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Western Political Thought

Notes In the Origins of the Family, Private Property and the State (1884), Engels remarked that the state was
generally a tool of the ruling class, but there were exceptional times when the warring classes
balanced one another, giving it sufficient independence. The independence of a Bonapartist state,
and its role as the “ostensible mediator” between the rival classes did not mean that the state was
in a position of suspended animation. The Bonapartist state, in reality, ensured the safety and
stability of bourgeois society, guaranteeing its rapid development.
In opposition to the German Federalists, in 1848 Marx and Engels contended that a strong centre
was a prerequisite of all modern states.
They criticized the Frankfurt Assembly for not creating a sufficiently strong central government,
and, conversely, praised the Jacobins during the French Revolution for overriding the powers of
the elected local authorities and establishing a centralized administration. Subsequently, Lenin
pointed out that the essential difference between the Marxists and the Anarchists was on the
question of centralism.
Both Marx and Engels had mixed feelings about parliamentary institutions. Whether the proletarian
revolution would be violent or peaceful would depend on the level and maturity of democratic
political institutions, but they were categorical that it would be democratic by virtue of being
majoritarian. In the light of the severe restrictions on suffrage in their times, they had qualms
about whether parliamentary means could act as instruments, or even as catalysts, for profound
social and economic changes. Hence, the Manifesto stressed the need to introduce democratic
institutions once the proletarian revolution was accomplished. The preliminary draft contended
that the revolution would “inaugurate a democratic constitution and thereby directly or indirectly
the political rule of the proletariat”.
Future Society

For Marx and Engels, Communist society eliminated all forms of alienation for the human
individual, from nature, from society and from humanity. It did not merely mean consumer
satisfaction, but the abolition of all forms of estrangement, the liberation of human forces and
enhancement of personal creativity. The institution of private property and division of labour,
identified as the source of alienation, would be destroyed as a prerequisite for the new and truly
human phase in history. Marx and Engels viewed the proletariat as an agent, and not as a tool in
history, and with the liberation of the proletariat came the liberation of society.
The transitional phase, the phase between the destruction of the bourgeois state and the inauguration
of a communist society, symbolized by the dictatorship of the proletariat, generated a great deal of
controversy in Marxist political theory. Interestingly, one of the well-known Utopias was the least
delineated. Marx’s cautious predictions were imposed by his own epistemological premises. Any
discussion of the future (which was not yet an existing reality) would smack of philosophical
idealism for it would amount to the description of an object that existed only in the consciousness
of the thinking subject. Moreover, he did not want to rival those Socialists whom he branded as
“utopian”, by constructing detailed blueprints for a communist society that would be determined
by the specific conditions under which it was established.
The crucial fact was that observations on future society were set forth in cautious tones “as a
posthumous analysis of the passing of the bourgeois world”. Communism, for Marx, “can never
be an ideal to which reality must adjust. It is reality that comes into being”. This was evident in
the’ Critique of the Gotha Programme. “What we have to deal with here is communist society not as
it has developed on its foundations, but on the contrary just as it emerges from capitalist society”.
In the Civil War in France, similar sentiments were stated. “The working class has no ideals to
realize but to set free the elements of the new society with which the old bourgeois society itself is
pregnant”.

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