The State, Marxism and Political Legitimation

Abstract

In the Western context political legitimation refers in the main to certain processes (and their doctrinal underpinning) whereby state and governmental power and policy-decisions are rendered morally acceptable to the governed, so that there may be conformity without coercion. Furthermore, legitimation here is usually taken to signify the institutionalisation of electoral choice between alternative and conflicting basic policies and between competing groups of aspiring power-holders. What is thus conspicuous here is electoral or popular ‘sovereignty’, i.e. the ever-present uncertainty attaching to the outcome of political contests, rendering the nature of politics somewhat abstract and indefinite, and legitimation a predominantly procedural, formal affair. The contrast to Marxist doctrine and practice at least in East European communist states could not be more pronounced, for what is conspicuous with the latter is the predominantly substantive character of political legitimation, i.e. the conformity of policies and personnel-in-power to certain clearly defined, concrete objectives, to which the formal procedures characterising electoral sovereignty are made at least in part subservient (e.g. one-party ‘elections’). Crudely, therefore, the contrast is between the ‘people’ or electorate as the ultimate source of legitimacy in one case, and the concrete objective (‘communism’) as defined by the ruling Party and made effective by state power in the other case, or to reduce it even further to the oft-repeated cliché: in liberal-democracy ‘society’ has the final say in politics, in communism it is the ‘state’.¹

I am grateful to my friend Terry McNeill, of the Hull Politics Department, for his bibliographical assistance and comments on an earlier draft of this chapter.