MARXIST THOUGHT

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Re: MARXIST THOUGHT

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Lea Ypi

London School of Economics

Legitimacy, Dictatorship and Utopia: A Marxist Perspective on Political Authority, continued ...

4. The republican model in the Marxist reflection on political authority, concluded ...

Only in communism are people able to observe the elementary rules of social life “without force, without compulsion, without subordination, without the special apparatus for compulsion that is called the state“.

Communism is therefore very different from the dictatorship of the proletariat, and only in communism “does the state cease to exist...and it becomes possible to speak of freedom”.
39

These last remarks help to explain how, despite its more radical democratic and anti-paternalist stance when compared to earlier analyses of dictatorship, the Marxian conception is also one that grounds a conception of limited legitimacy of political authority.

It is important to be clear on the kind of limitation at stake here.

In the Roman account of dictatorship, the powers of the dictator were limited, but the emphasis was on limitation from a temporal perspective (the other limitation, the way in which dictatorship required bracketing civic freedom was subsumed under this temporal limitation and justified in relation to it).

In the French republican tradition, the limited character of dictatorship is also understood in temporal terms and requires trust in the virtues of a small class of political leaders to constrain itself.

Although, as we saw above, Marx and Engels are not indifferent to the temporal dimension, the more important limitation is of another nature.

It has to do with the fact that for as long as a group of people (in this case the oppressed majority) needs to resort to the coercive power of state institutions (however much transformed) to enforce an obligation to obey the new laws, the promise of real self-mastery can never be entirely fulfilled.


This deeper limitation, I want to argue, is at the heart of a distinctive Marxist theory of legitimacy, which has been little noticed so far, and to which I now turn.

39 Ibid.

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Re: MARXIST THOUGHT

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Lea Ypi

London School of Economics

Legitimacy, Dictatorship and Utopia: A Marxist Perspective on Political Authority, continued ...

5. The limited legitimacy view of political authority

Recall the basic tenets of Marx’s theory of the state under capitalist conditions.

We assumed that (some version of) Marx’s critique of how capitalism hinders freedom is plausible.

The general problem can be presented in the following terms.

Imagine a state where the fundamental structures that enable social cooperation are affected by persistent and pervasive economic inequalities due to the mechanism through which wealth is produced and distributed.

Legal arrangements, property and inheritance rules, formal and informal networks of cooperation, the dominant societal culture, tend to inherit these inequalities and reproduce them.

Far from being fair and open to all, political opportunities and people’s access to offices and positions are corrupted by deep asymmetries in the degree of social and political power controlled by members of different classes. 40

As a result, the views and interests of certain groups tend to be systematically promoted at the expense of others.

There are winners (a small minority) and losers (a majority).

The winners tend to win and the losers tend to lose, albeit with some individual exceptions. 41

Those who benefit from the system contribute (whether intentionally or inadvertently) to consolidating methods of compliance, values and incentives that help to stabilize the social structure and entrench its inequalities even further.

These inequalities also have important epistemic implications for many people’s ability to observe the deficiencies of the system, their ascriptions of responsibility for the injustices it produces, and their willingness to do things differently.

They amount to a form of ideological domination, they shape the way many people see themselves and others in a social structure, and inform the courses of action that they perceive as open or closed to them.

Described in this way, the capitalist state fails to meet a number of familiar, liberal, criteria for being considered legitimate.

It does not embody a fair system of cooperation, it is not one where benefits and burdens are distributed in a reciprocal way, and it is not a system to which people would consent if they were making political decisions in an informed way.


Given these structural limitations, losers are merely coerced by the law.

To be merely coerced by the law means to have very little say in how the laws affect you.

It means, at least under one prominent conception of freedom and legitimacy that is also shared by Marx, to be unfree.

40 On the relation between economic inequalities and social power and the affinities between Rousseau’s and Marx's thoughts on this point see Frederick Neuhouser, "Rousseau's Critique of Economic Inequality," Philosophy & Public Affairs 41, no. 3 (2013).

41 See on this issue G. A. Cohen, "The Structure of Proletarian Unfreedom," ibid. 12, no. 1 (1983).

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Re: MARXIST THOUGHT

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Lea Ypi

London School of Economics

Legitimacy, Dictatorship and Utopia: A Marxist Perspective on Political Authority, continued ...

5. The limited legitimacy view of political authority, continued ...

When the system is pervasively corrupt in the way we have described, losers have reasons to want to change it.

They rebel and seek to modify the rules governing the economic and social structure.

A period of political revolution ensues.

Losers re-write the constitution, profoundly modify property arrangements, change inheritance rules, abolish economic privileges and use the coercive power of the state to prepare the transition to a society in which everyone is truly free.

Marx calls the truly free society a communist society.

But he notoriously says very little on how exactly a communist society ought to look like (I shall return to this point later).


Much more energy is devoted, instead, to discussing the transitional, intermediate phase, a society between the collapse of capitalism and the establishment of communism.

This is the dictatorship of the proletariat.

The dictatorship of the proletariat is not the final goal of the revolution, it is an institution that exercises political authority on a provisional basis.


It is also a freedom-enhancing measure, it does not embody freedom itself.

Moreover, being tied to the coercive exercise of power, the legitimacy it enjoys is of a limited kind.

Why is the legitimacy that the dictatorship of the proletariat enjoys a limited form of legitimacy?

And why is it legitimacy at all?

The answer, I believe, lies in an argument which Marx does not articulate explicitly about the epistemic impact of structural advantage and disadvantage on people’s views of justice and injustice.

If the argument about the ideological effects of capitalist social relations is correct, then it is implausible to expect literally everyone in a society rigged by capitalist injustice to endorse the revolutionary project.

While, for Marx the oppressed themselves will have an epistemic insight into the scale of injustice confronted by that society, he anticipates that their insight will not be shared by everyone.

People might object to radical change for all sorts of reasons: their motives might be selfish, ignorant, immoral or a combination of all of these.

But whatever the reasons are, there will be a strong epistemic bias which prevents members of certain groups in society (such as those who have vested interests in the preservation of the previous order, or those who are not directly oppressed and therefore are ideologically blinded to the scale of injustice), from identification with the new institutions.

Every institution emerging from deep political conflict faces serious obstacles in terms of the epistemic burdens associated to people’s recognition of new roles and positions in society or to a new system of economic production and distribution.

Thus, every institutional configuration, no matter how just in its inception, will be purely coercive for some.

In cases of epistemic bias affecting people’s endorsement of political authority, the revolutionary institutions cannot speak in the name of everyone since not everyone endorses their emancipatory project.

When that is the case, when the revolutionary institutions go on to apply the coercive apparatus they inherit to those who fail to recognise themselves in the normative purpose promoted by the new legal order, the political authority established might act justly but is only partially legitimate.


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Re: MARXIST THOUGHT

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Lea Ypi

London School of Economics

Legitimacy, Dictatorship and Utopia: A Marxist Perspective on Political Authority, continued ...

5. The limited legitimacy view of political authority, continued ...

The legitimacy of dictatorship is an expression of this limited legitimacy view of political authority.

A period of dictatorship, as we saw, is necessary given the emergency of the revolutionary circumstances and the need to exercise coercion to ensure compliance by all.

But to fully deliver on its freedom-enhancing promise, the dictatorship must necessarily be restricted to the transitional context in which it operates.

When the transitional period is over, when people are truly free and communism has been established, people do the right thing spontaneously and without need for a coercive political authority to enforce compliant behaviour.


The need for coercion disappears and the state withers away, or as the literal German translation suggests, it dies out (stirbt ab).

As Engels puts it “since the state is merely a transitional institution of which use is made in the struggle, in the revolution, to keep down one’s enemies by force, it is utter nonsense to speak of a free people’s state”.

Indeed, Engels continues, “so long as the proletariat still makes use of the state, it makes use of it” and “as soon as there can be any question of freedom, the state as such ceases to exist”. 42

I shall return to the argument about the withering away of the state and its relation to the utopia of freedom in the next section.

For now, let me emphasise how this distinctive theory of legitimacy, which I labelled the limited legitimacy view of political authority, compares to other theories we are familiar with.

As already emphasized, the dictatorship of the proletariat is for Marx an institution that embodies the limited legitimacy of political authority, an institution that acts justly but does not speak in the name of everyone.

An institution that acts justly but does not speak in the name of everyone exercises political authority in a way that is only partially legitimate.

This is different from liberal theories of political obligation which claim that when certain criteria of justice are satisfied, the state’s coercive power is fully legitimate and the freedom of the individual is perfectly compatible with it.

42 See Friedrich Engels, “Engels to August Bebel in Zwickau” (1875), available at https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/w ... _03_18.htm , accessed 7th March 2017

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Re: MARXIST THOUGHT

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Lea Ypi

London School of Economics

Legitimacy, Dictatorship and Utopia: A Marxist Perspective on Political Authority, continued ...

5. The limited legitimacy view of political authority, concluded ...

But it is also different from anarchist theories because political authority is not completely illegitimate when it falls short of the endorsement of everyone.

Those who deploy the coercive power of the state for just purposes act with some legitimate authority even if they do so provisionally, and on a temporary basis. 43

It might be interesting at this point to see the distinctiveness of Marx’s position on the relation between legitimacy and justice by contrasting it with a more familiar analysis from the recent contemporary literature, that of John Rawls.

In many ways, the society that removes the structural effects of economic and social inequalities is a well-ordered society in the Rawlsian sense of the term.

Marx’s idea that even in a well-ordered society there will be those who object to the normative project that society serves echoes Rawls’s view that in a well-ordered society there will be those for whom the affirmation of a sense of justice is not a good.

Or to put it in the terms of Political Liberalism, Rawls, like Marx, assumes that even in a well-ordered society there will be “many unreasonable views” or “doctrines that reject one or more democratic freedoms”. 44

The question, Rawls raises is whether “those who do affirm their sense of justice are treating these persons unjustly in requiring them to comply with just institutions”. 45

In A Theory of Justice the answer rests with the justifiability of a theory of punishment and the presumption that a coercive system is necessary to guarantee the stability of social cooperation. 46

In Political Liberalism, Rawls argues that those who undermine the system by affirming unreasonable views provide us with “the practical task of containing them – like war and disease – so that they do not overturn political justice”. 47

In other words, for Rawls, the system of punishment is essential to guarantee that everyone does their share in a system of social cooperation, whilst knowing that others are also required and compelled to do so.

The solution to the assurance problem is an authorised public system of interpretation of rules, backed up by coercive sanctions.

The need for such system to contain those who undermine it and to maintain political justice, is “a permanent fact of life, or seems so”. 48

From a Marxist perspective, we would take issue with the reification of human nature on which Rawls’s claim appears to rely.

For Marx, the public coercive authority that provides people with the assurance Rawls requires, is only provisionally justified, there is nothing permanent about it.

It characterises a provisional set-up in which the sense of justice is still in the process of developing, not one in which it has firmly established itself.

For Marx in a truly well-ordered society which realises freedom, people’s attitudes, psychological dispositions and mutual sentiments of trust and solidarity will develop in directions that we cannot anticipate or that might well appear naively optimistic from where we stand.

If a well-ordered society truly does do away with inequality, envy, the corrupting effects of hierarchies of social rank, and so on, why should we assume that people will still mistrust one another and continue to look over each other’s shoulders to ensure that everyone acts as they should?

Why do we need to continuously rely on an external authority that guarantees that everyone is doing their share, that deploys coercive sanctions to guarantee people’s compliance, and that resorts to a public penal system to punish those who fail to conform?

There is something perverse in assuming that although people create a civil condition so as to abandon the anti-social dispositions that characterise them in the state of nature (see Rawls’s reference to the Hobbesian thesis), they actually never succeed in doing so.

It seems much more plausible to think that what seems to us like “a permanent fact of life”, to use Rawls’s expression, might have to do with the kinds of institutions in which social attitudes develop, and the disposition to one another that they encourage or stifle.

This is why, Marx argues, that “under human conditions”, i.e. once the unsocial sources of crime are removed, punishment takes a very different form, it is “nothing but the sentence passed by the culprit on himself."

"No one will want to convince him that violence from without, done to him by others, is violence which he had done to himself”. 49

Thus Marx does not fully abandon the idea that even under humane conditions there will be something to punish, that people will err, commit wrongs, or hurt each other in various ways (whether intentionally or inadvertently). 50

But the trade-off which requires the acceptance of a public coercive authority for the sake of protecting people’s freedom is nothing more than a necessary evil, which can only be provisionally justified.

Real freedom is only realised when the need for such public political authority has been superseded and society has transformed itself to a sufficient degree that coercion is no longer needed.

That is what it means to say that the state progressively withers away.


43 There is some controversy in the literature on whether the dictatorship of the proletariat already begins to dissolve some crucial functions of the state by deprofessionalising politics and progressively bringing bureaucratic, administrative and judicial functions under the direct control of the people (as was Marx’s view) or whether the state continues to concentrate power and simply places it at the service of revolutionary goals (as in Engels’s reading). The interpretation I have offered above is more in line with the first but both are compatible with the limited legitimacy view of political authority. I shall leave aside here the complications that arise from the possibility of being a victim of war from an aggressive enemy which demands the maintenance of a national guard and which was justified by both Marx and Engels. The issue is discussed in the context of examining the duration of dictatorship but in a somewhat optimistic way, which assumes that the revolution will occur more or less simultaneously in a number of key states, for the issue of war not to be fatal to its survival. For a discussion of this problem see Hunt cit. esp. pp. 235 ff.

44 John Rawls, Political Liberalism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), p. 64.

45 A Theory of Justice, Rev. ed. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999)., pp. 211-212.

46 Ibid.

47 Rawls, Political Liberalism, p. 64.

48 Ibid

49 Marx, “The Holy Family” in Collected Works of Marx and Engels, vol. 4 (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 2010), p. 179.

50 See for a discussion of this Norman Geras, "Seven Types of Obloquy: Travesties of Marxism," Socialist Register 26 (1990), p. 13.

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Re: MARXIST THOUGHT

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Lea Ypi

London School of Economics

Legitimacy, Dictatorship and Utopia: A Marxist Perspective on Political Authority, continued ...

6. Freedom and utopia

An implication of the limited theory of legitimacy that I have outlined is that a state can be fully legitimate only when laws render people fully free.

But this is also slightly paradoxical.

If laws were to render us fully free, they would also emancipate us from the need for a coercive authority that enforces laws.

And if people really have no need to be coerced by the laws, if there are no longer structurally-rooted conflicts between them and everyone does what is right without need for sanctions and punishment, the state, at least in the form we know it, would have no reason to be there.


It would be converted from “an organ superimposed upon society into one completely subordinate to it”. 51

The state, understood as a coercive exercise of political power in function of the maintenance of justice, would spontaneously wither away.

This is why the state as such is not destroyed, or smashed, or swept away and why the question of how much revolutionary violence will be required to complete this transition reflects a misguided take on the problem. 52

The state is not smashed or destroyed, it is simply used for the purpose of promoting real freedom.

But the more that cause is effective, the more the sense of justice establishes itself through new social institutions, the more the state begins to fade and leaves in its place society with its spontaneous forms of social organization, with a purely voluntary form of cooperation between people, and with an unmediated exercise of self-rule.

Dictatorship is the exercise of coercive rule from the majority of the oppressed on the minority of the oppressors.

But the true realm of freedom marks the end of social conflict and with it of the very distinction between oppressors and oppressed.

The period of revolutionary transition indicates the transfer of power from one class to another, but the revolution is only really successful when the coercive basis on which power is exercised withers away.

It is not when the governers are truly representative of the governed but when the difference between the governors and the governed disappears.

The true realm of freedom is not a society in which perfect justice is fully realized but one that has moved beyond the need for justice.

51 See Marx, “Critique of Gotha Programme”, cit. above.

52 For a discussion of the problem of violence, see also Colletti cit.

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Re: MARXIST THOUGHT

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Lea Ypi

London School of Economics

Legitimacy, Dictatorship and Utopia: A Marxist Perspective on Political Authority, continued ...

6. Freedom and utopia, continued ...

This is the Marxian utopia and it is a utopia that many will not share, partly out of concern with the uncertainties of transition in the absence of a more specific account of what the perfect society ought to look like, and partly because one might find it hard to speculate over what will happen to human nature when material scarcity is permanently overcome and social dispositions are radically transformed.

In the first case, our capacity for abstraction does not seem to go far enough, in the second case it seems to require us to go too far.

The first concern, the issue of transition, can be addressed by returning to Marx’s argument that the conditions under which particular social transformations occur are not artificially brought about by particular visionaries of freedom or justice but linked to the crisis and social grievances already embedded in the old society.

The mechanisms through which this transition takes place, whether and how much sacrifice is needed, are difficult to calculate in advance and depend on the social context and development of institutions in place in each context.

As Marx puts it analysing the Paris Commune, the working class “have no ideals to realise”; they “have no ready-made utopias” to introduce by decree” since their goal is “to set free elements of the new society with which old collapsing bourgeois society itself is pregnant.” 53

However, the fact that there are no utopian blueprints to realise does not mean that it is impossible to specify some institutional measures that would facilitate the progressive erosion of the coercive basis of the state.

I already listed above some of the necessary changes that Marx mentions in the context of discussing the Paris Commune (over and above the economic transformation): the abolition of the professional army, the transformation of all administrative, legislative or judicial functions in revocable offices that are exercised on a rotational basis, the attempt to reduce reliance on experts and technocratic elites, the reduction of the wages of politicians and civil servants to those of ordinary working people and so on.

All this contributes to the general process of deprofessionalisation of politics in the state, and plants the seeds of its future erosion.

This takes us to the second concern: the undefined character of utopia.

For Marx freedom is established in great part through the process of making oneself free, and when that process is complete we are in the utopia of freedom, a place which is, in the etymological meaning of the term, no place as much as the best place, a place about which we can say very little in advance of having reached it.


To specify how the utopian society should look like is to deny the agency of those who will be responsible for freely constructing that society.

It is to conflate between the process of pursuing the good and its perfectionist aberration.

It is to turn utopia into the kind of elitist, bureaucratic, technological, and administrative nightmare that for a long time has been conflated with Marx’s own vision and that has posed the greatest obstacle to understanding his radical, and radically demanding, vision of freedom.

Marx defined utopia as “the play of the imagination on the future structure of society” but refused to write “recipes for the cookshops of the future” 54 and mocked his utopian socialist contemporaries for writing blueprints of the perfect society which were “silly, stale and thoroughly reactionary”.
55

53 Marx, “The Civil War in France”, cit. p. 590.

54 Marx, Letter to Friedrich Adolph Sorge [19 October 1877] in Collected Works, cit. vol. 5, p. 284 and vol. 34, p. 303.

55 Marx to Sorge, letter dated 19 October 1877, in CW, cit. vol. 34, p. 303; and vol. 45, p. 284. For an informative discussion of Marx’s and Engels’s relation to utopian socialism, see David Leopold, "The Structure of Marx and Engels's Considered Account of Utopian Socialism," History of Political Thought 26, no. 3 (2005).

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Re: MARXIST THOUGHT

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Lea Ypi

London School of Economics

Legitimacy, Dictatorship and Utopia: A Marxist Perspective on Political Authority, continued ...

6. Freedom and utopia, continued ...

Of course there are a number of things Marx says about the future, and they are not limited to the well-known economic dimension, and to the political measures already mentioned, but which include family relations, the development of children, the disappearance of divisions based on class, regions, nationality, religion, race, and their implications for the transformation of both nature and humanity. 56

But none of this is set out in great detail, and when Marx sought to explain more concretely the future communistic society he limited himself to such (perhaps ironic) remarks about hunting in the morning, fishing in the afternoon and criticising the evening which have made his an account an object of much derision.

But if we appreciate the structure of Marx’s argument about freedom and its relation to the problems of justice and legitimacy, we might also appreciate how the view’s apparent limitations are in fact its greatest virtues.

To say that a perfect society is one in which people are fully free requires also a non-committal stance as to how that perfect society will exactly look like, least those conditions of free agency be denied.

All this helps to explain why on this perspective the label of realistic utopia when articulating a particular vision of justice seems inappropriate.

Indeed, one might go as far as even doubting the pertinence of a utopia about justice.

To the extent that justice relies on the coercive use of power to be realised, it will always be a vehicle of punishment as much as a vehicle of emancipation.

Justice can only be part of our account of how we seek to reach utopia but never a part of utopia itself because to make use of coercion in a society in which coercion is by definition not needed risks turn utopia into a dystopian nightmare.

Real freedom is fully realised only in a society in which people do the right thing or relate to each other in the right way because they are motivated by what is right and not by fear of sanctions or desire of rewards.

When society is transformed so that human beings are liberated by material needs or by the competition for power and recognition, the structural roots of conflict disappear and justice is no longer needed.


The need for coordination is of course still there, and so are disagreements among human beings, but society takes on these challenges and discharges them differently from the state as we know it.

To say now, how exactly society does this and how it will look like in the future is both dangerous and unnecessary.

Marx’s positive account of the conditions that need to be in place for capitalism to be overcome and to pave the way to the truly free society is contained in his theory of the dictatorship of the proletariat and not in his vision of communism.


The former (the dictatorship of the proletariat) is, as I tried to suggest, a theory of (limited) legitimacy in its connection with the need for justice, and also a theory of the transition from non-ideal circumstances to an ideal of freedom.

The latter (communist society) is an ideal of perfect freedom but perfect freedom is as such beyond legitimacy and beyond justice.

Earlier I emphasised that a utopian society is one where political conflicts, understood as conflicts rooted in certain material conditions and the existence of social classes, come to an end.

This does not mean that wrongdoing, hurtfulness, and disagreement also come to an end.


Marxists are committed to the idea that a communist society is not one that represses individualism but where individual differences flourish and are brought to their maximal development.

“It goes without saying”, Engels argued, "that society cannot free itself unless every individual is freed”. 57

Emancipation is reached only “by offering each individual the opportunity to develop all his faculties, physical and mental, in all directions and exercise them to the full”. 58

But if human beings remain different from each other, with their own distinctive characteristics, temperaments and skills, it is also plausible to anticipate that misfortunes and disagreements might persist and they might still hurt, offend or be angry with each other.

The point to emphasise is that once the social basis of transgression and crime is removed and the need for coercive authority withers away, society finds ways of solving these disagreements much like a functioning family does, through a combination of toleration, deliberation and common efforts to find solutions that do not involve sanctions and punishment.

For Marx, democracy as a decision-making mechanism remains crucial even after the state has withered away. 59

Democracy takes a more deliberative and less antagonistic form, and is an integral part of the ways in which collective decisions are made.

But it is a kind of democracy that no longer needs the state and resembles more the democratic ideal of the ancients (without the latter’s exclusionary features) than that of the moderns.

It is a form of decision-making where the personal and the communal interest of the individual support each other rather than pulling apart, and where the social nature of human beings prevails over their unsociable one.

It is a form of democracy that succeeds in delivering the wisdom of the multitude championed by Aristotle, but in a context in which the material or power-related objections to that ideal that Plato or Hobbes highlighted no longer apply.

56 For more on each of these issues see Bertell Ollman, “Marx’s Vision of Communism: A Reconstruction”, Critique, vol. 8, number 1 (1977), pp. 4-41.

57 Engels, “Antidühring” in CW, cit. vol. 279. My italics.

58 Ibid, p. 280.

59 For an argument that insists on how democracy might disappear as a regime type but emphasises the persistence of democratic fora, see Hunt cit. p. 252.

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Re: MARXIST THOUGHT

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Lea Ypi

London School of Economics

Legitimacy, Dictatorship and Utopia: A Marxist Perspective on Political Authority, concluded ...

Conclusion

If we accept that capitalism is unjust and needs to be overcome, the idea of the dictatorship of the proletariat provides a plausible and attractive account of legitimacy in non-ideal circumstances.

As I tried to suggest, Marx’s analysis of it ties in with a neutral, non-derogatory, use of the term, which goes back to a respected republican tradition and has had a long legacy in the history of political thought.

It provides an interesting alternative to liberal and anarchist accounts of political obligation and a useful way of describing the authority claims of a just future state (the dictatorship of the proletariat) or criticising the injustice of the current one (the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie).

It also helps us see better what is at stake in Marx’s claim about the withering away of the state and his intentionally elusive account of utopia in a communist society.

https://www.law.berkeley.edu/wp-content ... gation.pdf
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