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to practically show, that the present pauperising, and despotic system of the subordination of labour to capital can be superseded by the republican and beneficent system of the association of free and equal producers.”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.