Gore

Charles Brown CharlesB at CNCL.ci.detroit.mi.us
Mon Sep 14 10:43:22 PDT 1998


Lenin concentrates all of Marx's teachings on the state in one place in _The State and Revolution_

Charles Brown

Detroit


>>> "hoov" <hoov at freenet.tlh.fl.us> 09/12 9:19 AM >>>
> >'The executive of the modern state is but a committee for managing
> >the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie.'
> >the focus should be on 'executive'...Michael Hoover
>
> Meaning that the legislature and the judiciary of the modern state are
> something else?
> Brad Delong

Marx, in the *18th Brumair*, writes that 'The executive power, in contrast to the legislative power, expresses the heteronomy of a nation, in contrast to its autonomy.' (in other words, not self-governing or self-determining)...

M, in the same work, refers twice to 'parliamentary cretinism' by which he means the self-deception of powerless assemblies vis-a-vis the executive...the legislature is 'contested terrain', thus he could call passage of the Ten Hours Bill in England not just a great practical accomplishment, but a victory for the principle of 'political economy of the working class.' (*Inaugural Address to the International Working Men's Association*)

M wanted executive power subjected to as many controls as possible: such authority in the Paris Commune, for example, was delegated to sub-groups of the assembly and subject to immediate recall...he writes, in *The Civil War in France*, that the Commune 'was to be a working, not a parliamentary body, executive and legislative at the same time.'...

rightly or wrongly, M opposed separation of powers...he refers, in *Crisis and Counter-Revolution*, to the 'worm-eaten theory of division of powers'...moreover, he calls the theory 'old constitutional folly' in *The Constitution of the French Republic* and goes on to say that the 'condition of a free government is not the division, but the unity of power.'

Michael Hoover



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