How did Marx come to the ideas that are today most associated with this revolutionary politics? This is a question with surprisingly complex answers. Most people who call themselves Marxists today are aware that Marx began his political trajectory as a Young Hegelian, but that he famously "turned Hegel upside down". But, as Bruno Leipold's wonderful new book shows, this is not enough to understand Marx's politics. Leipold argues that to understand Marx's communism, one has to understand its evolution from Marx's roots in Republicanism. He goes on to conclude that Marx's politics have to be seen as developing in both opposition to, and in debt to, the republican tradition.
Marx began his political career as a radical republican who believed that "the arbitary power of despotic regimes" had to be overcome and replaced with a democratic republic where people held democractic power and controlled their elected representatives "through binding mandates". While initially sharing a republican critique of communism, as Marx became a communist himself he "incorporated the republican opposition to arbitary power into his social critique of capitalism" retaining the belief in a democratic republic. Later, in response to the
1871 Paris Commune, Marx further developed his vision of democracy into one that meshed with his earlier radical views "returning to ideas he had defended as a young republican". Of course this was not a reversal, but a development of his radical democracy that "emphasized the need for a much more encompassing emocratic transformation of government."
These three stages are examined in detail in Leipold's book. The first section, which looks at Marx's republican ideas and the republican milieu he was active in is particularly interesting. Leipold begins with the progressive and radical nature of republicanism in the early to mid 19th century, but also its limitations. Marx's "shift from republicanism was driven by a growing disillusionment with the ability of political emancipation, through a democratic republic, to establish truly human emancipation" together with a growing understanding of the unique role of the working class as an agent for change. It is worth noting in passing though Leipold's point that few 19th century republicans "would be satisfied by democracy today". Their radicalism, was a genuine radicalism, but it was born from a utopian belief that everyone could be equal despite class divisions.
That said, and in something I found particularly illuminating, Leipold argues that we must see 19th century republicanism as a "distinct political movement". While liberals might form alliances against the monarchy with republicans at the time, they all "disagreed on the regime that should replace it". Republicanism was a political movement that fought for the "introduction of democracy and popular sovereignty" but with a "distinctive conception of liberty, understood as the absence of arbitrary power or domination". But as Leipold goes on to show this manifests, not as a republican vision for a society free of private property with the means of production held in common, but rather a semi-backward vision of a society of small producers.
Marx became radical within these frameworks but broke with them through a critical engagement both with social movements and with systematic studies of politics and political models. In 1843 Marx
condemned the despotic treatment of subjects and the exclusion of the mass of citizens from political particuipation that resulted from the arbitrary rule of absolute monarchs. In his critique of Hegel, Marx rehected his constitutional model of monarchy, which Marx argued only fractionally extended participation to the king's ministers, bureaucrats and the propertied elite. Marx expressed a preference for a republic over a constitutional monarchy, but also criticized the Maerican model of a republic, where the people were still estranged from the political sphere and consigned to particularism of civil society.
In constrast to these Marx proposed a "true democracy" where "people would hold active sovereign power through the popular administration of general interests... and the tight control over representatives through binding instructions [mandates]." Here I am particularly take with the word "active". It demonstrates that even then Marx's commitment to a popular participatory democracy with constant political engagement. Far more radical than our current democracy with its brief election periods every few years. It is this vision of democracy that re-emerges in 1871 when the Paris Commune explodes.
Around the same time as this, Marx was also going through a change in his attitude to communism. Leipold argues he was "sympathetic" but not convinced in the early 1840s. Marx heads to Paris to challenge communism, but ends up being converted. But, crucially, Leipold writes that "Marx did not so much convert to communism as fashion a new form of it".
This change is rooted in Marx's growing concern with the State as a body that could "not truly free people from obstacles to their freedom, it only relegated those obstacles to civil society". The republican critique of freedom was that people could never be free in a society where a ruler can make them behave in a particular way due to their power over them. Marx concluded that "in order to be free, a person has to live not only in a free state but in a free society". This insight takes Marx into the idea of revolutionary emancipation, whereby proletarian revolution coul lead to the "dissolution of all estates".
If property was the root of power, then a propertyless society could be the basis for a new set of social, political and economic relations that would bring in real freedom. Marx's conversion to communism is remarkably rapid. His time in Paris, described by Leipold as a time of politically sharp debates and engagement with socialist ideas, sees Marx develop a set of ideas that "could no longer be plausibly contained undert the banner of republicanism and democracy and amounted to an encompassing ideological and political conversion to communism."
But it was the revolutionary period of 1848/9 that cemented Marx's understandings of communism and the role of the working class in constructing a society based on freedom. While celebrating the overthrow of monarchies, Marx could also understand that the new bourgeois order was inadequate. As Leipold writes:
For Marx, the bourgeois republic was essentially a change in the political scaffolding that didn't touch the underlying social building... So closely did Marx associate the republic with being simply the poltiical accompaniment of bourgeois society that he often used 'republic' and 'bourgeois republic' interchangeably... Conflating the republic with the bourgeois republic also served Marx's political purpose of highlighting what he took to be the emancipatory limits of republicanism... Achieving the republic would, Marx stressed, not live up to the idealistic hopes of its supporters but instead cement the bourgeois transformation of society.
If the bourgeois republic offered only illusionary freedom to people then what sort of society could offer genuine freedom? Here Leipold usees Marx's Capital to explore how his understanding of capitalism allowed him to develop a vision of socialism and democracy that broke further from republicanism. Marx begins with a critique of the utopian vision of small producers as the basis for egalitarian society. Such a society was one that would be a step backward from the capitalist economy because such a collection of independent producers, isolated from each other, could not utilise the "gains from cooperation, division of labour, the application of scientific and technicalknowledge" and, in a phrase I found particularly insightful, "doomed it in the face of a mode of production that could".
Leipold writes that Marx, "recognised that the political form of bourgeois society, the bourgeois republic, was an inappropriate political form for bringing about communism". But how could a socialist society utilise these capitalist developments? Famously Marx says the "working class cannot simply lay hold of the read-made State machinery, and wield it for its own purposes". This line comes from Marx's writings on the Paris Commune, It was the Commune that allowed Marx to glimpse for the first time how a radical transformation of workers' relations to the means of production would usher in new forms of democracy and a new epoch of freedom. For some republicans, the opposite was true. The Giuseppe Mazzini said that the Commune's violence "ruined the possibility of national unity". Marx however saw in the Commune the possibilty of a new form of unity that shattered apart bourgeois society and constructed something new. Indeed this was a new shift in Marx's conception of the "social republic" where it was a specific form suited to maintaining and bringing about working-class social and political rule". As Marx writes:
The cry of 'Social Republic', with which the revolution of February [1848] was ushered in by the Paris proletariat did but express a vague aspiration after a Republic that wsa not only to supersede the monarchical form of class rule, but class rule itself. The Commune was the positive form of that Republic.
Crucially it was the active democratic engagement with society of working people coming together with their control of the economy that made the Commune that "positive form". Here Marx could celebrate the Parisian workers who, out of their struggle, implemented the radical vision of democracy that Marx himself had argued for in his younger republican days. The right to recall elected representatives, the payment of such representatives appropriate wages, and the ability to mandate. It was this active and real, albeit short lived, experiment in radical democracy that gave Marx the final insight into how a communist society could function.
Out of these discussions Leipold explores what freedom and equality mean. His final argument brings together earlier themes around politics, arguing that Marx was clear that politics would not vanish after the transition to communism, but take on new forms. Insightfully Leipold also argues that the argument for freedom in the sense Marx (and republicans) used it has an importance today. It means freedom from arbitary control, dictorial power and being tied to the capitalist accumulation machine. We aren't free, not because we don't have the appropriate definition of freedom in a constitution, but because workers cannot be free when they are forced to work for the capitalists - one where we are trapped by the "despotic system of the subordination of labour to capital". Leipold argues, that the "terrain of freedom has too easily been abandoned to conservatives and liberals". We need to win it back as part of a struggle for an emancipatory vision of socialism.
Bruno Leipold's book is a remarkable, and fresh, engagement with Marx's work. For me it opened up whole new areas of thought and refreshed my thinking around key concepts such as freedom, the state, and democracy. But above all I found it an exciting and stimulating reminder of why Marx's ideas remain crucial to the fight for human emancipation. Those whose understanding of Marxism is constrained by that articulated by supporters of Stalin or the regimes in China or Eastern Europe, would do well to engage with this account Marx's deeply human vision of socialism. Citizen Marx has deservedly won the Isaac and Tamara Deutscher Prize, I hope that the publishers bring out an affordable paperback soon for the thousands of people who would gain so much from reading it. It is my book of the year.
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Marx - Capital Volume I
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Löwy - The Theory of Revolution in the Young Marx
Saito - Marx in the Anthropocene: Towards the Idea of Degrowth Communism
Draper - The Dictatorship of the Proletariat from Marx to Lenin
