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In his new biography of Karl Marx, Bruno Leipold puts his subject in historical context. Marx, he tells Jacobin, was engaged in a political struggle against utopian communists and republicans unable to recognize the incompatibility of freedom and capitalism.

Three traditions have usually been considered to influence Karl Marx’s work: German philosophy, British political economy, and French socialism. Perhaps surprisingly, much less attention has been paid to the influence of republicanism, an ideology and political formation that competed with socialism for working-class support during Marx’s time. Recently, however, there have been several efforts to highlight the role of republicanism in shaping Marx’s ideas. Amongst these is Bruno Leipold’s newly released book, Citizen Marx: Republicanism and the Formation of Karl Marx’s Social and Political Thought.

Leipold argues that placing Marx in his historical context is essential to understanding the complexity of his thought and its contemporary relevance. Initially, Leipold argues, Marx was committed to the republican notion of freedom, defined as the absence of arbitrary power, and advocated for a democratic republic in which citizens exercised active popular sovereignty. Over time, however, and despite retaining key elements of his republican heritage, Marx shifted toward communism.

Leipold sat down with Jacobin to discuss these developments in Marx’s thinking and their broader significance for how socialists ought to understand emancipatory struggles in a world still shaped by the arbitrariness of capitalist domination.

Hugo de Camps Mora

Your book is entitled Citizen Marx: Republicanism and the Formation of Karl Marx’s Social and Political Thought. Before we start diving into its content, could you explain why you chose this title?

Bruno Leipold

In the nineteenth century, all radicals referred to each other by the title Citizen. And that has a republican background that goes right back to the French Revolution. It’s essentially an egalitarian replacement for aristocratic titles. Only much later in the nineteenth century did Citizen begin to be replaced by comrade. All of the minutes of the International Working Men’s Association, for example, refer to him as Citizen Marx. For me, it captures the way in which socialism has this forgotten republican background. So it’s not just a reference to Citizen Kane but actually a real historical practice in Marx’s time.

Hugo de Camps Mora

You argue that republicanism, and its particular understanding of freedom, is essential to understanding Marx’s work. The term republicanism has been used in a variety of ways, how do you use the term in your argument?

Bruno Leipold

Indeed, the word republican has been used in a huge variety of ways. Today we usually think of it in contemporary terms: in America, it usually means the Republican Party; in the UK, it just means anti-monarchism; in France, it’s been co-opted by the Right. So it has this huge variety of meaning. Obviously, these are all related to the older meaning of the term, but they’ve taken on quite different meanings over time.

For me, what really matters is to go back to what republicanism meant at the time in which Marx was writing and politically active. That means republicanism as a living political formation and ideology in the same way that there are now Conservatives, Liberals, and Socialists. Republicanism, and this is so easily forgotten, was the main competitor for working-class support in Marx’s time. What I’m trying to recreate in the book are the ways in which Marx drew and learned from, and was also opposed to, that political movement.

Hugo de Camps Mora

So what did nineteenth-century republicanism argue for?

Bruno Leipold

Most centrally, republicans held to a particular understanding of the idea of democracy. They were trying to create democratic regimes that were committed to, certainly, universal manhood suffrage, but also to much more than that. They wanted extensive control over representatives, a citizen public administration, in order to establish real active popular sovereignty. And by the way, it is often forgotten that liberals in the nineteenth century were not committed to democracy in the same way; they did not support universal suffrage but instead favored property and educational qualifications as requirements for voting.

Another distinguishing element of republicanism, and one that ties together these various commitments, is their understanding of freedom. Republicans believe that freedom means the absence of arbitrary power. That means that you are unfree whenever you have a master over you who has the power to interfere with you and your life as they please. Even if that master is benevolent and mostly lets you do what you want, you are still unfree because they still dominate you, they still have power over you that you don’t control. In the political sphere, this leads to a critique of absolute monarchy, which is a traditional republican worry. But republicans also used their conception of freedom in the nineteenth century to critique new emerging forms of arbitrary power or domination, including capitalism.

Republicans are, on the whole, quite critical toward capitalism, and this is easily forgotten. They object to how capitalist bosses dominate their workers. But they distinguish themselves from socialism in their critique of capitalism, since they believe in universalizing private property rather than abolishing it. So they basically have a political economy that supports small peasants, petty artisans, and so forth. The broad picture of nineteenth-century republicanism, then, is an ideology committed to democracy which upholds a popular political economy, all tied together by its vision of freedom.

Hugo de Camps Mora

You mention that, while Marx agreed with many parts of the republican social program, he decided to uphold a socialist — rather than republican — political economy. Why didn’t Marx support the universalization of the private property of small-scale independence producers?

Bruno Leipold

Marx initially dismisses the idea of universalizing the private property of small-scale independent producers as a petty-bourgeois ideal. However, later, in Capital, and as William Clare Roberts has argued, he’s more sympathetic to it. This is perhaps due to his direct engagement with artisans in the International Working Men’s Association. Given the popularity of republicanism at the time, Marx’s rhetorical strategy is to begin by showing how attractive that ideal is, as it provides real individual independence.

He then shifts and argues that, as attractive as that ideal is, it will be bulldozed aside by the advance of capitalist industry. The argument that Marx ends up making against the republican political economy is that its attempt to establish freedom will run up against the realities of market imperatives — the imperative to produce as cheaply as possible, which artisans just increasingly cannot do, as they are replaced by the efficiencies of large-scale industry and its proletarian workforce. That is why Marx believes freedom can only be accomplished through a different political economy: one based on the common ownership of those means of production, through workplace cooperatives and democratic planning of the economy.

Hugo de Camps Mora

Echoing Marxist accounts such as [the American historical sociologist] Robert Brenner’s concept of “vertical” relations or [the philosopher] Soren Mau’s mute compulsion, you argue that even capitalists are compelled to abide by market forces. Why is it so crucial, in your view, to emphasize that the laws of the market dominate everyone?

Bruno Leipold

It’s really important for me to emphasise this as part of Marx’s critique of political economy. It’s important for us to understand that we cannot just limit our critique of capitalism to individual arbitrariness. Certainly, Marx wrote extensively about the idea that capitalist employers dominate individual workers and subject them to all kinds of awful arbitrary interference in the workplace. That is definitely a crucial way to understand part of the story as to why workers are unfree in capitalism. And that’s something that Marx shares with Republicans. But Marx also insisted that we need to go beyond that.

Domination in capitalism is also an impersonal or abstract idea as well, which is the domination of all of society by market imperatives. And that can’t be reduced to a single person or a single capitalist. And that’s why, in Marx’s analysis, even good capitalists, let’s say, who are kindhearted and might want to pay their workers well, are forced by the market from doing so because they’ll be put out of business. This idea of market domination aims to capture a deeper level of domination than the merely individual relationships in our workplace. And we always need to try and understand the interaction between the two forms of domination.

Hugo de Camps Mora

As you explain in your book, the most prominent biographies of Marx give the impression that placing him in the nineteenth century confines his relevance exclusively to that era. In contrast, you argue that your book is written with the “spirit that there is much to be gained from studying Marx’s thought in its historical context.” Why do you think that it can be illuminating to study Marx’s work from a historical perspective?

Bruno Leipold

In general, when you carry out work in the history of political thought, I believe that it is of central importance to place thinkers in their context. In my view, this means reconstructing the political debates that they were engaged in at the time and seeing what interventions they were trying to make. And there is a particular benefit to doing this with Marx. As we know, Marx has been subjected to so many layers of tendentious misrepresentations, perhaps more than any of the other so-called canonical thinkers. What a contextualist approach can do in Marx’s case is to help peel back some of those layers of misinterpretation and try and get back to what he might have been trying to do at the time in which he was writing.

Unfortunately, some recent biographies of Marx have been written from the perspective that to contextualize Marx is a way to de-politicize him. Gareth Stedman Jones’s and Jonathan Sperber’s biographies have some real merits to them, yet they seem to believe that if we put Marx back into his context, we somehow stuff him back into history.

Contrarily, I think contextualism can bring to life that Marx was not simply engaged in abstract philosophical debates but that he was a political actor, who had political opponents, political allies, and who was trying to win people over to his ideas with his texts. I don’t think we can fully understand what Marx was trying to do unless we understand who those other people were and what they were arguing at the time.

Hugo de Camps Mora

You claim that Marx’s work can be grouped into three different phases, which are distinguished by the way he engaged with the republican tradition of his time. Could you briefly explain which these were?

Bruno Leipold

Yes, so the first phase represents Marx’s earliest political engagement. This is when he’s a newspaper editor in Rhineland, a part of Prussia. Although he’s often been interpreted as a liberal in this period, I argue that that is partly because some interpreters have not properly engaged with the historical context that would enable them to clearly distinguish liberals from republicans. It is also because they do not appreciate that he has a quite complicated political strategy at that point.

As a result of the political repression that existed at that time, Marx cannot be outwardly republican and radical and has to limit himself to what can be said in public. Nonetheless, republican commitments do shine through in his public journalism (and especially in his private unpublished writings). These include a general concern with arbitrary power, whether that is the Prussian monarch, elite Prussian bureaucrats, or the censors of the press.

I then look at the way in which he slowly converts from that republican position to communism in the years around 1844. It is important for me to stress that Marx’s conversion to communism is not a conversion to existing communism, because communism is incredibly anti-political at the time. What Marx does is to bring his republican inheritance — that is, his commitment to politics and democracy — into his communism. He then establishes what I would say is already a form of republican communism. Yet at the same time, I would also argue that, during that period, some of his more radical political ideas fall away — basically, some of his early critiques of representation and public administration are not as obvious as in his earliest writings.

It is only in the third period, which takes place in response to the Paris Commune, where I think those very early radical republican commitments come back and become crucial parts of what Marx calls a social republic. And that is a republic in which people have extensive control and participation over their government and public administration. Marx thinks that those political institutions are absolutely essential to social transformation. In my view, this final phase is a fuller synthesis of his republicanism and socialism.

Hugo de Camps Mora

Although you insist on underscoring the importance of politics and political institutions in Marx’s work, it is true that he has many times been presented as an “anti-political” thinker.

Bruno Leipold

This criticism that Marx is not political is one of the criticisms that most frustrates me because it’s based on a very limited engagement with Marx’s work, or just a lack of any comprehension of his context. It is just so patently obvious that what Marx was trying to do in the lead-up to, for example, the 1848 revolutions, was to push back against the dominant anti-political forms of socialism that existed during his time.

These literally argued that, in a revolution, workers should not come out to support a republic. And by the way, I would really want to emphasize this point: today, we really don’t know how anti-political socialism was at Marx’s time. Many socialists at the time thought that a republic was as useless as a monarchy, and that we should carry out various communitarian experiments that would somehow inspire people to peacefully spread socialism. Marx thought this was crazy and dangerous, and it’s one of his great contributions to push against those anti-political elements. This is why it is clear to me, once we’ve carried out that historical reconstruction of his work, that Marx cannot be considered an anti-political thinker.

Hugo de Camps Mora

It has also been argued that Marx believed that the role of politics would end in a communist society.

Bruno Leipold

This is a complication that I deal with at the very end of the book. I think the best case you can make for Marx being anti-political is the idea that politics and the state disappear in a future communist society. And although I think it’s the best case, I think it’s still wrong. I think it’s wrong because we need to distinguish between the disappearance of the state and politics. I think, obviously, Marx says that the state disappears, but it doesn’t necessarily mean that politics disappears, which we can broadly define as authoritative decision-making about matters of common concern. I really don’t see any evidence for thinking that Marx thought that that would disappear.

It would in any case be a fairly absurd thing to believe. There are very strong republican reasons to believe that politics would, and should, continue in a communist society. Among these is a republican skepticism about the notion that we could ever completely eliminate the oligarchic drive to reestablish a class society. For that reason, I believe radical democratic institutions are necessary to protect society from those oligarchic threats.

Hugo de Camps Mora

As you have explained, toward the end of his life, and particularly after the Paris Commune, Marx seriously engaged with the question of which political institutions were necessary to bring about socialism. How does Marx’s envisioned social republic differ from a bourgeois republic?

Bruno Leipold

To begin with, we can talk about the institutions that a bourgeois republic shares with the kind of social republic Marx was thinking of. They overlap in terms of a commitment to universal suffrage and to equal civic rights. Although Marx thinks that these institutions are very important, he believes that the way in which representation works in bourgeois republics really misrepresents the people, who end up being ruled by an elite class. Marx therefore advocates for a republic that is truly under the control of the people, by which he means a republic that is focused on the importance of controlling your representatives. He specifically advocates for what is called an imperative mandate, which is where you give binding instructions to your representatives; that the representatives can be recalled; and for there to be much more frequent elections.

Another institution he advocates for is the transformation of the state bureaucracy. Rather than having this elite professional body that exists apart from the people, he thinks that it becomes, in some sense, properly under its control by electing a large degree of that bureaucracy, who would similarly be subjected to these control mechanisms of recall. That, I think, gives a sense of how different he thought a social republic would look from a bourgeois republic.

Marx’s argument shows that in some ways, what we have come to call democracy today is actually the victory of a much more liberal version of what democracy would look like: one that, in a sense, is a fusion of the republican belief in universal suffrage to an architecture that remains broadly liberal, where the state and its representatives are outside of our control.

Hugo de Camps Mora

Your book ends with a postface, which suggests several resources that can be drawn from your study. With that in mind, how can a study of Marx and republicanism in the nineteenth century contribute to formulate a vision of socialism tailored to the challenges of today?

Bruno Leipold

It’s certainly been a problem for socialism that politics has sometimes been thought of in quite an instrumental sense, as if the design of political institutions isn’t important or that the political institutions we developed in order to achieve socialism do not really matter afterward. One resource I hope looking at Marx through republicanism provides is the insight that politics is in fact central to social emancipation. The second thing that I hope it provides in terms of resources is that we have quite a narrow understanding of what freedom means today. We often think of freedom as what’s called freedom as noninterference, where we’re free whenever the state or anybody else doesn’t interfere with us — an idea that makes it easy to believe we’re free at work simply because supposedly no one forced us into those relations.

I think that there’s a more interesting version of freedom that we can pick up on to show why capitalism makes people unfree. I do think that the republican freedom captures something important about what we understand by freedom, that we are not free when someone has this arbitrary power over you, that they can then degrade you, treat you as they wish, and that even if they don’t, the mere fact that they have that power — and that’s the really crucial republican insight — makes you unfree.

I think that is part of Marx’s view on freedom, which has been mostly neglected. In a way, we’ve allowed conservatives and liberals today to dominate the conversation about the value of freedom. I think it’s a value that we should reclaim as socialists. And if we were to do so, I think republican freedom is part of what we should understand by freedom.