Marx by Terrell Carver

Author:Terrell Carver
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
Published: 2017-12-27T05:00:00+00:00

Coalitions with Commercialisms

So far this argument merely states a kind of social malleability – and social responsibility – that anyone recognizing the ‘social question’ today could easily slot into. Indeed not slotting into this outlook on social issues and governmental responsibilities would simply erase the ‘social question’, or convert it into something other than an engagement with the economy. Alternatives today – as in Marx's time – include various forms of religious authoritarianism. These aim to enforce moral values derived from tradition, and claim a value superior to economic considerations. Characteristically such regimes and movements work specifically to curtail modern or secular or ‘Western’ economic incursions into social life as a matter of public policy. Another familiar alternative today is ethno-nationalism as a project, sometimes to the point of near-isolation from the international economy, often but not always a project of military dictatorships. There are also a few monarchies remaining today that resist democratization, understood as the requirement that government is derived from, and responsible to, ‘the people’ through representative institutions – and indeed that government is illegitimate if it does not. These comparisons should tell us that Marx was ‘on the money’ in identifying a common thread in revolutionary projects to democratize government by opening it out to commercial elites (as opposed to royal and court elites) and to institute commercial economies involving ‘private’ (i.e. non-state) investment of wealth and employment of ‘free’ (i.e. de-feudalized) labour, generally summed up by the slogans ‘free market’ and ‘free trade’.

Since Marx's time very strong claims have been made within the libertarian tradition that commercialism and democracy are coincident and that pulling them apart constitutes an injustice to individuals as well as generating inefficiencies in the economy. Contrarily very strong claims have been made within the social-democratic tradition that commercialism and market forces generate considerable injustices that are experienced by individuals in heritable class terms, so democratic institutions have obligations to act as regulators and agencies of income and wealth generation and distribution. It is one thing having a strategy to perform democratization by generating public concern with economic issues, and another to balance the competing political philosophies and substantive claims to some point of ‘success’. Marx strongly identified himself with an ultimate goal: communism as the institution of an industrial, but classless society, which – in his reasoning – would entail the abolition of money. This was a conception familiar to him from utopian writings of the period, his own criticisms of these various writers notwithstanding. However, an examination of Marx's activism reveals how this long-term view framed more immediate goals and local projects. These activisms took place chiefly in Brussels, where Marx was resident 1845–7, having been pushed into exile from the German states.

Marx engaged in coalition-building with the necessarily class-specific individuals and opportunities that arose and were accessible to a German émigré radical and his confrères. These were notably a middle-class, commercially minded Democratic Committee, holding somewhat public meetings in the local French language and circulating literatures that promoted further expansion of the franchise and public engagement with political decision-making.

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