DIRECT DEMOCRACY  The Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right – as

Marx put it, man is not an abstract being

 Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels attacked the idea
squatting outside the world. Man is the human
of a neutral liberal state and free market
world, the state, the society.
economy.
- Means that individuals only exist in
- Born in England; lived most of their working
interaction with an in relation to others;
lives in England; broke decisively with the
their nature can only be grasped as a social
terms of reference of liberal and liberal
and historical product.
democratic thought; place of the individual
in the society, role of property relations and  CLASS STRUCTURE - key to understanding the
the nature of capitalism relations between people according to Marx
and Engels.
- In an industrial capitalist world, the state
could never be neutral or the economy free.  CLASS DIVISIONS are not they maintained,
found in all forms of society: classes are creation
 John Stuart Mill’s liberal democratic state -
of history, and in future will disappear.
stated that liberal democratic state might claim
to be acting on behalf of all citizens; it might - Arise only when a surplus is generated such
defend its claim to legitimacy with the promise as it becomes possible for a class of non-
to sustain the security of a person and property producers to live off the productive activity
while promoting simultaneously equal justice of others.
among individuals.
- Those who gain control of the means of
 Security of a person is contradicted by the production form a dominant or ruling class
reality of class society where most aspects of an both economically and politically.
individual’s life – the nature of opportunities,
- Inherently conflictual and frequently give
work, health, life span – are determined
rise to a class struggle
according to his location in the class structure.
 Tribal society – earliest type in which it is
Class and class conflict considered as classless for there was no surplus
The preoccupations of a liberal democratic tradition: production and no private property.

 Human beings- individuals; individuals in a - Production was based upon communal

competition with one another; freedom of resources and the fruits of productive
choice activity were distributed throughout the
community as a whole.
 Politics – as the arena for the protection of
individual interests, the defence of life, liberty  Class relations – exploitative and imply divisions
and estate of interests between ruling and subordinate
classes.
 Democratic state- institutional mechanism for
the articulation of the legal framework for the  Origins of the Family , Private Property and the
pursuit of private initiatives in civil society and State
public concerns in the process of government - Written by Engels

 The proposers/theorists attacked the idea that

the starting point of the analysis of political life
and its most desirable organizational form can
be the individual and his relation to the state.
 - Link the origins of sexual domination to the  To ignore is to neglect the foundations of
emergence of private property, especially human existence
private ownership of the means of
 To explicate is to establish the conditions of
production, which in turn was regarded as
different forms of human association and of the
the condition of the development of the
possibilities of politics in each era.
state.
2 general concepts: SOCIAL FORMATION AND
- Matriarchal is the earliest forms of society
MODE OF PRODUCTION
- Became reversed if private ownership will
 Social formation – connotes a web of relations
be an issue since men assumed supremacy
and institutions which constitute a society. It
to protect inheritance
consists a combination of economic, political,
- Sexual exploitation = class exploitation and cultural phenomena including a particular
- The development of capitalism paves the type of economy, system of power, state
way for the overcoming of sexual apparatus and cultural life which have definite
exploitation because the main form of interconnections with one another. These
deprivation to which women are subject in interconnections can be uncovered by analysing
capitalist society – exclusion from equal the mode of production.
participation in the labour force – is to an  Mode of production – designated the essential
extent overcome by an increase in female structure of the society: social relations of
involvement in wage labour. production. These relations specify the
- Equality of participation in production will dominant way in which surplus production is
be the basis of achieving equality in other extracted and appropriated. It is the complex
spheres. combinations of relations and forces of
production
- Class and class struggle form the chief
mechanism or motor of historical  Social relations or production are pivotal,
development. crystallizes a variety of interconnected relations
and organizations.
History as evolution and the development of
 The proposers/theorists elaborated a
capitalism
conception of history based upon the idea of
 The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte successive stages of development. These stages
(Marx) – in order to understand the historical were distinguished by the different modes of
development adequately, it is essential to production and change was propelled by the
analyse how people make history but not economic base, particularly the interaction
always in circumstances of their own choosing between the progressively expanding forces of
because the latter are transmitted from the production and, on the one hand, and the
past. struggle of classes over the distribution of social
 To grasp the basis of history is to grasp how the wealth.
creative acts of humans are constrained and  A Contribution to the Critique of Political
enabled by the resources which people can Economy (Preface) – history as an evolutionary
command, by the productive techniques at their process marked by periods of revolutionary
disposal and by the form of society which exists change.
as a result of the efforts of the preceeding
 Marx believed the bourgeois or capitalist mode
generations.
of production was the last major stage before a
fundamentally new political and economic
 order in which the ideals of liberty and equality
would be gradually realized: communism. His
account of capitalism sheds direct light on his
reasons for holding that a new form of political
organization was not only desirable but
possible.
1. Contemporary society is dominated by the
capitalist mode of production.
2. Capitalism is not a harmonious social order.
3. Foundations of capitalism are progressively
undermined from within such as a result of
the development of capitalism per se.
4. Small and weak firms tend to be pushed out
of business by larger enterprises better able
to weather the poor economic conditions.
5. As part of these developments class
struggle intensifies both sporadically as a
feature of the cyclical tendencies of the
economy and more generally in the longer
term.
6. The development of the labour movement
is the means for achieving revolution.
7. Communism, as a political doctrine, has
several related sources apart from the
tradition of writing of utopian socialists.

Two theories of the state