Autonomy of politics and republicanism in Karl Marx

Abstract

In this article we argued that in the so-called «political writings» of Marx, in line with the analysis of the situation in France in the 19th century, a consideration of politics endowed with an autonomous and substantive status is elaborated, of which in no way can be given account with the hackneyed disqualifications of «economism» or «reductionism» («superstructure»), nor of anti-democratic authoritarianism («dictatorship of the proletariat). This novel analysis of Marx’s politics that is investigated here, both in its institutional (State) and action (organization, mobilization) dimensions, is elaborated in internal and conceptual connection with Capital’s critique of political economy and underlines in equal measure to the latter, the constitutive character, strictly ontological, of «fetishism» and «mystification» in the real process of the social and political reproduction of capitalism. Finally, the origin of the economistic and authoritarian reading of Marx is explained by the presence in his texts of two very different theoretical frameworks («production» and «class struggle») that overlap in internal conflict throughout these works and that are explored in depth here.