Bruno Leipold, "Citizen Marx: Republicanism and the Formation of Karl Marx’s Social and Political Thought" (Princeton UP, 2024)
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Welcome to the New Books Network. Hello everyone. Welcome to another episode of New Books Network. This is your host, Moteza Hajizadeh from Critical Theory Channel. Today I'm honored to be speaking with Dr. Bruno Leopold about a very interesting book that he recently published with Princeton University Press. The book is called Citizen Marx, Republicanism and the Formation of Karl Marx's Social and Political Thought.

Dr. Bruno Leopold is a fellow in political theory at London School of Economics and Political Science. He's also the co-editor of Radical Republicanism, Recovering the Tradition's Popular Heritage. Bruno, welcome to New Books Network. Hi, Montezza. Thank you so much for having me on.

I must say that when I came across this book, I was just fascinated by the title, Citizen Marx, and then I read the subheading of that, Republicanism and the Formation of Karl Marx's Social and Political Thought. Before we start talking about the book, can you just briefly introduce yourself, your field of expertise, and tell us about the idea of this book and what is different in this book about other writings of Karl Marx? Mm-hmm.

Sure. So, well, I'm a political theorist and historian of political thought based at the London School of Economics. Yes, I work on three main things. I work on the thought of Karl Marx. I work on the Republican political tradition and theories of popular democracy and especially the interrelationships between those three things. And I guess the book sits at kind of the centre of those interests.

And yeah, I mean, I guess what it's doing differently is that there hasn't been yet a book comparing Marxist thoughts to republicanism. And this is the first book to the Dozo and Dozo in a, I think, I hope, a reasonably comprehensive way, because I think that republicanism affects a lot of different aspects of Marxist thoughts. So I thought it needed to cover a lot of different aspects of Marxist thought as well. Hmm.

and i guess it's also it's true that you're uh you're analyzing the ideas of republicanism and its impact on karl marxist thinking but when i was reading the book it's also very much contemporary given whatever all the things that are happening around the world in the states and also in europe with the right of with the rise of writing populism there were a lot of things that you could kind of relate to and say well look it's still quite relevant which we'll get to talk about um

But before we start, can you just give us maybe a lay of the land? Let's say what was the dominant idea of republicanism like in the 19th century Europe? Sure, yeah. I mean, I suppose one helpful way to think about it is to compare it to the ideological landscape today. So I think that, you know, one way we are familiar with seeing political ideologies today is that you have socialists on the left, liberals in the center and conservatives on the right.

And in the 19th century, instead of socialism on the left, it was republicanism on the left, at least in Europe. So republicanism was kind of the left wing ideology. And, you know, it is slowly replaced by socialism over the course of the 19th century, in part by taking a lot of republican ideas.

And so what did republicanism mean in the 19th century? So I mean you can compare it to the other ideologies, liberalism and conservativism, and perhaps kind of the political regime that they're trying to fight for because let's say compared to Europe today which are pretty much every regime in Europe is pretty similar in some sort of constitutional representative democracy, and that wasn't the case in the 19th century where you had kind of quite competing different forms

And so conservatives were trying to fight for an absolute monarchy where you'd have a king that was kind of could rule as they wished, unconstrained by constitution and so forth. Then you have Republicans on the left fighting for a democratic republic. So with kind of universal suffrage, representative assemblies, equal civic rights for everyone. And then liberals kind of had a kind of compromise between these positions is what they call the constitutional monarchy.

that was supposed to kind of, you know, constrain the power of the king, but not go over to full democracy because they didn't believe in democracy. And that was really what distinguished Republicans from other political formations is their central belief in democracy, popular sovereignty, kind of widespread citizen participation, kind of all tied together by their particular idea of liberty, a Republican idea of liberty.

that you are unfree whenever you're subjected to arbitrary power, whether that is of an arbitrary monarch,

of various forms of oligarchy, and indeed also various forms of capitalist wage labor. And they were also critical of as well, although they had a different response than, let's say, socialists did to capitalist wage labor. Maybe that's something we can get into later on in the interview as well. Yeah, absolutely. So given that republicanism was more or less the left wing or left side of the politics, so you had also monarchy, and you start the book by saying

explaining Karl Marx's criticism of Prussia's monarchy in his early Republican journalism. What was Karl Marx's Republican journalism and what were some of these critiques that he laid against Prussia? And I'm guessing I'll get you to talk about it. He couldn't express all his ideas freely because

because of censorship. So can you talk about that aspect of the book, which you cover in your first chapter? - Yeah, so I think the censorship you mentioned is incredibly important to understanding Marx's early journalism. So it's really very restrictive. So it's a kind of what's called pre-publication censorship. So every newspaper that gets published in Prussia has to be sent to a government censor the night before it's published. And the government censor can then just literally go through chopping out bits that they don't like.

And then that's only what is allowed to be published. So that kind of informs the background of everything that Marx writes at this time. And so you're kind of what you're allowed to say in Prussia is kind of, you know, there's a little except a certain amount of, let's say, liberal criticism. But it's certainly not going to allow or not very extensively allow much more radical Republican revolutionary demands.

And so Marx has to be quite careful about how he expresses his republicanism. We know privately from his letters that he's already gone over to a republican position, but he still thinks it's important to kind of present a public face of liberalism that allows a kind of broad alliances with liberals as well as a kind of broad alliance against Prussian authoritarianism.

And so he has to be quite careful. That means that he doesn't believe in having direct frontal attacks on the Prussian monarchy as some kind of more hot-headed Republicans have been carrying out. Marx thinks it's much smarter to kind of pick out particular instances of arbitrary power within Prussia. So that includes kind of the system of government censorship itself.

It includes the kind of feudal legislatures that they had, these kind of like legislatures that are elected on the basis of socialist states, so orders. So the commoners vote for one set of representatives, the nobles for another, the princes are by right represented in the legislature. Marx criticizes this very heavily. And so this is the way he sets up his journalism as in some ways a model

more fine-grained directed attack on different aspects of prussia which actually then in the end prussia finds even more threatening to its position than the kind of more you know bombastic frontal attacks because it's a very grounded critique based on the kind of real conditions of what is going on in the rhineland which is this province of prussia and did karl marx also elaborate on the ideas of freedom and the role of citizens in his early and the importance of developing

laws that govern, I mean, citizens' roles in developing laws in his early journalism when he was in Prussia? Yeah, for sure. I mean, I think that this is really, the idea of freedom as the absence of arbitrary power is really what underlies Marx's early journalism.

And so, you know, he's attacking these various examples of arbitrary power and he makes it quite clear that they have made citizens unfree. So, you know, he says, for instance, when he's talking about the government censors, the way in which they kind of arbitrarily rule over the newspaper journalists and editors who are kind of just subjected to the arbitrary whims of this individual as to what is going to be allowed to be published.

published or not and he said this is really um makes them unfree makes border society unfree and instead he kind of contrasts that with the idea of proper press regulation in his early writings so he does believe that you know there should be proper government regulation of things of the press but that would involve bringing as he says a kind of the press under the realm of freedom because he associates freedom with um being um

the rule of law, this kind of impersonal system of rule that frees you from the kind of arbitrariness of individuals. But then crucially, he also adds, so that's also an idea that he shares with liberals and their criticisms of arbitrary power, the belief, conflate, thinking of freedom in terms of the rule of law.

But he then very much specifies that it has to be rule of law where the law is made by the people themselves. So it is collectively made law that you've imposed upon yourself. And that then doesn't limit your freedom. And that's what separates that Republican idea of freedom from the liberal idea of freedom. Karl Marx was more aligned with that Republican idea where it's the ordinary people who can develop or write these rules rather than the elites of the society. Yeah.

I guess that we'll talk about that one as well. The bourgeoisie or elite bourgeoisie or I think the term uses elite republicanism, but we'll get to talk about that. I'm also interested to know about

Hegel's ideas of constitutional monarchy and whether or not Marx agreed with him on that point. Yes, great. So once he's kind of in his public journalism, he's kind of dealing with this absolute monarchy of Prussia. And then when his newspaper is shut down by Prussia, he then kind of turns to a kind of more philosophical, theoretical critique of a constitutional monarchy and specifically Hegel's constitutional monarchy. So Hegel's often thought to be the kind of

big defender of Prussia and that's just not the case. Kegel sets up a very different political system that is, you know, much

well freer in some ways than prussia but still quite limited and politically exclusive in others and marx kind of criticizes those aspects of it so kind of critic gives what i would say is a republican critique of hegel's constitutional monarchy and now he kind of uh criticizes all aspects of hegel's setup um so hegel had said that the hegel that the state is divided into it's

principal aspect being the monarchy, the executive, by which he basically means the bureaucracy and the legislature. And in all three of those aspects, he had set up a really quite politically exclusive system. And Marx rejects all of it. So with the monarchy, where Hegel has a monarch that kind of, kind of a

points his own ministers, can pardon people. Marx sees all his examples and says that these are examples of arbitrary power. He rejects Hegel's defense of monarchical sovereignty. When it comes to the bureaucracy, Hegel has this idea that there's civil services, this kind of neutral actor within the state that is supposed to defend the common good. Marx rejects

Jekstats says that actually the bureaucracy will defend its own particular interests against the common good of society. And instead, he sketches an idea of citizens carrying out administration themselves. And then finally, with the legislature, Hegel has a really, this is really where his exclusive political idea comes up. He has no trust in the people. So he sets up an upper house that is, you know, something like the House of Lords, which is made up of hereditary landowners. The lower house is made up of propertied civil service retirees.

who are freed from any kind of direct control by the people or like binding instructions from the people. And again, Marx rejects all of that, says that no one has a hereditary right to sit in the legislature, defends a broad franchise freed from property qualifications for the lower house and says that those representatives need to be very tightly constrained by binding instructions from the people as well. And in those kind of three different ways, Marx presents a much more Republican idea of what the state should look like.

in that early Fijari writing. And was it, this idea of monarchy, constitutional monarchy, how was it different from popular sovereignty? Was it more or less the same, Hegel's ideas of popular sovereignty? Well, yes. So, I mean, so Hegel has a fairly extended discussion of monarchical and popular sovereignty, and he basically dismisses popular sovereignty as

as just an impossibility based on a kind of, I think he says a garbled notion of the people is the phrase that he uses. He just has no time for it really at all. He thinks that there has to be a singular person in whom sovereignty is bested.

And Marx instead thinks that sovereignty, you know, one way of understanding popular sovereignty is a kind of foundational moment in which the people chooses their constitution. And Marx has a more active understanding of popular sovereignty than that. So he says explicitly in his critique of Hegel that the people has a continuous right to remake their constitution as well. And if it has some deviated from the people's will, they have the right to create a new constitution as well at any moment as well. Yeah.

One thing I did not know until I read your book was that Karl Marx was not a big fan of, let's say, abolition of private property first. He initially, but he was against this idea first, but then later on he embraced that. So I'm interested to know how this change in his thinking came about.

And if that accepting, let's say the abolition of abolition of private property, did it also mean for him, did it also mean the rejection of republicanism? That's a great question. I think so. Yes, I mean, in his early republican writings, Marx criticizes early socialists for their obsession with abolishing private property. This is a very common criticism amongst republicans at the time.

And then slowly, as Marx then he moves to Paris in response to kind of Prussian authoritarianism. And it's there that he then starts to change his views about private property and about socialism and communism more broadly. He comes to see it as necessary to abolish private property in order to bring about what he thinks is a cause really human emancipation compared to just purely political emancipation.

And that then does involve a distancing from a certain republicanism as well. His earlier republicanism, he criticizes the idea that, you know, that he says, you know, you can emancipate people politically, create what he calls a free state, which is a synonym for the republic at the time.

And that you would still end up not having free people if you don't have a free society as well, if they're still constrained by private property and the unfreedoms that private property brings in the private sphere as well.

But I would also emphasize that that is only a critique of a kind of bourgeois or liberal or moderate republicanism that doesn't have any criticism of private property. As I do try to also say in the book, that Republicans, especially the more radical ends of it, do have a, as much as they defend private property, they have a belief in the private property which should be owned by all as well. So there's some nuances there as well, I would say.

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And it's interesting the term they use in the book that bourgeois republicanism, and that's what Marx was kind of rejecting because it didn't bring about, let's say, emancipation for all the people. And I think it's also a good segue to my next question, which is about the French Revolution, what happened in France in 1848, and the establishment of the French Republic. What was Marx's thoughts on the French Republic? Did

Did he accept it, embrace it? Did he think of it as, again, another example of bourgeois republicanism, which doesn't bring about social freedom for the masses? Mm-hmm.

Well, I mean, so when the bourgeois, when the republic is established in February 1848, Marx, like every radical in Europe, celebrates this as a massive step, right? They've all been calling for the creation of these, of a republic and have been waiting for this revolution to break out. And then when it spreads out from France, although France is one of the very few countries that actually goes over to a full republic,

most of the rest of Europe kind of sticks for the moment to a kind of constitutional monarchy. So France is really at the forefront and Marx welcoming this is part of his belief that a democratic republic is an essential element of bringing about communism and that separates him from other forms of socialism that don't believe that. So that is not a belief that can be taken for granted.

So that's essentially it's very important. He does accept it, but he's also at the same time very much believe that it is going to be a bourgeois republic as well. So as much as it's important, he also has criticisms of it.

And when he says it's a bourgeois republic, he kind of means three different things. He means, one, that the bourgeoisie rules politically as a class, that they will be in control of the republic. He also means that it will have a bourgeois economy, so it'll be a republic accompanied by a capitalist economy in the social sphere.

And then finally, and most interestingly, I think in some ways that it's unexpected, he also thinks that means it has a bourgeois constitution. So he also has an account of the way in which the Republic is set up constitutionally to further the rule of the bourgeoisie in the economic

economic and political spheres. And he has a very extensive account in his 1848 writings on 1848, most famously the 18th Brumaire and the class struggles in France, where he criticizes particularly the way in which the 1848 French Republic privileged the power of the president over the legislature.

and, you know, assigned various powers to him, being able to appoint your own ministers, making putting him in charge of the bureaucracy, similar criticisms that he'd actually made of the Prussian monarchy and Kegel's constitutional monarchy. And that these this very powerful executive, he believes, is going to escape the popular will and the danger in which all that sets up a president who then is able to appoint himself a

but potentially a dictator, which ends up happening when Louis-Napoleon overthrows the Republic at the end of 1851 and establishes the Second Empire. And let's talk about, we've talked about Marx, let's talk about Marx and again, Marx and Engels' conversion, let's say, to communism. You mentioned that there were

or at least Marx was critical of early strands of socialism. But what happened? How did that conversion to communism come about? And this is a term that I liked in your book, democratic communism. Can you tell us what it meant and what was the role of civic freedoms, let's say, in that democratic communism?

Well, I'm glad you picked up on that. So, yeah, they used the term democratic communism, I think, for the first time in 1845 or so. And the reason why they and this is, I think, in a in a kind of statement that they write congratulating some English radicals. I can't remember what they're congratulating them on. But and they explicitly say that, you know, we are writing as democratic communists from Germany. And the reason that they write that, of course, is because there are undemocratic forms of communism at the time.

So I think the really important thing to realize, or I try to emphasize in my book, is that early socialism and communism is united by being overwhelmingly anti-political and anti-democratic. So there is, those are quite related ideas that, you know, there is a belief that the political system

The system needs to be entirely given up on, not engaged with at all parliamentary, any kind of political reform, even revolution is just beside the point and unhelpful. And beyond that, even a lot of early communists and socialists explicitly reject democracy. They think that this is ruled by the majority, the majority that doesn't know what it's doing. They have quite principled objections to democratic rule.

And so when Marx and Engels position themselves as democratic communists, they are positioning themselves against these explicitly anti-democratic early forms of communism. And they're then saying that those features of democracy, particularly universal suffrage, you also mentioned civic freedoms, he thinks that they think that these are essential ingredients to bringing about communism and are not just things that can be just dispensed with.

when it comes to civic freedoms what so matters about them so much there is that they're contrasting um you know the situation that exists let's say in britain and france which have slightly more advanced political conditions and allow relative a relatively free press for instance compared to the german states which they don't have this government censorship mark says that this allows you know the working men's press to actually exist you know workers can have their own newspapers

And similarly also with free association as well, another important civic freedom. So Marx is very impressed by the Chartist movement in England and Britain who are fighting, this is a working class movement, fighting for a democratic constitution because the British constitution at the time excludes some 80% of people from voting.

And that's only possible at this child's movies because there is free association. And so he thinks that these rights are absolutely critical weapons that workers can use in emancipating themselves from capitalism.

I need this vision of a democratic conditions for the working class people. Were they, I mean, Marx and Engels, were they against socialism as well? Well, okay, it's interesting. I mean, I guess I wouldn't, I mean, I think that one can divide socialism and communism at this time, but it's also a difficult, everyone uses these terms in their own way somewhat. Yeah.

at the time. Socialism gets used by a broader set of people, I would say. So there are even some government reformers who think of themselves as socialists because they're interested in society.

And so then communism is considered to be a slightly more radical position in that way. But I would hesitate about making any sharp divisions between these just because you get some texts from one of Engels's very early texts about socialism. Communism just uses the two terms completely interchangeably. And lots of other writers do this as well. So I would be I would caution against doing any kind of a high divide between those terms.

uh and again let's let's go back to communism there are ideas of communism and you know um

Do you see any distinction again between their vision of communism and republicanism? I mean, let's say an ideal state of republicanism in which citizens have a role to develop rules and laws there. So do you distinguish these two from one another in their vision of an ideal society, let's say? Interesting. I mean, so I guess if we're thinking particularly, you mean on the political front? Yeah, yeah. Well, I guess that gets us into...

the larger question about what Marx and Engels thought a future communist society would look like. And I guess that a very common belief about what they are said to believe is that they think that there exists no politics, no laws, no state and so forth in the future communist society.

Now, they certainly said that they didn't believe that there would be a state in a future communist society. But actually, once we start to investigate what did that mean more generally, I think that we can separate the idea that there is no state from the idea that there is no politics. I certainly thought that Marx and Engels thought that there would be, you know, deliberation about matters of common concern and binding decisions about that. That might be one definition of what politics might mean.

And I think that, I think it's very hard to know exactly because also Marx refused to say anything very detailed about future communist society. He thought this was a kind of form of false utopianism and that he was really rejecting and other forms of socialism. So he doesn't say much, but I think what he does suggest, say, suggest that it would be quite similar to the kind of democratic structures that he thinks are essential to bringing about communism. He doesn't think that those things disappear. Perhaps some aspects of a, the, um,

of the more repressive aspects um of a state disappears kind of kind of it's more coercive aspects um

But I think that some of the more democratic elements are certainly likely to and it seems likely to stay. And that is not so different than I think from republicanism. So I think there are differences, but they're not as stark as people have sometimes emphasized. There's a kind of belief that Marx and Engels believed, as I say, into this kind of complete absence of politics. We're all just like a herd of animals without animals.

any kind of deliberation about how we should live in common. And I think I just see no evidence for Marx and Engels having believed that. And I don't see that as their separation from republicanism. So it sounds to me like there were a lot of commonalities, let's say, between Marx's vision of an ideal republicanism, also communism,

Because his idea of communism was also informed by that republicanism. Am I right? Despite all the critiques he might have had of communism. Sorry, republicanism. Yes, I mean, that's something that I'm trying to tread that line in the book, in that I'm trying to both say that republicanism is incredibly important for informing his republicanism at the same time in which he defines his communism against contemporary republicans at the same time.

So it's really this dual thing that he's just continuously drawing on and rejecting different aspects of the Republican tradition, which makes perfect sense at the time because they are, you know, key ideological elements.

opponents and allies of uh socialists at this time right in the way that the republicans in that way don't exist today right there is no identifiable republican faction apart from of course there are things called like say the republican party let's say in america but they're not republicans in the kind of deep ideological thick sense of what that means and uh let me ask you about another part of the book uh the columnists always talk about uh

the emancipation of the proletariat and how they've been in chained by these invisible chains, let's say. Why did he believe that people need to overcome both the capitalist class domination and also the domination of the market? So he didn't just focus on, let's say, one aspect of oppression or domination here. Yeah, well, I think

So I think this is, you know, if we go back to this kind of like dual integrating and rejecting, I think this is one thing where, you know, he really integrates a lot of republicanism into his social critique of capitalism is that, you know, this early critique that he had of the kind of political arbitrariness in Prussia is.

is extended into what he writes about capitalism. He extensively and repeatedly says that the arbitrary power that a capitalist has in a factory workplace to rule over their employees, make them do as they wish, makes those workers unfree in the same way that one can be unfree in the political sphere by being subjected to that arbitrary power.

And that's a very kind of like personal and direct way in which workers are ruled over by their individual capitalists. And that, you know, brings across that Republican idea to do that. Marx also extends it as well in other ways. He's also very keen to talk about the structural foundations of that personal domination that the capitalist has. So that, you know, he emphasizes the fact that workers, you know, their unfreedom of being ruled by a master who they work for.

is different to, let's say, a slave or a serf. So they are also dominated by an individual master. But workers do have an important freedom, which is to change their employer. They can work for someone else. They're not tied legally to that single employer.

But what Marx emphasizes is because they don't own any means of production, that is, they don't own their own, let's say, tools, their own factories, property and so forth. They have no choice but to work for someone. Right. They have to sell their labor to someone. And that means that though that they have the.

freedom to not work for any particular master, they do have to work for a master. So they're also structurally unfree in that sense, in addition to being unfree in having to work for that particular master once they are employed as well.

And then even more deeply, there's a sense that's, you know, a kind of domination by the individual capitalist and a domination by the capitalist class of masters. And then there's a final third form of domination that Marx emphasizes in capitalism, which is the domination of all of society by market imperatives. So the fact that everyone is driven by this ever present drive to accumulate and to produce as cheaply as possible.

as efficiently as possible, which means that even, let's say, a good capitalist who would like to not exploit his workers as much, would like to give them higher wages, shorten the working day and so forth, is driven by the competition of other capitalists to not do so. So they themselves are dominated by those market imperatives as well.

And so Marx emphasizes those three different aspects of domination. And I think that he very much uses Republican ideas and concepts to make that criticism of capitalism. And so that's a way in which republicanism informs his critique of capitalism as well.

even as maybe his alternative to capitalism is different to the Republican one. So I mentioned at the beginning that Republicans also have a critique of capitalism. So they also share this, you know, based on this idea of liberty, of freedom, that you are unfree, made unfree by wage labor because that makes you dependent on a master laborer.

The Republican response, the radical Republican response is to argue, well, then the answer to that dependency is to make everyone independent. So everyone should become a property owner. So you don't abolish private property, as socialists might be saying, but you actually make everyone universalize this private property ownership.

So they believe in various things like free credit, free education, free access to the land, abolishing inheritance, various things that are meant to equalize property owning across society or make it more equal, perhaps more accurate than it is.

And in that way, that's how Republicans think we should respond to capitalism. And Marx rejects that. He thinks, you know, he agrees with the idea that one is made dependent and unfree by capitalist relations. But he thinks that the idea that we could make everyone an independent property owner is a totally impossible social ideal because it I'm sorry, I've been talking for a while, but let's come to the end of this point that, you

He thinks that basically what it is calling for is a political economy of independent artisan workers, that is workers who kind of own their own tools and work in small kind of little workshops and free peasant proprietors who kind of own their own bit of land and work it themselves.

And this vision of independence that suggests he thinks is just entirely going to be destroyed and is being destroyed as he is writing by the efficiencies of large scale industrial capitalism that kind of just brushes aside these earlier forms of independent production.

which, you know, Marx thinks has something to say for it, but he thinks it's just entirely when you look at the realities of political economy and the historical direction of change is just being pushed aside. And so the only answer to really establish freedom as an absence of domination of arbitrary power in the modern world is to try and build on the advances of capitalism, to build on the efficiencies of these large-scale industries and to socialize all of those means of production. And that way one realizes fundamentally

freedom as non-domination rather than the Republican response to capitalism. When you were talking about republicanism idea of that it is possible to have private ownership but in that aspect that Marx rejected I was just reminded of John Dewey's idea of property owning democracy if I'm not mistaken that's a phrase

Is that in a way, is it in a way echoing that idea of republicanism? Oh, that's great. Yes, yes. So this idea of a property-owning democracy, which...

You know, it gets used by various 20th century and also more recently 21st century thinkers is, I think, something that has a certain similarity to 19th century Republican ideas. So if a property owning democracy is particularly about the idea to someone like John Rawls, for instance, a famous liberal, but actually a liberal who actually is led by... I think I said John Deere. That was my mistake. I meant John Rawls. Oh, sorry. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

So John Rawls, you know, he's, you know, he's led by his liberal principles to actually a critique of capitalism. And he says socialism might be one answer, but another that he's slightly more favorable to is this idea of property owning democracy, which is this kind of to spread productive assets as broadly as possible within society and to assure that there's a kind and that, you know, realizes his kind of abstract principles of justice.

And so there's a certain similarity there to that 19th century Republican idea, this kind of broadly held productive property across society that, you know, for the Republicans leads to an absence of independence and rules, rights, similar things as well. I'd say that there's some difference that at least with rules and I think other kind of advocates of property and democracy is that they don't have that connection to this artisan and peasant small scale democracy.

political economy vision as much. So they don't, I would say that they are, I think, thinking much more about an advanced industrial society. So there are similarities and then that difference, I would say, between that property of democracy idea.

Let me ask you another question about, let's get back to the book and the idea of Paris Commune. It did have an important role on Karl Marx's ideas. So I'm interested to know if the role of Paris Commune on his ideas of political institutions that are necessary to form socialism. Can you talk about the impact of Paris Commune on Marxist thoughts? Yeah, so...

the Paris commune thing is incredibly important for the development of Marxist thought. So the Paris commune, just to give a quick summary, as in 1871, the kind of a really quite unique thing where the workers of Paris almost by accident take over the city of Paris, eject the government, well actually the government flees, the national government flees to Versailles, and suddenly the workers of Paris find themselves in control of Paris.

And it's an incredible moment. I mean, you can imagine. I mean, imagine that today the national government of the UK was kicked out of London and had to retreat to Windsor, something like that. Right.

And in they and they kind of carry out a radical democratic experiment with kind of all kinds of ways. And it only lasts for six weeks because the Versailles government then attacks and takes over and brutally kills thousands of people and putting down the Paris commune.

And so for Marx, it's so important because it really confronts him with the idea of what political institutions does he believe are going to be important for socialism and to give a much more detailed account than he did previously. So, you know, I mentioned the fact that he already in 1848 had thought that democratic institutions were essential to socialism and that was different to anti-democratic communists.

But he hadn't fleshed that out in much detail and he really only reduced it to a quite simple, simple account about universal suffrage and civic freedoms. Right. That being the kind of central part of democracy. And now when it comes to the Paris commune, he starts to give a lot more bones and says it has to be much more extensive and more deeply democratic for that than that.

So to give you some sense of what he means, so in terms of, let's say, representation and our elected representatives, Marx now says that it's absolutely essential that they are subjected to binding instructions by the people, that we have the right to recall those representatives when they don't act in the ways that we agree with, that we should have much more frequent elections and they should also be paid workers' wages to reduce the difference, the gap between the people and the representatives who rule over them.

And that way, Marx thinks that you turn a system where I think he says something along the lines of where a class of rulers misrepresents the people in parliament to kind of popular sovereignty, having a real meaning for the people. So that's what it means in terms of representation. In terms of administration, Marx makes a similar argument about the kind of holding power.

rulers to account. So he says that civil servants, senior civil servants, it seems he means, are elected by the people as well. So they're not just kind of elite professional bureaucrats. They are elected. They are subjected to recall as well. And he thinks that this entire bureaucratic system, it's repressive and

civil service aspect has to be subordinated to legislative control, which he thinks is the democratic element in society. And suggesting a much more popular vision of what public administration should look like.

And, you know, that, as I, you know, maybe we talked about at the very beginning of the interview, is really quite similar to some of the things he wrote about in his very earliest Republican writings in, for example, his critique of Hegel. And so what you see is that his very earliest kind of more radical Republican ideas coming back at the towards the end of his life. Well, he lives for another 10, 12 years after the Paris coming, but later on in his life as essential elements in his account of what he

would bring about socialism in terms of the political institutions that are required to do so. Oh, I can't hear you, Mateo. Sorry, I forgot to unmute my microphone. I do like to have a couple of other questions. But, you know, when I was reading your book, and again, throughout this interview, I think it's quite clear. So Mark started with, is there any journalism with a critique of socialism?

monarchy, critique of Hegel's idea of a constitutional monarchy. He developed his idea of, he embraced parts of the ideology of republicanism. He developed his ideas of socialism or communism. So it seems that one of the main political ideas or political ideas in Karl Marx's political thought is freedom.

rather than maybe the idea of a community or equality. And I think it's one of the misconceptions that when people talk about Karl Marx, they say for the uninitiated, of course, they would say, yeah, Karl Marx wanted absolute equality for all. But I know that is way, way more complex than that. But I guess one of the, and it is part of the old book as well, the argument is that one of the main political ideas for Karl Marx was freedom.

So can you talk about that? Is it freedom or equality? Because a lot of people might have that misconception of equality rather than freedom. Yeah. So I think that Marx's central political value is freedom. He is a thinker of freedom, I would say. And he says, you know, this connection to equality is, you know, sure, central to socialist thought, but it's really not nearly as central to Marxist thought.

I mean, he says very explicitly, so like this idea of absolute equality, he rejects it in a text known as Critique of the Agatha Programme. He says that he, you know, this kind of idea that you could just equalize across all of society is doesn't take any difference of the, you know, our different needs. And for instance, and that people have, you can't just equalize, you know, wealth and income because people and people have different requirements.

And of course, we can have more complicated conceptions of equality. It doesn't have to mean that absolute leveling in that way. But that's what Marx takes equality to mean. And it's one reason he opposes it. And instead, the value he appeals to so repeatedly in his writings is the idea of freedom, the idea that we should be emancipated, liberated from these various forms of arbitrary power that exists in the world, whether that is

the arbitrary power that Prussian government censors, bureaucrats, feudal legislatures, even more the kind of ways in which even bourgeois democratic and political institutions, by having these representatives that are kind of freed from control of the people, all of these things are examples of domination. And then of course, most centrally for Marx, also the idea of why capitalism makes people unfree.

that people are subjected in their workplace to the dominating power of an employer, that they don't have the choice to work for anyone but an employer, and that all of society is driven by these market imperatives. All of these things are examples of unfreedom. And Marx believed that those things needed to be overcome in order to have free citizens, free people, free society.

And though I would, yeah, that I hope that comes across in the book is that is this value. I mean, of course, there are other aspects, I should say, that to Marx's idea of freedom, he sometimes connects it to an ideal of self-fulfillment and self-realization. Those are aspects of Marx's thought about freedom.

But I think we've not sufficiently grasped the point, the way in which one very important aspect of what he's saying about freedom is this absence of dominating control by others. And he thinks that that is, you know, completely...

widespread in the modern world and despite the fact that it um you know of course it was um true of also of other times in human history but in the contemporary world it's kind of obscured by a belief that actually let's say we are free when we sell our labor to um to a capitalist because we do so by our own will and mark says well this is actually the reasons why you're not free when you make that choice and once you show up at work as well you're not free once you get past the factory gate

And so in those various ways, I think that Marx was a thinker of freedom. And this is when I discuss this Karl Marx's ideas, and I'm not an expert by no means, but I've read bits and pieces here and there. And to me, it's to me myself, even a few years ago, I came, I had all those misconceptions of Karl Marx as being all about equality for all.

But then I started reading his writings and, you know, I came to realize it. And to me, it was a revelation. And I still, when I talk to my friends, they don't believe me. I said, well, you got to stop watching YouTube videos on Karl Marx. Yeah. And I think a couple of, you know, there was last year, I did another interview about a book called The Hidden Story of Capitalism. It was a small book again, published by Princeton or the untold history story or capitalism, the story behind the word. Yeah.

And I forgot the name of the author. Michael Sonsher. Yes, Michael Sonsher. You're right. Yeah. So I talked with him. And again, in that book, he also highlights the fact that Karl Marx was not for freedom for all. Sorry, equality for all. He didn't believe in the idea of equality for all. It's much more complex. So I'm glad that it also comes up in this book. But again, to me, the good thing about the book was that that idea of fight for freedom or how the idea of republicanism impacts his thoughts throughout his life.

life journey, it comes across quite strongly that he's also a philosopher of freedom. And I guess Hegel is also sometimes called a philosopher of freedom and Karl Marx as well for that matter. And maybe I just want to ask your thoughts about more or less about contemporary landscape of politics, especially in the United States, or even all other over Europe people are worried about

the kind of democracy and especially these days in America everybody's talking about how we're losing our what these some people are talking about how we're losing our democracy our freedoms and again that idea of freedom and that idea of not having absolute not one one president or one prime minister having absolute power to change everything uh

Do you see any, let's say, resonances with the themes in your book and Karl Marx's thoughts on freedom and republicanism? Well, I suppose one resonance that I'm repeatedly reminded of and surprises me because it wasn't why I wrote the book is necessarily is just Marx's critique of presidential power.

which is a repeated concern for him. I mean, particularly, you know, as I said in the 1848 writings, he really worries about the way in which, you know, a directly erected president gets this kind of almost divine, a power of almost divine right. They are kind of elected monarch in a way and all the powers that follow by being able to, you know, appoint who you want and pardon who you want and so forth.

And that, of course, seems suddenly surprisingly relevant again in a moment in which we have a very dangerous president in the United States who has been, you know, and through the offices of the president

and the kind of seeming legitimacy that's given him and the actual powers that he has that have, I think, been acquiesced to him also by the kind of growth of presidentialism across different parties, Democrat and Republican in America.

And the danger that that presidential power now poses to that republic, which is certainly not a very democratic republic, and certainly not a very free republic from my perspective, but looks like it might very well end up to be even less democratic than it was before, and might even in some form be the end of that republic, which seems incredible.

something that we really wouldn't have thought even just a few years ago. Yeah, especially that now he's even talking about the third term in the White House. It's, yeah. Are you working on another project, another book? I know that you have recently finished this one and I could tell that you put a lot of time and effort in researching this book. So you might want to take a short break. But is there any other project you're currently working on that might come up in the near future? No.

Yeah, well, I mean, I took a bit of a break after the book, but I keep getting drawn back in. And well, one thing I mean, so, you know, I talked a lot about this idea of what political institutions are necessary for socialism. And that's kind of an idea that that's been driving my research now. So I'm very interested in

What democratic institutions do we think would be, what institutions, political institutions would bring about real democracy compared to what the kind of thing that we've been sold as democracy today? And whether those political institutions could in fact be used to break down oligarchy and lead to a more socially free society?

And so I've got a paper that hopefully should be published soon, which is trying to argue about ways in which you could use random selection. So the idea of sortition to control representatives. So I propose an idea of constituency juries where you take a random selection from the constituency and they would be charged with holding the representative accountable to that constituency.

And in that way, I hope that it kind of breaks some of the oligarchic tendencies that elections and elected representatives have.

And so that kind of grows out a little bit of what Marx had to say about the Paris Commune and this idea of the importance of being able to properly hold your representatives to account and how they can otherwise escape popular control. Great. I'm really looking forward, if it turns into a book, I'm really looking forward to being able to speak to you about that book here again.

Thank you very much, Dr. Bruno Leopold. And the book we just discussed was Citizen, Mark, Republicanism, and the Formation of Karl Marx's Social and Political Thought, published by Princeton University Press. Thank you so much for your time. Thank you so much, Matan. Thank you. Thank you.