Marx and Republicanism. ‘Citizen Marx’ by Bruno Leipold
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Personally, I think they were more influenced by the French Anarchists in order to become socialists and many of their conceptions came from the French Anarchists, for me, the communist manifesto is not a communist document, it was revolutionary during their time but several of the concepts expressed in that documents were abandoned by them, and still there are many so called marxists who have not moved away further than the communist manifesto
https://jacobin.com/2024/12/marx-communist-republicanism-historical-context. How Karl Marx became a communist. I think Marx and Engels became communist when the came into contact with the Anarchists [!!!]
Oh come on now—Marx and Engels were communists before anarcho-communism was even a major anarchist tendency!; the original anarchists, such as those who helped found the First International, were mostly Proudhonists who advocated for Proudhon’s petty-bourgeois form of market socialism and small-scale handicraft production. (Proudhon himself was also far from a model anarchist by modern-anarchist standards, especially considering that he literally became a member of parliament following the 1848 Revolution in France. His later advocacy of abstentionism was also partly due to his opposition to the 1851 coup of Louis Napoleon. That, together with his repugnant misogyny, is also why many contemporary anarchists disown him entirely.) Marx’s and Engels’ communism was also present in earlier works like the Manifesto, even if they later considered certain aspects of the Manifesto obsolete (e.g. the revolutionary measures at the end of Section II). The abolition of bourgeois/private property and the control of production by society as a whole, according to a definite plan as opposed to the anarchy of capitalist production, is a central idea throughout the work. Marx’s comments on the state and political power during a revolutionary period are also largely consistent with later works like his Civil War in France. Marx and Engels themselves, in their 1872 preface to the Manifesto (i.e. after the Paris Commune), also explicitly stated that the main thrust of the work was as relevant as ever, with the exception of certain aspects mentioned above:
Marx and Engels wrote: However much the state of things may have altered during the last twenty-five years, the general principles laid down in the Manifesto are, on the whole, as correct today as ever. Here and there, some detail might be improved. The practical application of the principles will depend, as the Manifesto itself states, everywhere and at all times, on the historical conditions for the time being existing, and, for that reason, no special stress is laid on the revolutionary measures proposed at the end of Section II. That passage would, in many respects, be very differently worded today. In view of the gigantic strides of Modern Industry since 1848, and of the accompanying improved and extended organization of the working class, in view of the practical experience gained, first in the February Revolution, and then, still more, in the Paris Commune, where the proletariat for the first time held political power for two whole months, this programme has in some details been antiquated. One thing especially was proved by the Commune, viz., that “the working class cannot simply lay hold of the ready-made state machinery, and wield it for its own purposes.” (See The Civil War in France: Address of the General Council of the International Working Men’ s Association, 1871, where this point is further developed.) Further, it is self-evident that the criticism of socialist literature is deficient in relation to the present time, because it comes down only to 1847; also that the remarks on the relation of the Communists to the various opposition parties (Section IV), although, in principle still correct, yet in practice are antiquated, because the political situation has been entirely changed, and the progress of history has swept from off the earth the greater portion of the political parties there enumerated.
The struggle in the First International was between the follower of Bukanin and the Marxists that is the reason why the concept of Marxism was created by Engels and some of Marx followers. The SPGB has an article calling Bakunin a proto Leninist
https://www.marxists.org/subject/marxmyths/maximilien-rubel/article.htm
Where did Marx obtain the concept of a stateles and moneyless society, and the concept of according to their needs ? It was from the anarchists,
The followers of Proudhon avodcated for the same economic principles of the US economist Henry George which is based on the possession of the land, it is an agrarian conception similar to the Russian populists
Anarchism is older than Marx and Engels, and Europe was not the only place where Anarchism emerged. The concept of socialism/communism is older than Marx and Engels too
There were also anarchist movement in Latin American in the 1800 and the anarchists in Cuba had more influences within the working class rank than the Marxists and the Leninist
https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/angel-cappelletti-anarchism-in-latin-americaAs well in the Arabs world there were materialist philosophers. Europe is not the only place in the world where advanced political, philosophical ideas emerged
The socialist party wrote a pamphlet indicating that most of the concepts expressed by Marx and Engels in the communist manifesto already existed within the working class, and we have also indicated that the manifesto was a German manifesto and the manifesto contains certain state capitalists and reformists
clausesBefore the Paris Commune Marx and Engels had blanquist conception and Engels participated in certain armed revolts, and also they had conceptions similar to the Mensheviks.
The ethnological book of Marx shows that there were conceptual differences between Marx and Engels
“One can hardly characterize Pankhurst as a “follower of Lenin,” as you originally claimed that all left communists were, when she wrote about how he and the Russian Communist Party had “banished communism and workers’ control” in Russia.”
When I was talking about following Lenin it was more in reference to following the idea of minority anti-democratic revolution, and I didn’t say *all* left communists.
Incidentally, if you’d like to see what the SPGB has written about Pankhurst see here. The article was not written by me:
“when they were very young, both ( Marx and Engels ) they were petty bourgeois liberals”
This is a mistake in the historiography. Their early position is better categorised as radical republican.
“I think they were more influenced by the French Anarchists in order to become socialists”
At this early stage, the Proudhonists called themselves mutualists. The Anarchist tag came later.
With regards to Marx’s “the working class cannot simply lay hold of the ready-made state machinery, and wield it for its own purposes.” There’s a whole subsection in Leipold’s book about that.
In his article “Marx, Theoretician of Anarchism”, Maximilian Rubel’s point was that Marx was arguing for the abolition of the state before the likes of Proudhon (an unpleasant joke, I agree), Bakunin and Kropotkin.
https://www.marxists.org/archive/rubel/1973/marx-anarchism.htm
What is interesting is that academia is catching up with what we have been saying, in polemics against the Bolsheviks and their descendants, for over a hundred years — that Marx stood for winning control of the state and democratising it before using it to end capitalism and bring in socialism as the common ownership and democratic control of the means by which society survives.
“What is interesting is that academia is catching up with what we have been saying”
This is all just me speculating but perhaps the quality of Marx studies has been increasing due to the new generation having grown up in the post cold war era and so are more inclined to just read Marx on his own terms rather than thinking they have to attack or defend a particular state ideology that is supposedly ‘Marxist’.
Leipold says a partial influence for him beginning his project (the PhD thesis version was completed around 8 years ago) was a footnote in Quentin Skinners’ ‘Liberty Before Liberalism’. The revival of ‘republican freedom’ could be seen as something of a kickback against Berlin’s ‘Two Concepts of Liberty’. An essay some describe as an event of the cold war rather than an event in the development of philosophy!
I was thinking also of Soren Mau’s Mute Compulsion which argues that not just workers but capitalist corporations (and governments) are subject to the impersonal laws of the capitalist economic system identified by Marx to which they must comply or fail. This has long been the basis of our case, derived from Marxian economics, that capitalism cannot be reformed so as to work in the interest of the working class.
As well as Mau and Leipold, William Clare Roberts ‘Marx’s Inferno’ is another must-read of recent Marx scholarship. I’m not sure about his claim that Marx deliberately based the structure of Capital on Dante’s Inferno. But he does a good job of placing Capital within the theoretical debates that were taking place at the time of its publication. Roberts is another to highlight the republican element in Marx’s thought.
Soren Mau doesn’t seem to have come out of the republican revival. His PhD examiner was Michael Heinrich. Though of course another way of describing ‘Mute Compulsion’ would be ‘impersonal domination’.
A review of “Citizen Marx” for those that have not seen it.
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1057/s41296-025-00746-z
Leipold’s ‘Citizen Marx’ reviewed by Mike Macnair of the Weekly Worker. (He’s very fond of it.)
https://weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/1528/very-essence-of-marxism
Thanks for posting that. Macnair’s articles on that website about “socialism and civic republicanism” and ‘possibilism’ are also interesting.
Macnair writes:
“This is not exactly an argument for taking the academic civic republicans seriously. But it is an argument for taking seriously the republican heritage of our own movement: for using an improved understanding of the republican tradition – into which the academics (and particularly the historians) provide an imperfect route – as part of the necessary process of renewing Marxism in the aftermath of Stalinism.”
It seems he is still under the influence of an unmurdered idol. If the the republican influence on Marx is central, then this gives us another way of illustrating how the work of Lenin was antithetical to it, even before the Bolsheviks came to power.
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