- Information
- AI Chat
Marxist Notion OF Citizenship
Political science (BA Honours)
University of Delhi
Recommended for you
Preview text
MARXIST NOTION OF CITIZENSHIP
INTRODUCTION
The dialectical relationship of liberty and welfarehas guided modern political development, and it sets the criteria for citizenship in a modern state. However, to absolutize either liberty or welfare can undermine both. The governance of any mature, legitimate state whether capitalist or socialist requires respect for the autonomy of individuals and civil society as well as effectiveness in the promotion of general welfare. In the process of governance each state makes its own path as it adjusts to its own successes and failures.
MARX ON CITIZENSHIP
Marx believed that human history, on the whole, is such a process: from the individual being just ′′the accessory of a definite and limited human conglomerate′′ to ′′the independence of the people on the basis of the dependence of object′′ through the bourgeois'' ′′political revolution′′ and then to ′′a real community in which the individuals obtain their freedom in and through their association.′′ In such a historical perspective, on the one hand, the modern citizenship in a bourgeois state shows its historical limitations, and on the other hand, it also represents a historical progress.
Marx's critique of modern citizenship in the modernbourgeois state is not to end citizenship, but to transform citizenship. The historical limitations of modern citizenship lie in that the person whom the bourgeois state recognizes through ′′human rights′′ and protects through ′′citizenship rights′′ is just a member of ′′civil society′′ rather than a member of the ′′human society.′′
According to Marx’s well-known dictum, the rights of man, insofar as they are distinguished from the rights of the citizen, are those of the ‘‘member of civil society, i., the rights of egotistic man, of man separated from other men and from the community.’’ Marx thus examines the four ‘‘natural and imprescriptible’’ rights as they are articulated in ‘‘the most radical’’ version of the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, that of 1793- equality, liberty, security, and property. He shows that all come back to property, of which they serve as metaphors and whose free enjoyment they aim, in turn, to guarantee. ‘‘Natural’’ rights are conceived on the model of the individual-man, ideally self-sufficient and motivated by the unlimited desire to satisfy personal needs, what C. B. MacPherson designates as ‘‘possessive [or proprietary] individualism.’’ Marx’s argument rests on the following: that this anthropological figure of man-as-property owner results from an exclusion, from a primordial separation between man and his ‘‘generic essence’’, that is, man considered in constitutive multiplicity of his relations with other men and with social activities. Therefore, the human rights system of the modern bourgeois state, as a matter of fact, recognizes and preserves the privileges of the propertied class through the formal equality of rights, and consequently the substantial inequality in civil society.
In On the Jewish Question , Marx claims that contrary to the mystification conveyed by the state, which claims that the citizen is the truth of the man, the reverse is true: ‘‘This man, the member of civil society, is thus the basis, the precondition, of the political state. ’’ This amounts to saying that the citizen, the ideal proclaimed bythe Declaration, is the projection of a profane man, devoted to the materialism of bourgeois society, who thenceforth appears as the natural man.
The historical progress of modern citizenship is that it replaces the absolute obedience to a monarch with the political system based on the rights of citizenship, liberates its members from the feudal relationship of personal dependence, andmakes them become members with personal freedom in the ′′civil society.′′ Without the personal freedom that modern citizenship affirms and recognizes, there would be no free flowof factors of production, no capitalist development, and hence no material precondition towards ′′a real community in which the individuals obtain their freedom in and through their association.′′ In this regard, the establishment of modern citizenship is an insurmountable step towards human emancipation; in addition, the citizenship in the modern bourgeois state also provides the weapon for the proletariat and its political party to fight for and defend their own interests and to promote the human's emancipation.
The ideology of the state plays a major role in containing class-struggle and in reconstituting social relations on a basis other than class relations. Under capitalism, Marxists argue, social relations are formulated by this ideology as relations between citizens. The citizens are declared as free and equal and sometimes, as rooted in a cultural ethos and civilisational bond. The freedom and equality of citizens has its counterpart in the exchange relations of the market where from a one-sided view, equals gets exchanged for equals and the agents of such a system of exchange are free to exchange the products they have. However, such an ideology formulated by the state can be seen as superficial and partial when understanding and analysis is not confined to the surface. In such an exercise, social relations are marked as class-relations that are caught in an irreversible struggle betweenbasic classes. For Marxists, however, state ideology has a real basis in all societies including capitalism, although that real basis lies in an exclusive and one sided projection of social reality. It is not mere chimera.
Social agents irrespective of the classes they belong to come to locate their role and place in society in and through this ideology. In capitalistsociety, the force of this ideology remains persuasive and pervasive due to the massive institutional and ideological complexes of the state through which it is disseminated such as public education, the media, civic associations, political parties, trade unions, legal and juridical organisations and sometimes, religious organisations as well. The French philosopher, Louis Althusser, called them the ideological apparatuses of the state. The consciousness of social agents, routinely and prominently, under conditions of this ideology remains the consciousness of citizens, unless and until it is not challenged by the contradictions of capitalism and class struggle to overcome them. In terms of its emphasis on substantive equality, social citizenship is consistent with Marx's view in the spirit, but this does not mean that Marx would have no criticism against the practice of social citizenship in the 20th
against the feudal privileges. These rights helped to consolidate industrial capitalism and modern representative state.
● Economic civil rights signify those rights for which working class and trade-union activists fought against the bourgeois system of power. These include workers’ right to form their union, expand its activities, right to bargaining and right to strike. These rights soughtto challenge the dominance of the capitalist system.
According to Giddens, development of citizenship and modern democracy began in the late 16th century with the expansion of state sovereignty and administrative build-up. This paved the way for the extension for the state’s capacity for surveillance which implied the collection and storing for information about members of society. This type of supervision increased the state’s dependence on cooperative forms of social relations. It was no longer possible for the modern state to manage its affairs by force alone. More opportunities were generated for subordinate groups to influence their rulers. Giddens has termed this phenomenon as ‘two-way’ expansion of power.
Thus, Giddens has departed from the original tenetsof Marxism and has come round the view that citizenship rights can be maintained within the structure of liberal democracy.
CONCLUSION
The Marxist tradition has not engaged with the citizenship issue consistently but to the extent it does there is a deep ambivalence about it. Marxism feels that the ideology of the capitalist state, by and large, recasts social relations as relationsbetween citizens, putting a gloss on them as class relations. At the same time the human agency that citizenship furthers is appreciated as it sharpens the contradictions within capitalism itself. Marxism has not adequately reflected on how an older notion such as citizenship has been deployed under capitalism and made to play a role which is central in capitalist ideology. Such a perspective, therefore, makes certain notions closely bound with citizenship such as rights, justice and freedom ambivalent. For Marxism the basic social relations in all class divided societies are class relations. It is the relation between the peasantry and landlords under feudalism and between the working class and the bourgeoisie that decisively shape the social relations under feudalism and capitalism respectively.
Marxist Notion OF Citizenship
Course: Political science (BA Honours)
University: University of Delhi
This is a preview
Access to all documents
Get Unlimited Downloads
Improve your grades
