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Brief Quote from Karl Marx

DECENTRALISM FILE

Karl Marx

Karl Marx (1818-1883) was born in Trier, Germany and died in London. He was an extremely influential German philosopher, critic of political economy, economist, historian, sociologist, political theorist, journalist and communist revolutionary. His best-known titles are the 1848 pamphlet The Communist Manifesto and the three-volume Das Kapital (1867).

Marx and his frequent co-author Friederich Engels were outspoken advocates for armed revolution by the working classes, led by the Communist Party, to “expropriate the expropriators” and establish a communist regime where the State owns all of the means of production. Engels later suggested that after the emergence of the “new man” blessed with working class consciousness, the State would gradually “wither away”, leaving the workers to manage their own means of production, a consequence that happened nowhere. Nonetheless, it would be very hard to describe Marx as any sort of decentralist, since the working class needed to seize absolute state power to push through its communist program for the masses.

In the passage quoted below, Marx seems to favor civil society taking power back from an overgrown state to “create organs of their own.” It is found in his and Engels The 18th Brumaire of Louis Napoleon, a political tract published (in New York) in 1852 at a time of revolutionary ferment in France.  It is cited in Nageshwar Prasad, Decentralisation in Yugolavia and India (1972) @ 25, as Selected Works, Vol. 1, p 284.

“It is immediately obvious that in a country like France, where the executive power commands an army of officials numbering more than half a million individuals and therefore constantly maintains an immense mass of interests and livelihoods of the most absolute dependence; where the state enmeshes, controls, regulates, superintends and tutors civil society from its most comprehensive manifestations of life down to its most insignificant stirrings, from its most general modes of being to the private existence of individuals, where through the most extraordinary centralisation this parasitic body acquires a ubiquity, an omniscience, a capacity for accelerated mobility and an elasticity which finds a counterpart only in the helpless dependence, in the loose shapelessness of the actual body politic – it is obvious that in such a country the National Assembly forfeits all real influence when it loses command of the  ministerial posts, if it does not at the same time simplify the administration of the state, reduce the army of officials a far as possible, and finally, let civil society and public opinion create organs of their own, independent of the governmental power.”

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