Kiev Communard
14th October 2010, 10:59
Marx’s theory of democracy is a critique of the ‘political state’ in political philosophy, tied to his conception of the good society. Marx’s discussion of ‘democracy’ is faced with two difficulties. Firstly, the notion of ‘democracy’ is a ‘contested terrain’ revealing clashing political worldviews underneath its theory. Because of its hegemonic role in the existing ‘general consciousness’, even authoritarian politics masks itself as ‘democratic’, as in therecent Imperial promulgation of the export of democracy as a packaged set of political conditions imposed on the ruled by a dominant alien ruler. In such neo-colonialism disguised as ‘democracy’ there is a grand inversion of form and content, where democracy as the self-determination of the societal whole by itself for itself is presented as being the product of the will of One over the communal self of an heteronomous many.
The second difficulty concerns the historical absence of any democraticinstitutional life in the early nineteenth century. Universal enfranchisement,
political parties, public trials and an independent judiciary, parliaments as representation of the general will, publicity of assembly proceedings (Marx, 1975b, pp. 145, 147), and other political institutions associated with representative democracy were non-existent (Sperber, 1991). Even demands for a democratic state based on popular sovereignty were officially censored.
In such political context dominated by centralised absolutisms and an anaemic civil society, Marx’s 1843 critique of the principles of the modern
constitutional state through a detailed critical examination of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right is highly original. He had already criticised the exclusionary forms of political representation of the monarchical state arriving at his core idea that if there is to be true political representation, it ‘must
be conceived only as the people’s self-representation [Selbstvertretung]’ (Marx,1975c, p. 306). ‘Universal enfranchisement’ emerges as a necessary political precondition in order to overcome the ‘abstract political state’ itself as a separate realm from civil life so as to restore to society, its real human form as a unified societal community of all.[1].
I will explore the socio-political relationship against which Marx erects his theory of democracy. This is the relationship between civil (bourgeois) society and the political state,[2] and its mode of conditioning the relation between state sovereignty and the people in a way it ought not to do. Also, in the Critique of Hegel’s Doctrine of the State (Marx, 1975a) even though Marx has not yet developed any notion of social class determination of individual existence, his challenge to the contours of Hegel’s state will awaken him to the existence of supra-individual structures of relation that determine individual will formation. Furthermore, Marx concurs with basic conceptual presuppositions made by Hegel but he also negates major Hegelian theoretical consequences through logical inversions and by his use of a social materialist perspective that supersedes the Hegelian primacy of the Idea as state-spirit with the notion of society as the essence of the human speciesbeing,its ‘species-life itself, society’ (Marx, 1975d, p.164). Lastly, I employ the prism of presentism,[3] of focusing on the issues under discussion having in mind their significance for us today, that is, ‘our criticism centres on the very questions of which the present age says: that is the question’ (Marx,1994, p. 62). Hence I highlight the contemporary relevance of Marx’s critical remarks on the constitutional republic.
The political state against civil society
Marx engages with the hard core of the Philosophy of Right (Hegel, 1991) which deals with the constitution of the ‘inner sovereignty’ of the state, the political state proper. Hegel’s state (der Staat) is an ethico-political organism that realises as its universal end the unity of ‘subjective and objective freedom’(Hegel, 1991, §258, p. 276). The ‘political state’ (politische Staat) is the plexus of political institutions (the three powers of monarchy, the executive and the legislative) which in espousing the universal aims of the state-community secures objective freedom as the highest end and as a prerequisite for the exercise of the subjective freedom of the particular individuals who constitute the members of civil society.
Marx in unfolding his critique follows Hegel’s exposition which is structured as a movement from the general to the concrete, from the most abstract to the most specific, and this obliges Marx to face on from the very start the essential blueprint of Hegel’s conception of the ‘modern’ state (Hegel, 1991, §§261–2, pp. 283–6). Marx immediately identifies ‘an unresolved antinomy’ in the organic connection that Hegel posits between ‘family and civil society’ and the political state in §261. ‘On the one hand,the state stands opposed to the sphere of the family and civil society as an “external necessity” ’ to which family/civil society ‘are subordinate […]and […] dependent’. On the other hand, Hegel counterpoises to the relation of ‘external necessity’ that ‘other relationship in which the family and civil society are related to the state as their “immanent end”’ (Marx, 1975a, p. 59).
To talk of the state as the organic unity of civil society with the political state and at the same time to see it as composed by a dual relationship of ‘external necessity’ and ‘immanent end’ is to posit an unsurpassable conflict in the conceptual articulation of the state. And since ‘Hegel makes no mention of empirical conflicts’, this clash must concern ‘the essential relationship between these spheres themselves’ (Marx, 1975a, p. 59). So, it is not only a logical contradiction that lurks in Hegel’s theorisation of the state but also an antinomy in the very essence of the modern state that Hegel ‘describes’ speculatively. It becomes evident that Marx, methodologically, employs the mode of immanent or internal critique that rests on holding accountable the theorist under criticism for logical contradictions and inconsistencies which derive from his/her own premises.[4] These are self-contradictions that result in the self-destructive negation of the coherence of the system in the eyes of critical Reason. This is a mode of critique that works via determinate negationof the opponent’s premises and presuppositions and of socio-historical reality itself (Marx, 1994, p. 58).
The philosophical crux of Marx’s rebuttal is that no organic unity can exist as such if it is internally divided in such a way that its membra disjecta are perennially in conflict, unified through an opposition that continually tends to explode ‘the internal essence of the thing’ (Marx, 1975a, p. 60),to disintegrate it into its component member parts. Hegel’s concept of the divided identity of the state has unduly privileged ‘one side’ of the identity,‘the aspect of estrangement within the unity’ (Marx, 1975a, p. 60) and this estrangement as separation has turned the political state into a despot over civil society, ‘a merely external compulsion exerted by the ruling power upon private life’ (Marx, 1975a, pp. 78–9) instead of providing a ‘rational system’ that harmoniously resolves their mode of imbrication.
Hegel’s idea of the rational state as an ‘ethical organism’ is premised on two conditions. Firstly, that the state is actually ethical and does not just pretend to be so. This means that the citizens of the state have self-consciously accepted and internalised as ‘second nature’ the institutionalised political constitution and thus they recognise the necessity of the existence of a political authority that takes care of the universal interest since they themselves in their particularity are mainly engaged with their private concerns. This political authority also recognises and guarantees their rights and ensures their free exercise. Thus, they ought to respect and be committed to the duties they owe to the state whose ‘strength consists in the unity of its universal and ultimate end with the particular interest of individuals’ (Hegel, 1991, §261, p. 283). The very strength of the (political) state itself rests on the degree of acceptance of the universal aims it pursues by the particular interests of the individuals. The more consonant they are with each other, the greater the strength of the state, the more they diverge, the less its strength and the greater the loss of its ethical character.
On this basis, Marx’s critique of the state’s executive power as a bureaucracy which follows its own particular interests and treats the state as its private property (Draper, 1977, p. 82) under the pretext of promoting the universal end may be absolutely right as far as empirical state policies are concerned, but it cannot invalidate per se this Hegelian presupposition of the rational state. But if the ethical bond of duty which grounds the legitimacy of the political state as a universalistic agency over the particular interests of individuals in their own consciousness is not to remain an empty ideal, introducedexternally, then it has to face up to the presence of its absence in the actual civil society.
For such an ethical bond to subsist which unifies the particular with the universal after their divorce, the members of civil society themselves must not be inherently divided into private selves and public personae in their empirical social existence. They should not be intrinsically split into self-seeking egoists and other-directed human beings opposed to their ‘communal essence’ (Gemeinwesen) as an adversarial sociality which at the same time is the social precondition of their formation as individuals and the absolute structure of social interdependency through which only they can ‘satisfy’ their human needs and personal interests. But it is precisely the dissolution of this ethical bond that we see as being realised in contemporary liberal democracies, encapsulated in the ‘image’ of the schizophrenic citizen. In his/her political/public identity as member of the state s/he understands that taxation is necessary to provide for social welfare and the other collective functions (education, public health, pension, defence, material infrastructures) needed to maintain the social integration of the whole society intact. But in his/her private/egoistic identity s/he does not want to pay any taxes (or the less the better) ‘feeling’ taxation as an ‘oppressive’ burden on his/her ‘free’ individuality. Instead, in a self-contradictory fashion s/he desires everyone else to pay his/her taxes [5] (the ‘free rider’ strategy) or in the form of a spurious universality no-one to pay any taxes in blatant opposition to his/her status as a citizen and its concomitant political and ethical obligations.
The second condition of the ethical/rational state is the universality of laws. Laws in their generality must not discriminate against citizens nor privilege any special interests (Hegel, 1999, p. 177). Of course, equal treatment via universal laws of socially unequal citizens results in the reproduction of inequality not equality, as Marx with acuity would argue later in life (Marx, 1996, p. 214). In spite of ‘formal rationality’ the principle of universalistic law is in itself defective within the context of bourgeois civil society.The modern constitutional state which operates on the principle of the ‘rule of law’ and thus prima facie treats its citizens universalistically still suffers from the ‘absolute’ contradiction that it reduces human beings to ‘legal persons’ in order afterwards to recognise their ‘essential human rights’ as supposedly intrinsic in their very individuality. Within bourgeois social life ‘juridical personality’ is divorced from and thus opposed to the actual existence of human beings with the consequence that ‘legal existence’ becomes the absolute presupposition of being human rather than the inverse. This general condition is seen starkly in the predicament of refugees, of stateless persons who in not having their human existence recognised ‘legally’ by a state are reduced to a sub-human existence.
The presuppositions of the constitutional state have been ‘cogently analysed’ by Hegel but he has not ‘demonstrated their validity’ (Marx,1975a, p. 96). Against the constitutional, law-based political republic, ‘n democracy [[I]Demokratie], man does not exist for the sake of law, but the law exists for the sake of man, it is human existence, whereas in other political systems man is a legal existence. This is the fundamental distinguishing feature of democracy’ (Marx, 1975a, p. 88). The ‘abstract’ existence of law in bourgeois modernity is further accentuated not only by the problem of the ‘implementation deficit’ [6] but even more by the actual implementation.There is not only lack of accountability and of popular control of the state’s administrative action but also no protection against its use of legal power as abuse, whenever the ‘bureaucratic hierarchy’ itself ‘sins’ through the official action of its civil servants (Marx, 1975a, p. 114).
To Be Continued
The second difficulty concerns the historical absence of any democraticinstitutional life in the early nineteenth century. Universal enfranchisement,
political parties, public trials and an independent judiciary, parliaments as representation of the general will, publicity of assembly proceedings (Marx, 1975b, pp. 145, 147), and other political institutions associated with representative democracy were non-existent (Sperber, 1991). Even demands for a democratic state based on popular sovereignty were officially censored.
In such political context dominated by centralised absolutisms and an anaemic civil society, Marx’s 1843 critique of the principles of the modern
constitutional state through a detailed critical examination of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right is highly original. He had already criticised the exclusionary forms of political representation of the monarchical state arriving at his core idea that if there is to be true political representation, it ‘must
be conceived only as the people’s self-representation [Selbstvertretung]’ (Marx,1975c, p. 306). ‘Universal enfranchisement’ emerges as a necessary political precondition in order to overcome the ‘abstract political state’ itself as a separate realm from civil life so as to restore to society, its real human form as a unified societal community of all.[1].
I will explore the socio-political relationship against which Marx erects his theory of democracy. This is the relationship between civil (bourgeois) society and the political state,[2] and its mode of conditioning the relation between state sovereignty and the people in a way it ought not to do. Also, in the Critique of Hegel’s Doctrine of the State (Marx, 1975a) even though Marx has not yet developed any notion of social class determination of individual existence, his challenge to the contours of Hegel’s state will awaken him to the existence of supra-individual structures of relation that determine individual will formation. Furthermore, Marx concurs with basic conceptual presuppositions made by Hegel but he also negates major Hegelian theoretical consequences through logical inversions and by his use of a social materialist perspective that supersedes the Hegelian primacy of the Idea as state-spirit with the notion of society as the essence of the human speciesbeing,its ‘species-life itself, society’ (Marx, 1975d, p.164). Lastly, I employ the prism of presentism,[3] of focusing on the issues under discussion having in mind their significance for us today, that is, ‘our criticism centres on the very questions of which the present age says: that is the question’ (Marx,1994, p. 62). Hence I highlight the contemporary relevance of Marx’s critical remarks on the constitutional republic.
The political state against civil society
Marx engages with the hard core of the Philosophy of Right (Hegel, 1991) which deals with the constitution of the ‘inner sovereignty’ of the state, the political state proper. Hegel’s state (der Staat) is an ethico-political organism that realises as its universal end the unity of ‘subjective and objective freedom’(Hegel, 1991, §258, p. 276). The ‘political state’ (politische Staat) is the plexus of political institutions (the three powers of monarchy, the executive and the legislative) which in espousing the universal aims of the state-community secures objective freedom as the highest end and as a prerequisite for the exercise of the subjective freedom of the particular individuals who constitute the members of civil society.
Marx in unfolding his critique follows Hegel’s exposition which is structured as a movement from the general to the concrete, from the most abstract to the most specific, and this obliges Marx to face on from the very start the essential blueprint of Hegel’s conception of the ‘modern’ state (Hegel, 1991, §§261–2, pp. 283–6). Marx immediately identifies ‘an unresolved antinomy’ in the organic connection that Hegel posits between ‘family and civil society’ and the political state in §261. ‘On the one hand,the state stands opposed to the sphere of the family and civil society as an “external necessity” ’ to which family/civil society ‘are subordinate […]and […] dependent’. On the other hand, Hegel counterpoises to the relation of ‘external necessity’ that ‘other relationship in which the family and civil society are related to the state as their “immanent end”’ (Marx, 1975a, p. 59).
To talk of the state as the organic unity of civil society with the political state and at the same time to see it as composed by a dual relationship of ‘external necessity’ and ‘immanent end’ is to posit an unsurpassable conflict in the conceptual articulation of the state. And since ‘Hegel makes no mention of empirical conflicts’, this clash must concern ‘the essential relationship between these spheres themselves’ (Marx, 1975a, p. 59). So, it is not only a logical contradiction that lurks in Hegel’s theorisation of the state but also an antinomy in the very essence of the modern state that Hegel ‘describes’ speculatively. It becomes evident that Marx, methodologically, employs the mode of immanent or internal critique that rests on holding accountable the theorist under criticism for logical contradictions and inconsistencies which derive from his/her own premises.[4] These are self-contradictions that result in the self-destructive negation of the coherence of the system in the eyes of critical Reason. This is a mode of critique that works via determinate negationof the opponent’s premises and presuppositions and of socio-historical reality itself (Marx, 1994, p. 58).
The philosophical crux of Marx’s rebuttal is that no organic unity can exist as such if it is internally divided in such a way that its membra disjecta are perennially in conflict, unified through an opposition that continually tends to explode ‘the internal essence of the thing’ (Marx, 1975a, p. 60),to disintegrate it into its component member parts. Hegel’s concept of the divided identity of the state has unduly privileged ‘one side’ of the identity,‘the aspect of estrangement within the unity’ (Marx, 1975a, p. 60) and this estrangement as separation has turned the political state into a despot over civil society, ‘a merely external compulsion exerted by the ruling power upon private life’ (Marx, 1975a, pp. 78–9) instead of providing a ‘rational system’ that harmoniously resolves their mode of imbrication.
Hegel’s idea of the rational state as an ‘ethical organism’ is premised on two conditions. Firstly, that the state is actually ethical and does not just pretend to be so. This means that the citizens of the state have self-consciously accepted and internalised as ‘second nature’ the institutionalised political constitution and thus they recognise the necessity of the existence of a political authority that takes care of the universal interest since they themselves in their particularity are mainly engaged with their private concerns. This political authority also recognises and guarantees their rights and ensures their free exercise. Thus, they ought to respect and be committed to the duties they owe to the state whose ‘strength consists in the unity of its universal and ultimate end with the particular interest of individuals’ (Hegel, 1991, §261, p. 283). The very strength of the (political) state itself rests on the degree of acceptance of the universal aims it pursues by the particular interests of the individuals. The more consonant they are with each other, the greater the strength of the state, the more they diverge, the less its strength and the greater the loss of its ethical character.
On this basis, Marx’s critique of the state’s executive power as a bureaucracy which follows its own particular interests and treats the state as its private property (Draper, 1977, p. 82) under the pretext of promoting the universal end may be absolutely right as far as empirical state policies are concerned, but it cannot invalidate per se this Hegelian presupposition of the rational state. But if the ethical bond of duty which grounds the legitimacy of the political state as a universalistic agency over the particular interests of individuals in their own consciousness is not to remain an empty ideal, introducedexternally, then it has to face up to the presence of its absence in the actual civil society.
For such an ethical bond to subsist which unifies the particular with the universal after their divorce, the members of civil society themselves must not be inherently divided into private selves and public personae in their empirical social existence. They should not be intrinsically split into self-seeking egoists and other-directed human beings opposed to their ‘communal essence’ (Gemeinwesen) as an adversarial sociality which at the same time is the social precondition of their formation as individuals and the absolute structure of social interdependency through which only they can ‘satisfy’ their human needs and personal interests. But it is precisely the dissolution of this ethical bond that we see as being realised in contemporary liberal democracies, encapsulated in the ‘image’ of the schizophrenic citizen. In his/her political/public identity as member of the state s/he understands that taxation is necessary to provide for social welfare and the other collective functions (education, public health, pension, defence, material infrastructures) needed to maintain the social integration of the whole society intact. But in his/her private/egoistic identity s/he does not want to pay any taxes (or the less the better) ‘feeling’ taxation as an ‘oppressive’ burden on his/her ‘free’ individuality. Instead, in a self-contradictory fashion s/he desires everyone else to pay his/her taxes [5] (the ‘free rider’ strategy) or in the form of a spurious universality no-one to pay any taxes in blatant opposition to his/her status as a citizen and its concomitant political and ethical obligations.
The second condition of the ethical/rational state is the universality of laws. Laws in their generality must not discriminate against citizens nor privilege any special interests (Hegel, 1999, p. 177). Of course, equal treatment via universal laws of socially unequal citizens results in the reproduction of inequality not equality, as Marx with acuity would argue later in life (Marx, 1996, p. 214). In spite of ‘formal rationality’ the principle of universalistic law is in itself defective within the context of bourgeois civil society.The modern constitutional state which operates on the principle of the ‘rule of law’ and thus prima facie treats its citizens universalistically still suffers from the ‘absolute’ contradiction that it reduces human beings to ‘legal persons’ in order afterwards to recognise their ‘essential human rights’ as supposedly intrinsic in their very individuality. Within bourgeois social life ‘juridical personality’ is divorced from and thus opposed to the actual existence of human beings with the consequence that ‘legal existence’ becomes the absolute presupposition of being human rather than the inverse. This general condition is seen starkly in the predicament of refugees, of stateless persons who in not having their human existence recognised ‘legally’ by a state are reduced to a sub-human existence.
The presuppositions of the constitutional state have been ‘cogently analysed’ by Hegel but he has not ‘demonstrated their validity’ (Marx,1975a, p. 96). Against the constitutional, law-based political republic, ‘n democracy [[I]Demokratie], man does not exist for the sake of law, but the law exists for the sake of man, it is human existence, whereas in other political systems man is a legal existence. This is the fundamental distinguishing feature of democracy’ (Marx, 1975a, p. 88). The ‘abstract’ existence of law in bourgeois modernity is further accentuated not only by the problem of the ‘implementation deficit’ [6] but even more by the actual implementation.There is not only lack of accountability and of popular control of the state’s administrative action but also no protection against its use of legal power as abuse, whenever the ‘bureaucratic hierarchy’ itself ‘sins’ through the official action of its civil servants (Marx, 1975a, p. 114).
To Be Continued