Corey Robin

Tag: Eighteenth Brumaire

Not your grandparents’ Marxist theory of the state

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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 […]

Marx on Trump’s Abuses of Power

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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, […]