What sort of political system did Marx want?

[Imag1ne]

I was just curious to whether Marx ever stated specifically what political system he wanted (direct democracy, representative, centralized, republic, etc.) during the transitional stage of socialism or how a revolution ought to be lead.

My bad if a thread like this was already posted.

[SubcomandanteJames]

You'll find that young Marx who was not unknown to criticize authority ("The state shall never find fault within itself, and will remain seperate from the will of the people") is quite different from later Marx who was a bit more authoritative. I personally believe in the Manifesto he means for their to be two revolutions from capitalism to socialism (statist communism, or maybe state capitalism), socialism to stateless communism. I think that Marx always expected the workers to be the leaders of each transition with the use of soviets, unions, etc., and eventually the soviets themselves are the seperate socialist stateless communities.

He's a very varied man, however!
:blushing:

[SocialismOrBarbarism]

I was just curious to whether Marx ever stated specifically what political system he wanted (direct democracy, representative, centralized, republic, etc.) during the transitional stage of socialism or how a revolution ought to be lead.

My bad if a thread like this was already posted.

No, but he did describe the Paris Commune as an example of the dictatorship of the proletariat, and he and Engels described the organizational form of the commune in detail in The Civil War in France and it's postscript:


From the outset the Commune was compelled to recognize that the working class, once come to power, could not manage with the old state machine; that in order not to lose again its only just conquered supremacy, this working class must, on the one hand, do away with all the old repressive machinery previously used against it itself,and, on the other, safeguard itself against its own deputies and officials, by declaring them all, without exception, subject to recall at any moment.

...

Against this transformation of the state and the organs of the state from servants of society into masters of society the Commune made use of two infallible expedients. In this first place, it filled all posts administrative, judicial, and educational by election on the basis of universal suffrage of all concerned, with the right of the same electors to recall their delegate at any time. And in the second place, all officials, high or low, were paid only the wages received by other workers. The highest salary paid by the Commune to anyone was 6,000 francs. In this way an effective barrier to place-hunting and careerism was set up, even apart from the binding mandates to delegates to representative bodies which were also added in profusion."



The Commune was formed of the municipal councillors, chosen by universal suffrage in the various wards of the town, responsible and revocable at short terms. The majority of its members were naturally working men, or acknowledged representatives of the working class. The Commune was to be a working, not a parliamentary body, executive and legislative at the same time.
Instead of continuing to be the agent of the Central Government, the police was at once stripped of its political attributes, and turned into the responsible, and at all times revocable, agent of the Commune. So were the officials of all other branches of the administration. From the members of the Commune downwards, the public service had to be done at workman’s wage. The vested interests and the representation allowances of the high dignitaries of state disappeared along with the high dignitaries themselves. Public functions ceased to be the private property of the tools of the Central Government. Not only municipal administration, but the whole initiative hitherto exercised by the state was laid into the hands of the Commune.
Having once got rid of the standing army and the police – the physical force elements of the old government – the Commune was anxious to break the spiritual force of repression, the “parson-power", by the disestablishment and disendowment of all churches as proprietary bodies. The priests were sent back to the recesses of private life, there to feed upon the alms of the faithful in imitation of their predecessors, the apostles.
The whole of the educational institutions were opened to the people gratuitously, and at the same time cleared of all interference of church and state. Thus, not only was education made accessible to all, but science itself freed from the fetters which class prejudice and governmental force had imposed upon it.
The judicial functionaries were to be divested of that sham independence which had but served to mask their abject subserviency to all succeeding governments to which, in turn, they had taken, and broken, the oaths of allegiance. Like the rest of public servants, magistrates and judges were to be elective, responsible, and revocable.
The Paris Commune was, of course, to serve as a model to all the great industrial centres of France. The communal regime once established in Paris and the secondary centres, the old centralized government would in the provinces, too, have to give way to the self-government of the producers.
In a rough sketch of national organization, which the Commune had no time to develop, it states clearly that the Commune was to be the political form of even the smallest country hamlet, and that in the rural districts the standing army was to be replaced by a national militia, with an extremely short term of service. The rural communities of every district were to administer their common affairs by an assembly of delegates in the central town, and these district assemblies were again to send deputies to the National Delegation in Paris, each delegate to be at any time revocable and bound by the mandat imperatif (formal instructions) of his constituents. The few but important functions which would still remain for a central government were not to be suppressed, as has been intentionally misstated, but were to be discharged by Communal and thereafter responsible agents.

The unity of the nation was not to be broken, but, on the contrary, to be organized by Communal Constitution, and to become a reality by the destruction of the state power which claimed to be the embodiment of that unity independent of, and superior to, the nation itself, from which it was but a parasitic excresence.

While the merely repressive organs of the old governmental power were to be amputated, its legitimate functions were to be wrested from an authority usurping pre-eminence over society itself, and restored to the responsible agents of society. Instead of deciding once in three or six years which member of the ruling class was to misrepresent the people in Parliament, universal suffrage was to serve the people, constituted in Communes, as individual suffrage serves every other employer in the search for the workmen and managers in his business. And it is well-known that companies, like individuals, in matters of real business generally know how to put the right man in the right place, and, if they for once make a mistake, to redress it promptly. On the other hand, nothing could be more foreign to the spirit of the Commune than to supercede universal suffrage by hierarchical investiture.
...

The Communal Constitution would have restored to the social body all the forces hitherto absorbed by the state parasite feeding upon, and clogging the free movement of, society. By this one act, it would have initiated the regeneration of France.
...

It was essentially a working class government, the product of the struggle of the producing against the appropriating class, the political form at last discovered under which to work out the economical emancipation of labor.
...

The Commune, they exclaim, intends to abolish property, the basis of all civilization!
Yes, gentlemen, the Commune intended to abolish that class property which makes the labor of the many the wealth of the few. It aimed at the expropriation of the expropriators. It wanted to make individual property a truth by transforming the means of production, land, and capital, now chiefly the means of enslaving and exploiting labor, into mere instruments of free and associated labor. But this is communism, “impossible” communism! Why, those members of the ruling classes who are intelligent enough to perceive the impossibility of continuing the present system – and they are many – have become the obtrusive and full-mouthed apostles of co-operative production. If co-operative production is not to remain a sham and a snare; if it is to supersede the capitalist system; if united co-operative societies are to regulate national production upon common plan, thus taking it under their own control, and putting an end to the constant anarchy and periodical convulsions which are the fatality of capitalist production – what else, gentlemen, would it be but communism, “possible” communism?

[chimx]

You'll find that young Marx who was not unknown to criticize authority ("The state shall never find fault within itself, and will remain seperate from the will of the people") is quite different from later Marx who was a bit more authoritative. I personally believe in the Manifesto he means for their to be two revolutions from capitalism to socialism (statist communism, or maybe state capitalism), socialism to stateless communism. I think that Marx always expected the workers to be the leaders of each transition with the use of soviets, unions, etc., and eventually the soviets themselves are the seperate socialist stateless communities.

He's a very varied man, however!
:blushing:

I don't think this is really correct at all. The younger Marx who wrote the Manifesto was less critical of centralized political power than the later Marx. This is obviously present in the earliest drafts of the Manifesto. You can also see this during the 1848 revolution(s) of the German states. At the time Marx was an editor for a paper called Neue Rheinische Zeitung whose theme was surprisingly not that of a revolutionary working-class ideology, but rather advocating "a single, indivisible, democratic German republic".

The older Marx is different. One has to keep in mind that Marx's historical background at this time was a pre-United Germany. After the unification of Germany in 1870, I think you see something of a shift in Marx's political vision. In 1871 he published The Civil War in France, writing in it, "one thing especially was proved by the Commune, viz., that 'the working class cannot simply lay hold of ready-made state machinery, and wield it for its own purposes."

At the same time the Manifesto was republished with a new introduction that read, "no special stress is laid on the revolutionary measures proposed at the end of Section II. That passage would, in many respects, be very differently worded today." Section II was of course the section emphasizing political and economic centralization.

One of Marx's last major writings is the Critique of the Gotha Program, a criticism of the German Social Democratic movement's unification program. While this is famous for elaborating on the nature of the Dictatorship of the Proletariat, notably the idea of "to each according to his contributions", it also stands in contrast to the Marx of 1848 struggling for a united democratic Germany:

"[the programs] political demands contain nothing beyond the old democratic litany familiar to all: universal suffrage, direct legislation, popular rights, a people's militia, etc. They are a mere echo of the bourgeois People's party, of the League of Peace and Freedom. They are all demands which, insofar as they are not exaggerated in fantastic presentation, have already been realized."

[chimx]

I was just curious to whether Marx ever stated specifically what political system he wanted (direct democracy, representative, centralized, republic, etc.) during the transitional stage of socialism or how a revolution ought to be lead.

Marx never specifically stated anything because he rightly knew that each country was unique and therefore had to develop naturally in ways that made sense to the social mores of their own unique communities and cultures. I was just rereading Marx's critique of the "gotha program" for the above post and thought that this passage could help answer your question on this. In the program mentioned above, the Germany social democrats emphasized the term "present-day state" when dealing with capitalist state, which was entirely too vague for Marx. He wrote:


"And what of the riotous misuse which the program makes of the words "present-day state", "present-day society", and of the still more riotous misconception it creates in regard to the state to which it addresses its demands?

"Present-day society" is capitalist society, which exists in all civilized countries, more or less free from medieval admixture, more or less modified by the particular historical development of each country, more or less developed. On the other hand, the "present-day state" changes with a country's frontier. It is different in the Prusso-German Empire from what it is in Switzerland, and different in England from what it is in the United States. The "present-day state" is therefore a fiction."

He doesn't mean that the state is a fiction, but the idea that a capitalist state is a single homogenous one-dimensional entity is fictitious. They are unique, have unique histories and developments. Equally so must any movement towards communism make strides that are reflective of their societies unique features.

For example, following the Hague conference of 1872, Marx made a speech known as La Liberte Speech. In it he emphasized the unique nature of different states, and how because capitalist states are unique, proletarian dictatorship may unfold differently from state to state:


Someday the worker must seize political power in order to build up the new organization of labor; he must overthrow the old politics which sustain the old institutions, if he is not to lose Heaven on Earth, like the old Christians who neglected and despised politics.

But we have not asserted that the ways to achieve that goal are everywhere the same.

You know that the institutions, mores, and traditions of various countries must be taken into consideration, and we do not deny that there are countries -- such as America, England, and if I were more familiar with your institutions, I would perhaps also add Holland -- where the workers can attain their goal by peaceful means. This being the case, we must also recognize the fact that in most countries on the Continent the lever of our revolution must be force; it is force to which we must some day appeal in order to erect the rule of labor.

The institutions he is referring to are democratic institutions with full male-suffrage. Essentially he is saying that the dictatorship of the proletariat can be obtained through democratic peaceful means if the political institutions are in place to do so, or they can be obtained through violent revolutionary means depending on the situation.

I hope this helps.

[SubcomandanteJames]

My reference to "by the workers" was an original Marxist idea. As The Claremon Institute points out: "As Marx grew older he began to realize that the existing working classes were not quite totally dehumanized have-nots, human prime matter waiting to be formed by Marx's theory-inspired indignation in the service of revolution. The real-world workers never ceased disappointing Marx with their contemptible backsliding and gullibility to bourgeois blandishments. Therefore Marx gradually developed a doctrine of a party organization of intellectuals who could lead the proletariat into the revolution." That's what I meant by him becoming more authoritative, and I by no means believe that he always felt it was a workers-led struggle forever.

[chimx]

I would like to read specific quotations that the Claremon Insitute is referring to. Marx always felt that leftist tendencies of the bourgeoisie would side with the workers, and idea he talked about in his earlier works like the Manifesto -- why else would Marx and Engels participate in working class struggles, both coming from bourgeois society themselves?