What We Are Reading Today: Citizen Marx by Bruno Leipold

In Citizen Marx, Bruno Leipold argues that, contrary to certain interpretive commonplaces, Karl Marx’s thinking was deeply informed by republicanism.
Marx’s relation to republicanism changed over the course of his life, but its complex influence on his thought cannot be reduced to wholesale adoption or rejection. Challenging common depictions of Marx that downplay or ignore his commitment to politics, democracy, and freedom, Leipold shows that Marx viewed democratic political institutions as crucial to overcoming the social unfreedom and domination of capitalism.
One of Marx’s principal political values, Leipold contends, was a republican conception of freedom, according to which one is unfree when subjected to arbitrary power.
Placing Marx’s republican communism in its historical context—but not consigning him to that context—Leipold traces Marx’s shifting relationship to republicanism across three broad periods. One of Marx’s great contributions, Leipold suggests, was to place politics (and especially democratic politics) at the heart of socialism.