Terrell Carver
Andrew (Chengyi) Peng’s article ‘Sinicized Marxist Constitutionalism’ provides a very welcome window on recent and continuing political developments in China. As Peng explains, the whole idea of such an area of interest has been almost unthinkable within Western scholarship, and is only recently opening up in the last couple of years. This was because – from most Western perspectives – Marxism and constitutionalism did not go together in the first place, so one never really needed to look for it at all. There was no ‘it’ to look ‘at’ in any serious way.
By way of comparison, it took quite a long time for serious study of the Soviet state bureaucracy to emerge, as opposed to minutely detailed interest in the Communist Party and its hierarchies, purges, intrigues, secret speeches and the like, all of which was taken to sum up the political realm. Only with perestroika and its various devolutions did Soviet studies begin to embrace a genuinely pluralist (as opposed to merely factional) model for Soviet politics, but the applicable time period was all too brief. Since then, the situation has grown even more complex, and pluralist assumptions seem to hold rather poorly in grasping post-Communist realities.
China is of course a double puzzle in this regard. Western access to the documents, elites and publics involved was even more limited by linguistic and cultural considerations than was the case with the Soviet Union, not to mention distance, lack of informants and state restrictions and constraints (which persist). And it was also limited by the persistence of the pervasive Western view about constitutions that ‘if it’s Marxist, then it’s a sham’. Since the 1990s, Westerners have had a further double puzzle. Given radical changes in economic policies and successive waves of ideological vacuity, in what sense is China still credibly Marxist, as it claims? And if it is no longer Marxist, how then are we (in the Anglophone West) to understand its politics?
Perhaps we are unhappier than are the Chinese with our rather out-of-date selection of models – one-party state? devolved and competing bureaucracies? Authoritarian capitalism? developing country? emerging economy? and so on. The Western press focuses overwhelmingly on human rights protesters and government responses, because we understand that at once. It fits into our civil rights and civil disobedience discourse, and particularly after the Tiananmen Square protests and massacre of 1989 – now an iconic world-historical sequence of events – we are on the case for those issues 24/7. We were there ourselves in our own Western histories beforehand in terms of demonstrations, protests and martyrdoms, as we built and developed constitutional regimes, and we are still there, having more or less regularized the balance – so we might think – between citizens’ rights (as derived from popular sovereignty) and legal obligations (as required for social order).
Or so we might have thought till the 9/11 securitization and Global War on Terror brought home to the United States such un-Western practices as incarceration without trial (or credible trial of the usual sort), secret rendition and torture, remission of American citizens into military prisons, pervasive surveillance and ‘profiling’ for lists, murder-by-drone and ‘collateral’ casualties, etc. While some of these practices had occurred historically, and indeed reflected legally entrenched racisms and paranoia, they were hardly celebrated in the acronymic (‘USA PATRIOT’ Act) and Orwellian (‘Homeland Security’) terms proudly promoted by the G. W. Bush administration and overwhelmingly approved and funded by Congress. Whether and to what extent this represents some ‘re-balancing’ of the rule of law and constitutional rights, on the one hand, with public order considerations of security, on the other, is still a hotly debated question. And of course some of these issues unfold directly and indirectly in other constitutional states, such as Canada, Western Europe and elsewhere. This is to say that even where the Western press likes to draw a line between ‘us’ and ‘them’, to some readers, anyway, the idea that the West exemplifies rule of law derived from stable constitutional structures, whereas China does not, seems more than somewhat debateable at present. The Chinese leadership, understandably, has not been slow to play this card, but I am not convinced that their comments are always reported to us in full, or indeed at all, in major media sources.
Peng’s article informs us about ‘Sinicized Marxist Constitutionalism’ as a Western-derived and therefore possibly common – or at least translatable – paradigm applicable to the developing political situation in China. It is thus offered as a way of summarizing and understanding the history and trajectory of political practice in terms that supplant the Party-only model, or even the Party-State model, through which communist states were formerly and exclusively viewed. Crucially this paradigm focuses on rule of – or by – law within a constitutional framework that is said to have credibility, or is at least gaining credibility. In other words, a legislative and judicial system that had some genuine independence from a party-executive governmental system would have to be in place, and indeed the latter would have to be visibly accountable to the former, rather than the reverse.
How much credibility and for whom are of course the operative questions. Peng argues that credibility seems to be growing in terms of the way that citizens and lawyers in China use legal processes which have a regularity and consistency that we recognize. Ultimately, within the paradigm, this must come from the judiciary interpreting the law and the state then respecting the judiciary’s interpretations, rather than power and influence flowing the other way. Thus we are looking at a practice of constitutionalism, not just the letter of any current constitution, and we might indeed be looking towards revisions as these processes develop, which is, of course, a normal part of constitutionalism. The paradigm itself does not have to fit current realities exactly; rather it characterizes those realities one way, rather than another, and thus guides us into a predictive mode where we think it likely that we will see more of the same constitutional regularities – barring unpredictable and countervailing events, of course. Then – as in the United States most recently – public discussions must ensue.
My response here is not to argue that constitutionalism is or is not a good way to interpret Chinese politics at the moment, but rather to suggest that one aspect of opening this kind of window on China is that it should make us usefully question our own understandings of constitutionalism more closely, and in that way expose ourselves to things that we may already know as matters of detailed variation, but which in this geopolitical context, are really matters of definitional significance. Put bluntly, I am saying that we have a considerable variety of significant constitutional variation already in the West, and that this derives both from formal differences in terms of texts and legal systems and from circumstantial differences in terms of local or cultural practices and presumptions.
My starting point is to note, as Peng explains, that over the last 30 years a significant number of Chinese intellectuals have accepted the ‘liberal constitutional paradigm’, and are thus committing themselves to understanding and developing political practices in China in those terms (and on occasion to suffering notable consequences for this). The article lucidly details the ways that this ideal is interpreted and pursued in contemporary China. My task here is to reflect further on this ideal so that we guard against idealizing ourselves and losing our critical sense of just where and why our own practices should come up for scrutiny. Taking a critical position about policies and practices elsewhere is fine, but we should use that opportunity to watch our backs even more closely and thus to resist the temptation to glory in the way that others idealize what we say we stand for. Is our ideal really as consistent as that? Are our practices really exemplars of the varied and often conflicting ideals that we espouse?
Taking the constitutional route, critics of China – even from within China, as Peng explains – focus on the lack of judicial independence, compared to the West and particularly to the United States. But this discussion in China, as explained by Peng, seems to me to reflect an over-emphasis on the role of the US Supreme Court in reviewing and striking down both Federal and state legislation. These are not powers granted to the Court by the US Constitution at all, but were rather arrogated to the Court itself by early justices and their decisions – a process not uncontroversial at the time. Moreover both the stability and the steady progress of democracy in America are highly questionable presumptions. The US Civil War was specifically constitutional in character (approximately half a million casualties and untold internecine suffering), and for almost 100 years the Supreme Court consistently upheld racial segregation and institutionalized prejudice (whereas the slave system had been controversial from its introduction in the seventeenth century).
A quick review of French, German, Italian and Eastern European history reveals that Western democracy is highly fragile, and that its course of development has been far from smooth, given the number of constitutional states that have ‘gone under’ to fascism, authoritarian militarism and the like over the years. Indeed if we go to the pre-War period, most were not all that democratic in their constitutionalism anyway, particularly with respect to women and working class people generally. And many were self-justifying and self-promoting empires, with scant interest in credible constitutionalism for their ‘possessions’. Commonplace judgements of stability require not just the long view, but an active process of erasure and forgetting.
While it is true that the United Kingdom is only just now establishing a supreme court independent of the legislative branch (which of course is famously not separated from the executive), it is rather a mistake to see judicial independence as peculiarly American. It is in fact the foundational argument of John Locke’s (1988) Two Treatises of Government, first circulated and published in 1688/89, and widely reproduced and translated since then. The ‘Second Treatise’ on ‘Civil Government’ is probably the most successful political tract in history to date, and is unquestionably the largest stone in the foundations of liberalism. It argues that people form a ‘politick’ society and then derogate their individual executive powers to a government, precisely so that this common executive can protect their persons and property by enforcing the decisions of ‘known and indifferent’ judges or magistrates (II§§124–5).
Most commentators on democracy focus on the representative institutions through which laws are made and on the party political processes through which governments come to hold the power to execute the law. Judicial processes and judicial independence thus tend to disappear, especially if formal review of legislation against constitutional provisions and rights is not part of the process, or is – as is usual – exercised with great restraint. Even worse, courts are sometimes dismissed as undemocratic (though many state judges in the United States are directly elected), whereas they are in fact crucial to liberalism, conceived as a constitutional system that guarantees the rights of citizens against unwarranted government actions. As Locke says, governments have but a ‘fiduciary power’ from the people to act only for the ‘publick good’ (II§§131, 149). ‘Rule of law’ is thus often taken for granted in Western constitutionalism, poorly understood in theoretical terms, and – tragically – rather easily suspended. Under the G. W. Bush administration, it was perverted at times into a simulacrum, notably in the novel ‘trials’ and ‘procedures’ operating in (or at least planned for) the detention centres at Guantánamo Bay.
Arguing that courts are inherently undemocratic is thus a mistake. Locke was rightly worried that governments would be tempted into the ‘absolute and arbitrary’ power (II§23 and passim.) that is the ‘evil other’ in his theory, and it is the independence of the judiciary – and the popularly enforced requirement that governments respect this – that generates the whole enterprise of liberal democracy (though Locke used neither word to describe his theoretical edifice). This of course may be off the point as to what either Chinese intellectuals or Western commentators think is going on. But then my point is that Peng’s article should be provoking us into thinking again, and thinking carefully.
Somewhat the same process is evidently going on in China. Political studies are more popular there than constitutional studies, because the authorities are not keen on documents and practices that ‘interfere’ with what they want to do. Constitutional and legal studies are indeed flourishing in the United States, but then to what extent are they already informed with local and cultural content that has become normalized as ‘just part of the ideal’? In fact the British parliamentary system has been copied more often as a model of democratic practice throughout the world – even in post-war zones of sole or hegemonic American occupation such as Japan and Germany – than the US model, which has full separation of powers, a directly elected chief executive, judicial review at the highest level and a highly devolved federal system. Peng rightly points this out. I would not enter into any debate about what local content is or is not helpful or appropriate (or even what counts as generically ‘Chinese’) as argued through in current debates in China. But it is certainly the case that liberal democracy has recognizable and distinct French characteristics, as well as British and American ones, not to mention the intriguing constitutional issues raised in recent years by Aboriginal and Maori politics in Australia, Canada and New Zealand (obviously the cases of local variation can be multiplied considerably from here). From China, it may all look Western, and the West in that view may well be exemplified in the US Constitution as amended. But trust me, US constitutionalism plays well in Peoria, but not in Paris or Pisa or Poznań.
But what about the one-party state? I would not dream of defending this, but any discussion on this point should note that some Western democracies have had very long periods of quite uncompetitive one-party rule (e.g. Sweden, Japan), and that the supposedly crucial constituent of democracy – classically formulated by Joseph Schumpeter (2010: chs 21–2) as a party-competitive system of elections – is rarely if ever embodied in constitutions themselves. How much difference there may in fact be between competing parties, how broad a choice voters actually have, how honest and accountable party leaderships are (not to mention how open their candidate selection procedures are) and numerous other debates about political parties are characteristic areas where the ‘Western liberal paradigm’ has simply not settled, or if it has, a lot of us are unhappy about it, wherever we are. Gestures in China towards party pluralism and non-party representation in consultative bodies may look feeble, but then in what sense are political parties credible just because they are (usually) competing?
The founding theorists of liberalism were – to a man – hostile to faction and party. In a notable essay, Carole Pateman (1983: 204) crisply remarked that, ‘For feminists, democracy has never existed; women have never been and still are not admitted as full and equal members and citizens in any country known as a “democracy”’. Her target was largely the party political presumptions and procedures that formed the sexist (and racist) basis from which governments were constructed and through which courts – however independent or not – construed legality. Given our own confusions and erasures regarding the party political process, we lack a sound basis for dismissing out of hand any of the current Chinese discussions on the party-state configuration, or indeed the ‘Han Chinese’ settlement projects in the Far West, given exclusionary and replacement practices in place in some Western locales until quite recently. While anti-racism and other multi-cultural activisms against unwarranted forms of discrimination have a lengthy history in Western politics, the reconciliation of these ideals with constitutionalism has been and still is a slow and painful process. Saying sorry on a national basis in some of these cases might mean something, but many of these processes continue, and it is not always obvious that constitutionalism as such generates sufficient consistency in practice to warrant belief that it is a solid bulwark against structural inequality and sectarian bigotry.
Indeed the liberalism/Marxism boundary is itself more porous than many (inside China or within Western countries) might think; not all democracy on the Marxist side of things is utterly sham. Marx was an economically oriented left-democrat, committing himself to middle-class groups working for constitutional reform (and indeed for constitutions in the first place, over and against non-constitutional, highly authoritarian monarchies).1 While Marx then – and Marxists along the line – looked over and beyond liberal politics and its presumed free-market deficiencies and ideological smokescreens, it is not the case that the overall vision within Marxism is illiberal as such. Rather there is overwhelming evidence that its socialist character was specifically intended as an advance on democracy, recouping its basic assumptions and improving on its practice – in theory anyway, whereas practice often works out otherwise, of course. The problem for Marxists was that liberal democracies preserved economic inequalities (which are now more extreme in many places than was the case in post-war times) at the expense of class-rooted exclusion and misery, not just ‘fair competition’ and ‘equal opportunity’. Arguably the economic construction of democracy today as pro-‘private enterprise’ and anti-‘state interference’ has not simply taken a toll on the kind of democratic and economic advances that Marx himself predicted and promoted – such as minimum wages and hours, health and safety at work, realistic pensions and unemployment benefits and the like. These have been rolled back not just by neoliberal legislation and executive action (or inaction, in the case of regulatory agencies), but also by interpretations of constitutional principles that support this ‘free market’ ideology. Judicial independence is quite a strictly constructed practice; constitutional decisions are necessarily political – rather than sublimely Olympian – in all cases.
Discussions along these lines may or may not be taking place in China, and may or may not be very genuine in all cases, but given a convergence of systems between Western capitalisms and current Chinese economic management (or at least comparable levels of economic growth and social stratification), there is more common ground here – as Peng argues – than many might assume. I put this kind of question personally to a Chinese interlocutor at a conference on contemporary capitalism in China in 2006. My way of conceptualizing this was to ask about concepts of social democracy that ‘the left’ (outside the United States, usually) rather takes for granted, even if the onward march of neoliberalism (not to mention neo-conservatism) has made many ‘leftists’ feel beleaguered. ‘Ah’, my Chinese friend replied, ‘we’ve got over Lenin, but we’re not yet allowed Bernstein’ (see Bernstein 2009).
This is just where Marxist constitutionalism gets interesting and well before it gets ‘Sinicized’. At its simplest (which is historically located in the 1840s) Marx’s and Engels’s common political project was piggy-backed on radical constitutionalism, which was itself not just revolutionary in political terms but also in economic presumptions. The economic presumption involved was not merely that humans were by nature entrepreneurial as producers and utility-maximizing as consumers, but that politics and specifically the state must be organized so as to allow this to flourish, rather than to inhibit it on grounds of tradition, morals, religion or anything else. In practice this was a self-conscious attack on hierarchies of ‘birth’ and ‘time-honoured’ institutions which prevented or discouraged this realization, and thus on the non-representative and unaccountable monarchies which stood in the way. Constitutionalism was a means to an end, and as Marx correctly saw – and many openly acknowledged – the ‘end’ was to be a state structure and political practice amenable to financial and industrial entrepreneurs at the expense of feudal and rentier classes. Marx, and many others, discounted the ideological claims commonly made that this outcome would liberate ‘all’ – including everyone without substantial property and wealth – but he supported pro tem the political alliances that would – as was done in a day during the French Revolution – abolish feudalism, and open the way to trade, industry and financial gain without limit.
This state structure – termed ‘bourgeois’ by Marx and understood as commercial or middle class more generally – evolved in fits and starts in ways that mirror the Lockean perspective from the late seventeenth century. This was unsurprising, as Locke’s relentlessly anti-feudal and pro-commercial narrative – ‘God gave the world to the use of the industrious and rational’ – says not a word about monarchy, constitutional or otherwise, precisely to obtain clarity about popular sovereignty, albeit refracted through a lens of commercial privilege (II§34). This was said to be a politics of majority rule, but in institutions that specifically or by implication failed to include all adults. ‘Majority of whom’ is always an interesting question. Western democracy thus evolved in tandem with Western economics, against which Chinese authoritarianism and hostility to trade (after the late fifteenth century) make an important historical contrast and controversial subject of contemporary debate. Given the economic changes in China since the 1990s and the liberalization of commercial practices, it is easy to identify a parallelism in Western experience. ‘Enrichissez vous’ was François Guizot’s famous slogan, and the West has hardly looked back since he proclaimed this in the 1840s. In China this has been translated into what is said to be a Marxist imperative to ‘Build the productive forces’ at this stage in history, with consumer capitalism and high finance put in place (and let rip) to do the trick.
Marx himself was not quite on board for this strategy, though it is less than completely clear what political and intellectual strategy he in fact espoused from the later 1850s onwards, once the revolutionary wave of constitutionalism had receded. It left behind in its wake a string of modernizing, post-feudal constitutional regimes, mostly monarchies that balanced land-owning and industrializing interests through various forms of representative and responsible government. Representative of what and responsible to whom were good questions with – throughout the nineteenth century – quite a clear answer: propertied males. Suffrage and electoral restrictions were a notable feature of ‘liberal’ constitutionalism, notably the US Constitution (see the passages on ‘free persons’ and ‘Indians not taxed’, with women tacitly excluded), and the German Imperial Constitution (with a strong monarchy and institutionalization of ‘Junker’ class privilege), not to mention the successive struggles for electoral reform and enfranchisement in the United Kingdom (of Great Britain and the whole of Ireland), at Westminster and elsewhere.
Marx’s position on these regimes was excoriatingly critical for the exclusion of working-class (male) voters, to the detriment of their economic interests. His comments on peasant farmers and other excluded classes of society were sketchy and not exactly flattering, though his views on colonial subjects were generally anti-imperialist, if not always upbeat about economies and cultures. Personally he excluded himself from active partisan and electoral participation in Prussia and the successive formations of the non-Austrian German state up to 1871. Though his citizenship had been revoked, he could possibly have got it back, but in correspondence he demurred from returning to Germany from English exile. His politics there was very largely expatriate in character and mindful of his position as a resident alien. This is not to say that a political thinker’s immediate politics has to be ‘on-side’ with his ideas, or even activist or participatory in any dramatic way. Marx was a prolific correspondent and committee-man in his time, though whether this really qualifies him for the posthumous and commonplace Marxist claims that he was a great revolutionary as such seem open to question. However, it does cut off a route of argument. Had he returned to Germany, become openly active (prior to the Anti-Socialist law of 1878) and/or clandestinely active (up to his death in 1883), then we would know more about precisely where he stood on questions of social democracy (as opposed to proletarian revolution, at least in the longer term). The immediate goals of the Communist Manifesto of 1848 (Part II) are notably social democratic and indeed broadly overlapping with many current and at least semi-constitutional institutions, for example, central banks, income tax, industrialization of agriculture, free education etc. (Marx and Engels 1976: 505).
We don’t know if Marx was on the road to becoming Bernstein; it is somewhat clearer that Engels wasn’t. The ‘revisionism’ debate of the early years of the twentieth century is precisely relevant here, when considering Marxist constitutionalism today (in China or elsewhere, Cuba or Vietnam for example). The crux is the extent to which a constitutional, party-political system is open to possibilities other than capture by commercial and financial interests, and a monopolization of the terms of policy debate that suit their own interests (not to mention media ownership, also an issue dating from these early days). On the whole Marx and Engels got used to the idea – or even celebrated it – that enfranchised voters would elect governments that would reform or restrain capitalism (which Marx had exhaustively analysed, at least in its basic conceptual terms). Having put these mandated agencies in place, they thought it would follow that capitalist terms of unequal competition (say, between largely property-less workers and well-off shareholders and rentiers) would succumb to legislation, regulation and popular, comprehensive socialization.
These are exactly the terms of debate (whether overt or covert) in China today. Except that the world has moved on, and those involved now have more complexities to deal with, precisely because there is more evidence to consider, one way or another, and precisely because the stakes are so high in China (and arguably much higher in planetary terms). If commercialism and capitalism are indeed the way to build up the forces of production, then does this process go better with Western multi-party constitutionalism, or indeed require it? Are Chinese state and Communist Party structures for consultation in decision making and liberalization in enterprise and communication an adequate substitute for this, or a pragmatic and moral perversion of it? On the other hand, if commercialism and capitalism are inherently wasteful and counter-productive to majority interests in the Chinese population, then exactly what alternative interests do they have and what structures would help to realize them? ‘Social democracy in one country’ has been a goal in many Western nations, especially Scandinavia. Possibly this was the case ‘with Japanese characteristics’, and perhaps it persists in Japan. But on the whole the ‘pro-market’ and ‘pro-privatization’ forces backing neoliberalism have won considerable victories in various kinds of electoral systems, and as I have suggested, these regimes have indeed altered some of the values through which Western constitutions are interpreted. Social democracy in one country would be an interesting project in China, and one with Marxist credentials, even if ‘revisionist’.
The fault-line between what is clearly Marxist and what isn’t dates back to the 1880s, and it has been drawn in different ways on varying grounds. Initially and consistently it has been about proletarian revolution, most excitingly conceived as a coup d’état and popular takeover, not achieved even as a purely theoretical claim until Lenin’s arrival at the Finland Station in 1917. China’s engagement with Marxism has been far more Leninist than anything else in the Marxist tradition. From that perspective even Karl Kautsky’s revolutionary rhetoric (but reformist participation) was ‘renegade’. Lenin was wounded by a bullet from a would-be assassin in 1918 and was dead by early 1924, so there is little record to go on (notwithstanding an industry of justification and demonization ever since as to his ‘real’ intentions, beliefs and doctrinal legacy). Has China today cranked up an NEP (an early Soviet ‘New Economic Policy’ allowing limited markets and individual accumulation and investment) of gargantuan proportions? Or is the current mode of production in China something completely different? Either way, are proletarian revolution and communist society meaningful or vacuous as political goals?
The other notable fault-line between what is Marxist and what isn’t takes us via Bernstein back to Western constitutionalism itself. Are the institutions of representative and responsible government inherently capitalist, as ideologues on both sides have notably claimed? Marx was quite clear that capitalism was inherently anti-egalitarian in substantive results, ideological claims of trickling down and levelling up notwithstanding. However, in terms of a socialist or social-democratic politics, at least of transition, he was somewhat more informative, sketching out a bottom-up system of mandated representatives and responsible assemblies intended to protect the economic interests of the vast majority of any given population, or so he saw it at the time (Marx 1986: 332–3). In these days of capitalist near-collapse and squeezed middle classes, this ‘vast majority’ looks rather more plausible than in more prosperous times of middle-class hegemony. However, Marx’s thoughts are just a sketch, and they say nothing about competitive partisan politics, which has come to be the sine qua non of credible democracy and – by extension – credible constitutionalism.
On the one hand Marx’s perspective – and that of Marxists generally – is substantive, rather than procedural. The right institutions are those that deliver the good (and the goods) that the people want (on some aggregation of interests), or that serve the public interest (as somehow determined in a singular way). Western constitutionalism is procedural, in that the good institutions are those that protect the natural rights of each individual to security of the person and possession of property. Who has exactly what by way of access to goods and services is thus a procedural outcome rather than substantive goal. Moreover good structures are those that resist the incursion of substantive goals into areas of procedural purity, imposing a so-called patterned distribution of income and wealth. The questions here are not always economic ones in the first instance; witness the resistance to civil rights and anti-discrimination decisions taken by the ‘Warren Court’ and its successors in the United States, where purity of principle in relation to individuals and their rights, and in relation to the terms of the Federal system of governments, have played a very large role. This is a very large fault-line indeed and one that is currently debated – though not very explicitly – in Western constitutional regimes. In Chinese terms, given the heritage of Marxist emphasis on substance over procedure and the limited and unsuccessful experience in the Republican period with Western norms that value procedure over substance, it seems clear that debate in China will be on this ground and will concern outcomes and the means to get them. There may of course be a realm of disingenuousness, as there always is in politics; politicians may reward themselves and their cronies with the opportunities of proceduralism while declaring that these outcomes – or that future outcomes – will be to the substantive benefit of ‘all’. Our own concern with bankers and industrialists and their bonuses, incentive-schemes and pension-pots comes to mind here, given their claims that we will all be worse off if we ‘interfere’.
My conclusions from this brief and rather sketchy chapter are: that liberal democracy is necessarily a broad church, with considerable local content; that it rests on judicial independence at all levels as a bulwark against governmental usurpations; that Marxist jurisprudence is not necessarily a wilder shore than the more familiar systems of common law and Roman law; that the fault-line between procedure and substance is not exclusive to Marxism; and that Peng’s article opens a window on varieties of constitutionalism tout court as a matter of common global interest.
Note
1 For an exposition of this view, see Carver (1998: ch. 6).
References
Bernstein, E. (2009) [1911], Evolutionary Socialism: A Criticism and Affirmation. Whitefish, MT: Kessinger Publishing.
Carver, T. (1998), The Postmodern Marx. Manchester: Manchester University Press.
Locke, J. (1988), Two Treatises of Government. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Marx, K. (1986) [1871], The Civil War in France, in Marx, K., and Engels, F., Collected Works, volume 22 (London: Lawrence & Wishart), pp. 307–59.
Marx, K., and Engels, F. (1976) [first pub. 1848], The Communist Manifesto, in Collected Works, volume 6 (London: Lawrence & Wishart), pp. 477–519.
Pateman, C. (1983), ‘Feminism and democracy’, in G. Duncan (ed.), Democratic Theory and Practice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 204–17.
Schumpeter, J. A. (2010) [1942], Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy. Milton Park: Routledge.