Miguel Afonso Caetano<p>"Bruno Leipold’s Citizen Marx presents a compelling, deeply researched, and elegantly written analysis of Marx’s relationship to republicanism, and it will no doubt become an important point of reference in future discussions about Marx’s thought.Based on fresh, close readings of Marx—including canonical texts such as The Communist Manifesto and Capital, as well as lesser-known articles and notebooks—and discussions of an impressive body of scholarship, Leipold reconstructs the intellectual trajectory that led Marx to articulate a powerful republican communism as the alternative to the despotic power of capital.</p><p>In the mid-nineteenth century, to be a “republican” meant fighting for a free and democratic political system based on universal (male) suffrage, in opposition to defenders of absolute monarchy and liberalist defenders of constitutional monarchy. The central political value of republicanism is freedom, understood in a purely negative sense as nondomination, or, the absence of arbitrary power—that is, not just the absence of actual interference, but of the very possibility of interference. Leipold’s core claim is that Marx’s critique of capitalism, as well as his thoughts on revolutionary strategy and the communist future, developed through a sustained dialogue with republican currents.<br>(...)<br>In this way, Marx and Engels occupied a unique and powerful position in the radical political landscape of the mid-nineteenth century: a republican communism grounded in an unshakable belief in the proletariat’s capacity for self-emancipation, against both antipolitical communists and anticommunist republicans (and, needless to say, defenders of monarchy)."</p><p><a href="https://spectrejournal.com/marxs-republican-communism/" rel="nofollow noopener" translate="no" target="_blank"><span class="invisible">https://</span><span class="ellipsis">spectrejournal.com/marxs-repub</span><span class="invisible">lican-communism/</span></a></p><p><a href="https://tldr.nettime.org/tags/Marx" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#<span>Marx</span></a> <a href="https://tldr.nettime.org/tags/Republicanism" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#<span>Republicanism</span></a> <a href="https://tldr.nettime.org/tags/Politics" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#<span>Politics</span></a> <a href="https://tldr.nettime.org/tags/Communism" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#<span>Communism</span></a> <a href="https://tldr.nettime.org/tags/Capitalism" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#<span>Capitalism</span></a> <a href="https://tldr.nettime.org/tags/Capital" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#<span>Capital</span></a> <a href="https://tldr.nettime.org/tags/Democracy" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#<span>Democracy</span></a></p>