cullinane
3rd November 2001, 17:41
The conclusion of Marx's argument in the Critique of Hegel's Doctrine of the State is the 'suppression of politics' and the extinction of the state. The progressive tendencies of civil society, the tendency to transform itself that is, becomes an aim to dissolve the state.
" ...the vote must constitute the chief political interest of real civil society. Only when civil society has achieved unrestricted active and passive suffrage has it really raised itself to the point of abstraction from itself, to the political existence which constitutes its true, universal, essential existence...By really establishing its political existence as its authentic existence, civil society ensures that its civil existence is inessential in so far as it is distinct from its political existence. And with the demise of the one, the other, its opposite, collapses also. "
Critique of Hegel's Doctrine of the State.
Therefore the thrust towards full suffrage and electoral reform is an expression of the tendency to overcome the separation of state and society and towards the withering away of the state. The working class is thedriving force, the protagonist of this tendency.
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Don't know if your aware of it, but in the Introduction to the Early Writings of Marx by Penguin Books, Lucio Colleti (not familiar with this name) says that Engels and Lenin glossed over the one important theory of
the state developed in the Critique of Hegel's Doctrine of the State and continued in the 'Jewish Question'. Colleti says Marx's conception of the state is only the modern state, since it is only under modern conditions that the detachment of state from society occurs. In ancient Greece the state and the community were identified with the polis..there existed a certain unity between the people and the state. The common interest of citizens coincided with the content of citizen's life..participating directly in the city's decisions. There existed no separation of public and private. The idea of freedom of private individualism was unknown.
In feudal times, politics followed the economic structure so closely that socio economic distinctions were also political distinctions. Serf and Lord, Subject and Sovereign.
Now in modern civil society the individual appears free from all social ties, he is neither integrated into the citizen community as in Greece or the corporate community as in trade guilds. We are now all divided and
independent from each other. Just as we are independents, so does the real connection of mutual dependence becomes in turn independent of all
individuals. This universal interest is now independent of all interested parties and assumes a separate existence...social unity established in separation from its members is the hypostatised modern state.
According to Colleti, Engels and Lenin failed to grasp the mechanism whereby the state is really abstracted from society and the whole organic, objective process which produces the separation from one another. Engels and Lenin do not perceive the intimate connection between such separation and the structures of the state. They see the state as a machine, consciously formed by the ruling class in deliberate pursuit of their own ends.
Regards,
N.A. Cullinane
" ...the vote must constitute the chief political interest of real civil society. Only when civil society has achieved unrestricted active and passive suffrage has it really raised itself to the point of abstraction from itself, to the political existence which constitutes its true, universal, essential existence...By really establishing its political existence as its authentic existence, civil society ensures that its civil existence is inessential in so far as it is distinct from its political existence. And with the demise of the one, the other, its opposite, collapses also. "
Critique of Hegel's Doctrine of the State.
Therefore the thrust towards full suffrage and electoral reform is an expression of the tendency to overcome the separation of state and society and towards the withering away of the state. The working class is thedriving force, the protagonist of this tendency.
>
Don't know if your aware of it, but in the Introduction to the Early Writings of Marx by Penguin Books, Lucio Colleti (not familiar with this name) says that Engels and Lenin glossed over the one important theory of
the state developed in the Critique of Hegel's Doctrine of the State and continued in the 'Jewish Question'. Colleti says Marx's conception of the state is only the modern state, since it is only under modern conditions that the detachment of state from society occurs. In ancient Greece the state and the community were identified with the polis..there existed a certain unity between the people and the state. The common interest of citizens coincided with the content of citizen's life..participating directly in the city's decisions. There existed no separation of public and private. The idea of freedom of private individualism was unknown.
In feudal times, politics followed the economic structure so closely that socio economic distinctions were also political distinctions. Serf and Lord, Subject and Sovereign.
Now in modern civil society the individual appears free from all social ties, he is neither integrated into the citizen community as in Greece or the corporate community as in trade guilds. We are now all divided and
independent from each other. Just as we are independents, so does the real connection of mutual dependence becomes in turn independent of all
individuals. This universal interest is now independent of all interested parties and assumes a separate existence...social unity established in separation from its members is the hypostatised modern state.
According to Colleti, Engels and Lenin failed to grasp the mechanism whereby the state is really abstracted from society and the whole organic, objective process which produces the separation from one another. Engels and Lenin do not perceive the intimate connection between such separation and the structures of the state. They see the state as a machine, consciously formed by the ruling class in deliberate pursuit of their own ends.
Regards,
N.A. Cullinane