Theoretical Conclusions and Political Perspectives

Abstract

The concluding chapter sums up the theoretical outcome and the political effects of the pre-communist Marxian theory of democracy. I confirm the hypothesis that the young ‘citizen Marx’ did not confuse the end of the state with the end of politics, while admitting the influence on Marx’s theory of democracy exerted by the ‘paradigm’ of the Athenian polis or the Rousseauist model of the participatory or anti-parliamentarian republic, and taking into account the works of major political thinkers of our time such as Arendt and Castoriadis. Applying the Aristotelian distinction between ‘poiesis’ and ‘praxis’, I conclude that Marxian politics goes far beyond the horizon of the state. In the context of Marx’s ‘true democracy’, politics is a life process and is an end in itself, leading to the formation of a society in which, as the communist Marx would soon argue, ‘the free development of each’ will not be a limit to but ‘the condition for the free development of all’.