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Bruno Leipold’s Citizen Marx: Republicanism and the Formation of Karl Marx’s Social and Political Thought
Bruno Leipold’s Citizen Marx presents a compelling, deeply researched, and elegantly written analysis of Marx’s relationship to republicanism, and it will no doubt become an important point of reference in future discussions about Marx’s thought.(1) Based on fresh, close readings of Marx—including canonical texts such as The Communist Manifesto and Capital, as well as lesser-known articles and notebooks—and discussions of an impressive body of scholarship, Leipold reconstructs the intellectual trajectory that led Marx to articulate a powerful republican communism as the alternative to the despotic power of capital.
In the mid-nineteenth century, to be a “republican” meant fighting for a free and democratic political system based on universal (male) suffrage, in opposition to defenders of absolute monarchy and liberalist defenders of constitutional monarchy. The central political value of republicanism is freedom, understood in a purely negative sense as non-domination, or, the absence of arbitrary power—that is, not just the absence of actual interference, but of the very possibility of interference. Leipold’s core claim is that Marx’s critique of capitalism, as well as his thoughts on revolutionary strategy and the communist future, developed through a sustained dialogue with republican currents.
Most other socialists in the 1840s were deeply “anti-political” in the sense that they “had an ambivalent, even hostile, relationship to politics, democracy, and revolution,” as Leipold puts it.(2) Drawing on the republican ideas he had defended in his pre-communist phase as a journalist and critic of the Prussian state (1842–43), Marx (and Engels) rejected the technocratic and authoritarian tendencies of British Owenists, German ‘True Socialists’ and French Saint-Simonians. Instead, he developed an analysis of the bourgeois republic as “an insufficient but necessary step for the emancipation of the proletariat.”(3) For Marx, the struggle for emancipation must pass through the capitalist state, rather than just circumventing it. …
Perhaps the most important conclusion of Citizen Marx is that “Marx’s principal political value was freedom.”(14) This is, as Leipold puts it, “one way in which a study of Marx and republicanism in the nineteenth century could help with the formulation of a socialism for the twenty-first.”(15) Throughout the history of the left, different answers have been offered to the question of what exactly the problem with capitalism is. Not all of them are equally convincing. … For these reasons, I believe the most compelling critique of capitalism is that it is a system of domination, or: capitalism is an enemy of freedom. This critique is not necessarily opposed to the others mentioned above, and I believe it makes perfect sense to combine it with the critiques of ecological destruction and exploitation—though less so with the critique of alienation, which, to be honest, I find of limited use. A critique of capitalism in the name of freedom does not center a specific subsection of the proletariat as inherently more revolutionary than others, and it has the potential to resonate with a broad set of experiences of life under capitalism, since everyone is subjected to the arbitrary power of capital, regardless of whether they work or not, or, if they do work, whether in the form of wage labor, informal labor or unpaid domestic labor. The communist variant of the republican idea of freedom as nondomination also has the advantage of not implying a substantial idea of the good life. It rather conceives of communism as a society in which people are free to shape their own lives. Understanding the struggle against capitalism as a struggle against domination also makes it easier to grasp “the continuity between the Marxian project of universal emancipation and ongoing freedom struggles that are not all socialist in character,” as William Clare Roberts—another proponent of the republican reading of Marx—puts it.(16) The relationship between struggles against capital and struggles against racism or sexism, for example, should not be understood as a relationship between “struggles against exploitation” and “struggles against oppression”; they are rather variations of the same fundamental emancipatory struggle against domination. This is one of the many important insights that Leipold’s reading of Marx as a republican communist critic of arbitrary power helps us to articulate and develop.
Source: Søren Mau in Spectre Journal
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