Republicanism Was Central to Karl Marx’s Thought
The republican tradition is an oft-overlooked strain of 19th-century politics, at odds with liberalism and many currents of socialism. It was key to Karl Marx’s thinking — and he himself drove it forward.
Portrait of Karl Marx in the journal L'Illustration 1871. (API / Gamma-Rapho via Getty Images)
For Karl Marx, writing his Instructions for the Delegates of the Provisional General Council during the era of the First International, it was important to “acknowledge the co-operative movement as one of the transforming forces of the present society based upon class antagonism.” He continued that its “great merit is to practically show, that the present pauperising, and despotic system of the subordination of labour to capital can be superseded by the republican and beneficent system of the association of free and equal producers.”
Why the word “republican”? In his new book Citizen Marx, Bruno Leipold offers a brilliant, systematic study of Marx’s relationship to republicanism as a form of radical politics in his lifetime, and the heavy influence on Marx’s ideas of the republican conception of freedom. This republican conception sees freedom not as the absence of interference (as liberalism would have it) but as the absence of domination by others: of their arbitrary power over you.
Leipold’s book ought to be very widely read; though it is an academic book, it is extremely clearly written. And because, like Hal Draper’s multivolume Karl Marx’s Theory of Revolution, it places Marx’s and Friedrich Engels’s arguments in the context of their actual engagement in the politics and the left politics of their times, it should be comprehensible and useful to activists in the organized and disorganized left.
That said, I am sorry to say that it is actually likely that the activist left either will not read Leipold’s book or will read it in such a way as to minimize its differences with their existing views. The reason for this is that the spine of Leipold’s argument is that Marx and Engels, starting with a purely political democratic republicanism, were persuaded to a communism that was initially anti-political (as were the communisms of the “utopian socialists” later criticized in The Communist Manifesto and elsewhere), but then moved to a new form of communism, which placed democratic political revolution first — not as the end point, but as the necessary first step toward communism. And at the same time Marx and Engels grounded this possibility on the struggle for political power of the proletariat as a class.
The modern activist left, though it calls itself Marxist, largely consists of opponents of this policy, and supporters of the ideas of those who in Marx’s and Engels’s times were opponents of Marx and of “Marxism” (used in a derogatory sense).
Either (like the former Eurocommunists, who have not altogether gone over to the Right, and other “opponents of class reductionism”) they reject altogether Marx’s conception of the centrality of the movement of the proletariat to the project of general human emancipation. These instead favor the creation of broad alliances of the oppressed — as did Giuseppe Mazzini and other republicans who rejected class-talk and socialist-talk around 1850.
Or (the modern activist far left, who put all their faith in spectacular outbursts of action developing into a mass strike) they follow, without knowing it, the line of Mikhail Bakunin’s 1870 argument: “All the German socialists believe that the political revolution must precede the social revolution. This is a fatal error. For any revolution made before a social revolution will necessarily be a bourgeois revolution. . . .”
Or (the modern broad-frontist left or Trotskyist adherents of the “transitional method”) they follow, without knowing it, the arguments of ex-Bakuninist “possibilist” Paul Brousse in the 1880s–’90s against the “minimum program” (as Marx called it) of the 1880 Program of the Parti Ouvrier français and, in particular, against its inclusion of constitutional proposals.
1842–1880
Leipold’s account is approximately but not rigidly chronological. He begins with a chapter on Marx’s early republican journalism (1842–43). This draws out the extent to which Marx’s critique of the Prussian regime in these pieces is republican in the sense of republican political theory — that is, focused on how the regime creates domination and arbitrary power.
Chapter two, “True Democracy: Marx’s Critique of the Modern State, 1843” addresses Marx’s critique of G. W. F. Hegel on the state and Marx’s collaboration with left-republican Arnold Ruge. The preponderant theme is the arbitrary character of the state bureaucracy.
Chapter three deals with Marx’s transition to communism in 1843–45 and his political break with Ruge. Leipold sees Marx, and more sharply Engels, at this period temporarily moving into the kind of “critique of politics” typical of the socialists of the time. For them, the struggle for democracy/republicanism was to be altogether rejected in favor of a focus on economic alternatives to capitalism. But he argues that even in this period, in the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, Marx’s objections to alienated labor remain republican: shaped by its character as subjecting the worker to domination.
Chapter four, “The Red Flag and the Tricolor: Republican Communism and the Bourgeois Republic, 1848–52,” is mainly about the idea that the bourgeois republic “was an insufficient but necessary step for the emancipation of the proletariat.” Leipold stresses the novelty of this idea. He also makes the point that Marx offered very specific criticisms of the constitutional order of the French Second Republic (1848–52), which have been “perhaps the most neglected aspect of Marx’s critique”: criticisms of the directly elected presidency; of the ideas of “separation of powers” and “checks and balances”; and of the “balancing” of rights by vague “public order” limitations, in practice a selective approach that specifically undermined the proletariat’s rights. Nonetheless, the bourgeois republic did provide openings for the proletariat, in particular freedom of the press and manhood suffrage: insufficient but necessary.
Chapter five, “People, Property, Proletariat: Marxian Communism and Radical Republicanism, 1848–52” focuses on polemics between Marx and Engels and the radical republicans Karl Heinzen and William James Linton. Heinzen and Linton sought a return to or protection of small-scale private production as the foundation of republicanism, and hence opposed both the idea of the socialization of large industry and the wager on the propertyless proletariat.
Chapter six, “Chains and Invisible Threads: Liberty and Domination in Marx’s Critique of Capitalism, 1867,” contextualizes Marx’s argument from the competing perspectives on offer in the First International (Proudhonist, left-Ricardian, Comtean positivist, and so on). The narrative is largely one very familiar to Marxists, of the way in which the capitalist market produces the radical subordination of the wage-worker. Leipold’s account, however, brings to the fore the prominence of standard republican arguments about freedom and domination in Marx’s arguments.
Chapter seven, “A Communal Constitution: The Social Republic and the Political Institutions of Socialism, 1871,” centers on the Paris Commune of 1871 and Marx’s response to it in his Civil War in France. This is again a text extensively read by Marxists. But Leipold again locates Marx’s discussion in relation to the conflicting views of the Commune held by republicans. Further, a good deal of what Marx wrote was traditional democratic-republican positions (the formation of a militia, sovereign elected body, and so on). Marx insisted on the Commune as a form of self-government. This involved a radical opposition to bureaucracy that went back to his 1843 critique of Hegel.
The brief “Postface” begins with the introductory part of the 1880 program of the Parti Ouvrier français as a summary of Marx’s argument. It shows the continued necessity to argue both against ideas of a property-owning democracy and against anti-political and antidemocratic socialisms. The point, Leipold argues, is still fundamental: “Social transformation requires a constitutional setup that provides ‘the Republic with the basis of really democratic institutions.’”
As I have already indicated, I think this is a great book and one that should be very widely read. I have a couple of small issues with the argument, concerned with the absences of the English constitution before the Reform Acts of the nineteenth century (1832, 1867. . .). These, in turn, pose questions in relation to issues Leipold raises in chapter seven about how far Marx’s constitutional ideas are relevant to present politics.
The “English question” begins with Marx on Hegel on “corporations” and representation. Leipold here in passing presents the British Constitution as showing “a more modern, individual form of representation” by constituencies, in contrast to Hegel’s representation by “corporations.” But this retrojects onto the 1810s, when Hegel was writing the Philosophy of Right [Law], the post–Reform Acts constitutional order; before the Reform Acts, England’s urban population was precisely represented by “corporations”; the more modern form of geographical constituencies designed to equalize their sizes is a product of the French Revolution.
The other side of this coin is Leipold’s queries in chapter seven about how far the level of self-government and “de-professionalization” of the state proposed in The Civil War in France is actually feasible — or, at least, how far all the current levels of civil service and local government could practically be elected. He suggests that increased use of “sortition” (random choice of officials or representatives, as used in ancient Athens) might help.
Here, again, the English Constitution before the early-mid-nineteenth century could add something: the very extensive use of trial by jury, much more extensive than its modern practice; the conscript militia, and conscription of police constables and analogous local officers; the strong constitutional convention against interference with local government; the House of Lords, including the non-lawyer peers, as the ultimate court of appeal; the use of parliamentary enquiries to deal with scandals. These were all systems that involved the self-government of the property-owning classes. The Reform Acts, gradually letting hoi polloi into voting and into juries, required the reduction of the democratic/republican elements of the constitution, beginning in that same period.
The relevance of this material is that the “unreformed” English Constitution organized a country that was more economically “modern,” and a state that was more militarily effective, than the French absolutist regime celebrated as a necessary stage on the road to “modernity” by Weberians and similar writers. And aspects of this regime of local self-government have persisted in the United States down to recent times — again, in connection with a more modern economy and a more militarily effective state than is produced by the cult of bureaucratic professionalism.
Still Relevant?
The conception of the democratic republic as the necessary first step to communism was Marx’s conception: Leipold has, I think, shown this beyond rebuttal. But it is still possible to argue that Marx was wrong on this question. And it is also possible to argue that Marx’s and Engels’s conception of the road to socialism is superseded by twentieth-century developments.
I put on one side the argument for the “coalitions of the oppressed” approach. It has resulted in handing the issue of class to the right wing, producing “Vote Harris: Get Trump” and analogous results across the world, and as a result far worse outcomes for the oppressed than the old conception of prioritizing the working class.
It is nonetheless arguable that the more advanced stage of the spread of capitalism across the whole globe, and its decline at its core, means that we should focus more on socialization: the immediate need to move beyond markets and privately owned concentrations of capital as the means of coordinating human productive activities. It is certainly true that capital has created giant oligopolistic firms, which are “private” and “competitive” only in name; that the de-nationalization of publicly owned infrastructure in the “Counter-Reformation” of the 1980s has merely produced decay; and that human-induced climate change requires global planned action to respond to it. In this sense, socialization is more immediately posed than it was in the later nineteenth century.
There are two problems with this line of argument. The first is the Soviet case. Although the restoration of capitalism in the USSR has proved disastrous, it is nonetheless the case that Soviet “planning” systematically failed, and this failure lay below the decision of its bureaucratic heads to collapse their own regime in 1989–91. It failed because the Soviet bureaucracy and managerial class proved to have all the vices that Marx identified in 1843 in the Prussian bureaucracy and in Hegel’s Prussian-imaged bureaucracy as expressing the “general interest.” On the contrary, bureaucrats and managers pursue their individual turf interests, and the result is “planning irrationalities.” Democratic republicanism is essential to effective economic planning; and because it is essential to effective economic planning, it is also essential to believable socialism.
The second and more immediate is that at a low level, capital rules through the support of the managerialist labor bureaucracy — from its right wing in the “AFL-CIA” to its left wing in the full-timers of the Trotskyist left. We need to overcome this managerialist labor bureaucracy in order to actually challenge capital. There are other outworks of the capitalist state’s star-fort layers of fortifications, but this element is the furthest out. It is illusory to imagine that it is possible to fight for “workers’ democracy” against the bureaucracy, without simultaneously proposing a constitutional alternative to the capitalist state regime as such.
Marx’s republicanism, then, remains essential to any socialism that is to go beyond the endless gerbil-on-a-wheel repetitions of the far-left groups and the short-lived broad-left and people’s front attempts. Hence the extraordinary value of Leipold’s recovery of Marx’s ideas.