I’ve been following the online debate over the slogan “no kings” with some interest. On the one side, critics argue that it’s a normie notion, which obscures all sorts of questions about imperial war, Palestine, oil, and oligarchy. On the other side, defenders say it appeals to a broad set of values and voters, providing the basis for a popular movement against not just Trump but all the ills he stands for and promotes, not to mention the kind of state he is trying to create and consolidate. Interestingly enough, as Bruno Leipold shows in his magnificent book, Citizen Marx, Marx struggled with this very question across the 1840s, 50s, and 60s. While most readers associate Marx with the claim […]
Most readers and followers of Marx are familiar with two fairly simple and stereotypical versions of his theory of the capitalist state. The first, which can be gleaned from On the Jewish Question and other writings, essentially sees the liberal constitutional state, with a rule of law and various civil liberties, as the perfected form of the capitalist state. The second, which can be gleaned from the Eighteenth Brumaire, sees a populist dictator, like Louis Bonaparte, as a different, more authoritarian version of the capitalist state. But in reading and re-reading Bruno Leipold’s Citizen Marx, I think we can find, in Marx’s other writings, particularly his articles on 1848, some of which were later collected in The Class Struggles in […]
One of the more surprising elements in Bruno Leipold’s book Citizen Marx is just how fierce a critic Marx was of what political scientists call presidential systems. In presidential systems, the executive is invested with power that does not derive from the legislature, as in a parliamentary system. Instead, the executive is invested with power derived from elsewhere, most commonly election by the people themselves. Such systems tend to lionize the executive as a creature above and beyond the normal shabbiness of politics. That kind of elevation of the executive in a presidential system is something that Alexander Hamilton, that old fox, was wise to, and why he advocated so forcefully for it. Marx saw immediately how such a system, […]
Three items that might be of interest. First, over at Balkinization, I participated in a symposium on Rogers Smith and Desmond King’s book America’s New Racial Battle Lines, which came out earlier this year. Rogers was my adviser in graduate school who taught me a lot of what I know about the American right. So I was thrilled to be invited to participate in this discussion, even if I disagree with some of his and King’s claims about where things stand with the right and racial politics in the US. From the conclusion to my post: While cultural battles are critical, it may be that they don’t require, on either side, new racial orders for their fighting. Existing languages, paradigms, […]