Coalition Socialism
Coalition Socialism
The intertwined relationship between liberalism and socialism offers important lessons for today’s fractious intra-left fights.
Citizen Marx: Republicanism and the Formation of Karl Marx’s Social and Political Thought
by Bruno Leipold
Princeton University Press, 2024, 440 pp.
The Political Theory of Liberal Socialism
by Matthew McManus
Routledge, 2024, 268 pp.
In June, somewhere between 4 and 6 million Americans showed up to No Kings Day demonstrations in more than 2,100 cities and towns across the country. Observers estimated that this was the largest single-day protest in U.S. history since 1970, exceeding the mass demonstrations of the civil rights and anti–Vietnam War movements, the anti–Iraq War protests of 2003, and the mobilizations against police brutality after the murder of George Floyd in 2020. Indivisible, the progressive protest organization formed during Donald Trump’s first administration, led the organizing effort. A sprawling coalition of over 200 other groups, including labor unions, advocacy groups, and faith-based organizations, joined them in a massive show of defiance against the Trump administration’s drive to consolidate an authoritarian, oligarchical, and white supremacist regime.
The country’s largest socialist organization, Democratic Socialists of America, was conspicuously absent from the list of sponsoring organizations, though many DSA members (myself included) and local chapters mobilized for marches and rallies in their own capacities. Unfortunately, this was consistent with the political orientation of DSA’s current national leadership, whose majority is too wary of working in coalition with organizations and movements that are not explicitly socialist.
This was not, of course, the first time socialists took a sectarian stance toward developments outside their own ranks, nor will it be the last. Despite this stubbornly persistent tendency, however, the socialist movement has often been enriched and renewed through engagement with other political traditions and movements. In the present moment, traditions like republicanism and liberalism, which are rooted in opposition to arbitrary and despotic modes of rule, seem particularly worthy of engagement.
In his excellent book Citizen Marx, the political theorist Bruno Leipold demonstrates in great detail how important such engagement was to Karl Marx himself. Leipold argues that the traditional account of Marxism’s three main sources—German philosophy, English political economy, and French socialism—is incomplete, because it omits the formative role of nineteenth-century European republicanism in Marx’s political thought. Among its many valuable contributions to the vast literature on Marx and Marxism, Citizen Marx establishes, against critics like Hannah Arendt, how fundamentally political and democratic Marx’s socialism was.
In On Revolution, Arendt takes Marx to task for his “obsession with the social question and his unwillingness to pay serious attention to questions of state and government.” Under Marx’s baleful influence, she argues, revolutionaries traded the struggle for political freedom for the conquest of bread for the masses—a fateful turn that signaled the arrival of new and even more terrible despotisms. Yet while Marx’s conceptions of politics, state, and government are certainly not above criticism, Leipold conclusively shows how such judgments more accurately “descri[be] . . . the antipolitical forms of socialism that Marx tried to displace.” For Marx, it was precisely by the achievement of political freedom through the establishment of a democratic republic that “the social question” would be solved.
A strong orientation toward democratic political action differentiated the socialism of Marx and Engels from the communitarian socialisms of Robert Owen, Charles Fourier, Saint-Simon, and other “utopian” socialists of the early nineteenth century. Owen, for example, thought that a socialist transition would come about through the spread of small-scale intentional communities, like his New Lanark in Scotland or New Harmony in Indiana. “This communitarian transition to socialism,” Leipold notes, “was deliberately developed in contrast to the republican insistence on political reform.” The British workers of the Chartist movement who campaigned for manhood suffrage, annual parliamentary elections, equal representation, and other political reforms were, in Owen’s view, wasting their time. By setting up cooperative communities under the patronage of enlightened industrialists, the workers of the world would win “emancipation from their present sufferings by a much shorter and surer course than through political agitation.”
Marx, who had closely followed the Chartist struggle for democracy in Britain, rejected these antipolitical socialisms and developed a new kind of republican socialism (Leipold uses “socialism” and “communism” interchangeably throughout the book). “One of Marx’s great contributions,” Leipold contends, “was to place politics (and especially democratic politics) at the heart of socialism.” This in itself is not an original insight: Michael Harrington, for example, argued in his 1972 book Socialism that “what set [Marx and Engels] off from all other radicals of the time was their insistence on the democratic character of the coming revolution.” What is new about Citizen Marx is how conclusively Leipold documents this political commitment, through exhaustive research into Marx’s fruitful engagement with the republican tradition.
The thinkers and agitators Marx grappled with wanted to overthrow autocratic regimes and establish new republics that guaranteed equal civil and political rights for all. They also recognized that such rights could not be guaranteed without an economic system that counteracted social inequality and prevented citizens from sinking into a state of material dependency on employers. For radical republicans like Félicité de Lamennais and William James Linton, freedom meant the absence of arbitrary power—in Leipold’s words, a state of “not being subjected to the will of another and instead having democratic control over the laws to which one was subject.” The republican conception of freedom aspires not merely to noninterference, but rather to non-domination; domination still exists even where masters treat their subjects with liberality and kindness. Lamennais, Linton, and other nineteenth-century republicans expanded older, more aristocratic conceptions of republicanism downward and outward, from a rejection of monarchical rule to a rejection of the social dependency of women and workers.
This sounds a lot like socialism. But radical republicans were not necessarily socialists. They wanted a democracy of widely distributed, small-scale property ownership, and thought the collectivization of property would lead to a new system of despotism. To Marx, modern capitalist development—with its massive industrial enterprises and a burgeoning world market—had scheduled this essentially artisanal vision for extinction. The property question was thus the main dividing line between republicans and socialists, and in retrospect both Marx and his republican interlocutors had a point. Marx was right to insist that capitalist expansion could help lay the foundations of a free and equal society, but the communist experience has vindicated republican fears of full collectivization by the state.
The social-republican tradition that Leipold excavates is of more than academic interest. Its emphasis on freedom as a cardinal political value, and on the struggle against domination as a potential link between different emancipatory movements, has practical importance for building coalitions and alliances on the left. It may also give socialists an effective counter to conservative claims that any kind of socialism is the road to serfdom. Through its insistence on freedom from all forms of domination, including domination by repressive and anti-democratic states, republicanism can help the socialist movement address some of its traditional blind spots and reach beyond the already converted.
Nineteenth-century liberals also wanted to topple despotic regimes and establish basic civil and political rights, but not all of them were comfortable with mass politics or working-class participation in affairs of state. Liberals “believed in the importance of representative government,” Leipold writes, “but rejected extending the suffrage to all, maintaining that political participation should be limited to the capable through property and educational qualifications on the vote.” If the property question divided republicanism from socialism, then the question of democracy was the dividing line between republicanism and liberalism.
While it is certainly true that many liberals opposed democracy on elitist grounds, Leipold’s sharp distinction between liberalism and democracy is overly categorical. As Matthew McManus reminds us in The Political Theory of Liberal Socialism, “it is more accurate to speak about liberalisms than liberalism.” Even in the nineteenth century, there were liberalisms with an affinity for democracy, and even for certain conceptions of socialism.
McManus describes his book as an exercise in “retrieval,” a concept borrowed from the Canadian political theorist C.B. Macpherson. In McManus’s summary, retrieval entails reconstructing “the key ethical commitments of a tradition which ha[s] become occluded, calcified, or perverted into ideology over time”—in this case the tradition of liberal socialism. In doing so, he seeks to build a canon of liberal socialist ideas and thinkers ranging from John Stuart Mill in the mid nineteenth century through Charles W. Mills, Chantal Mouffe, and Axel Honneth in the twenty-first.
McManus seeks to convince the reader that “liberal ideology can be detached from support for capitalism and that socialism can be made conciliable with liberalism.” This is no easy feat, considering that the very word “liberal” has become an all-purpose term of opprobrium on today’s left. The sorts of labor-liberals whom Harrington once sought to win over to a project of social democratic reform are long gone. For many younger socialists, you can’t spell liberalism without the prefix “neo.” For them, Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton is the paradigmatic liberal, not Shirley Chisholm or Ted Kennedy. Nevertheless, whether they admit it or not, even the most avowedly anti-liberal socialists take the basic predicates of liberalism—including the freedom to publicly criticize liberalism—for granted. So I am very sympathetic to McManus’s goal, and his book is an admirable first step toward developing a distinctive conception of liberal socialism. There are, however, notable gaps in his canon and lingering questions about how he reconciles liberalism and socialism.
Many Marxists and liberals posit an organic relationship between liberalism and capitalism and deny the former is compatible with socialism. McManus seeks to refute this idea. All liberals, he contends, share a “commitment to the normative equality, or equal worth, of all human beings and, relatedly, their fundamental entitlement to equal liberty in civil society.” These commitments, however, are not enough to get from liberalism to socialism. To do that, McManus introduces republicanism and the hybrid figure of the “republican liberal,” who embraces the principles of solidarity or fraternity. These republican liberals appear to be basically indistinguishable from liberal socialists, who also embrace “the republican principle of community and solidarity” and “extend it to the economy.” Republicanism therefore plays a crucial if not fully acknowledged role in McManus’s framework—a kind of emulsifier that allows for the potentially incompatible ingredients of liberalism and socialism to mix successfully. And there are recurrent similarities between McManus’s elaborations of liberal socialism and the radical republicanism Leipold considers in Citizen Marx.
“Put loosely,” McManus writes, “liberal socialism is committed to instituting a basic social structure securing the equal emancipation of all society’s members as a basis for their shared long-term flourishing. The various political theories of liberal socialism attempt to justify and unpack this core commitment.” This is rather like the republican insistence that equal civil and political rights cannot not be guaranteed without a complementary economic system that counteracts social inequality and facilitates popular political participation. According to McManus, liberal socialists “highlight how relations of power pervade many other forms of human relations,” including the economy and the family. We find something similar in Citizen Marx, where Leipold describes the radical republican William James Linton’s belief that marriage forced women to “surrender the natural right of sovereignty and stoop to be the property and possession of their lords,” and that “arbitrary threats of hunger” put working people “under the power of another class of men who dispose of them as they think fit.”
Yet it is not clear from McManus’s book whether the pursuit of liberal socialism necessarily entails the abolition of private property, or something short of it. He writes, for example, that whether a transition to liberal socialism would entail “a form of market socialism characterized by cooperatives or an economy still nominally capitalist but oriented by heavily unionized private firms whose production is largely determined by state investment is a big question.” A liberal socialism need not adopt a single perspective on programmatic or institutional questions to be valuable. But this somewhat indeterminate quality can make it difficult to see where liberal socialism begins and republicanism or social democracy ends.
McManus ably surveys many essential figures of a liberal socialist canon, including Mill, Eduard Bernstein, Carlo Rosselli, and John Rawls. There are nevertheless some notable omissions, such as J.A. Hobson, L.T. Hobhouse, and other advocates of the socially conscious New Liberalism that emerged in Britain and elsewhere in the late nineteenth century. Against the “old” laissez-faire liberalism of the early 1800s, these liberals supported the extension of rights from the political realm into social and economic life and advocated for extensive redistribution to combat the rampant inequality of turn-of-the-century Britain. As Helena Rosenblatt puts it in The Lost History of Liberalism, they “began to say that people should be accorded not just freedom, but the conditions of freedom.” That position led Hobhouse to conclude that “true Socialism serves to complete rather than destroy the leading Liberal ideals.” While the postwar Labour government built the major pillars of Britain’s welfare state, its intellectual architect was William Beveridge, a Liberal Party economist whose work focused on social insurance and full employment. John Maynard Keynes, whom McManus rightly includes in the liberal socialist canon, was another product of this milieu, although McManus notes this only in passing. Greater attention to New Liberalism would not only have given the movement its due place in a liberal socialist “retrieval”; it might also have helped McManus reduce his reliance on republicanism as a middle term between liberalism and socialism.
These reservations aside, McManus is to be commended for his work in reconstructing a liberal socialist tradition, and for pushing back against the hostility to liberalism too often found on the socialist left. His book is unfortunately well timed to the second Trump administration’s authoritarian lurch, and reminds us that liberalism was once a fighting faith whose radical heritage is worth retrieving. Leipold and McManus also remind us of just how intellectually fruitful and politically dynamic it can be to put socialist ideas in dialogue with other traditions that share an interest in human emancipation and the development of our individual and collective capacities. This is always worth doing, but especially in a time when everything that democratic and progressive people hold dear is under existential threat. We hang together, or we hang separately.
Chris Maisano is a trade unionist and Democratic Socialists of America activist. He lives in Brooklyn, New York.
