Скачать или смотреть Andreas Kalyvas — Constituent Power in Karl Marx: Revolution and Dictatorship

Andreas Kalyvas (New School of Social Research)

Karl Marx’s relation to the political tradition of constituent power remains a question and a problem, and my presentation treats it as such. It is a question to the degree that the concept never appears explicitly in his writings, although its logic and meaning are present in his critical considerations on revolutionary politics. It is also a problem because Marx’s reflections on constituent power point to two different possibilities. There are two distinct interpretations that suggest two contrasting versions of the power to constitute in his writings. The first appears in the young Marx’s 1843 critical confrontation with Hegel’s Philosophy of Right. It follows and renews a longer tradition of constituent politics, formulated as the perpetual movement of the self-constitution of society. It evokes a vision of radical
autonomy, democratic collective self-determination, and the popular activity of founding and refounding. The second version is introduced in his writings on the 1848 European revolutions. It represents a decisive break from his earlier approach and inaugurates a profound conceptual resignification with some lasting implications. It marks a clear departure from the paradigm of
democratic autonomy and moves in the direction of the politics of emergency, elaborated in the republican language of dictatorship.