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The Socialist Polis: Antiquity and Socialism in Marx's Thought

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 August 2009

Claudio Katz
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The central question guiding this essay is: what does Marx's socialism owe to classical antiquity? Underlying this question is the thesis that Marx's studies of classical Greece supply the angle of vision necessary to bring to light the hallmark of his conception of the socialist polity. The argument challenges a widespread interpretation of the connection between antiquity and socialism in Marx's work—that his socialist vision takes its bearings from the Aristotelian understanding of the relationship between necessity and leisure. In Marx's view, the fundamental legacy of antiquity was the notion of freedom as masterlessness. The roots of this legacy are in the political experience of the democratic polis, not in Aristotle's reflections on the ideal household. The core of Marx's project, then, is not to open a realm of freedom beyond necessity, but rather to create spaces for democratic action within the realm of necessity itself, to ensure that work is free and compatible with leisured activities.

Type
Research Article
Information
The Review of Politics , Volume 56 , Issue 2 , Spring 1994 , pp. 237 - 260
Copyright
Copyright © University of Notre Dame 1994

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References

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72. Commentaries on the Commune tend to focus on the view, shared by Marx and Engels, that it was a concrete expression of the “dictatorship of the proletariat.” Exhaustive studies by Draper and Hunt have shown that this phrase did not have the antidemocratic connotations it acquired in the twentieth century. Both provide extensive documentation of Marx's commitment to democratic political practice. If anything, Marx failed to address the need for safeguards against the excessive spontaneity of popular sovereignty. Proletarian dictatorship, in Marx's view, meant “nothing more and nothing less than ‘rule of the proletariat,’ the ‘conquest of political power’ by the working class, the establishment of a workers' state in the first revolutionary period” (Draper, Hal, Karl Marx's Theory of Revolution, 4 vols. [New York: Monthly Review Press, 1977–1990], 3: 213Google Scholar; see also pp. 269–74). Hunt argues that, for Marx, the Commune's main achievement was the de-professionalization of political life (Hunt, , Political Ideas of Marx and Engels, 2: 211–265Google Scholar). What I wish to underscore here is that Marx praised the Commune not so much because it promised proletarian rule or politics without professionals, but rather because it promised to replace the principles of capitalist rule with classical principles of civic association.

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75. Ibid., p. 339.

76. Ibid., p. 335.

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79. Marx, , The Civil War in France, First Draft, CW 22: 484Google Scholar.

80. Ibid., p. 486.

81. The democratization of the coercive apparatus of the state is Lenin's understanding of the chief accomplishment of the Commune (Lenin, Vladimir, The State and Revolution, trans. Christman, Henry M. [New York: Bantam Books, 1966], pp. 275, 280–82, 301–303, 338–39Google Scholar). In Lenin's view, politics and the state are exclusively repressive forces. For him, then, communism is tantamount to the withering away of politics and the state (Ibid., pp. 347–49). Rooted more deeply in the classical Greek tradition, Marx discovers in the democratic public realm the institutionalization of freedom.

82. Marx, , The Civil War in France, First Draft, CW 22: 486Google Scholar; see also p. 49.

83. Ibid., pp. 332–33.

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