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Marx and Engels' Critique of Democracy: The Materialist Character of their Concept of Autonomy

2011; Routledge; Volume: 39; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/03017605.2011.537451

1748-8605

Vasilis Grollios,

Critical Theory and Philosophy

Abstract The philosophical background to Marx and Engels' concept of democracy has not been seriously analysed by the research community thus far. Rather than focusing on one aspect of Marx and Engels' understanding of democracy, this article attempts to clarify the overall development of this concept in their political theory. By providing supporting textual evidence in order to generate a precise understanding of the value-laden meaning of their use of the term 'democracy', it for the first time links democracy with the materialist character of their philosophy. In their thinking, autonomy obtains a materialistic character, meaning it is strongly connected to the conditions of society's reproduction and thus to the question of property. Democracy for Marx and Engels was a moment of social practice, the social form taken by the most important social relationship, capital, and is therefore, like other social forms, a process. At the end of the paper, I differentiate my understanding of what Marx and Engels bring to the discussion on democracy from other interpretations that either reject the Marxian approach to democracy or misunderstand its materialist character, as Negri does, even though he claims to be following the Marxian path. Keywords: Human DignityDialecticsMaterialismCritical TheoryOpen MarxismToni Negri Acknowledgements I would like to thank Professor Werner Bonefeld, the supervisor of my post-doctoral research that led to this article, for his strong encouragement and valuable comments and Professor Yannis Plangesis, who first introduced me to the idea of writing on democracy and Marx and for letting me present the core ideas of the article twice in seminars of the Master's programme that he supervises. Notes 1I use this term for the sake of the argument since Marx and Engels used it. As will be argued later, it is a self-contradictory one. 2K. Marx, Capital, Vol.1, Collected Works, Vol. 35 (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1996), p. 186. 3Such as Lenin's Materialism and Empirio-Criticism and What the "Friends of the People" Are and How They Fight the Social-Democrats, Collected Works, Volume 1 (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1960). 4Werner Bonefeld and Richard Gunn and Kosmas Psychopedis (eds) Open Marxism, Vol. 1: Dialectics and History (London: Pluto Press, 1992), p. xviii. 5For an excellent analysis of materialism from this perspective, see K. Psychopedis, 'New Social Thought: Questions of Theory and Critique' in Werner Bonefeld and Kosmas Psychopedis (eds) The Politics of Change. 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Marx's The Civil War in France' in Marx and Engels, Collected Works, Vol. 27 (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1990), p. 191. 52Soma Marik, Reinterrogating the Classical Marxist Discourses of Revolutionary Democracy (Delhi: Aakar Books, 2008), pp. 205–206. 53Soma Marik, Reinterrogating the Classical Marxist Discourses of Revolutionary Democracy (Delhi: Aakar Books, 2008), p. 207. 54August H. Nimtz, Marx and Engels. Their Contribution to the Democratic Breakthrough (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2000), p. 216, p. 219. 55Friedrich Engels, 'A Critique of the draft Social-Democratic Programme of 1891' in Marx and Engels, Collected Works, Vol. 27 (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1990), p. 227. 56Hal Draper, Karl Marx's theory of Revolution. Vol. III: The 'Dictatorship of the Proletariat' (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1986), p. 322. 57Hal Draper, Karl Marx's theory of Revolution. Vol. III: The 'Dictatorship of the Proletariat' (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1986), p. 319. 58Hal Draper, Karl Marx's theory of Revolution. Vol. III: The 'Dictatorship of the Proletariat' (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1986), p. 293. For a more concise analysis by the same author, see Hal Draper, The 'Dictatorship of the Proletariat' from Marx to Lenin (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1987). 59Karl Marx, 'Critique of the Gotha Programme' in Marx and Engels, Collected Works, Vol. 24 (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1989), p. 93. 60Karl Marx, 'Critique of the Gotha Programme' in Marx and Engels, Collected Works, Vol. 24 (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1989), p. 94. 61Karl Marx, 'Critique of the Gotha Programme' in Marx and Engels, Collected Works, Vol. 24 (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1989), p. 88. 62For a stimulating analysis of this relationship, see Ellen Wood's, 'The separation of the "economic" and the "political" in capitalism' in Ellen Wood, Democracy Against Capitalism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 19–48. 63Werner Bonefeld, 'The Capitalist State: Illusion and Critique' in Werner Bonefeld (ed.) Revolutionary Writing (New York: Autonomedia, 2003), p. 208. 64I am familiar with the differences that Engels has in his understanding of dialectics to Marx's in Anti-Dühring and the debate about it, but there is insufficient space to expand on it here. However, I do not believe that these differences seriously compromise my assertion that they share a common understanding of democracy. 65Karl Marx, 'Value, Price and Profit' in Marx and Engels, Collected Works, Vol. 20 (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1985), p. 149. 66Karl Marx, 'Value, Price and Profit' in Marx and Engels, Collected Works, Vol. 20 (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1985), p. 149. 70Friedrich Engels, 'Letter to Friendrich Adolph Sorge, 29 November 1886' in Marx and Engels, Collected Works, Vol. 47 (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1988), p. 531-2. 67Friedrich Engels, 'Letter to Florence Kelley-Wischnewetzky, 28 December 1886' in Marx and Engels, Collected Works, Vol. 47 (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1988), p. 541. 68Friedrich Engels, 'Letter to Florence Kelley-Wischnewetzky, 27 January 1887' in Marx and Engels, Collected Works, Vol. 48 (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 2001), p. 8. 69Friedrich Engels, 'Letter to Florence Kelley-Wischnewetzky, 27 January 1887' in Marx and Engels, Collected Works, Vol. 48 (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 2001), p. 9. 71John Holloway, 'Open Marxism, History and Class Struggle', Common Sense, 13 (1993), p. 76. 72Friedrich Engels, 'The Condition of England. 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The Eighteenth Century' in Marx and Engels, Collected Works, Vol. 3 (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1975), p. 474. 74For a 'volatile' interpretation of the concept of the dictatorship of the proletariat, see Zoltan Barany, 'The "Volatile" Marxian Concept of the Dictatorship of the Proletariat', Studies in East European Thought, 49:1 (1997), pp. 1–21. 75Friedrich Engels, 'The Condition of the Working Class in England' in Marx and Engels, Collected Works, Vol. 4 (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1975), p. 581. 76Friedrich Engels, 'The Condition of the Working Class in England' in Marx and Engels, Collected Works, Vol. 4 (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1975), p. 582. 77Karl Marx, 'Record of Marx's Interview with The World Correspondent' in Marx and Engels, Collected Works, Vol. 22 (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1986), p. 602. 78Joseph Femia, Marxism and Democracy (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993), p. 10. 79Joseph Femia, Marxism and Democracy (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993), p. 45. 80Allen Buchanan, 'The Marxist Conceptual Framework and the Origins of Totalitarian Socialism' in Ellen Frankel Paul, Fred Miller, Jeffrey Paul and John Ahrens (eds) Marxism and Liberalism (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1986), p. 141. 81Allen Buchanan, 'The Marxist Conceptual Framework and the Origins of Totalitarian Socialism' in Ellen Frankel Paul, Fred Miller, Jeffrey Paul and John Ahrens (eds) Marxism and Liberalism (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1986), p. 143. 82This fact is stressed by Lenin himself in his short text on Marx. 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Globalization and Communication', 1999, http://www.libcom.org/library/marx-s-mole-is-dead-globalization-and-communication-micheal-hardt-antonio-negri . 106Werner Bonefeld and Richard Gunn and Kosmas Psychopedis (eds) Open Marxism, Vol. 2: Theory and Practice, op. cit., p. xiv. 107Negri, Insurgencies. Constituent Power and the Modern State, op. cit., p. 261.