Karl Marx: A biography by David McLellan

PARIS

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legislative power, but in the framework of a medieval system of estates!

It is the worst sort of syncretism.'^28

Since the whole problem arose, in Hegel's view, from the separation

of the state from civil society, Marx saw two possibilities: if the state and

civil society continued to be separate, then all as individuals could not

participate in the legislature except through deputies, the 'expression of

the separation and merely a dualistic unity'.^29 Secondly, if civil society

became political society, then the significance of legislative power as

representative disappeared, for it depended on a theological kind of separ-

ation of the state from civil society. Hence, what the people should aim

for was not legislative power but governmental power. Marx ended his

discussion with a passage which makes clear how, in the summer of 1843 ,

he envisaged future political developments:

... It is not a question of whether civil society should exercise legis-

lative power through deputies or through all as individuals. Rather it

is the question of the extent and greatest possible extension of the

franchise, of active as well as passive suffrage. This is the real bone of

contention of political reform, in France as well as in England....

Voting is the actual relationship of actual civil society to the civil

society of the legislative power, to the representative element. Or, voting

is the immediate, direct relationship of civil society to the political

state, not only in appearance but in reality.. .. Only with universal

suffrage, active as well as passive, does civil society actually rise to an

abstraction of itself, to political existence as its true universal and

essential existence. But the realisation of this abstraction is also the

transcendence of the abstraction. By making its political existence actual

as its true existence, civil society also makes its civil existence unessential

in contrast to its political existence. And with the one thing separated,

the other - its opposite - falls. Within the abstract political state the

reform of voting is a dissolution of the state, but likewise the dissolution

of civil society.^50

Thus Marx arrived here at the same conclusion as in his discussion of
'true democracy'. Democracy implied universal suffrage, and universal
suffrage would lead to the dissolution of the state.
It is clear from this manuscript that Marx was adopting the fundamen-
tal humanism of Feuerbach and with it Feuerbach's reversal of subject
and predicate in the Hegelian dialectic. Marx considered it evident that
any future development was going to involve man's recovery of the social
dimension that had been lost ever since the French Revolution levelled
all citizens in the political state and thus accentuated the individualism of
bourgeois society. Although he was convinced that social organisation had
no longer to be based on private property, he was not here explicitly