Citizen Marx: Republicanism and the Formation of Karl Marx’s Social and Political Thought
Bruno Leipold
Princeton University Press
ISBN: 9780691205236
We treat words like “Marxism” and “communism” today as almost synonymous, but in the 19th century, the socialist scene was composed of multiple intellectuals vying to determine the course of progressive politics. Socialism was in fact far from being the dominant ideological opponent on the progressive spectrum to conservatism and liberalism. Republicanism championed the cause of popular freedom on mostly political, non-economic grounds. It favoured political reforms to enfranchise popular self-government but was weary of using the state to impose socio-economic equality on the population. Progressive republicans mainly criticised the arbitrary use of power by authoritarian state apparatuses and campaigned for the broadening of political participation. Only in the 19th century did their focus shift slightly from the political sphere to the factory, when some republicans realised that, even if people would be liberated from authoritarian kings and oppressive aristocracies, they would still suffer from social dependency under the system of capitalist wage-labour. The republicans strove for a return to a pre-bourgeois economy of small-scale artisans, local farmers, and independent business owners as a remedy against the ongoing proletarianisation of workers under industrial capitalism.
Leipold meticulously documents Marx’s vacillating journey between the philosophies of republicanism and socialism.
Long before Marx became the figurehead of socialist thought, his intellectual development was deeply rooted in this republican tradition. In Citizen Marx, political theorist and historian of political thought Bruno Leipold meticulously documents Marx’s vacillating journey between the philosophies of republicanism and socialism. While republicanism focused on political reforms to constitutional systems, electoral laws, or civil rights, and promoted a return to a middle-class economy of small business owners, socialism fully embraced the economic and technological development of capitalism toward concentration of power and proletarianisation. The industrialisation of production was, for the socialist movement, a blessing in disguise insofar as it massively increased the collective production of wealth. Economies of scale augmented the overall wealth available to society, but capitalist property laws denied workers the benefits of this economic progress. The socialists subsequently imagined different ways for the working class to claim ownership over the enhanced means of production. However, most of these proposals were surprisingly silent on politics, constitutional reform, or revolution. Robert Owen thought capitalists could simply be convinced into founding worker-managed cooperatives while Henri Saint-Simon believed politics could be reduced to a technocratic science that would let experts administer the production and distribution of goods without much democratic input.
Classical history of political thought tends to present Marx’s thought as a stand-alone, independent reflection on the political tensions of industrial capitalism, as if Marx’s socialism emerged out of an intellectual vacuum. But Leipold shows that Marx continuously positioned himself vis-à-vis rival thinkers and activists.
Leipold’s book documents Marx’s intellectual development between these two philosophies to show how Marx articulated his own hybrid version of republican socialism, which would soon become the dominant intellectual tradition of progressive politics for one-hundred years. Leipold superbly surveys Marx’s expansive oeuvre from his early journalistic writings – and even his high-school essays – to his major works in political economy and his commentaries on the Paris Commune. He thereby distinguishes three phases in Marx’s thought. While Marx started as a republican critic of the Prussian State and Hegelian philosophy, around 1843 he broke publicly and privately with republicanism and shifted towards socialism. Only much later, in his commentaries on the failed republican experiments in France, would Marx wholeheartedly return to his republican principles. But by now, these principles would be so infused with socialist political economy that it put Marx in direct confrontation with the main republican thinkers of his day, like Giuseppe Mazzini. While the latter dismissed the Paris Commune from the start as futile working-class egoism, Marx viewed the Commune as a tragic prefiguration of a post-capitalist future that convincingly combined working-class social emancipation with republican institutions of democratic self-government. The road forward, he believed, lay in a combination of the collectivisation of the economic infrastructure and the establishment of a social republic that would put the proletariat definitively in charge of this infrastructure.
The key lesson from Leipold’s work is how Marx created his hybrid philosophy of republicanism and socialism through intense continued debate with other critical thinkers of his time. Most of these authors are currently forgotten, like the republican Hegelian Arnold Ruge, the antipolitical socialist Karl Grün, or the rabid anti-communist republican Karl Heinzen. Classical history of political thought tends to present Marx’s thought as a stand-alone, independent reflection on the political tensions of industrial capitalism, as if Marx’s socialism emerged out of an intellectual vacuum. But Leipold shows that Marx continuously positioned himself vis-à-vis rival thinkers and activists. Without the intellectual conflict between these competing views, there simply would not have been a Marxian political philosophy. If class struggle is the motor of history, then intellectual struggle was the motor of Marx’s life. By excavating the writings of these understudied rival thinkers – including the witty details of how these individuals clashed with Marx’s challenging personality – Leipold throws Marx’s thought in the flames from which it drew its vigorous spark.
Socialist political philosophy as a political practice should not consistently reaffirm a coherent, static doctrine of theoretical principles. Rather, it is a dynamic series of interventions in concrete political situations
A new look at the chemical reaction of republican and socialist elements that produced the combustion we nowadays call “Karl Marx’s philosophy” is particularly interesting for today’s left-wing political thought. On the one hand, an influential strand of accelerationist Marxism has moved away from experiments in local anti-hierarchical social movements and democratic self-government, which they dismissively describe as “folk politics”. They champion technological innovation as leverage toward a postcapitalist future where humanity can enjoy renewed free time as the production process becomes increasingly automated. On the other hand, new left-wing republicanisms have either uncoupled progressive demands for popular self-government from economic working-class emancipation (Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe) and/or revived the ideal of property-owning democracy for independent small-scale business owners (Elizabeth Anderson). Even within the communist movement itself, calls for degrowth communism (Kohei Saito) dismiss Marx’s pleas for collectivising the industrial production apparatus in favour of small-scale, self-reliant economies reminiscent of republican agrarianism.
While these debates between pro- or anti-growth, pro- or anti-technology, pro- or anti-agrarian communes are currently ravaging left-wing intellectual debate, Marx’s hybrid and flexible positioning between republican self-government and socialist large-scale collectivised production provides a helpful new perspective. Socialist political philosophy as a political practice should not consistently reaffirm a coherent, static doctrine of theoretical principles. Rather, it is a dynamic series of interventions in concrete political situations, where the “correctness” of a position is determined through a theory’s effectiveness in political and intellectual struggle. By showing the malleability and relativity of Marx’s own thought throughout his struggles with other progressive thinkers, Leipold teaches progressives today the same lesson of identifying philosophical thought as an exercise in political intervention.
Note: This review gives the views of the author, not the position of the LSE Review of Books blog, or of the London School of Economics and Political Science.
Dr. Tim Christiaens is assistant professor of philosophy and economic ethics at Tilburg University in the Netherlands. He writes about critical theory in relation to work and/or technology with, among others, a book on platform work called Digital Working Lives (Rowman & Littlefield, 2022).
Spread the word