elsewhere within the same thread, there is a discussion of what marx thought of "rights," but unless i've missed it (which is possible, with the amount of traffic on this list), there's been no discussion within this subthread of what marx thought about democracy. purely by coincidence, i happened to be reading marx's critique of the philosophy of right, yesterday. marx says, among other things,
"I[D]emocracy is the essence of every political constitution, socialised man under the form of a particular constitution of the state. It stands related to other constitutions as the genus to its species; only here the genus itself appears as an existent, and therefore opposed as a particular species to those existents which do not conform to the essence. Democracy relates to all other forms of the state as their Old Testament. Man does not exist because of the law but rather the law exists for the good of man. Democracy is human existence, while in the other political forms man has only legal existence. That is the fundamental difference of democracy.
"All remaining forms of the state are certain, determined, particular forms of the state. In democracy the formal principle is simultaneously the material principle. For that reason it is the first true unity of the universal and the particular."
he goes on to say:
"Furthermore it is evident that all forms of the state have democracy for their truth, and for that reason are false to the extent that they are not democracy. "
there are others on this list who know marx far far better than i do, but perhaps some discussion of this set of (early) opinions of marx, or of marx on state forms generally, would be enlightening. it would be for me, anyway . . .
j
ps--rather than typing all that (quite poorly, i'm sure), i grabbed the quotation from http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1843/critique-hpr/index.htm
On Wednesday, April 3, 2002, at 09:47 AM, Justin Schwartz wrote:
<snip>
>> But there aren't any feasible alternatives that we know of. The
>> question is
>> idle.
>>
>> ================
>> What, are you channeling The Iron Lady and Francis Fukuyama already? :-
>
> Fukayama, maybe. But I am not talking about his economics. There are no
> alternatives to liberal democratic politics. In the realw orld you
> yourself would not setiosuly entertain any proposed replacement.
>
> <snip>
> One can imagine Mondragon gone global with all sorts of institutional
>> arrangements for bargaining and collective deliberation that didn't
>> rely on bicameralism, a hierarchical judicial
>> buraeucracy, an imperial presidency.
>
> Liberal democracy is not exhausted by the particuakrarrangements that
> now exist in the US. I repeat, probably not for the last time, that
> liberal denocracy means:
>
> (1) Competitive elections for representative government
>
> (2) Universal suffrage
>
> (3) Extensive civil and political liberties.
<snip>
>
> Thus the pervasive skepticism amongst the citizenry that we even live
> in democracy anymore. Or are
>> you going to go Hegelian on me and tell me the actually existing US is
>> a democracy rather than a form of State
>> capitalism with an incredibly shrinking zone of civil liberties.
>
> We have real if limited democracy. Ask people who don't have any.
>
> <huge snip>
> Actually
>> existing US political system in form and content *does* raise serious
>> ground for doubt as to whether our institutional
>> matrix serves the notions of democracy many on this list tacitly
>> share. So in that sense, it seems we're still dealing
>> with democracy as a kind of a dang in sich.
>
> Ding an sich? No, we have a real if limited democracy. Wedo not live
> under a totalitarian dictatorship. We do not even live in an
> oligarchary. The rich have vastly disproportionate power. The
> politicians are corrupt. Not news. That does not mean we have no
> democracy.