Marx, Republicanism and Representative Institutions

• In Event: Histories and Possibilities of “Instituent Power”

Abstract

Marx is sometimes presented as having a nearly wholly negative view of representation and representative institutions. Drawing on arguments from my forthcoming book, Citizen Marx: Republicanism and the Formation of Karl Marx’s Social and Political Thought (Princeton: 2024), I contest this interpretation by exploring the continuities and shifts in Marx’s views across three periods: his early republicanism, his shift to communism and his later synthesis of republicanism and communism after the Paris Commune. In Marx’s early writings he critiqued both Prussia’s feudal representative institutions and the liberal models of Britain and France for their exclusion of the people through property qualifications and failure to realize the common good, while sketching a radical alternative with extensive political participation and tight control over representatives. When Marx converted to communism, he carried with him many of his republican commitments, including the importance of manhood suffrage and legislative supremacy over the executive, but some of his more radical views of representation receded into the background. With the outbreak of the Paris Commune, however, Marx returned to his early ideas and defended the necessity of extensive popular control over representatives through imperative mandates, recall and frequent elections. I conclude with a discussion of how Marx’s views on representation might be developed for contemporary radical politics.

Author

• Bruno Leipold, LSE