Prometheus had the pleasure of interviewing Bruno Leipold, author of Citizen Marx: Republicanism and the Formation of Karl Marx’s Social and Political Thought ahead of the book’s British release. Those in London can join us for an in-person launch on January 14th with Bruno Leipold and Barnaby Raine.
Below is an edited interview transcript with Leipold discussing the ideas of the book and what they mean for socialists today.
Prometheus: When did you first actually come to Marx? How did you get interested?
That takes me back. I was first exposed to Marx as an undergraduate, as part of a Hegel and Marx course, which ended up being nine weeks of Hegel and one week of Marx and that one week was why everything that Marx says is due to Hegel. So I didn’t really pick up much from that, although I learned a lot about Hegel.
For my master’s, I had a very good teacher, John Filling. He was one of those teachers who could really inspire. I think he really gave me my first proper introduction. It was also the right political moment to be introduced to Marx; not long after the financial crisis, there was the coalition government with all the deep disappointment of that moment. So I guess I was politically primed to be introduced to Marx at what was also an academically opportune moment.
Prometheus: What drove you to start thinking about the relationship between Marx and republicanism?
I can’t say that it was necessarily a political response – as much as I would love to say that. It was likely through Filling, who also taught a class on republican freedom. I think that’s how I came to see a potential connection. It was just realizing, well, there’s a research gap there. There are these two things that seem very related. A couple of people had said that they’re related in passing, shouldn’t we try and check whether there is something interesting to say? It’s unfortunately not a very exciting story!
Prometheus: So that leads us to Citizen Marx, your new book exploring the relationship between Marx and republicanism. Can you briefly begin with what you understand by republicanism?
In the book I take republicanism to be what it meant when Marx was politically active. Republicanism was a political formation with its own ideology. In the same way that today we have liberalism, conservatism, socialism and so forth, in the 19th century there were republicans who were their own political formation on the left. They were in fact the left-wing political formation. It took a long time for socialism to replace it.
Centrally, I think that republicanism in the 19th century at its core was committed to democracy. That sounds like a really boring thing to be committed to today. But in the 19th century, you’re looking at societies that mainly did not even meet the most basic understanding of democracy as universal suffrage. The kind of regimes that Marx engaged with were deeply authoritarian and therefore this commitment to democracy is a radical claim.
I’d say on top of that, republicans believed in a much deeper sense of democracy than we think of democracy today. Of course, they wanted universal suffrage. That was often the minimal goal. That was already a radical goal, but they wanted more than that. They wanted forms of representation where you really control your representatives. You could be involved in the state through various forms of participation, through public administration, through referendums, all of these various different ideas of how you could be involved.
I think this is all united by a commitment to freedom as non-domination, as a particular conception of freedom.
Prometheus: Could you expand on what you mean by freedom as non-domination?
To me, republican freedom means that you are unfree whenever you are subjected to the arbitrary power of a master.
If that’s the general idea, then there are a lot of examples of that for republicans. Most obviously there is the case of an absolute monarch. That’s the most central example. An absolute monarch can do what they want with you and your property. But 19th century republicans also used this idea for more radical social ends.
This is something I’m also keen to say in the book, that republicanism is not just a political ideology. Republicans have their own social ideas and those are often anti-capitalist ideas. So many oppose the arbitrary power that comes with wage labour – they think that when you work for someone else, in most cases, you’re made unfree by it. What differentiates them from socialism and from Marx is that they think the solution to that is to try and make everyone an independent worker once again, that is an independent artisan or peasant or so forth.
So they don’t believe in abolishing private property as a response to capitalism. They want to reassert universal private property. So it’s a non-socialist anti-capitalism, which is a view of economics that we’ve mostly lost sight of.
I think Marxist scholars lose sight of republicanism as an alternative that isn’t just reducible to liberalism and isn’t just socialism – it’s something in between that doesn’t really fit neatly into the categories we have today.
Prometheus: In your work, you identify three stages of Marx’s engagement with republicanism. I’m simplifying these very much; him coming up through the republican tradition, then something like a communist turn away from republicanism, and finally, something of a synthesis between the two towards the end of his life. It would be great to unpack these further. So how would you summarize the young Marx’s engagement with republicanism?
The first thing that it’s good for people to know is that Marx, when he entered the political scene, was a republican, just straightforwardly. The context that really matters here is Prussia and Prussian authoritarianism.
Marx set out to become a journalist because an academic career had been denied to him by the state. As a journalist he really experienced first-hand what state censorship looked like. The setup was that every time you wrote an article the newspaper wanted to publish, it had to be sent the night before publishing to a government censor. These were Prussian state appointed officials who read through the newspaper and literally cut out the bits they didn’t like, sent it back and that was what was allowed to be printed. So it was pre-publication censorship. It was really quite extreme. And that really limited, of course, what Marx or anyone else could say in public.
This is what I think makes Marx’s republicanism at the time interesting because privately and to the wider radical movement, he was very clearly committed to a German republic. But he was politically quite smart in that he didn’t just think the thing to do was to put on the front page of the newspaper, front and centre, size 50 font ‘we want the republic’. This is what some other young Hegelians, people like Edgar Bauer for instance, had been advocating. This would succeed in really pissing off the Prussians, but pissing them off in a way that it might just lead to the newspaper being shut down.
Marx thought this kind of ultra-radicalism was just not helpful. He also believed in the importance of allies. At that time, he thought it was very important for him to ally with liberals who also had criticisms of the Prussian monarchy, though not as radical as republicans did. He thought it was important not to create a breach with them.
What you get in his early articles is what I would term ‘public liberalism, private republicanism’. Although within the public liberalism the republicanism shines out in various ways, he’s trying to be smart about what he can say. So we can situate his republicanism as differentiated from liberalism, but also differentiated from a kind of an ultra-radical republicanism. That is also a theme that I think we see throughout Marx’s later works in having to deal with various ultra-radical trends.
Prometheus: And where do you begin to see the development of the more public radical turn away from republicanism?
This is the end of 1843, beginning of 1844, when Marx moved to Paris with Arnold Ruge, a republican collaborator and also a Young Hegelian. They set up this journal together, the Deutsch–Französische Jahrbücher. This was a brand new, exciting environment that he was thrown into. Paris was the intellectual capital of Europe at this point. Socialism was in the air. There were a thousand different theories and groupings available – Marx threw himself into them.
It is interesting because just before he went to Paris, he wrote a republican critique of socialism, criticizing it for various things; being too anti-political, too obsessed with property. It’s quite interesting to see Marx make these points, then within a few months, he’s made his own turn. This meant he personally broke with Arnold Ruge. He effectively argued ‘Arnold Ruge, you’re just a politician, I’m a communist.’
What I’m really keen to emphasize is that this transition or turn to communism isn’t a turn to actually existing communism. I use that phrase because Marx used that phrase, it’s not just a 20th century phrase. Many strains of communism in the early 1840s were deeply anti-political and anti-democratic. It’s hard for us to recognize how anti-political they were and that’s why in the book I have a very long section about anti-political forms of socialism.
What ends up happening in the years following is that Marx integrates his earlier republican commitments to politics, to democracy, and so forth into the communism that he forges together with Engels and others leading up into 1848. So it’s a communist turn in a way, but it’s also a forging of a new form of republican communism.
Prometheus: So how do the 1848 revolutions shift Marx’s relationship with republicanism?
If earlier it was public liberalism and private republicanism, going into the revolution, it was now public republicanism and private communism. They quite explicitly said we need to be republicans first until we establish the republic, and then we can carry out our communist agitation.
It was a difficult position for them to run strategically because they also didn’t want to see the communist movement die out. Engels at one point went fundraising for their newspaper in his hometown of Barmen and he said if their Demands of the Communist Party in Germany circulated locally ‘all would be lost for us.’
So that was their strategy in 1848 and it didn’t work out. The revolutions didn’t work out. When they then got to London, they started to change their view a little bit and they were made to eat what Richard Hunt quite nicely calls a ‘rather large portion of humble pie’1.Insofar as there had been other communists who had argued for keeping a clearer separate communist identity from the republican party, Marx and Engels came to believe that now they needed to be organising separately.
That was really a change in strategy and organisation. I don’t think it was a big change in terms of their commitments to political structures around democracy and republicanism per se.
Prometheus: What changes in these long years of exile? Particularly how does this politics come out around Capital?
I hope that this is not too much of a detour, but on the political front, there is both an integration of republicanism and a certain rejection of it. I think that Marx integrated republican concepts and commitments into his critique. I think that freedom as non-domination and his opposition to arbitrary power are central to his economic critiques. And yet at the same time, he also reacts against the republican political economy – this small-scale independent producer ideal.
In his early critiques of republicanism in the 1840s and 1850s, he gave a very critical view of this independent political economy. He was very dismissive – it’s just a petty bourgeois fantasy and so forth. I think in Capital, I think it actually gives a much more sympathetic portrayal of that ideal. One might argue this is a more politically effective way of arguing.
I think this is a little bit down to political interactions Marx had in the International Working Men’s Association. He realised how attractive this ideal was and therefore thought more about what was the more effective way to argue against it.
I think one of the things that William Clare Roberts, in his great book, Marx’s Inferno, has really brought out is the way in which Marx really celebrated that ideal in Capital and condemned the capitalist destruction of it. But then there’s a kind of twist when Marx argued that capitalism had destroyed it so thoroughly that we could not bring it back. Even if it was tried, capitalism would just out-compete it. He argued these big capitalists will destroy the small capitalists. So he was praising it in order to bury it. That’s the story of Capital, or one story of Capital.
I would emphasize just how much republican categories inform some other aspects. There was a very clear condemnation in Capital of the arbitrary power of the individual capitalist; how they subject their worker to a very demeaning and degrading form of arbitrary power that comes out in all kinds of ways and undermines their freedom.
That category of domination is used in a more kind of structural and impersonal understanding to describe the way in which workers were tied to the capitalist class rather than a single capitalist, as well as the functioning of the market itself. And so I try to set out in Citizen Marx how we might think of different levels of domination from the personal all the way to the abstract and impersonal.
Prometheus: And then we have the Paris Commune of 1871. That obviously had a huge impact on Marx. How do you sort of assess that?
It made a huge impact on him and it had a big personal impact as well. A lot of comrades he knew died there. It seems that he had some kind of nervous reaction to it as a result. But it was also a celebratory encounter in a lot of ways, even if it was a tragic celebration.
He said, and he could not be more explicit about this, that he was wrong to have accepted so much of the political architecture of what we might call the bourgeois republic – the idea that having universal suffrage and equal civic rights within a bourgeois republic would be sufficient as a political structure for bringing about socialism.
The experience of the Paris Commune made him rethink this and argue we need something much more radical, something he then called a social republic. In that kind of republic, you have universal suffrage and so forth. But you also, for instance, have representatives subjected to recall. You have what is called an imperative mandate where you give binding instructions. You have much more frequent elections, where representatives are paid workman’s wages.
Similar kinds of accountability mechanisms are transferred into the state bureaucracy as well. Marx said that a large portion, it’s unclear how large, of state administrators should be elected directly by the people and be similarly recallable. Those that aren’t should be subjected to the subordinating control of the legislature. So he believed in legislative control of the executive. That’s an older idea, but it’s really the kind of extensiveness of it in the Paris Commune that he learned from. Hence, Marx and Engels said explicitly in a new preface to the Communist Manifesto that this was one thing that the Manifesto just got wrong and didn’t state clearly enough. Which is quite significant because Marx doesn’t often say he was wrong.
Prometheus: I had a question about freedom as non-domination more broadly. How does a conception of freedom as self-mastery fit in with this?
So we could call that broadly positive freedom, or freedom as self-determination or self-realisation. I’m not saying that Marx didn’t also have that view of freedom. I think that my argument is not that Marx only believed in freedom as non-domination or republican freedom. It’s that Marx also believed in republican freedom, and that it’s been neglected. We so often associate Marxism with this ideal of positive freedom and I think there is also very much a clear negative republican idea of freedom, which is about absence of mastery by others.
I also do believe, maybe more controversially, that the more interesting version of freedom for us to pick up today is a non-domination view. I think that non-domination is a value that unites quite a lot of what we oppose in the world. There are various relations of subordination, most obviously between worker and capitalist but also gender subordination, racial subordination, that I think are captured quite nicely by the idea of domination. Republican freedom is a quite ecumenical value that combines a lot of our different struggles and can describe them in ways that for me is also quite political.
Because when you talk about domination, you’re automatically talking about a dominator. There is someone or some group of people or at least a set of systems that are carrying out domination and that is what is making you unfree. That requires a struggle to overcome it. I feel positive freedom doesn’t quite do that for me – it doesn’t identify a political target.
Some people think that talking about republican freedom is to somehow make Marx a moralist; to talk too much about normative values which we as Marxists ‘don’t believe in’. I just don’t buy that story. Partly because I do believe that normative values are more important than we give credit for, but also, for me, achieving freedom as non-domination means you would be materially overcoming certain relations that objectively dominate people in the world. You can try and say that’s moralistic, but it’s just not. The things that upset, frustrate and anger people are often the things that disempower them in the world.
Prometheus: If you’re a Marxist in Britain today, what does it mean to start thinking of ourselves as part of this republican tradition?
Well, firstly, this point about freedom. I think that we’ve always, as Marxists, talked somewhat about freedom, but I think, it’s often been in this kind of more positive vein. I’m not saying that people need to stop doing that. But there is also a language here with republican freedom that we can appropriate for quite useful rhetorical and political purposes.
So there’s a point about freedom and maybe the second point would be about politics and democracy. I think that the best Marxists and the best socialists have always taken politics and political institutions quite seriously. I think republicanism reminds us of the centrality of democracy to socialism – in a way that I hope isn’t boring. It’s very easy to think, well, everyone loves democracy. But what I tried to emphasize is that there are different ideas of what democracy might entail. What I really hope that Citizen Marx tells is the centrality of political institutions to social transformation. Of course, there is the importance of political parties, trade unions and having the right strategy but there are the political institutions we face too. These things are not just secondary, something that can be figured out further down the line. I think they are the terrain on which we struggle. And that’s the language that Marx and Engels rightly used.
What that means very precisely in terms of a party political program, I’m not sure if I can say much about that, but I hope that that more general insight might be of some use to people.
Prometheus: You mentioned democracy throughout this. How do you understand democracy?
The abstract definition, of course, is just a kind of collective self-rule. I am quite influenced recently by a very excellent piece of work by Sam Bagg, who is not a socialist but is I’d say an anti-oligarchical thinker. In his book, The Dispersion of Power, he has this reorientation that democracy should be understood as resistance to state capture.
I find that a quite useful negative ideal and it’s also a more realist understanding in my head because it’s not about whether democracy realizes, let’s say, a Rousseauian general will and so forth. It’s just that there is this thing, the state, and how do we make it less dominating? Democracy understood broadly is the tool to do so.
That’s very much a contemporary intervention that I haven’t thought about how much it can also be traced back historically as well. But I do think that might be one way for us to think about democracy. It is how I at least historically see the fight for democracy. So if you think of the Chartists, for instance. I think it makes sense to think of them as recognising we have this British state. It allows some people to vote, but not very many, and it’s a deeply corrupt state as a result. They say we’re going to try and make it serve our purposes more than it currently does. We’re going to make it less captured by the wealthy than it currently is.
Prometheus: So when I start talking about Marxist republicanism to people they often imagine that it is just protesting against the king. How is the idea of the social republic and republicanism far more broad than that?
Yeah, I’m not sure I would argue that it makes sense for socialists or the left to start using republicanism as an organizing term. Firstly, because we have our own language, which is socialism. And secondly, it’s just so bound up with the monarchy.
I think part of republicanism, as I explained earlier, includes an absolute objection to monarchy. But I think the interesting thing about 19th century republicans is that a lot of them said we want to get rid of the monarch, but it’s not solely what we want. We want a democratic government more broadly. So who sits at the very top, might be a president or something else. But if it is a monarch, that’s actually not what matters so much to republicans as long as a host of other changes to the state are secured. I think that it is a better way to think about it. Although I will emphasize that I do want to remove King Charles, but I think we can over-focus on that at the expense of the wider structures of the state.
That might mean that adopting a specifically republican identity in some ways could just confuse more than it helps.
Prometheus: Maybe one way of rephrasing it is that it’s actually quite rare that King Charles is the one dominating you in Britain today.
I think that’s a very nice way to put it. Exactly. He’s not really the dominator in this situation.
Prometheus: We’ve created a whole host of other horrors.
Precisely.
References
- Hunt, Richard (1975), The Political Ideas of Marx and Engels – Volume 1: 1818-50, p. 240.
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