Karl Marx's Theory of Revolution
Volume I: State and Bureaucracy
Draper, Hal Publisher: Monthly Review Press, New York, USA
Year Published: 1977
Pages: 748pp ISBN: 0-85345-461-2
Library of Congress Number: JC233.M299D7 Dewey: 301.5'92
Resource Type: Book
A wide-ranging and thorough exposition of Marx's views on democracy.
Abstract: Draper writes: In his historical and political writings there were no state "norms" for Marx to start with even had he been so minded. For one thing a "normal" state (whatever that is thought to be) must be as hard to find in reality as an "average" person; and no planet actually follows Kepler's Laws even though they are "true." For another, the states that Marx spent time discussing were all states distorted, or modified, from the "normal" by social stresses, national factors, obsolete hangovers, and so on. It was scientifically valid for Marx in Capital to posit a "pure" or "abstract" bourgeois economy for the purpose of analyzing its basic laws; this is a way to begin. But in the case of the theory of the state, there is a tendency to end with the beginning. This means freezing the theory into a static formula. It can make little sense of real political phenomena, which are usually seen in the process of becoming, of change and interaction. In the life course of states -- arising, flourishing, and dying -- more time is spent in the first and last stages than in the more "normal" middle: that is, the "normal" is one of the more abnormal conditions encountered. Even more important, historical attention, and especially Marx's, must tend to focus on the problem situations, on critical periods of change and dislocation and revolution, even more than on times of relative stasis. The static formula is a blunt, brittle tool, which breaks off at the first attack on reality. This reality is complex, but it is a complex of simplicities; and this makes it possible for people to understand and control their social destiny. So Marx thought, and implicit in these pages is the thesis that political theory today had best look back to Marx.
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