Demokrati mod stat og kapital: Bidrag til rekonstruktionen af Karl Marx’ materialistiske gentænkning af demokrati

This article contributes to the exploration and development of alternative conceptions of democracy by reconstructing and developing Karl Marx’s materialist rethinking of democracy as a form of revolutionary constituent power in his unfinished 1843 manuscript Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right. Through close reading and theoretical contextualization, I show how the concept of democracy developed in Marx’s thought and came to constitute a central part of his critique of political theology: that is, the idea of the seemingly sovereign state and its structural integration into the capitalist system. I demonstrate how Marx interpreted democracy as the social and material foundation of all forms of state, thereby revealing the inherent possibility of challenging and overthrowing them and, in their place, developing collective, non-sovereign forms of self-determination beyond state and capital. Marx drew on the works of Aristotle and Abbé Emmanuel Sieyès, among others, to formulate his materialist idea of democracy as the unruly constituent power of the people; a continuous collective practice of self-organization.