Karl Marx and the Anarchists Paul Thomas

Marx against Bauer: ‘political emancipation’

Bruno Bauer, who had been a protege of Hegel’s, and an intellectual
mentor to Marx (having supervised his doctoral dissertation in 1841),
is best known as a radical critic of religion. Despite his corresponding
championing of the claims of the secular state, his publication of
religious views unpalatable to the Prussian government - which was
anything but secular - lost him his professorial post at Bonn (thereby
indirectly precluding an academic career for Marx). However, Bauer’s
pamphlet, ‘The Jewish Question’ (1843), which regarded the Jews
much as Voltaire had regarded them - as reactionary - and which




opposed the movement for their emancipation for this very reason,
antagonized Marx, whose father had had to renounce his religion to
keep his job, and who supported the granting of full civil rights to the
Jews, as a measure that would be in accordance with the premises of
bourgeois society and, as such, a necessary prerequisite of full, human
emancipation. Marx was to express in The Holy Family (1845) as well
as in ‘On the Jewish Question’ the belief that the degree of modernity
achieved by a modern state-form could be measured by the political
rights which the Jews living in it enjoyed. In his general advocacy of
Jewish emancipation Marx was following Hegel, whose record in this
respect, unlike Bauer’s, was quite above reproach.

Bauer’s pamphlet, ‘The Jewish Question’, had opposed the political
emancipation of the Jews in Prussia and the Rhineland on the grounds
that since their claim for equal treatment and participation could be
granted only on the basis of a secular conception of society, the Jews
would have to renounce their religion before being granted political
rights. ‘He requires’, said Marx,

on the one hand that the Jew renounce his Judaism and, in a general
manner that man renounce religion in order to be emancipated
civicly. On the other hand, as a logical consequence, he considers
that the ‘political’ suppression of religion is equivalent to the
suppression of all religion. The state that presupposes religion is
not yet a true and real state.¹⁹

Whereas Bauer wished to use the state to combat religious alienation,
Marx considered that the secularization of the state - even if this were
complete, as it manifestly was not in Prussia - would be quite insufficient
either to loosen the hold of religious ideas or to free men from thei:
real servitude. Marx’s ‘On the Jewish Question’ indicated, along the
lines laid down in the Critique, that the modern state - the state that
Bauer, in Hegelian fashion, had presented as the solution to religious
‘alienation’ - was itself suffused with religious alienation. ‘Since the
existence of religion implies a defect’, wrote Marx in a deceptively
Feuerbachian manner, ‘the source of this defect must be sought in the
nature of the state itself. We no longer take religion to be the basis but
only the manifestation of secular deficiencies.’²⁰ The split between the
citizen and the adherent of a religion to which Bauer had drawn atten-
tion is in this way part of a more fundamental schism. ‘The contradiction
in which the adherent of a particular religion finds himself in relation
to his citizenship is but one aspect of the universal secular contradiction
between political state and civil society.’ If religion, no longer officially
sanctioned or promulgated by the modern state, is displaced so that it
becomes a purely individual concern, this does not mean that the hold
of religion on men is in any way loosened. Political emancipation from




religion (in other words, the emergence of a secular state) leaves religion
in existence; ‘the emancipation of the state from religion is not the
emancipation of actual man from religion’.²¹

In the same way, the abolition of property qualifications for the
franchise, far from abolishing property, presupposes the continued
importance of property and of distinctions among men based upon the
amount of property held. ‘Political emancipation’, then, frees property
from political restraint without freeing men from property itself. In its
insistence that the amount of property, or the type of property, that is
held by any particular person is politically irrelevant, property had
become responsible to nothing outside itself, and its newly oppressive -
because unrestrained - nature was, for the first time, clearly exposed
and keenly experienced by those who in their everyday lives bore the
brunt of its free play. Religiosity, like property, is consummated, not
abolished, by the transition from medieval-theocratic to modern
state-forms (a process which in Germany was far from complete, as
Marx fully recognized). A theocratic state-form, using religion for its
own purposes, obscures the human bases of religiosity. The modern
state not professing any particular religious creed, on the other hand,
is not the abolition but the realization of religion, which is displaced
from the orbit of government to that of everyday life. This means
that the emancipation of the state from religion, like its emancipation
from property, will solve nothing for man: religion ‘only begins to
exist in its true scope when the state declares it to be non-political
and thus leaves it to itself.²²

With the collapse of feudalism, civil society and the state become
discontinuous in an unprecedented and radical way. Civil society and
property relations become wholly emancipated from all political
restraint or regulation for the first time in history. Private life, or
indeed life in society, becomes independent of any consideration of
the common good; all political limitations on economic activity give
way, and the market becomes ‘self-regulating’. Emancipation from
feudal and communal restrictions (usury, guild regulations, sumptuary
laws, censorship by ecclesiastical fiat) formally free civil society from
state control. The removal of political limitations upon economic
activity is, accordingly, decisive; it was signified most dramatically by
(although it was not limited to) the French Revolution. The Declaration
of the Rights of Man and the Citizen of 1789, which marked the
emancipation of civil society from the purview of the state, is in this
way doubly important. Just as the state became ideologically universal,
out of the control of the aristocracy and the priesthood, proclamations
of ‘The Rights of Man’ recognized the citizenship of the individual as
such, be he rich or poor, Jew or Christian. Citizenship no longer de-
pended upon birth, rank, status or occupation; all such attributes were
to be not political qualifications or disqualifications, but were instead




relegated to the level of purely individual concerns. This fundamental
shift, Marx continued, had political and social implications which,
although crucial, might not initially be apparent.

Marx believed that the emergence of bourgeois society had bifurcated
men’s lives in a fundamentally new way. Once bourgeois society had
established itself, ‘private’ and ‘public’ were no longer in any sense
contiguous realms, as they had been in the past. In the Middle Ages,
for example, the dominant persons in society were ipso facto politically
dominant also; the privileges of the feudal landowning aristocracy, for
instance, linked the form of the state with the prevailing structure of
society - which thus had had a ‘directly political character’ (albeit an
unfree political character). Political emancipation,by contrast, detached
man’s political significance from his private condition. Citizenship and
private life became mutually exclusive spheres of activity for the first
time. A man was now a capitalist or worker and a citizen; vocation and
political status were no longer linked organically. Instead, they coexisted
uneasily alongside each other. Man, while he formally belonged to the
state (as its citizen), actively participated only in civil society.

Not only did these two newly counterposed areas not overlap; their
confrontation was expressed within each individual as a rigid distinction
between his exclusive roles. The schism between state and society - a
schism which in Hegelian terms opposed man’s alienated universal
essence to his everyday (alltaglich) activity - constantly reproduced
itself in microcosm within each individual, in a distilled, concentrated
form. Marx was to extend this particular aspect of ‘political emanci-
pation’ in The German Ideology.

In the course of historical evolution, and precisely through the
inevitable fact that within the division of labour social relations
take on an independent existence, there appears a division
within the life of each individual, in so far as it is personal and
in so far as it is determined by some branch of labour and the
conditions pertaining to it. (We do not mean.. . that, for example,
the rentier, the capitalist etc. cease to be persons; but their
personality is conditioned and determined by quite definite
class relationships and the division appears only in their
opposition to another class, and, for themselves, only when
they go bankrupt). In the estate, this is as yet concealed; for
instance a nobleman always remains a nobleman, a commoner
always a commoner, apart from his other relationships, a
quality inseparable from their individuality. The division between
the personal and the class individual, the accidental nature of
the conditions of life for the individual, appears only with the
emergence of the class, which is itself a product of the
bourgeoisie ²³




In ‘On the Jewish Question’ Marx indicated that the newly ‘privatized’
man, denied participation in the communal and universal, sought solace
in a postulated realm of universality, a realm separate from the limited
sphere of his mundane, finite life. This realm, though, was not religious,
as Hegel and Feuerbach had thought; it was more nearly political.

The picture of political emancipation Marx drew in ‘On the Jewish
Question’ nevertheless follows Hegel closely. Hegel, as we have seen,
recognized and delineated the division of homme from citoyen, the
self-validating distinction between the public role of the citizen and
the private role of the person engaged in the mundane (and now politi-
cally untouchable) realm of needs, work and economic relations. Hegel
had gone on to indicate that relations among men producing for the
sake of their needs in an atomistic, competitive manner are ‘ethically
incomplete’ and need for their substantiation that complement of
rationality which only the state could provide. The Philosophy of
Right had stressed that although man lives simultaneously in both
realms, the satisfaction he derives from activity in the state is qualitat-
ively different from that he derives from the pursuit of self-interested
concerns in civil society; and it was against this Hegelian perception
that Marx proceeded to indicate that ‘political emancipation’ was
bound to have the effect of displacing and negating the very satisfac-
tions that Hegel had valued most highly. In particular, what Hegel
had put forward as man’s need for the universal, or general (dasAllge-
meine), corresponding to the communal side of human nature, or to
what Marx, in the 1844 Manuscripts, was to call ‘species-being’ (Gat-
tungswesen), was bound to remain unsatisfied. Once civil society was
emancipated, freed from political restraint, property relations were
enabled to penetrate every crevice of the supposedly transcendent
political realm.

Moreover, Hegel had portrayed the state as being both immanent
and external to society, whereas to Marx only something ideal could
stand above and beyond society in this way. This can only mean, as
Marx deftly indicated in ‘On the Jewish Question’, that the state and
the life of the citizen had become unreal, even religious, and that the
state is thus eminently susceptible to the type of criticism Feuerbach
(and Hegel) had levelled against religion. If the state was a realm of
religious values in this way, Bauer’s secularism was simply begging the
question.

By its nature the perfected political state is man’s species-life in
opposition to his material life. All the presuppositions of this
egoistic life remain in civil society outside the state but as
qualities of civil society. Where the political state has achieved
its full development man leads a double life, a heavenly and an
earthly life, not only in thought or consciousness but also in




reality. In the political community he regards himself as a
communal being; but in civil society he is active as a private
individual, treats other men as means, reduces himself to a
means and becomes the plaything of alien powers. The political
state is as spiritual in relation to civil society as heaven is in
relation to earth ... In the state where he counts as a species-
being, he is the imaginary member of an imaginary universality,
divested of his real individual life and endowed with an unreal
universality.²⁴

This ‘abstract universality’, however, is necessary. Despite the remote-
ness of political life from ordinary, profane individual pursuits - over
which the state has relinquished control - universality and communality
remain part of man’s life in ‘Feuerbachian’ fashion if their attainment
is impossible in reality. What men lack in fact they attain in fancy. If
meaningful political participation is withheld or denied, man will
participate abstractly, in the fantasy world of citizenship; the state
itself becomes a kind of religious fetish. The division of man’s social
nature into separate, exclusive spheres of privacy and universality must
mean that man’s very ‘universality’ is fictitious. Worse still, the state is
presented as ‘universal’ at the very historical moment when the relations
of production begin to make the state, whatever its constitutional
form, the surrogate of the bourgeoisie.

Marx goes on to stress the connection between the state’s abstract,
idolatrous universality and economic laissez faire. Political emancipation
replaced the impact of personal power with the impersonal arbitrariness,
the repressive anonymity, of the ‘hidden hand’. The illusion of liberty
which the modern state creates and sustains is necessary because the
state does not and cannot liberate men from the disastrous effect of
the predatory social agencies (private property and religion) it permits
to flourish freely. The ideological expression and celebration of this
state of affairs was none other than the doctrine of the ‘Rights of Man’
enunciated by the American and French Revolutions.

None of the supposed rights of man go beyond the egoistic man,
man as he is, man as a member of civil society; that is, as an
individual separated from the community, withdrawn into
himself, wholly occupied with his private interest and acting
in accordance with his private caprice. Man is far from being
considered, in the rights of man, as a species-being; on the
contrary, species-life itself, society, appears as a system which
is external to the individual and as a limitation of his original
independence. The only bond between men is natural necessity,
need and private interest, the preservation of their property and
their egoistic persons. . . The political liberators reduce the




political community, to a mere means for preserving these so-called
rights of man . . . The citizen is declared to be the servant of the
egoistic man . . . The sphere in which man functions as a species-
being is degraded to a level below the sphere where he functions
as a political being ... it is man as a bourgeois and not man as a
citizen who is considered the true and authentic man.²⁵

The ‘rights of man’ refer to men as though they were self-sufficient,
self-motivated atoms closed to one another and thus lead by extension
to a social system close to the Hobbesian bellum omnium contra
omnes. ‘This’, says Marx,

is the liberty of man viewed as an isolated monad, withdrawn into
himself. . . [which is] not based on the association of man with
man but rather on the separation of man from man. . . The
practical application of the right of liberty is the right of private
property ... it lets every man find in every other man not the
reality but the limitation of his own freedom.²⁶

In portraying the ideology and the reality of modern civil society as
‘atomistic’, Marx was not claiming that men were iri fact reduced to
the status of atoms, but that men’s behaviour in certain respects was
atomistic; he believed that to derive the former from the latter pro-
position would be to fall prey to the illusion of theorists such as Hobbes.
Civil society was not, in Marx’s view, a simple aggregate of human
atoms unrelated to one another, as some British economists and utili-
tarians imagined, but a state of mutual dependence of all on all.

It is natural necessity, essential human properties, however
alienated they may seem to be, and interest that hold together
the members of civil society; civil, not political, life is their real
tie. It is therefore not the state that holds together the atoms of
civil society but the fact that they are atoms only in imagination,
in the heaven of their fancy, but in reality beings tremendously
different from atoms, in other words, not divine egoists, but
egoistic human beings. Only political superstition today
imagines that social life must be held together by the state
whereas in reality the state is held together by civil life.²⁷

‘On the Jewish Question’ was much more than a polemical Streitschrift,
a mere reply to the essay by Bruno Bauer which had provoked and
occasioned it; Marx extended the terms of the debate by incorporating
into what is ostensibly an attack on Bauer a host of references not so
much to Bauer as to Feuerbach, Hegel and others. As we have seen,
Hegel, as well as Feuerbach, should be credited with having linked




religion with human deprivation, with having refined the Enlighten-
ment’s view of religion as an agency that compensated men’s perception
of a world out of joint. Marx goes well beyond this kind of designation,
however, in indicating that private, internalized religiosity signified a
much more radical alienation than did official, institutionalized religion.
Indeed, Marx’s terrain was by now quite different from that of Feuer-
bach. He conspicuously does not rest content, as Feuerbach had, with
dramatically uncovering and ‘solving’ deficiency as though it were
merely a hidden secret. Instead, Marx offers an historical explanation
based on an analysis of man’s non-religious life; in particular, he
emphasizes the part played there by property relations. Feuerbach’s
notion of alienation, when extended in this way from religion and
contemplation to politics and society, is no longer Feuerbachian.
Marx, in other words, shifted the grounds of alienation, making it
something that could be not only outlined but solved, practically
and socially.

Only when the actual individual man takes back into himself the
abstract citizen and in his everyday life, his individual work, and
his individual relationships has become a species-being, only when
he has recognized and organized his own powers as social powers
so that social force is no longer separated from him as political
force - only then is human emancipation complete.²⁸

If citizenship is a religious phenomenon, the fantasy of universality,
the reintegration of political powers to which Marx refers can be seen
in one sense as the realization of the fantasy of citizenship, as a genuine
secularization of the spiritual world. Yet ‘On the Jewish Question’ does
not merely substitute some populist ‘direct democracy’ for a sham
‘representative democracy’. Marx never believed that the state could be
the agency or the instrument of its own reintegration. The state is an
institutional expression of human alienation, and such alienation by its
very nature cannot be overcome within the sphere of alienation. What
this means is that the state (whatever its constitutional form), far from
being insulated against the claims of property and exchange, will in
some way reflect or express the prevailing pattern of property relations.
What follows is that alienation can be overcome only by an agency
which does not reflect property relations in this way. Civil society’s
animating principle, its esprit general, is private property; the prolet-
ariat, which is defined and given meaning by its propertylessness,
might appear irrelevant to it; but, in fact, far from being marginal to
civil society, as Max Stirner for example thought it was, the prolet-
ariat was its very basis. Without this basis bourgeois society could
not - and Marx hastened to add, would not - persist. To invoke the
spectre of Stirner is to be reminded that the overthrow of civil society




does not correspond to the advent of anything resembling an anarchist
utopia. What mattered to Marx is something very different - the re-
integration of communal control, once ‘political’ has led to ‘human’
emancipation, into the realm of a society that is at present regulated
only by the impersonal forces of the market. With ‘political emanci-
pation’ there seems to be no excess of political rule at all. The forces
dominating civil society are not political or communal forces, but the
impersonal forces of private property and the division of labour. Since
the consequences of the unimpeded domination of these mechanisms
are inhuman and oppressive, what is required is some extension of
rational, human control over them. This is a very different perception
of the problem from the anarchists’ complaints about the pervasiveness
and deep-rootedness of the power of the state. Marx attributes to the
state no real autonomous power at all, and advocates not more control
per se, but more control of a certain type. Society stands in need of
non-alien authority; without such an authority, it can operate as a
system, or even as a self-regulating mechanism, but it can do so only in
a destructive (and self-destructive) way.

The ‘politically emancipated’ state has abdicated control over the
market. Society is left to its own devices; it operates as a system (and as
such it is susceptible to analysis) but only to the extent that elements
within civil society that are permitted to proceed blithely and destruc-
tively, in their own manner, add up to a system. The elements in
question are non-human and the results of their unrestrained operation -
however ‘systematic’ they may be - are inhuman. If, in such circum-
stances, citizenship is a fantasy, it is a fantasy that can and must be
made real. That society has undergone a certain depoliticization says
nothing, however, about the kind of reintegration of politics into
society that Marx is advocating. There is no historical precedent for it,
and Marx nowhere suggests that the state itself has the capacity to bring
it about. Nevertheless, ‘freedom’, as Marx was some years later to put
it,

consists in converting the state from an organ superimposed upon
society into one completely subordinated to it. .. instead of
treating existing society (and this holds good for any future one)
as the basis of the existing state (or of the future state in the case
of future society) it [the German Workers’ Party] treats the state
rather as an independent entity . . ,²⁹

This statement, too, is nothing like any anarchist perspective: but it is
remarkably akin to an earlier essay by the same writer, to ‘On the
Jewish Question’ of 1843.

This similarity, spanning as it does some three decades of Marx’s
career, should not surprise us; The Critique of the Gotha Programme


was to contain many direct echoes of Marx’s attack on the etatisme of
Bruno Bauer thirty-two years earlier. Both Bauer and the Lassalleans
who helped draw up and clearly influenced the Gotha Programme
indulged in their respective ways in the ‘idolatrous’ belief that the state
could be dealt with in and of itself ‘as an independent entity possessed
of its own intellectual, ethical and libertarian bases’.³⁰ Marx never
wavered in his contrary view that the state was not formative or deter-
minant in this way, but instrumental and derivative. Statists like Bauer
and Lassalle are guilty of arguing from the state to society - as though
the state were capable of autonomously formulating the conditions of
its own existence - as were anarchists like Proudhon in their facile and
illegitimate overestimation of the primacy and effects of the removal of
the state.

Marx was to castigate the Gotha Programme of 1875 because in it
Lassalle’s epigoni had made a first-order mistake similar to that of
Bauer in 1843 in confusing political with human emancipation. Their
Programme’s demands, Marx insisted, were appropriate only to a
democratic republic, which remained a distant prospect as far as their
own ‘present-day national state’, the Prusso-German Empire, was
concerned. From a confusion of political emancipation (the elusive
‘free state’ of the Lassalleans-or the supposedly secular state of Bauer)
and human emancipation only defective theoretical formulations and
meaningless demands could emerge. From such confusion the German
Workers’ Party could only fall prey to the illusion that accompanied
political emancipation of the primacy and autonomy of the state, and
fail to recognize that the Lassalleans’- catch-all category, the ‘present-
day national state’, was no more than an abstraction. The result in
1875 was the Party’s programme: confusion worse confounded.

... its political demands contain nothing beyond the old
democratic litany familiar to all: universal suffrage, direct
legislation, popular rights . . . They are demands which, in so
far as they are not exaggerated in fantastic presentation, have
already been realized. Only the state to which they belong does
not lie within the borders of the German Empire but in
Switzerland, the United States, etc. This sort of ‘state of the
future’ is a present-day state, although existing outside the
borders of the German Empire.³¹

Of the Programme’s understanding of the relationship of democracy to
socialism, Marx went on to say, archly, that

even vulgar democracy, which sees the millennium in the
democratic republic, and has no suspicion that it is precisely
in this last form of state of bourgeois society that the class




struggle has to be fought out to a conclusion - even it towers
mountains above this kind of democratism [in the Programme]
which keeps within the limits of what is permitted by the police
and not permitted by logic.³²

Marx’s taunts, that the Lassalleans’ lack of perspective on certain
elementary political realities would cause a supine attitude even towards
political reaction, did not lack for verification; and they apply also to a
certain kind of anarchist thinking which overvalues or is obsessed with
political power, as we shall soon see in discussing Proudhon.

Marx in The Critique of the Gotha Programme, as in ‘On the Jewish
Question’, presented what he had called in the earlier work ‘political
emancipation’ not as a solution to but as an index of men’s degradation
in the face of impersonal market forces. Upon their ‘political emanci-
pation’ individuals (whatever their real condition might be) were for
the first time officially and bureaucratically considered equal political
beings, or citizens; this formal consideration was supposed to pertain
whatever their social status or occupational category. The Economic
and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 specified (against Hegel) that in
bourgeois society men’s most personal attributes - their skill, knowledge,
creative potential or even physical beauty - become alienable attributes
that can now be bought and sold on the market. It is of the utmost
importance for us to recognize, at this juncture, that these specifications
are linked. Each stresses that under capitalist conditions social relations
among individuals endowed with personal qualities and attributes
giving meaning to their lives had become impossible. Men, according to
the precepts of ‘political emancipation’ and Marxist economics alike,
are formally and in principle free and equal; but they are so only in an
inhumanly restricted sense. They are free at the level of bourgeois
citizenship and bureaucratic consideration; they are equal in the ad-
ditional sense of being distinguishable only in what they buy or have to
sell. It is at this point in the argument that ‘On the Jewish Question’
and the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts come together; the
dehumanization of the distinctions among individuals the latter de-
scribes is the obverse and complement of the political and bureaucratic
homogenization of individuals required and defined by the former’s
central concept of ‘political emancipation’. The two are opposite sides
of the same coin. Without understanding alien politics, we fail to
understand alienation.

To recapitulate the argument of ‘On the Jewish Question’ is at this
point to better appreciate its resonance throughout Marx’s later thought.
With the atomization of feudal, corporate society into biirgerliche
Gesellschaft, the behaviour of individuals in their everyday life fails to
transcend their self-defined, immediate goals. Because of this failure,
general regulative and ideological measures have to be imposed from




without. The manner of their imposition is as unprecedented as it is
alien. The bourgeois state is grafted on to a realm of private self-
interested activities, which nevertheless operate in such a way that
the superimposition of the state does nothing to alleviate men’s sub-
jection to the conditions and relations of production. In so far as any
real authority now exists, it is the impersonal authority of the market;
the human control capitalism increasingly demands and denies is
correspondingly projected upwards and outwards, on to the alien,
fantastic level of the bourgeois state.

Yet this development is no mere ruse. Far from straightforwardly
denying it, political emancipation presages human emancipation,
blazes its trail, points the way forward - and parodies it in advance.
Citizenship in the alien state is a cruel joke upon man, one which mocks
the universality, the Gemeinwesen, the extension of real, social control
he desperately and increasingly needs. It does so by presenting it to him
in an alien, abstract form. Capitalism, which had had the positive and
laudable effect of putting the whole world at the disposal of man and
having ‘created a world after its own image’,³³ by the same token put
men at the disposal of the material process of the impersonal market
mechanism. Yet at the same time capitalism removed many of the
obstacles to the emergence of man as he could be, man as the many-
sided social individual; and it was precisely because capitalism had
removed these obstacles that citizenship could so much as appear as
a universal category. Capitalism, Marx believed, had more than one
cutting edge; on the one hand its emergence and operation signalled
‘real, human emancipation’, towards which it was tending, and which
was presaged and in a way promised, on the political level as citizen-
ship, and on the economic level by capitalism’s own expansionist,
universalizing tendencies. On the other hand, it made man ‘the play-
thing of alien powers’, powers which could not but stifle the ‘universal’
side of human nature that Marx and Hegel held so dear. Capitalism, in
short, creates the need as it denies the need for emancipation; it plays
with mankind, apparently granting as it substantively withholds signifi-
cant, human emancipation. While it supplies preconditions for the
emergence of man as man potentially could be, it can furnish these only
in an alien (and tantalizing) form - that of the bourgeois state.

The continuity between one of Marx’s earliest writings on the state,
‘On the Jewish Question’ (1843), and one of his last, The Critique of
the Gotha Programme (1875), suggests that all of Marx’s investigations
of the modern state were predicated upon, and informed by, the theory
of alien politics Marx developed in a series of writings leading up to
The German Ideology. This common source, while it does not clear up
all the ambiguities encountered throughout Marx’s utterances, does
help to put them into perspective. One of the most frequent objections
to Marx’s theory of the state has been that Marx did not comprehend




the independent power of political institutions; yet we find that not
only do Marx’s more detailed essays address this very problem, and
attempt to assess the degree of independence shown by political insti-
tutions, but also that they do so in a manner that unavoidably recalls
the analysis found in ‘On the Jewish Question’.

To see this is to begin to be able to deal with another frequently
voiced objection to Marx’s theory of the state. Most accounts emphasize
its unfinished character. There are gaps in Marx’s arguments which have
bequeathed an ambiguous legacy; most notably, the third volume of
Capital breaks off at the very point where Marx, according to his own
admission, was about to embark upon an elaboration of the theory of
the state and of class he had sketched out elsewhere. These sketches,
which contain their fair share of cryptic, gnomic pronouncements -
and of outright propaganda - are not, however, made up simply of
isolated, fragmentary utterances. Marx wrote a great deal throughout
his career about the various structures of the bourgeois state, about
what distinguished modern bourgeois state-forms from their feudal
forerunners, about the dangers of authoritarianism, and about the
necessity for revolutionary struggle - which was to be a political struggle,
as Marx never tired of insisting, not least against his anarchist inter-
locutors. All these features of Marx’s theory of the state have a specifi-
cally anti-anarchist bearing and a discernibly Hegelian lineage; all of
them proceed from the theory of alien politics first outlined in the
course of his auto-emancipation from Hegel. These elements of con-
tinuity may not clear up all the ambiguities we encounter in what was
an unfinished enterprise. Marx often wrote in a spirit of revolutionary
urgency that only subsequently was proved by events to be unwarranted;
The Manifesto of the Communist Party, a document that at the time
of its composition was designed to push or shape events, is a case
in point. But he was also no stranger to recollection in (enforced)
tranquillity.

It is possible to distinguish between broad, theoretical formulations
- such as those found in the Manifesto - and more detailed ‘empirical’
investigations, such as The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte,
where these broad formulations are, as it were, put to the test. Such a
distinction - which indicates that what Marx discovers in the course of
his specific historical investigations rarely bears out the broadest of his
theoretical claims - is useful, even though it all too patently begs the
question of whether Marx should be considered as a twentieth-century
social scientist testing out ‘empirically’his ‘hypotheses’. This reservation
to one side, however, the distinction between a theoretical Marx and
an empirical Marx - a distinction that would have made little sense to
Marx himself - is best complemented, not displaced, by the emphasis
advanced here on Marx’s early formulation of alien politics as a principle
underlying whatever he had to say about the state.




To fail to include Marx’s theory of alien politics - his idea of the
state as a fake universal, based on men’s alienated capacities - alongside
his characterization of the state as an instrument of bourgeois pre-
dominance is to fail to see a significant connection between the two.
Worse still, to exclude alien politics is to lay one’s emphasis wrongly.
To concentrate upon Marx’s ruling-class theory of the state, as did
Lenin, can easily enough be seen to be politically programmatic, for
it leads directly into the notion of the dictatorship of the proletariat -
a notion so disliked by anarchists. Yet Marx’s own theory of the state
has greater depth then Lenin saw fit (for good reasons of his own,
perhaps) to plumb in The State and Revolution. Most importantly, we
should recognize that what Marx has to say about politics and com-
munity is not exhausted by what he has to say about the bourgeois
state; overemphasis on the latter might distract us from considering the
former. The reason why such distraction is a danger best avoided is
that Marx himself predicated even his most programmatic revolutionary
message - the necessity for political action - not simply upon his ruling-
class theory of the state, but also upon his notion of the modern,
bourgeois state as the ideological representation of the alienated com-
munal abilities of men, abilities which men as a result of revolutionary
political activity can (and must) reappropriate.