ABSTRACT
Democracy, Marx insists again and again in his 1843 critique of Hegel, is the essence of the state (Marx 1843: 64ff.). The state is the people; it is their creation, and Hegel as usual confuses subject and object when he makes the state into the supreme earthly being and ordinary individuals into its dependants and servants. The way in which this essence is best realised, he thinks, is through true democracy where people make decisions about their collective life without intermediaries and special institutions of state. The ‘withering away of the state’,as Marx later describes it, is the disappearance of institutions which stand between the people and the expression of popular will — an overthrow of political authority which will become possible once class divisions are overcome. In the 1843 Critique Marx says nothing about international relations, though they play such an important role in Hegel's theory of the state, and thus he invites the criticism that political institutions are indispensable in a world where states are likely to come into conflict with each other. In his later works he envisioned, as we have seen, the eventual formation of an international society without states. But how everyone in the world can become one people, whether this result is desirable from a democratic point of view, how the collective will of everyone in the world can be determined and carried out without the existence of a vast army of bureaucrats, is something he never discusses. As far as political theory is concerned, Marx never gets much beyond his early identification of the democratic essence of politics.
