by destroying it”. [37]

The following year Marx incorporated the substance of this review of the French constitutional device in his Eighteenth Brumaire . After making the point and giving some examples, Marx writes that the “organic laws” regulated all the liberties granted “in such manner that the bourgeoisie in its enjoyment of them finds itself unhindered by the equal rights of the other classes”. For anything that contravenes its own safety is obviously not “in the interest of public safety”.

“In the sequel, both sides accordingly appeal with complete justice to the Constitution: the friends of order, who abrogated all these liberties, as well as the democrats, who demanded all of them. For each paragraph of the Constitution contains its own antithesis, its own Upper and Lower House, namely, liberty in the general phrase, abrogation of liberty in the marginal note. Thus, so long as the name of freedom was respected and only its actual realization prevented, of course in a legal way, the constitutional existence of liberty remained intact, inviolate, however mortal the blows dealt to its existence in actual life.” [38]

In the 1851 article, Marx also included a powerful denunciation of another device by which the government bureaucracy exercised de facto control over the liberties of the individual regardless of constitutional or other façades. This device is the internal passport and “labour book”.

“The excess of despotism reached in France will be apparent by the following regulations as to working men.

“Every working man is supplied with a book by the police – the first page of which contains his name, age, birthplace, trade or calling, and a description of his person. He is therein obliged to enter the name of the master for whom he works, and the reasons why he leaves him. But this is not all: the book is placed in the master’s hands, and deposited by him in the bureau of the police with the character of the man by the master. When a workman leaves his employment, he must go and fetch this book from the police office; and is not allowed to obtain another situation without producing it. Thus the workman’s bread is utterly dependent on the police. But this again, is not all: this book serves the purpose of a passport. If he is obnoxious, the police write ‘ bon pour retourner chez lui ’ in it, and the workman is obliged to return to his parish! No comment is needed on this terrific revelation! Let the reader picture to himself its full working, and trace it to its actual consequences. No serfdom of the feudal ages – no pariahdom of India has its parallel. What wonder if the French people pant for the hour of insurrection. What wonder if their indignation take the aspect of a storm.” [39]

Twenty years later Marx denounced the use of the same system by the Versaillese government; one of his counts against the police-state methods of the Thiers régime was “the reintroduction of passports for travelling from one place to another.” [40] In both cases the French government used the internal-passport system for population control in the wake of a revolutionary upsurge.  

Minimization of the Executive Power

In 1853 Marx analyzed the provisions in the new draft constitutions for Schleswig and Holstein, noting their undemocratic character. In addition, he notes that one of the “most remarkable paragraphs ... deprives the courts of law of their ancient right of cancelling administrative decrees ...” [41]

Such provisions are bad because it is the “power of the bureaucracy” which has to be kept down: this is also spelled out in Marx’s analysis, written in 1858, of the Prussian constitution of 1850. Once again he sees constitutional rights nullified by the freedom of action accorded to the executive power:

“The question of ministerial responsibility possesses in Prussia, as it did in the France of Louis Philippe, an exceptional importance, because it means, in fact, the responsibility of bureaucracy. The ministers are the chiefs of that omnipotent, all-intermeddling parasitic body, and to them alone, according to article 106 of the Constitution, have the subaltern members of the administration to look, without taking upon themselves to inquire into the legality of their ordinances, or incurring any responsibility by executing them. Thus, the power of the bureaucracy, and by the bureaucracy, of the executive, has been maintained intact, while the constitutional ‘Rights of the Prussians’ have been reduced to a dead letter.” [42]

The Prussian reality, writes Marx, shows the gulf between constitutional theory and actual practice:

“Every step of yours, simple locomotion even, is tampered with by the omnipotent action of bureaucracy, this second providence of genuine Prussian growth. You can neither live nor die, nor marry, nor write letters, nor think, nor print, nor take to business, nor teach, nor be taught, nor get up a meeting, nor build a manufactory, nor emigrate, nor do any thing without ‘ obrigkeitliche Erlaubnis ’ – permission on the part of the authorities. As to the liberty of science or religion, or abolition of patrimonial jurisdiction, or suppression of caste privileges, or the doing away with entails and primogeniture, it is all mere bosh.”

Marx explains why this is so in the same way as he explained the self-vitiation of the French constitution of 1848: all the liberties are granted only within “the limits of the law”, which in this case means the absolutist law predating the Constitution.

“Thus there exists a deadly antagonism between the law of the Constitution and the constitution of the law, the latter reducing, in fact, the former to mere moonshine. On the other hand, the Charter in the most decisive points refers to organic laws ... They [the organic laws now adopted] have done away with guarantees even existing at the worst times of the absolute Monarchy, with the independence, for instance, of the Judges of the executive Government. Not content with these combined dissolvents, the old and the new-fangled laws, the Charter preserves to the King the right of suspending it in all its political bearings, whenever he may think proper.” [43]

This is the second time that we have seen Marx upholding the independence of the courts against the executive power. It is clear, however, that this is only one aspect of his advocacy of every possible means of minimizing the autonomous power of the executive. In 1859 Marx wrote an analysis of the Hessian constitution of 1831 which praised it as “the most liberal fundamental law ever proclaimed in Europe”, except for its undemocratic method of electing representatives. Naturally, this praise was relative to the times; but what stirred this enthusiastic description?

“There is no other Constitution which restrains the powers of the executive within limits so narrow, makes the Administration more dependent on the Legislature, and confides such a supreme control to the judicial benches.” [44]

The article spells out the detailed reasons for this tribute, including the fact that “the Courts of law, empowered to decide definitively upon all the acts of the Executive, were rendered omnipotent”. The courts also have the final say “in all questions of bureaucratic discipline”. The representatives can remove any minister declared guilty of misinterpreting its resolutions; the Prince’s “right of grace” is shorn, and also his control over members of the Administration. “The Representative Chamber selects out of its members a permanent committee, forming a sort of Areopagus, watching and controlling the Government, and impeaching the officials for violation of the Constitution, no exception being granted on behalf of orders received by subalterns from their superiors in rank. In this way, the members of the bureaucracy were emancipated from the Crown.” Military officers are similarly bound to the Constitution, not to the Crown. “The representation, consisting of one single Chamber, possesses the right of stopping all taxes, imposts and duties, on every conflict with the executive.” Later, mentions Marx, the revolution of 1848–9 democratized the election forms and made two other improvements. Both of the latter were likewise directed against the power of the executive: “by putting the nomination of the members of the Supreme Court into the hands of the legislature, and, lastly, by taking out of the hands of the Prince the supreme control of the army, and making it over to the Minister of War, a personage responsible to the representatives of the people”.

In the same article Marx points to another democratic feature of this constitution: “Communal councillors, nominated by popular election, had to administer not only the local, but also the general police.” Over a decade later, Marx pointed to the Paris Commune’s system of community control of the police as a democratic achievement. [45] In general, Marx’s views on the minimization, or thorough subordination, of the executive power reached fullest expression in his analysis of the Paris Commune.  

Safety-Valves for the Bourgeoisie

Comments on various aspects of democratic rights are, of course, scattered through the later writings of Marx and Engels, though not the subject of any systematic work. Examples of aspects not yet mentioned may have some interest:

(1) Freedom of opinion. Discussing the Bonapartization of France in 1851, even before the coup d’état, Marx commented that the very last straw was the 1850 law which restored censorship of the drama. “Thus freedom of opinion was banished from its last literary refuge.” [46]

(2) Restrictions on voter eligibility. In the same connection – the anti-democratic swing in France after the 1848 defeat – Marx noted two infringements dealing with voting limitations. The law of 31 May 1850 not only excluded political offenders “but it actually established domiciliary restrictions, by which TWO-THIRDS of the French people are incapable of voting”! A little further there is a related point: “By the law of August 7, 1848, all those who cannot read and write are erased from the jury list, thus disqualifying two-thirds of the adult population!” [47]

In his article on the Schleswig and Holstein constitutions, Marx also noted a related question: among the undemocratic restrictions is the provision “making the right of election dependent on the holding of landed property, and limiting its exercise by the condition of ‘domicile’ in the respective electoral districts”. [48] In his already mentioned article on the Prussian constitution of 1850, he remarked that although it allows payment of deputies and voting rights from the age of 25, “The electoral rights, however, and the machinery of election, have been managed in such a way as to exclude not only the bulk of the people, but to subject the privileged remnant to the most unbridled bureaucratic interference. There are two degrees of election.” [49]

(3) Gerrymandering. The “unbridled bureaucratic interference” in the Prussian electoral system included more than the complicated system of grouping voters by the amount of tax paid, etc.

“As if this complicated process of filtering was not sufficient, the bureaucracy has, moreover, the right to divide, combine, change, separate and recompose the electoral districts at pleasure. Thus, for instance, if there exists a town suspected of liberal sympathies, it may be swamped by reactionary country votes, the Minister, by simple ordinance, blending the liberal town with the reactionary country into the same electoral district.”

Marx concludes: “Such are the fetters which shackle the electoral movement, and which, only in the great cities, can exceptionally be broken through.” [50]

(4) Unicameralism. In general, Marx was for a single representative assembly, not the bicameral system devised to check the exuberance of popular sovereignty. In his article on the Hessian constitution, he noted approvingly that “The representation, consisting of one single Chamber, possesses the right of stopping all taxes, imposts and duties, on every conflict with the executive.” [51]

(5) Right to demonstrate. The following case in point has a special interest. In 1872 a Hyde Park demonstration was organized by Irish members of the International, to demand a general amnesty. But at the last session of Parliament the government had put through a law regulating public meetings in parks: it required two days’ prior notification to the police, including the speakers’ names. Engels wrote:

“This regulation carefully kept hidden from the London press destroyed with one stroke of the pen one of the most precious rights of London’s working people – the right to hold meetings in parks when and how they please. To submit to this regulation would be to sacrifice one of the people’s rights.

“The Irish, who represent the most revolutionary element of the population, were not men to display such weakness. The committee unanimously decided to act as if it did not know of the existence of this regulation and to hold their meeting in defiance of the Government’s decree.” [52]

The police decided not to intervene after all.

(6) The informer system. The use of informers, spies and stool-pigeons ( mouchards in French and also in Marx and Engels most of the time) was, of course, the common instrument of the governments and a constant plague in the radical and labour movements. Here, however, is an important variant.

The Austrian commander in Milan, after suppressing an insurrection, decreed that anyone who failed to denounce another’s illegal act was himself guilty. Marx reported this bitterly:

“Whoever will not become a spy and informer for the Hapsburg shall be liable to become the lawful prey of the Croat [Austrian troops]. In a word, Radetsky proclaims a new system of wholesale plunder.” [53]

(7) Freedom in wartime. After the outbreak of the Franco-Prussian war, Bebel and Liebknecht were arrested by the Bismarck government on charges of high treason –

“simply because they dared to fulfil their duties as German national representatives, viz. to protest in the Reichstag against the annexation of Alsace and Lorraine, vote against new war subsidies, express their sympathy with the French Republic, and denounce the attempt at the conversion of Germany into one Prussian barrack.”

So Marx, in a protest published in the London press. His letters also described the governmental repression of other anti-war socialists, and added:

“The few independent German journals existing outside Prussia are forbidden admission into the Hohenzollern estates. German workmen’s meetings in favour of a peace honourable for France are daily dispersed by the police. According to the official Prussian doctrine ... every German ‘trying to counteract the prospective aims of the Prussian warfare in France’, is guilty of high treason.” [54]

He compares the liberty existing in France (where the Empire had just been overthrown – it is the interlude between Sedan and the Paris Commune):

“The French soil is infested by about a million of German invaders. Yet the French Government can safely dispense with that Prussian method of ‘rendering possible the free expression of opinion’. Look at this picture and at that!” [55]

In truth, the French republican government could hardly do otherwise; it had come into being through a mass upsurge in the streets after Sedan, and a revolution loomed before it. Revolutionary pressures ensured its democratic distinction from Prussianism.

In England, pressure against freedom in wartime was political. During the Crimean war, John Bright accused the government of undermining “the Parliamentary system of this country” by its intolerance of criticism. Marx commented:

“It may be asked of what use this system is? Domestic questions must not be agitated because the country is at war. Because the country is at war, war must not be discussed. Then why remains Parliament? Old [William] Cobbett has revealed the secret. As a safety-valve for the effervescing passions of the country.” [56]

It could be put more generally: for bourgeois democracy, not only a parliament but the whole structure of democratic rights and institutions was, in good part, “a safety-valve for the effervescing passions of the country”. Or, as we put it in another connection in another part of the work, it was used as a means of containing popular pressures, not expressing them.  

The “Democratic Swindle”

As in the case of most political problems, it is not possible to extract from Marx and Engels’ writings a systematic account of what Marx called the “democratic swindle” – the methods whereby the bourgeoisie utilized (used and abused) democratic forms for the purpose of stabilizing its socio-economic rule; besides the present and preceding chapters, aspects of the subject will emerge subsequently. But a couple of basic points may be made here.

The “democratic swindle” was a swindle not insofar as it was democratic but, on the contrary, insofar as it utilized democratic forms to frustrate genuine democratic control from below. The phrase itself comes from a reference by Marx to the country which, he well understood, was the most democratic in constitutional form at this time: the United States. It was, indeed, “the model country of the democratic swindle” [57] not because it was less democratic than others but for precisely the opposite reason. The fact that the US had developed the formal structure of the constitutional republic in the most democratic forms meant that its bourgeoisie likewise had to develop to its highest point the art of keeping the expression of popular opinion within channels satisfactory to its class interests.

In Marx’s time there was no problem about putting the finger on the main method of this enterprise: the system of rank political corruption mentioned in the preceding chapter. As long as it was possible to work it, within the cadre of a country that was expanding economically and geographically, social explosions could be avoided. The expense was worth while to gain “a safety-valve for the effervescing passions of the country”.

The expense of buying up public opinion, however, should not be confused with the expensiveness on a social scale of a democratic structure as against an authoritarian one. Other things being equal, a democratic state form is cheaper to operate than a despotism; as long as it is possible, it is a bargain for a ruling class interested in keeping down overhead costs. This is true not only in terms of hard cash outlay (necessary for any swollen state apparatus) but also in terms of intangibles, such as the willing interest of the mass of the population in cooperating in their own exploitation. Marx pointed to the difference in his polemic against the liberal Heinzen:

“The monarchy involves great expenses. No doubt. Just take a look at governmental finances in North America and compare them with what our 38 duodecimo fatherlands [the German states] have to pay for being administered and kept under discipline!” [58]

In England the main representatives of the bourgeoisie in politics aim ideally at bargain-rate government, and therefore –

“to these champions of the British Bourgeoisie, to the men of the Manchester School, every institution of Old England appears in the light of a piece of machinery as costly as it is useless, and which fulfills no other purpose but to prevent the nation from producing the greatest possible quantity at the least possible expense, and to exchange its products in freedom. Necessarily their last word is the Bourgeois Republic, in which free competition rules supreme in all spheres of life; in which there remains altogether that minimum only of government which is indispensable for the administration, internally and externally, of the common class interest and business of the Bourgeoisie; and where this minimum of government is as soberly, as economically organized as possible. Such a party, in other countries, would be called democratic .” [59]

Time and again Marx or Engels analysed bourgeois-democratic politics as an exercise in convincing a maximum of the people that they were participating in state power, by means of a minimum of concessions to democratic forms. On the eve of the 1848 revolution – the preceding November, to be exact – Engels took up the programmatic manifesto issued by Lamartine, the poet-politician who headed the moderate republican party.

“What, then, is the meaning of the political measures proposed by M. de Lamartine? To give the government into the hands of the inferior bourgeoisie , but under the semblance of giving it to the whole people (this, and nothing else, is the meaning of his universal suffrage, with his double system of elections).” [60]

The century saw a plethora of clever electoral systems devised to insert a manipulative factor into the forms of a more or less universal suffrage, beginning with the American Constitution. As Engels indicated in the case of Lamartine, the mechanisms were calibrated to achieve a single type of effect: How far down in the social scale, in the hands of what class or class stratum, was political power expected to reside? This was the link between the class struggle and often technical-sounding questions of constitutional forms; that is, between a political programme in the narrow sense and a social programme. A movement that aimed to place political power in the hands of the working-class masses could afford to press for complete democratization with no twists.  

Toward the Socialization of Democracy

Lamartine, wrote Engels, might be able to inspire poets and philosophers with enthusiasm for “his system of graduated election, poor rate, and philanthrophic charity”, but not the people.

“The principles, indeed, of social and political regeneration have been found fifty years ago. Universal suffrage, direct election, paid representation – these are the essential conditions of political sovereignty ... What we want, is not English middle-class expediency, but quite a new system of social economy, to realize the rights and satisfy the wants of all.” [61]

This was published in a Chartist paper and written for the eyes of Chartist workers, who were indeed already battling for what was then the political programme of the democratic extremists. But Engels’ friends in the left wing of Chartism, Harney and Jones above all, were fighting for “the Charter and Something Else”, i.e. for the extension of the democratic idea to a social programme. This, of course, had been what Engels had also urged since his arrival in England. As we have seen [62] , he began by counterposing “communism” against democracy, in the wake of Proudhon and Weitling. By 1844 he had corrected this to advocating going over from mere political democracy to a more basic social transformation.

In an 1844 article which Engels wrote for a German paper in Paris, he analysed the constitutional forms of British democracy in this spirit. [9*] Conceding that “England is undoubtedly the freest, that is, the least unfree country in the world, North America not excepted”, he undertook an examination of the methods and forms of the political system “on purely empirical lines”, to show how the structure is designed toward “making concessions merely in order to preserve this derelict structure as long as possible”, and maintaining the rule of the middle class in partnership with the progressive-minded aristocracy. [63] Since the representative chamber, the House of Commons, wielded all power (he thought), it followed that “England should be a pure democracy, if only the democratic element itself were really democratic”. It is the latter condition that he subjects to detailed analysis, measuring constitutional and formal pretensions against the “empirical” facts of class power. His conclusion is that “The Englishman is not free because of the law, but despite the law, if he can be considered free at all” [64] , for it is the constant threat from below that ensures the recognition of democratic rights in practice.

It is, he argues, likewise the struggle of classes which will move matters still further:

“The struggle is already on. The constitution has been shaken in its foundations. How things will turn out in the near future can be seen from what has been said. The new alien elements in the constitution are of a democratic nature; public opinion too, as time will show, develops in accordance with the democratic side; England’s near future is democracy.

“But what a democracy! Not that the French Revolution, whose antithesis was the monarchy and feudalism, but that democracy whose antithesis is the middle class and property. This is evident from the entire preceding development. The middle class and property are in power; the poor man is bereft of rights, oppressed and sweated; the constitution disowns him, the law maltreats him; the struggle of democracy against the aristocracy in England is the struggle of the poor against the rich. The democracy which England is heading for is a social democracy.

“But mere democracy is unable to remedy social evils. Democratic equality is a chimera, the struggle of the poor against the rich cannot be fought out on the ground of democracy or politics in general. Hence this stage too is only a transition, the last purely political measure that still is to be tried and from which a new element must immediately develop, a principle transcending everything political.

“This principle is the principle of socialism.” [65]

“Mere democracy” is merely political democracy, democracy which stops with governmental forms and does not extend to the “social question”, to the democratization of socio-economic life.

In sum: Marx and Engels always saw the two sides of the complex of democratic institutions and rights which arose under bourgeois democracy. The two sides corresponded to the two classes which fought it out within this framework. One side was the utilization of democratic forms as a cheap and versatile means of keeping the exploited masses from shaking the system, of providing the illusion of participation in the state while the economic sway of the ruling class ensured the real centres of power. This was the side of the “democratic swindle”. The other side was the struggle to give the democratic forms a new social (class) content, above all by pushing them to the democratic extreme of popular control from below, which in turn entailed extending the application of democratic forms out of the merely political sphere into the organization of the whole society.

In any case, the key was popular control from below. This phrase was best translated by Marx in a comment on a slippery slogan, the Lassallean catchword of a “free state”. Taking it literally, Marx replied that we do not want a state that is free, but rather a state that is completely subordinate to society.

“Free state – what is this?

“It is by no means the aim of the workers, who have got rid of the narrow mentality of humble subjects, to set the state free. In the [Bismarckian] German Empire the ‘state’ is almost as ‘free’ as in Russia. Freedom consists in converting the state from an organ superimposed upon society into one completely subordinate to it, and today, too, the forms of state are more or less free to the extent that they restrict the ‘freedom of the state’.” [66]

This proposes a basic test for, and measure of, freedom in the sense of popular control from below, and it applies equally before and after the social revolution.

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1*. As a liberal Marx-critic, A.D. Lindsay, put it from his own viewpoint: “the Liberal, if to be a Liberal is to believe in democracy, must explain why he will not extend democracy to the government of the collective labourer and become a socialist. Socialism is for Marx essentially the democratization of the collective labourer. Because it was that, he regarded it as inevitable; for a society in which ‘the notion of human equality has already acquired the fixity of a popular prejudice’, and in which the prevailing form of production is social and involves government, is already in principle committed to it.” [1]

2*. An example: Among the backward-looking anti-democrats that Marx ran into was the maverick David Urquhart, against whom Marx warned in an article: “there is another clique of ‘wise men’ emerging in England, who are discontented with the Government and the ruling classes as much as with the Chartists. What do the Chartists want? they exclaim. They want to increase and extend the omnipotence of Parliament by elevating it to people’s power. They are not breaking up parliamentarism but are raising it to a higher power. The right thing to do is to break up the representative system! A wise man from the East, David Urquhart , heads that clique.” [5] Marx goes on to explain that Urquhart wants to turn the clock back on civilization, to return to the old Anglo-Saxon conditions, “or, better still, to the Oriental state”, to localism, to economic conditions prior to the modern division of labour and concentrated capital. The subject of social tendencies hostile to both capitalism and the proletariat is reserved for separate consideration.

3*. In this explanation we have used “democracy” and “democratic” in their modern sense; but in mid-19th century, especially on the Continent before 1848, the democratic forms involved were more commonly labelled “liberties”, specific “freedoms” (e.g. freedom of press, expression, etc.), specific “rights” (right of organization or assoclation, etc.), “popular” institutions, including “popular sovereignty”, and so on.

4*. This is the same Arnold Ruge who, five years before, had been Marx’s co-editor of the Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher , complaining that the German people were hopelessly apathetic and could never make a revolution. He was prominent among those who helped to fulfil his prophecy. By the 1870s he wound up on the pension rolls of the far-from-apathetic Bismarck. [9]

5*. Marx was also acquainted with the government device of allegedly suppressing only “false” statements by the press. This became prominent under the Bonaparte dictatorship in France, which claimed to be for freedom of the press to tell the “truth” but not its freedom to tell “lies”. In an 1858 article Marx derisively quoted the Bonapartist press: “The duty of the press is to enlighten the public, and not deceive it,” and demonstrated that this was only a façade for the principle that the duty of the press is to obey the government’s orders on how to deceive the public. [12]

6*. Lit., the “right of association”; so throughout.

7*. This catch-line, adapted from Beaumarchais, amounts to a sarcastic “What a brilliant idea!”

8*. This article was written by Marx for Ernest Jones’ paper as part of a series on The Constitutions of Europe . It is therefore very specifically concerned with the exact provisions of the document, thus providing a supplement to the broader political analysis of this constitution which Marx had written the year before, in his Class Struggles in France . [34] A year later, Man, reviewing the same history in The Eighteenth Brumaire , included the constitutional points too, as discussed below.

9*. This was before Engels teamed up with Marx, and while he was still denouncing “all state forms” in principle, in anarchoid language which can be found in the same article. The contradiction is striking.

MEW  = Marx-Engels Werke , Berlin, Dietz, 1961–8. (Vol. and page no. abbreviated in colon form; e.g. 2: 363 = Vol. 2, p. 363.)

ME:SW  = Marx-Engels, Selected Works in three volumes , Moscow, Progress Pub., 1969–70. ME: Art. Brit.  = Marx-Engels, Articles on Britain , Moscow, Progress Pub., 1971. NRZ  =  Neue Rheinische Zeitung . NYT  =  New York (Daily) Tribune . ME = Marx and Engels. M/E = Marx or Engels.

1. A.D. Lindsay, Karl Marx’s Capital (London, 1937,), 105.

2. This refers to Marx’s 1843 manuscript; in the O’Malley translation (the only complete one available, Cambridge University Press, 1970), pp. 30–1 are especially relevant.

3. See my The Two Souls of Socialism (Berkeley, 1966; or in New Politics , Winter 1966, 5744).

4. ME: The German Ideology (Moscow, P.P., 1964), 362.

5. M: The Association for Administrative Reform , in ME: Art. Brit. , 236–7.

6. E. to M., 9 March 1847, MEW27:  78.

7. E. in NRZ , 1 June 1848, MEW5:  14.

8. Ibid. , 15–17.

9. For Ruge’s political evolution, see W.J. Brazill, The Young Hegelians (Yale U.P., 1970), 256–9.

10. E. in NRZ , 3 September 1848, MEW5:  358.

11. For the first number, see M/E in NRZ , 1 June 1848, MEW5:  18; besides the passages quoted further along, there was constant emphasis on the issue, e.g. E. in NRZ , 20 July 1848, MEW5:  238.

12. M: France , in NYT , 30 April 1858.

13. M. in NRZ , 11 July 1848, MEW5:  200.

14. E: Preface to Karl Marx vor den Kölner Geschworenen (1885), in MEW21:  201.

15. E. in NRZ , 15 June 1848, MEW5:  68–9.

16. M. in NRZ , 20 July 1848, MEW5:  241.

17. M/E in NRZ , 23 June 1848, MEW5:  97.

18. E. in NRZ , 20 July 1848, MEW5: &nsp;238.

19. M. in NRZ , 21 July 1848, MEW5:  244–5.

20. M/E in NRZ , 7 June 1848, MEW5:  39; M. in NRZ , 2 June 1848, MEW5:  23; M/E in NRZ , 4 June 1848, MEW5:  30.

21. M/E in NRZ , 17 September 1848, MEW5:  406–7.

22. M. in NRZ , 21 July 1848, MEW5:  251.

23. E. in NRZ , 22 July 1848, MEW5:  229.

24. E. in NRZ , 28 July 1848, MEW5:  276.

25. Ibid. , 276–7.

26. E. in NRZ , 14 June 1848, MEW5:  64–5.

27. E. in NRZ , 18 June 1848, MEW5:  222–3.

28. M/E in NRZ , 7 June 1848, MEW5:  39–40.

29. Ibid. , 40.

30. E.g. in E. in NRZ , 8 June 1848, MEW5: 49, 52.

31. M/E in NRZ , 8 June 1848, MEW5:  53.

32. M/E in NRZ , 19 June 1848, MEW5: %nbsp;83; ditto 21 June 1848, MEW5:  90–3.

33. M. in NRZ , 21 July 1848, MEW5:  245.

34. M: Class Struggles in France , in ME:SW1:  233%ndash;6.

35. M: The Constitution of the French Republic [etc.] , in Notes to the People , No. 7, June 1851, Vol. 1, p.&nbso;125.

36. Ibid. , p. 126.

37. Ibid. , p. 129.

38. M: Eighteenth Brumaire of L.B. , in ME:SW1:  409.

39. M: The Constitution of the French Republic ..., 129.

40. M: Civil War in France, First Draft , in ME: Writings on the Paris Commune , ed. Draper (NY 1971), 134.

41. M. in NYT , 5 November 1853 (untitled article).

42. M: Affairs in Prussia , NYT , 8 November 1858.

43. M: Affairs in Prussia , NYT , 3 November 1858.

44. M: Trouble in Germany , NYT , 2 December 1859.

45. M: Civil War in France, First Draft , in ME: Writings on the Paris Commune , 152; and Second Draft , Ibid. , 200. For the final version, see ME:SW2:  220.

46. M: The Constitution of the French Republic ..., 126.

47. Ibid. , 127, 128. See also M: Eighteenth Brumaire , in ME:SW1:  408.

48. M. in NYT , 5 November 1853 (untitled article).

49. M: Affairs in Prussia , NYT , 8 November 1858.

51. M: Trouble in Germany , NYT , 2 December 1859.

52. E: Letters from London, 3 , in ME: Art. Brit. , 364.

53. M: The Attack on Francis Joseph [etc.] , NYT , 8 March 1853.

54. M: Letter to Daily News , 19 January 1871, in ME: Selected Corr. , 2nd ed. (Moscow, P.P., 1965), 254–55.

55. Ibid. , 255.

56. M. in NYT , 12 June 1854 (untitled).

57. Letter, M. to E., 7 September 1864, in ME: The Civil War in the US , 3rd ed. (NY, Citadel Press, 1961), 271.

58. M: Die moralisierende Kritik [etc.] , 1847, in MEW4:  348.

59. M: The Chartists , NYT , 25 August 1852, in ME: Art. Brit. , 117–18.

60. E: The Manifesto of M. de Lamartine , in MEGA I , 6: 339.

61. Ibid. , 340.

62. [In a previous chapter.]

63. E: The Condition of England: 2. The English Constitution , in ME: Art. Brit. , 32, 33, 34, 41.

64. Ibid. , 38, 57.

65. Ibid. , 57–8, revised after ME:W1:  592.

66. M: Critique of the Gotha Programme , in ME:SW3:  25.

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Karl Marx (1818–1883) is best known not as a philosopher but as a revolutionary, whose works inspired the foundation of many communist regimes in the twentieth century. It is hard to think of many who have had as much influence in the creation of the modern world. Trained as a philosopher, Marx turned away from philosophy in his mid-twenties, towards economics and politics. However, in addition to his overtly philosophical early work, his later writings have many points of contact with contemporary philosophical debates, especially in the philosophy of history and the social sciences, and in moral and political philosophy. Historical materialism — Marx’s theory of history — is centered around the idea that forms of society rise and fall as they further and then impede the development of human productive power. Marx sees the historical process as proceeding through a necessary series of modes of production, characterized by class struggle, culminating in communism. Marx’s economic analysis of capitalism is based on his version of the labour theory of value, and includes the analysis of capitalist profit as the extraction of surplus value from the exploited proletariat. The analysis of history and economics come together in Marx’s prediction of the inevitable economic breakdown of capitalism, to be replaced by communism. However Marx refused to speculate in detail about the nature of communism, arguing that it would arise through historical processes, and was not the realisation of a pre-determined moral ideal.

1. Marx’s Life and Works

• 2.1. On The Jewish Question
• 2.2. Contribution to a Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right: Introduction
• 2.3. 1844 Manuscripts
• 2.4. Theses on Feuerbach

3. Economics

4.1 the german ideology, 4.2 1859 preface, 4.3 functional explanation, 4.4 rationality, 4.5 alternative interpretations, 5. morality, other internet resources, related entries.

Karl Marx was born in Trier, in the German Rhineland, in 1818. Although his family was Jewish they converted to Christianity so that his father could pursue his career as a lawyer in the face of Prussia’s anti-Jewish laws. A precocious schoolchild, Marx studied law in Bonn and Berlin, and then wrote a PhD thesis in Philosophy, comparing the views of Democritus and Epicurus. On completion of his doctorate in 1841 Marx hoped for an academic job, but he had already fallen in with too radical a group of thinkers and there was no real prospect. Turning to journalism, Marx rapidly became involved in political and social issues, and soon found himself having to consider communist theory. Of his many early writings, four, in particular, stand out. ‘Contribution to a Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, Introduction’, and ‘On The Jewish Question’, were both written in 1843 and published in the Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher. The Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts , written in Paris 1844, and the ‘Theses on Feuerbach’ of 1845, remained unpublished in Marx’s lifetime.

The German Ideology , co-written with Engels in 1845, was also unpublished but this is where we see Marx beginning to develop his theory of history. The Communist Manifesto is perhaps Marx’s most widely read work, even if it is not the best guide to his thought. This was again jointly written with Engels and published with a great sense of excitement as Marx returned to Germany from exile to take part in the revolution of 1848. With the failure of the revolution Marx moved to London where he remained for the rest of his life. He now concentrated on the study of economics, producing, in 1859, his Contribution to a Critique of Political Economy . This is largely remembered for its Preface, in which Marx sketches out what he calls ‘the guiding principles’ of his thought, on which many interpretations of historical materialism are based. Marx’s main economic work is, of course, Capital (Volume 1), published in 1867, although Volume 3, edited by Engels, and published posthumously in 1894, contains much of interest. Finally, the late pamphlet Critique of the Gotha Programme (1875) is an important source for Marx’s reflections on the nature and organisation of communist society.

The works so far mentioned amount only to a small fragment of Marx’s opus, which will eventually run to around 100 large volumes when his collected works are completed. However the items selected above form the most important core from the point of view of Marx’s connection with philosophy, although other works, such as the 18 th Brumaire of Louis Napoleon (1852), are often regarded as equally important in assessing Marx’s analysis of concrete political events. In what follows, I shall concentrate on those texts and issues that have been given the greatest attention within the Anglo-American philosophical literature.

2. The Early Writings

The intellectual climate within which the young Marx worked was dominated by the influence of Hegel, and the reaction to Hegel by a group known as the Young Hegelians, who rejected what they regarded as the conservative implications of Hegel’s work. The most significant of these thinkers was Ludwig Feuerbach, who attempted to transform Hegel’s metaphysics, and, thereby, provided a critique of Hegel’s doctrine of religion and the state. A large portion of the philosophical content of Marx’s works written in the early 1840s is a record of his struggle to define his own position in reaction to that of Hegel and Feuerbach and those of the other Young Hegelians.

2.1 ‘On The Jewish Question’

In this text Marx begins to make clear the distance between himself and his radical liberal colleagues among the Young Hegelians; in particular Bruno Bauer. Bauer had recently written against Jewish emancipation, from an atheist perspective, arguing that the religion of both Jews and Christians was a barrier to emancipation. In responding to Bauer, Marx makes one of the most enduring arguments from his early writings, by means of introducing a distinction between political emancipation — essentially the grant of liberal rights and liberties — and human emancipation. Marx’s reply to Bauer is that political emancipation is perfectly compatible with the continued existence of religion, as the contemporary example of the United States demonstrates. However, pushing matters deeper, in an argument reinvented by innumerable critics of liberalism, Marx argues that not only is political emancipation insufficient to bring about human emancipation, it is in some sense also a barrier. Liberal rights and ideas of justice are premised on the idea that each of us needs protection from other human beings who are a threat to our liberty and security. Therefore liberal rights are rights of separation, designed to protect us from such perceived threats. Freedom on such a view, is freedom from interference. What this view overlooks is the possibility — for Marx, the fact — that real freedom is to be found positively in our relations with other people. It is to be found in human community, not in isolation. Accordingly, insisting on a regime of rights encourages us to view each other in ways that undermine the possibility of the real freedom we may find in human emancipation. Now we should be clear that Marx does not oppose political emancipation, for he sees that liberalism is a great improvement on the systems of feud and religious prejudice and discrimination which existed in the Germany of his day. Nevertheless, such politically emancipated liberalism must be transcended on the route to genuine human emancipation. Unfortunately, Marx never tells us what human emancipation is, although it is clear that it is closely related to the idea of non-alienated labour, which we will explore below.

2.2 ‘Contribution to a Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, Introduction’

This work is home to Marx’s notorious remark that religion is the ‘opiate of the people’, a harmful, illusion-generating painkiller, and it is here that Marx sets out his account of religion in most detail. Just as importantly Marx here also considers the question of how revolution might be achieved in Germany, and sets out the role of the proletariat in bringing about the emancipation of society as a whole.

With regard to religion, Marx fully accepted Feuerbach’s claim in opposition to traditional theology that human beings had invented God in their own image; indeed a view that long pre-dated Feuerbach. Feuerbach’s distinctive contribution was to argue that worshipping God diverted human beings from enjoying their own human powers. While accepting much of Feuerbach’s account Marx’s criticizes Feuerbach on the grounds that he has failed to understand why people fall into religious alienation and so is unable to explain how it can be transcended. Feuerbach’s view appears to be that belief in religion is purely an intellectual error and can be corrected by persuasion. Marx’s explanation is that religion is a response to alienation in material life, and therefore cannot be removed until human material life is emancipated, at which point religion will wither away. Precisely what it is about material life that creates religion is not set out with complete clarity. However, it seems that at least two aspects of alienation are responsible. One is alienated labour, which will be explored shortly. A second is the need for human beings to assert their communal essence. Whether or not we explicitly recognize it, human beings exist as a community, and what makes human life possible is our mutual dependence on the vast network of social and economic relations which engulf us all, even though this is rarely acknowledged in our day-to-day life. Marx’s view appears to be that we must, somehow or other, acknowledge our communal existence in our institutions. At first it is ‘deviously acknowledged’ by religion, which creates a false idea of a community in which we are all equal in the eyes of God. After the post-Reformation fragmentation of religion, where religion is no longer able to play the role even of a fake community of equals, the state fills this need by offering us the illusion of a community of citizens, all equal in the eyes of the law. Interestingly, the political liberal state, which is needed to manage the politics of religious diversity, takes on the role offered by religion in earlier times of providing a form of illusory community. But the state and religion will both be transcended when a genuine community of social and economic equals is created.

Of course we are owed an answer to the question how such a society could be created. It is interesting to read Marx here in the light of his third Thesis on Feuerbach where he criticises an alternative theory. The crude materialism of Robert Owen and others assumes that human beings are fully determined by their material circumstances, and therefore to bring about an emancipated society it is necessary and sufficient to make the right changes to those material circumstances. However, how are those circumstances to be changed? By an enlightened philanthropist like Owen who can miraculously break through the chain of determination which ties down everyone else? Marx’s response, in both the Theses and the Critique, is that the proletariat can break free only by their own self-transforming action. Indeed if they do not create the revolution for themselves — in alliance, of course, with the philosopher — they will not be fit to receive it.

2.3 Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts

The Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts cover a wide range of topics, including much interesting material on private property and communism, and on money, as well as developing Marx’s critique of Hegel. However, the manuscripts are best known for their account of alienated labour. Here Marx famously depicts the worker under capitalism as suffering from four types of alienated labour. First, from the product, which as soon as it is created is taken away from its producer. Second, in productive activity (work) which is experienced as a torment. Third, from species-being, for humans produce blindly and not in accordance with their truly human powers. Finally, from other human beings, where the relation of exchange replaces the satisfaction of mutual need. That these categories overlap in some respects is not a surprise given Marx’s remarkable methodological ambition in these writings. Essentially he attempts to apply a Hegelian deduction of categories to economics, trying to demonstrate that all the categories of bourgeois economics — wages, rent, exchange, profit, etc. — are ultimately derived from an analysis of the concept of alienation. Consequently each category of alienated labour is supposed to be deducible from the previous one. However, Marx gets no further than deducing categories of alienated labour from each other. Quite possibly in the course of writing he came to understand that a different methodology is required for approaching economic issues. Nevertheless we are left with a very rich text on the nature of alienated labour. The idea of non-alienation has to be inferred from the negative, with the assistance of one short passage at the end of the text ‘On James Mill’ in which non-alienated labour is briefly described in terms which emphasise both the immediate producer’s enjoyment of production as a confirmation of his or her powers, and also the idea that production is to meet the needs of others, thus confirming for both parties our human essence as mutual dependence. Both sides of our species essence are revealed here: our individual human powers and our membership in the human community.

It is important to understand that for Marx alienation is not merely a matter of subjective feeling, or confusion. The bridge between Marx’s early analysis of alienation and his later social theory is the idea that the alienated individual is ‘a plaything of alien forces’, albeit alien forces which are themselves a product of human action. In our daily lives we take decisions that have unintended consequences, which then combine to create large-scale social forces which may have an utterly unpredicted, and highly damaging, effect. In Marx’s view the institutions of capitalism — themselves the consequences of human behaviour — come back to structure our future behaviour, determining the possibilities of our action. For example, for as long as a capitalist intends to stay in business he must exploit his workers to the legal limit. Whether or not wracked by guilt the capitalist must act as a ruthless exploiter. Similarly the worker must take the best job on offer; there is simply no other sane option. But by doing this we reinforce the very structures that oppress us. The urge to transcend this condition, and to take collective control of our destiny — whatever that would mean in practice — is one of the motivating and sustaining elements of Marx’s social analysis.

2.4 ‘Theses on Feuerbach’

The Theses on Feuerbach contain one of Marx’s most memorable remarks: “the philosophers have only interpreted the world, the point is to change it” (thesis 11). However the eleven theses as a whole provide, in the compass of a couple of pages, a remarkable digest of Marx’s reaction to the philosophy of his day. Several of these have been touched on already (for example, the discussions of religion in theses 4, 6 and 7, and revolution in thesis 3) so here I will concentrate only on the first, most overtly philosophical, thesis.

In the first thesis Marx states his objections to ‘all hitherto existing’ materialism and idealism. Materialism is complimented for understanding the physical reality of the world, but is criticised for ignoring the active role of the human subject in creating the world we perceive. Idealism, at least as developed by Hegel, understands the active nature of the human subject, but confines it to thought or contemplation: the world is created through the categories we impose upon it. Marx combines the insights of both traditions to propose a view in which human beings do indeed create — or at least transform — the world they find themselves in, but this transformation happens not in thought but through actual material activity; not through the imposition of sublime concepts but through the sweat of their brow, with picks and shovels. This historical version of materialism, which transcends and thus rejects all existing philosophical thought, is the foundation of Marx’s later theory of history. As Marx puts it in the 1844 Manuscripts, ‘Industry is the real historical relationship of nature … to man’. This thought, derived from reflection on the history of philosophy, together with his experience of social and economic realities, as a journalist, sets the agenda for all Marx’s future work.

Capital Volume 1 begins with an analysis of the idea of commodity production. A commodity is defined as a useful external object, produced for exchange on a market. Thus two necessary conditions for commodity production are the existence of a market, in which exchange can take place, and a social division of labour, in which different people produce different products, without which there would be no motivation for exchange. Marx suggests that commodities have both use-value — a use, in other words — and an exchange-value — initially to be understood as their price. Use value can easily be understood, so Marx says, but he insists that exchange value is a puzzling phenomenon, and relative exchange values need to be explained. Why does a quantity of one commodity exchange for a given quantity of another commodity? His explanation is in terms of the labour input required to produce the commodity, or rather, the socially necessary labour, which is labour exerted at the average level of intensity and productivity for that branch of activity within the economy. Thus the labour theory of value asserts that the value of a commodity is determined by the quantity of socially necessary labour time required to produce it. Marx provides a two stage argument for the labour theory of value. The first stage is to argue that if two objects can be compared in the sense of being put on either side of an equals sign, then there must be a ‘third thing of identical magnitude in both of them’ to which they are both reducible. As commodities can be exchanged against each other, there must, Marx argues, be a third thing that they have in common. This then motivates the second stage, which is a search for the appropriate ‘third thing’, which is labour in Marx’s view, as the only plausible common element. Both steps of the argument are, of course, highly contestable.

Capitalism is distinctive, Marx argues, in that it involves not merely the exchange of commodities, but the advancement of capital, in the form of money, with the purpose of generating profit through the purchase of commodities and their transformation into other commodities which can command a higher price, and thus yield a profit. Marx claims that no previous theorist has been able adequately to explain how capitalism as a whole can make a profit. Marx’s own solution relies on the idea of exploitation of the worker. In setting up conditions of production the capitalist purchases the worker’s labour power — his ability to labour — for the day. The cost of this commodity is determined in the same way as the cost of every other; i.e. in terms of the amount of socially necessary labour power required to produce it. In this case the value of a day’s labour power is the value of the commodities necessary to keep the worker alive for a day. Suppose that such commodities take four hours to produce. Thus the first four hours of the working day is spent on producing value equivalent to the value of the wages the worker will be paid. This is known as necessary labour. Any work the worker does above this is known as surplus labour, producing surplus value for the capitalist. Surplus value, according to Marx, is the source of all profit. In Marx’s analysis labour power is the only commodity which can produce more value than it is worth, and for this reason it is known as variable capital. Other commodities simply pass their value on to the finished commodities, but do not create any extra value. They are known as constant capital. Profit, then, is the result of the labour performed by the worker beyond that necessary to create the value of his or her wages. This is the surplus value theory of profit.

It appears to follow from this analysis that as industry becomes more mechanised, using more constant capital and less variable capital, the rate of profit ought to fall. For as a proportion less capital will be advanced on labour, and only labour can create value. In Capital Volume 3 Marx does indeed make the prediction that the rate of profit will fall over time, and this is one of the factors which leads to the downfall of capitalism. (However, as pointed out by Marx’s able expositor Paul Sweezy in The Theory of Capitalist Development , the analysis is problematic.) A further consequence of this analysis is a difficulty for the theory that Marx did recognise, and tried, albeit unsuccessfully, to meet also in Capital Volume 3. It follows from the analysis so far that labour intensive industries ought to have a higher rate of profit than those which use less labour. Not only is this empirically false, it is theoretically unacceptable. Accordingly, Marx argued that in real economic life prices vary in a systematic way from values. Providing the mathematics to explain this is known as the transformation problem, and Marx’s own attempt suffers from technical difficulties. Although there are known techniques for solving this problem now (albeit with unwelcome side consequences), we should recall that the labour theory of value was initially motivated as an intuitively plausible theory of price. But when the connection between price and value is rendered as indirect as it is in the final theory, the intuitive motivation of the theory drains away. A further objection is that Marx’s assertion that only labour can create surplus value is unsupported by any argument or analysis, and can be argued to be merely an artifact of the nature of his presentation. Any commodity can be picked to play a similar role. Consequently with equal justification one could set out a corn theory of value, arguing that corn has the unique power of creating more value than it costs. Formally this would be identical to the labour theory of value. Nevertheless, the claims that somehow labour is responsible for the creation of value, and that profit is the consequence of exploitation, remain intuitively powerful, even if they are difficult to establish in detail.

However, even if the labour theory of value is considered discredited, there are elements of his theory that remain of worth. The Cambridge economist Joan Robinson, in An Essay on Marxian Economics , picked out two aspects of particular note. First, Marx’s refusal to accept that capitalism involves a harmony of interests between worker and capitalist, replacing this with a class based analysis of the worker’s struggle for better wages and conditions of work, versus the capitalist’s drive for ever greater profits. Second, Marx’s denial that there is any long-run tendency to equilibrium in the market, and his descriptions of mechanisms which underlie the trade-cycle of boom and bust. Both provide a salutary corrective to aspects of orthodox economic theory.

4. Theory of History

Marx did not set out his theory of history in great detail. Accordingly, it has to be constructed from a variety of texts, both those where he attempts to apply a theoretical analysis to past and future historical events, and those of a more purely theoretical nature. Of the latter, the 1859 Preface to A Critique of Political Economy has achieved canonical status. However, The German Ideology , co-written with Engels in 1845, is a vital early source in which Marx first sets out the basics of the outlook of historical materialism. We shall briefly outline both texts, and then look at the reconstruction of Marx’s theory of history in the hands of his philosophically most influential recent exponent, G.A. Cohen, who builds on the interpretation of the early Russian Marxist Plekhanov.

We should, however, be aware that Cohen’s interpretation is not universally accepted. Cohen provided his reconstruction of Marx partly because he was frustrated with existing Hegelian-inspired ‘dialectical’ interpretations of Marx, and what he considered to be the vagueness of the influential works of Louis Althusser, neither of which, he felt, provided a rigorous account of Marx’s views. However, some scholars believe that the interpretation that we shall focus on is faulty precisely for its lack of attention to the dialectic. One aspect of this criticism is that Cohen’s understanding has a surprisingly small role for the concept of class struggle, which is often felt to be central to Marx’s theory of history. Cohen’s explanation for this is that the 1859 Preface, on which his interpretation is based, does not give a prominent role to class struggle, and indeed it is not explicitly mentioned. Yet this reasoning is problematic for it is possible that Marx did not want to write in a manner that would engage the concerns of the police censor, and, indeed, a reader aware of the context may be able to detect an implicit reference to class struggle through the inclusion of such phrases as “then begins an era of social revolution,” and “the ideological forms in which men become conscious of this conflict and fight it out”. Hence it does not follow that Marx himself thought that the concept of class struggle was relatively unimportant. Furthermore, when A Critique of Political Economy was replaced by Capital , Marx made no attempt to keep the 1859 Preface in print, and its content is reproduced just as a very much abridged footnote in Capital . Nevertheless we shall concentrate here on Cohen’s interpretation as no other account has been set out with comparable rigour, precision and detail.

In The German Ideology Marx and Engels contrast their new materialist method with the idealism that had characterised previous German thought. Accordingly, they take pains to set out the ‘premises of the materialist method’. They start, they say, from ‘real human beings’, emphasising that human beings are essentially productive, in that they must produce their means of subsistence in order to satisfy their material needs. The satisfaction of needs engenders new needs of both a material and social kind, and forms of society arise corresponding to the state of development of human productive forces. Material life determines, or at least ‘conditions’ social life, and so the primary direction of social explanation is from material production to social forms, and thence to forms of consciousness. As the material means of production develop, ‘modes of co-operation’ or economic structures rise and fall, and eventually communism will become a real possibility once the plight of the workers and their awareness of an alternative motivates them sufficiently to become revolutionaries.

In the sketch of The German Ideology , all the key elements of historical materialism are present, even if the terminology is not yet that of Marx’s more mature writings. Marx’s statement in 1859 Preface renders much the same view in sharper form. Cohen’s reconstruction of Marx’s view in the Preface begins from what Cohen calls the Development Thesis, which is pre-supposed, rather than explicitly stated in the Preface. This is the thesis that the productive forces tend to develop, in the sense of becoming more powerful, over time. This states not that they always do develop, but that there is a tendency for them to do so. The productive forces are the means of production, together with productively applicable knowledge: technology, in other words. The next thesis is the primacy thesis, which has two aspects. The first states that the nature of the economic structure is explained by the level of development of the productive forces, and the second that the nature of the superstructure — the political and legal institutions of society— is explained by the nature of the economic structure. The nature of a society’s ideology, which is to say the religious, artistic, moral and philosophical beliefs contained within society, is also explained in terms of its economic structure, although this receives less emphasis in Cohen’s interpretation. Indeed many activities may well combine aspects of both the superstructure and ideology: a religion is constituted by both institutions and a set of beliefs.

Revolution and epoch change is understood as the consequence of an economic structure no longer being able to continue to develop the forces of production. At this point the development of the productive forces is said to be fettered, and, according to the theory once an economic structure fetters development it will be revolutionised — ‘burst asunder’ — and eventually replaced with an economic structure better suited to preside over the continued development of the forces of production.

In outline, then, the theory has a pleasing simplicity and power. It seems plausible that human productive power develops over time, and plausible too that economic structures exist for as long as they develop the productive forces, but will be replaced when they are no longer capable of doing this. Yet severe problems emerge when we attempt to put more flesh on these bones.

Prior to Cohen’s work, historical materialism had not been regarded as a coherent view within English-language political philosophy. The antipathy is well summed up with the closing words of H.B. Acton’s The Illusion of the Epoch : “Marxism is a philosophical farrago”. One difficulty taken particularly seriously by Cohen is an alleged inconsistency between the explanatory primacy of the forces of production, and certain claims made elsewhere by Marx which appear to give the economic structure primacy in explaining the development of the productive forces. For example, in The Communist Manifesto Marx states that: ‘The bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionising the instruments of production.’ This appears to give causal and explanatory primacy to the economic structure — capitalism — which brings about the development of the forces of production. Cohen accepts that, on the surface at least, this generates a contradiction. Both the economic structure and the development of the productive forces seem to have explanatory priority over each other.

Unsatisfied by such vague resolutions as ‘determination in the last instance’, or the idea of ‘dialectical’ connections, Cohen self-consciously attempts to apply the standards of clarity and rigour of analytic philosophy to provide a reconstructed version of historical materialism.

The key theoretical innovation is to appeal to the notion of functional explanation (also sometimes called ‘consequence explanation’). The essential move is cheerfully to admit that the economic structure does indeed develop the productive forces, but to add that this, according to the theory, is precisely why we have capitalism (when we do). That is, if capitalism failed to develop the productive forces it would disappear. And, indeed, this fits beautifully with historical materialism. For Marx asserts that when an economic structure fails to develop the productive forces — when it ‘fetters’ the productive forces — it will be revolutionised and the epoch will change. So the idea of ‘fettering’ becomes the counterpart to the theory of functional explanation. Essentially fettering is what happens when the economic structure becomes dysfunctional.

Now it is apparent that this renders historical materialism consistent. Yet there is a question as to whether it is at too high a price. For we must ask whether functional explanation is a coherent methodological device. The problem is that we can ask what it is that makes it the case that an economic structure will only persist for as long as it develops the productive forces. Jon Elster has pressed this criticism against Cohen very hard. If we were to argue that there is an agent guiding history who has the purpose that the productive forces should be developed as much as possible then it would make sense that such an agent would intervene in history to carry out this purpose by selecting the economic structures which do the best job. However, it is clear that Marx makes no such metaphysical assumptions. Elster is very critical — sometimes of Marx, sometimes of Cohen — of the idea of appealing to ‘purposes’ in history without those being the purposes of anyone.

Cohen is well aware of this difficulty, but defends the use of functional explanation by comparing its use in historical materialism with its use in evolutionary biology. In contemporary biology it is commonplace to explain the existence of the stripes of a tiger, or the hollow bones of a bird, by pointing to the function of these features. Here we have apparent purposes which are not the purposes of anyone. The obvious counter, however, is that in evolutionary biology we can provide a causal story to underpin these functional explanations; a story involving chance variation and survival of the fittest. Therefore these functional explanations are sustained by a complex causal feedback loop in which dysfunctional elements tend to be filtered out in competition with better functioning elements. Cohen calls such background accounts ‘elaborations’ and he concedes that functional explanations are in need of elaborations. But he points out that standard causal explanations are equally in need of elaborations. We might, for example, be satisfied with the explanation that the vase broke because it was dropped on the floor, but a great deal of further information is needed to explain why this explanation works. Consequently, Cohen claims that we can be justified in offering a functional explanation even when we are in ignorance of its elaboration. Indeed, even in biology detailed causal elaborations of functional explanations have been available only relatively recently. Prior to Darwin, or arguably Lamark, the only candidate causal elaboration was to appeal to God’s purposes. Darwin outlined a very plausible mechanism, but having no genetic theory was not able to elaborate it into a detailed account. Our knowledge remains incomplete to this day. Nevertheless, it seems perfectly reasonable to say that birds have hollow bones in order to facilitate flight. Cohen’s point is that the weight of evidence that organisms are adapted to their environment would permit even a pre-Darwinian atheist to assert this functional explanation with justification. Hence one can be justified in offering a functional explanation even in absence of a candidate elaboration: if there is sufficient weight of inductive evidence.

At this point the issue, then, divides into a theoretical question and an empirical one. The empirical question is whether or not there is evidence that forms of society exist only for as long as they advance productive power, and are replaced by revolution when they fail. Here, one must admit, the empirical record is patchy at best, and there appear to have been long periods of stagnation, even regression, when dysfunctional economic structures were not revolutionised.

The theoretical issue is whether a plausible elaborating explanation is available to underpin Marxist functional explanations. Here there is something of a dilemma. In the first instance it is tempting to try to mimic the elaboration given in the Darwinian story, and appeal to chance variations and survival of the fittest. In this case ‘fittest’ would mean ‘most able to preside over the development of the productive forces’. Chance variation would be a matter of people trying out new types of economic relations. On this account new economic structures begin through experiment, but thrive and persist through their success in developing the productive forces. However the problem is that such an account would seem to introduce a larger element of contingency than Marx seeks, for it is essential to Marx’s thought that one should be able to predict the eventual arrival of communism. Within Darwinian theory there is no warrant for long-term predictions, for everything depends on the contingencies of particular situations. A similar heavy element of contingency would be inherited by a form of historical materialism developed by analogy with evolutionary biology. The dilemma, then, is that the best model for developing the theory makes predictions based on the theory unsound, yet the whole point of the theory is predictive. Hence one must either look for an alternative means of producing elaborating explanation, or give up the predictive ambitions of the theory.

The driving force of history, in Cohen’s reconstruction of Marx, is the development of the productive forces, the most important of which is technology. But what is it that drives such development? Ultimately, in Cohen’s account, it is human rationality. Human beings have the ingenuity to apply themselves to develop means to address the scarcity they find. This on the face of it seems very reasonable. Yet there are difficulties. As Cohen himself acknowledges, societies do not always do what would be rational for an individual to do. Co-ordination problems may stand in our way, and there may be structural barriers. Furthermore, it is relatively rare for those who introduce new technologies to be motivated by the need to address scarcity. Rather, under capitalism, the profit motive is the key. Of course it might be argued that this is the social form that the material need to address scarcity takes under capitalism. But still one may raise the question whether the need to address scarcity always has the influence that it appears to have taken on in modern times. For example, a ruling class’s absolute determination to hold on to power may have led to economically stagnant societies. Alternatively, it might be thought that a society may put religion or the protection of traditional ways of life ahead of economic needs. This goes to the heart of Marx’s theory that man is an essentially productive being and that the locus of interaction with the world is industry. As Cohen himself later argued in essays such as ‘Reconsidering Historical Materialism’, the emphasis on production may appear one-sided, and ignore other powerful elements in human nature. Such a criticism chimes with a criticism from the previous section; that the historical record may not, in fact, display the tendency to growth in the productive forces assumed by the theory.

Many defenders of Marx will argue that the problems stated are problems for Cohen’s interpretation of Marx, rather than for Marx himself. It is possible to argue, for example, that Marx did not have a general theory of history, but rather was a social scientist observing and encouraging the transformation of capitalism into communism as a singular event. And it is certainly true that when Marx analyses a particular historical episode, as he does in the 18th Brumaire of Louis Napoleon , any idea of fitting events into a fixed pattern of history seems very far from Marx’s mind. On other views Marx did have a general theory of history but it is far more flexible and less determinate than Cohen insists (Miller). And finally, as noted, there are critics who believe that Cohen’s interpretation is entirely wrong-headed (Sayers).

The issue of Marx and morality poses a conundrum. On reading Marx’s works at all periods of his life, there appears to be the strongest possible distaste towards bourgeois capitalist society, and an undoubted endorsement of future communist society. Yet the terms of this antipathy and endorsement are far from clear. Despite expectations, Marx never says that capitalism is unjust. Neither does he say that communism would be a just form of society. In fact he takes pains to distance himself from those who engage in a discourse of justice, and makes a conscious attempt to exclude direct moral commentary in his own works. The puzzle is why this should be, given the weight of indirect moral commentary one finds.

There are, initially, separate questions, concerning Marx’s attitude to capitalism and to communism. There are also separate questions concerning his attitude to ideas of justice, and to ideas of morality more broadly concerned. This, then, generates four questions: (1) Did Marx think capitalism unjust?; (2) did he think that capitalism could be morally criticised on other grounds?; (3) did he think that communism would be just? (4) did he think it could be morally approved of on other grounds? These are the questions we shall consider in this section.

The initial argument that Marx must have thought that capitalism is unjust is based on the observation that Marx argued that all capitalist profit is ultimately derived from the exploitation of the worker. Capitalism’s dirty secret is that it is not a realm of harmony and mutual benefit but a system in which one class systematically extracts profit from another. How could this fail to be unjust? Yet it is notable that Marx never concludes this, and in Capital he goes as far as to say that such exchange is ‘by no means an injustice’.

Allen Wood has argued that Marx took this approach because his general theoretical approach excludes any trans-epochal standpoint from which one can comment on the justice of an economic system. Even though one can criticize particular behaviour from within an economic structure as unjust (and theft under capitalism would be an example) it is not possible to criticise capitalism as a whole. This is a consequence of Marx’s analysis of the role of ideas of justice from within historical materialism. That is to say, juridical institutions are part of the superstructure, and ideas of justice are ideological, and the role of both the superstructure and ideology, in the functionalist reading of historical materialism adopted here, is to stabilise the economic structure. Consequently, to state that something is just under capitalism is simply a judgement applied to those elements of the system that will tend to have the effect of advancing capitalism. According to Marx, in any society the ruling ideas are those of the ruling class; the core of the theory of ideology.

Ziyad Husami, however, argues that Wood is mistaken, ignoring the fact that for Marx ideas undergo a double determination in that the ideas of the non-ruling class may be very different from those of the ruling class. Of course it is the ideas of the ruling class that receive attention and implementation, but this does not mean that other ideas do not exist. Husami goes as far as to argue that members of the proletariat under capitalism have an account of justice which matches communism. From this privileged standpoint of the proletariat, which is also Marx’s standpoint, capitalism is unjust, and so it follows that Marx thought capitalism unjust.

Plausible though it may sound, Husami’s argument fails to account for two related points. First, it cannot explain why Marx never described capitalism as unjust, and second, it does not account for the distance Marx wanted to place between his own scientific socialism, and that of the utopian socialists who argued for the injustice of capitalism. Hence one cannot avoid the conclusion that the ‘official’ view of Marx is that capitalism is not unjust.

Nevertheless, this leaves us with a puzzle. Much of Marx’s description of capitalism — his use of the words ‘embezzlement’, ‘robbery’ and ‘exploitation’ — belie the official account. Arguably, the only satisfactory way of understanding this issue is, once more, from G.A. Cohen, who proposes that Marx believed that capitalism was unjust, but did not believe that he believed it was unjust (Cohen 1983). In other words, Marx, like so many of us, did not have perfect knowledge of his own mind. In his explicit reflections on the justice of capitalism he was able to maintain his official view. But in less guarded moments his real view slips out, even if never in explicit language. Such an interpretation is bound to be controversial, but it makes good sense of the texts.

Whatever one concludes on the question of whether Marx thought capitalism unjust, it is, nevertheless, obvious that Marx thought that capitalism was not the best way for human beings to live. Points made in his early writings remain present throughout his writings, if no longer connected to an explicit theory of alienation. The worker finds work a torment, suffers poverty, overwork and lack of fulfillment and freedom. People do not relate to each other as humans should.

Does this amount to a moral criticism of capitalism or not? In the absence of any special reason to argue otherwise, it simply seems obvious that Marx’s critique is a moral one. Capitalism impedes human flourishing.

Marx, though, once more refrained from making this explicit; he seemed to show no interest in locating his criticism of capitalism in any of the traditions of moral philosophy, or explaining how he was generating a new tradition. There may have been two reasons for his caution. The first was that while there were bad things about capitalism, there is, from a world historical point of view, much good about it too. For without capitalism, communism would not be possible. Capitalism is to be transcended, not abolished, and this may be difficult to convey in the terms of moral philosophy.

Second, and perhaps more importantly, we need to return to the contrast between scientific and utopian socialism. The utopians appealed to universal ideas of truth and justice to defend their proposed schemes, and their theory of transition was based on the idea that appealing to moral sensibilities would be the best, perhaps only, way of bringing about the new chosen society. Marx wanted to distance himself from this tradition of utopian thought, and the key point of distinction was to argue that the route to understanding the possibilities of human emancipation lay in the analysis of historical and social forces, not in morality. Hence, for Marx, any appeal to morality was theoretically a backward step.

This leads us now to Marx’s assessment of communism. Would communism be a just society? In considering Marx’s attitude to communism and justice there are really only two viable possibilities: either he thought that communism would be a just society or he thought that the concept of justice would not apply: that communism would transcend justice.

Communism is described by Marx, in the Critique of the Gotha Programme , as a society in which each person should contribute according to their ability and receive according to their need. This certainly sounds like a theory of justice, and could be adopted as such. However it is possibly truer to Marx’s thought to say that this is part of an account in which communism transcends justice, as Lukes has argued.

If we start with the idea that the point of ideas of justice is to resolve disputes, then a society without disputes would have no need or place for justice. We can see this by reflecting upon Hume’s idea of the circumstances of justice. Hume argued that if there was enormous material abundance — if everyone could have whatever they wanted without invading another’s share — we would never have devised rules of justice. And, of course, Marx often suggested that communism would be a society of such abundance. But Hume also suggested that justice would not be needed in other circumstances; if there were complete fellow-feeling between all human beings. Again there would be no conflict and no need for justice. Of course, one can argue whether either material abundance or human fellow-feeling to this degree would be possible, but the point is that both arguments give a clear sense in which communism transcends justice.

Nevertheless we remain with the question of whether Marx thought that communism could be commended on other moral grounds. On a broad understanding, in which morality, or perhaps better to say ethics, is concerning with the idea of living well, it seems that communism can be assessed favourably in this light. One compelling argument is that Marx’s career simply makes no sense unless we can attribute such a belief to him. But beyond this we can be brief in that the considerations adduced in section 2 above apply again. Communism clearly advances human flourishing, in Marx’s view. The only reason for denying that, in Marx’s vision, it would amount to a good society is a theoretical antipathy to the word ‘good’. And here the main point is that, in Marx’s view, communism would not be brought about by high-minded benefactors of humanity. Quite possibly his determination to retain this point of difference between himself and the Utopian socialists led him to disparage the importance of morality to a degree that goes beyond the call of theoretical necessity.

Primary Literature

• Marx, Karl and Friedrich Engels, Gesamtausgabe (MEGA), Berlin, 1975–.
• –––, Collected Works , New York and London: International Publishers. 1975.
• –––, Selected Works , 2 Volumes, Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1962.
• Marx, Karl, Karl Marx: Selected Writings , 2 nd edition, David McLellan (ed.), Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000.

Secondary Literature

See McLellan 1973 and Wheen 1999 for biographies of Marx, and see Singer 2000 and Wolff 2002 for general introductions.

• Acton, H.B., 1955, The Illusion of the Epoch , London: Cohen and West.
• Althusser, Louis, 1969, For Marx , London: Penguin.
• Althusser, Louis, and Balibar, Etienne, 1970, Reading Capital , London: NLB.
• Arthur, C.J., 1986, Dialectics of Labour , Oxford: Basil Blackwell.
• Avineri, Shlomo, 1970, The Social and Political Thought of Karl Marx , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• Bottomore, Tom (ed.), 1979, Karl Marx , Oxford: Blackwell.
• Brudney, Daniel, 1998, Marx’s Attempt to Leave Philosophy . Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
• Carver, Terrell, 1982, Marx’s Social Theory , New York: Oxford University Press.
• Carver, Terrell (ed.), 1991, The Cambridge Companion to Marx , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• Carver, Terrell, 1998, The Post-Modern Marx , Manchester: Manchester University Press.
• Cohen, Joshua, 1982, ‘Review of G.A. Cohen, Karl Marx’s Theory of History ’, Journal of Philosophy , 79: 253–273.
• Cohen, G.A., 1983, ‘Review of Allen Wood, Karl Marx ’, Mind , 92: 440–445.
• Cohen, G.A., 1988, History, Labour and Freedom , Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• Cohen, G.A., 2001, Karl Marx’s Theory of History: A Defence , 2nd edition, Oxford, Oxford University Press.
• Desai, Megnad, 2002, Marx’s Revenge , London: Verso.
• Elster, Jon, 1985, Making Sense of Marx, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• Geras, Norman, 1989, ‘The Controversy about Marx and Justice,’ in A. Callinicos (ed.), Marxist Theory , Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989.
• Hook, Sidney, 1950, From Hegel to Marx , New York: Humanities Press.
• Husami, Ziyad, 1978, ‘Marx on Distributive Justice’, Philosophy and Public Affairs , 8: 27–64.
• Kamenka, Eugene, 1962, The Ethical Foundations of Marxism London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.
• Kolakowski, Leszek, 1978, Main Currents of Marxism , 3 volumes, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• Leopold, David, 2007, The Young Karl Marx , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• Lukes, Stephen, 1987, Marxism and Morality , Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• Maguire, John, 1972, Marx’s Paris Writings , Dublin: Gill and Macmillan.
• McLellan, David, 1970, Marx Before Marxism , London: Macmillan.
• McLellan, David, 1973, Karl Marx: His Life and Thought , London: Macmillan.
• Miller, Richard, 1984, Analyzing Marx , Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press.
• Peffer, Rodney, 1990, Marxism, Morality and Social Justice , Princeton: Princeton University Press.
• Plekhanov, G.V., (1947 [1895]), The Development of the Monist View of History London: Lawrence and Wishart.
• Robinson, Joan, 1942, An Essay on Marxian Economics , London: Macmillan.
• Roemer, John, 1982, A General Theory of Exploitation and Class , Cambridge Ma.: Harvard University Press.
• Roemer, John (ed.), 1986, Analytical Marxism , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• Rosen, Michael, 1996, On Voluntary Servitude , Cambridge: Polity Press.
• Sayers, Sean, 1990, ‘Marxism and the Dialectical Method: A Critique of G.A. Cohen’, in S.Sayers (ed.), Socialism, Feminism and Philosophy: A Radical Philosophy Reader , London: Routledge.
• Singer, Peter, 2000, Marx: A Very Short Introduction , Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• Sober, E., Levine, A., and Wright, E.O. 1992, Reconstructing Marx , London: Verso.
• Sweezy, Paul, 1942 [1970], The Theory of Capitalist Development , New York: Monthly Review Press.
• Wheen, Francis, 1999, Karl Marx , London: Fourth Estate.
• Wolff, Jonathan, 2002, Why Read Marx Today? , Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• Wolff, Robert Paul, 1984, Understanding Marx , Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
• Wood, Allen, 1981, Karl Marx , London: Routledge; second edition, 2004.
• Wood, Allen, 1972, ‘The Marxian Critique of Justice’, Philosophy and Public Affairs , 1: 244–82.

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Negativity and Democracy: Marxism and the Critical Theory Tradition

Vasilis Grollios, Negativity and Democracy: Marxism and the Critical Theory Tradition , Routledge, 2017. (Routledge Advances in Democratic Theory Series)

Despite the crisis and the fact that many people regard bourgeois parliamentary democracy as a system that does not and cannot express their needs, the same model persists. People have become even more shackled within its intellectual framework and look for parties or politicians that will act as saviors and alter the current political situation. Instead of debunking the philosophical anthropology, the values that are adopted by those who occupy the state and by those who support the bourgeois form of democracy, people continue to embrace and reiterate their faith in these very values – growth, interpreted as the perpetual accumulation of wealth, competition and hard work – and seek politicians who will more effectively implement them for the common good. Different parties occupy states all the time yet the logic according to which we are supposed to live remains the same. To what extent is the irrational rationality of capitalism, which evaluates everything in terms of money multiplication, being produced by ordinary people who only attempt to fulfill a decent livelihood?

Through exploring and elaborating on the critical theory of the early Frankfurt School, my book,  Negativity and Democracy: Marxism and the Critical Theory Tradition , challenges the view that democracy should be understood as a call for a more effective domination of the people, as another kind of power or as a demand for the replacement of the elite that currently holds power, even by a party that claims to be socialist or Marxist.

For the critical theorist, the concept of democracy is theorized in terms of negative dialectics. Negative dialectics attempts to make us aware of the human content that lies hidden inside fetish-forms such as the state, the bourgeois form of democracy, values as money or the trinity formula of capital, rent, and wage. The critical theory of democracy poses the question of how it is possible for people, on the one hand, to be the only subjects of history, and on the other, to be ultimately dominated by the aforementioned forms, over which they have no control. Why does human doing – that is to say, the way that we come into contact with each other and with nature to fulfill our basic needs – take forms that we cannot control, that do not express our needs and that ultimately dominate us? Why does this content take these forms? Could one say that we ourselves built the bars of our prison? Are we the victims of capital or we should be proud of being the crisis of it? What is it that which dominates us: the state and the politicians along with the big corporations and banks or a deeper dynamic that we ourselves create? Such questions point to the complexity of the concerns of critical theory: in attempting to reveal and unravel the very essence of the apparent fetish-forms, it poses much deeper questions than those posed by traditional theory.

In this study, I support the idea that the early theorists of the Frankfurt School employed a dialectics that was negative and open. For these theorists, critical theory has a specific meaning and purpose, which is to denaturalize and thus defetishize the forms that make up the topsy-turvy world by penetrating to their real content, thus revealing the hidden human content of the forms. This conceptualization of critical theory is at odds with the way in which most researchers currently use the term: they attribute to it a vague meaning that has very little to do with how it was perceived by the founders of the critical theory tradition, that is, the first generation of Frankfurt School theorists.

My hope is that a critical-negative analysis can help us act in open and negative terms towards social reality and thus understand the non-apparent, hidden character of social fetish-forms such as the state, value as money and the bourgeois-liberal-representative form of democracy. In so doing, our efforts to change the world and our struggle for democracy might bring to an end our reproduction of the mystified forms that estrange us from our dignity and will instead succeed in opening new cracks in the capitalist mode of production.

It should be noted that the aim of this book is not to present a diverse collection of studies on the concept of negativity and democracy. Instead, there is a common theme running throughout the book: key to the philosophy of all the major figures of the Frankfurt School/critical theory tradition is the notion of the ‘enchanted’, bewitched, ‘topsy-turvy world’ (K. Marx, Capital , Volume 3, CW 37, Lawrence and Wishart, 1998, p. 817) or the ‘concept of the spell and all its implications’ (Adorno, History and Freedom , Polity, Great Britain, 2006, p. 173), which can come to the fore only with a philosophical account of the dialectics between appearance/form and essence/content. The research goal that the major thinkers of the critical theory tradition shared was to investigate how fetishism is a process that is produced and reproduced by us by and through our daily doing. Irrespective of the varied conclusions that these critical theorists reached as a result of their philosophical investigations, the concepts of negativity, contradiction and their analysis of fetishism as a process played a defining role in their understanding of the spellbound social totality, a role that is not encountered in any other social theory tradition. My study elaborates on the common perspective that these theorists shared.

More specifically, I will also support among others the unique idea that in Adorno not only the concept of the spell, but all the key notions in his philosophy hold an inherent political meaning that can come to the fore only if they are connected to its idea that ‘society remains class struggle’ (Adorno, “Society”, in Boyers Robert (ed.) The Legacy of the German Refugee Intellectuals , Schocken Books, New York, 1969, p. 149). Horkheimer also adopts a similar concept of the spell, of fetishism since he recognises ‘the irrationality of the world’ (Horkheimer, Dawn & Decline. Notes 1926-1931 and 1950-1969 . New York: The Seabury Press. p. 104) in which ‘men must submit to conditions they themselves create as to something alien and overwhelmingly powerful’ (Ibid. p. 51). These conditions determine the way in which the ‘topsy-turvy world’ appears, that is, in the inverted, distorted forms previously mentioned. He even calls for a ‘Marxist clarification of the concept of freedom’ (Ibid. p. 52). Marcuse holds, in regard to dialectics and fetishism, that ‘[t]he entire dimension that has been neglected in Marxian theory […] [is] how social institutions reproduce themselves in the individuals, and how the individuals, by virtue of their reproducing their own society act on it’. (Marcuse, “Heidegger’s Politics. An Interview”, in Marcuse, Heideggerian Marxism , p. 175). My chapter on Marcuse is the only I know that puts this idea at the center of its analysis.

To get a discount on the book, download the flyer here . A review copy of the book can be obtained by emailing Grollios .

If you would like to discuss a book you’ve published on the APA Blog, contact us here .

Vasilis Grollios

Vasilis Grollios teaches in the Greek Open University. He has taken all his degrees form the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece and has conducted postdoctoral research in the University of York, UK. He has published articles on J.S.Mill and Critical Theory in Constellations, Journal of Political Ideologies, Capital and Class, Critique: A Journal of Social Theory and Critical Sociology.

• critical theory
• Editor: Nathan Eckstrand
• Frankfurt School
• Negative dialectics

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Marxism as a political ideology made its way to India when we were struggling for independence. Many political parties believe in Marxism and Communism but they aren’t as popular as the Bharatiya Janata Party or the Indian National Congress. Marxism as a social phenomenon or economic postulation is also not very popular. But, Marxism is still relevant not only in India but most of the underdeveloped nations around the world.

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2 The Marxist Critique of Liberal Democracy

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• Published: June 1993
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The various Marxist criticisms of liberal democracy are analysed and assessed. These can be divided into two broad categories: philosophical and sociological. The former type of criticism, whose locus classicus in the early work of Marx, concentrates on the idea of political alienation. The latter type of criticism, relying as it does on economic determinism, dismisses the state as a tool of bourgeois interests. In whatever form, Marxist criticisms of liberal democracy depend on a priori assumptions about human nature and social causation.

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You are here, socy 151: foundations of modern social theory,  - marx's theory of history.

We consider closely Marx’s Grundrisse , written between The German Ideology  and  Das Kapital . In the  Grundrisse , Marx revisits and revises his theory of historical change. Previously, he argued that history is characterized by a uni-linear increase in the division of labor. He also argued that class struggle caused revolutionary transitions from one mode of production to the next–slavery to feudalism to capitalism–and that Communism will be the last stage in social evolution. In the  Grundrisse , Marx develops a theory of historical change focused on property relations. In addition, he depicts a more complex, multi-linear development of history. The facet of Marx which he exhibits in the  Grundrisse  tends not to be the one that is widely remembered, but understanding the nuances he presents there is crucial to fully understand his idea of history and historical change and the role of property in capitalism and Communism.

Lecture Chapters

• The Many Facets of Karl Marx
• "Grundrisse": Major Themes
• Centrality of Division of Labor in "The German Ideology"
• Modes of Production
• New Contributions in "Grundrisse"
• Multiple Trajectories in "Grundrisse"

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Is ‘cultural Marxism’ a conspiracy theory or a threat to democracy?

Ted cruz said the student protests are a result of ‘cultural marxism.’ what does that mean.

By Jennifer Graham

Student protests at universities across the U.S. are ostensibly related to the Hamas attacks on Oct. 7 and Israel’s military response. But there’s something else that’s being blamed for the uprisings: cultural Marxism.

Speaking to Sean Hannity on Fox earlier this week, Texas Sen. Ted Cruz blamed cultural Marxism directly, without offering a definition. In a previous appearance on Fox, he explained that this system of belief divides the world into two groups — oppressors and victims — and that student protesters see Palestinians as the victims oppressed by Israel.

Cruz is likely talking up cultural Marxism because he published a book on that theme last year. But he’s not the only person on the political right to link campus unrest to this ideology, or to warn of its dangers in recent years.

A 2022 report from the Heritage Foundation said that cultural Marxism poses a “far more serious and existential threat to the United States than did Soviet communism.” Jordan Peterson has spoken about it, as have other thought leaders on the right.

Those on the left, however, call this idea balderdash, “ the newest intellectual bugaboo on the radical right ,” as an article published in the magazine of the Southern Poverty Law Center put it.

It’s actually not that new — Pat Buchanan was using the term in his presidential campaign in the year 2000. But cultural Marxism has risen to the fore again, in part because Columbia University — the epicenter of the student protests — has a history of affiliation with Marxist thought. And while some on the left have dismissed the concept of cultural Marxism as a “far-right conspiracy theory,” there are, in fact, advocates of Marxism teaching in American universities, and the number of young adults who prefer socialism and Marxism to capitalism is on the rise.

Here’s a short primer on why the controversial German philosopher, born 206 years ago this week, is coming up in connection with campus protests in 2024.

When was the Frankfurt School at Columbia University?

Prior to World War II, a group of German scholars focused on neo-Marxist theory became collectively known as the Frankfurt School. According to an overview published by ThoughtCo ., “It was not a school, in the physical sense, but rather a school of thought associated with scholars at the Institute for Social Research at the University of Frankfurt in Germany.”

After Adolph Hitler came to power, the scholars moved their base camp to Columbia University, where it resided from 1934 to 1949, the New Republic explained in an article entitled “ Frankfurt on the Hudson .” The scholarship most associated with this group of intellectuals is Critical Theory, which examines oppression and inequality in social structures, and the role of media and culture in shaping society; it is the ideological ancestor of Critical Race Theory , a recent front in the culture wars.

As described in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy , the Frankfurt School scholars “revised and updated Marxism by integrating it with the work of Sigmund Freud, Max Weber, and Friedrich Nietzsche while developing a model of radical critique that is immanently anchored in social reality. They used this model to analyze a wide range of phenomena — from authoritarianism as a political formation and as it manifests in both the nuclear family and deep-seated psychological dispositions, to the effects of capitalism on psychological, social, cultural, and political formations as well as on the production of knowledge itself.”

The fact that many of these scholars were Jewish contributes to arguments that opposition to cultural Marxism is antisemitic, as an article by Bill Berkowitz in Intelligence Report, the magazine of the Southern Law Poverty Center, claims.

Berkowitz writes: “Right-wing ideologues, racists and other extremists have jazzed up political correctness and repackaged it — in its most virulent form, as an anti-Semitic theory that identifies Jews in general and several Jewish intellectuals in particular as nefarious, communistic destroyers. These supposed originators of ‘cultural Marxism’ are seen as conspiratorial plotters intent on making Americans feel guilty and thus subverting their Christian culture.”

But in political discourse on the right, the term has largely been divorced from its complex history and instead is being used to more broadly condemn “wokeness” and any progressive cause, especially those that focus on economic or social inequality.

And of course, when it comes to the student protests, the people crying “cultural Marxism” are defenders, not critics, of Israel and the Jewish people.

What does ‘cultural Marxism’ mean?

According to the Oxford English Dictionary , the first known use of the term cultural Marxism dates to 1938, when it was then described in the British Union Quarterly as “the preliminary bolshevisation of the mind, facilitated by the indiscriminate toleration-psychosis of liberalism, inherent in Social-Democracy, and leading to its final inevitable collapse.”

It has since been used by the political right to describe “a political agenda advocating radical social reform, said to be promoted within western cultural institutions by liberal or left-wing ideologues intent on eroding traditional social values and imposing a dogmatic form of progressivism on society,” according to the Oxford Dictionary.

The antisemitism on college campuses is utterly disgusting. It is a direct result of the sickness of Cultural Marxism that has seized control of colleges. Every violent rioter should be expelled, arrested, and—if they are not a citizen—deported. pic.twitter.com/XtYVAIPyED — Ted Cruz (@tedcruz) May 2, 2024

In a 2018 article on the topic in The Hedgehog Review , Andrew Lynn noted that cultural Marxism is “centered in the academy” and is “said to hold sway over the professoriate in humanities and social science departments.” Their students are then sent forth into the world to proselytize Marxist cultural principles, which rose up to replace Marxist economic principles after their failure.

Marxism on campus

How many American professors are actually Marxists? Forbes reported that one estimate puts the number at 3%, although those who generally embrace Marxist or Democratic Socialist views are likely higher, and Marxist-leaning professors outnumber conservatives in some disciplines, like social science.

As Reason’s Robby Soave wrote in “Panic Attack: Young Radicals in the Age of Trump,” published in 2019, “Most people know that professors are more left-leaning than the average American: what they might not realize is that so many professors teach from an explicitly Marxist perspective or at the very least apply critical theory to the subject they teach.”

As for the general public, the rise in young adults expressing support for Marxism is “disquieting,” according to the Acton Institute, which in 2020 reported on a five-fold increase in just one year, saying “nearly one-third of the members of Gen Z — Americans between the ages of 16 and 23 — deem ‘Marxism’ worthy of support. The term’s favorability has skyrocketed to 30% among Gen Z respondents, up from 6% in 2019.”

The same survey found that 49% of Gen Z approved of socialism, compared to 40% the year prior.

More recently, in 2022, Pew Research Center found shrinking support for socialism among all Americans, but noted a sharp generational divide: “While younger adults are more likely than older adults to say they have positive impressions of socialism, the opposite is true for capitalism. Just 40% of those ages 18 to 29 view capitalism positively; that is the lowest share in any age group and 33 percentage points lower than the share of those 65 and older.”

There is also a pronounced generational divide when it comes to Americans’ feelings about Israel and Palestine. In multiple surveys, young adults are more likely to sympathize with Palestinians than with Israelis. And notably, according to a report in The Washington Post, “Fourteen percent of 18- to 29-year-olds thought it was ‘very important’ for the United States to protect Israel compared with two-thirds of those 65 or older.” The same article, written by Frances Vinall, noted that one explanation for young Americans’ support of Palestine is their tendency to see the conflict “through a racial justice lens.”

Vinall quoted Eitan Hersh, a political science professor at Tufts University, who said many college students see the war as “a people of color — that is, the Palestinians — rising up against a white oppressor.”

In other words, Cruz wasn’t wrong to note a thread of cultural Marxism leading to the uprisings, which have led to the arrests of more than 2,000 people across the United States.

Nor was his argument hurt when social media sleuths discovered that one protester and Ph.D. candidate at Columbia University was interested in “theories of the imagination & poetry as interpreted through a Marxian lens.”