KARL MARX

PARIS
103
legislative power, but in the framework of a medieval system of estates!
It is the worst sort of syncretism.' 28
Since the whole problem arose, in Hegel's view, from the separation
of the state from civil society, Marx saw two possibilities: if the state and
civil society continued to be separate, then all as individuals could not
participate in the legislature except through deputies, the 'expression of
the separation and merely a dualistic unity'. 29 Secondly, if civil society
became political society, then the significance of legislative power as
representative disappeared, for it depended on a theological kind of separation
of the state from civil society. Hence, what the people should aim
for was not legislative power but governmental power. Marx ended his
discussion with a passage which makes clear how, in the summer of 1843,
he envisaged future political developments:
... It is not a question of whether civil society should exercise legislative
power through deputies or through all as individuals. Rather it
is the question of the extent and greatest possible extension of the
franchise, of active as well as passive suffrage. This is the real bone of
contention of political reform, in France as well as in England.. . .
Voting is the actual relationship of actual civil society to the civil
society of the legislative power, to the representative element. Or, voting
is the immediate, direct relationship of civil society to the political
state, not only in appearance but in reality.. .. Only with universal
suffrage, active as well as passive, does civil society actually rise to an
abstraction of itself, to political existence as its true universal and
essential existence. But the realisation of this abstraction is also the
transcendence of the abstraction. By making its political existence actual
as its true existence, civil society also makes its civil existence unessential
in contrast to its political existence. And with the one thing separated,
the other - its opposite - falls. Within the abstract political state the
reform of voting is a dissolution of the state, but likewise the dissolution
of civil society. 50
Thus Marx arrived here at the same conclusion as in his discussion of
'true democracy'. Democracy implied universal suffrage, and universal
suffrage would lead to the dissolution of the state.
It is clear from this manuscript that Marx was adopting the fundamental
humanism of Feuerbach and with it Feuerbach's reversal of subject
and predicate in the Hegelian dialectic. Marx considered it evident that
any future development was going to involve man's recovery of the social
dimension that had been lost ever since the French Revolution levelled
all citizens in the political state and thus accentuated the individualism of
bourgeois society. Although he was convinced that social organisation had
no longer to be based on private property, he was not here explicitly