Marx Criticism Of The Civil Society

Civil Society has become one the most important features of the Morden State, whether operate independently or cooperated by the state. The primary role for the civil society is to limit the control of power by the state but more often now more civil society organisations have been co-opted into the state. This move has been criticized as it is view as that the state only do it to advance its own interest. Starting off with the idea of civil as state society, Marx does not go with the idea that it is the state that creates and sustains civil society. Below some of Marx criticism of this idea by different scholars in discussed.
When one looks at Marx criticism of the modern state; it can be said that Marxism views the state as an apparatus of

The contradiction is exposed in the system of representation mediating between the state and civil society. The representatives can themselves articulate only particular interests. The system of representation cannot itself transmute these particular interests into universal interests. Therefore, if the state comes to represent the universal as against the particular interest, representatives cannot appear as representatives of particular interests but as abstract individuals. Marx's conclusion is that in so far as the state continues to claim to represent universality it can do so only by neglecting all particular interests, divorcing the state from the social needs of real individuals. 'This point of view is certainly abstract, but the 'abstraction' is that of the political state as Hegel has presented it. It is also atomistic, but its atomism is that of society itself. The 'point of view' cannot be concrete when its object is 'abstract'. The atomism into which civil society is plunged by its political actions is a necessary consequence of the fact that the community, the communistic entity in which the individual exists, civil society, is separated from the state, or in other words: the political state is an abstraction from civil society' (Marx CHDS EW 1975:145). A true state is not divorced from but actually expresses the social quality that defines the human essence. The essence of the particular person is not some abstract nature defined by the state but that social quality that is the human essence. For Marx; the affairs of state are nothing but the modes of action and existence of the social qualities of men. “It is self-evident, therefore, that in so far as individuals are to be regarded as the vehicles of the functions and powers of the state, it is their social and not their private capacity that should be taken into account” (Marx CHDS 1975:78). Consequently separation, with the state as an