The Ambivalent Relationship Between Marxism and Citizenship

Citizenship feels like one of the most settled ideas in political life. You are born into a country, you carry an identity card, you vote, and you claim certain rights. But the moment you place this idea under a Marxist lens, the comfortable picture starts to crack. Marxism does not simply accept or reject citizenship. It holds the concept at arm’s length, treating it with deep suspicion while also recognising its quiet power. This is what makes the relationship between Marxism and citizenship so genuinely ambivalent. To understand why, we need to look at how Marxism reads the gap between the equal citizen on paper and the unequal worker in the factory.

Why Marxism distrusts the language of citizenship 🔗

For Marxism, the foundation of any class-divided society is the relationship between classes. Under feudalism, it was the relation between the peasantry and the landlords. Under capitalism, it is the relation between those who own the means of production and those who own only their labour. Everything else, including the legal and political vocabulary of a society, sits on top of this economic base.

The problem is that the language of citizenship hides this base. When the state speaks of all of us as citizens, it presents a society of equals. Each person has one vote. Each person is equal before the law. Each person carries the same set of fundamental rights. But this equality is only formal. The factory owner and the daily-wage worker are equal as citizens, yet profoundly unequal as economic actors. Marxism argues that the capitalist state, through its ideology, recasts social relations of classes as relations of citizens, putting a gloss over the underlying class struggle.

Citizenship as an ideological gloss 🔗

This is the heart of the Marxist critique. The category of the citizen does not abolish class. It conceals it. When a society constantly tells its members that they are equal participants in a shared political community, the deeper inequalities of wealth, property, and power become harder to see and easier to tolerate. The worker is invited to identify as a citizen of the nation rather than as a member of an exploited class.

Marxist theory connects this to the wider machinery of capitalist ideology. Institutions such as the legal system, schools, and the electoral process do not merely serve neutral functions. They also help reproduce the conditions that keep capitalist relations intact. Marxist criticism examines how institutions are treated as tools to perpetuate bourgeois control over society rather than as instruments of genuine equality. The citizen, in this reading, is partly a useful fiction that keeps the system running smoothly.

Marx and the limits of political emancipation 🔗

The sharpest early statement of this view comes from Karl Marx’s 1844 essay, On the Jewish Question. Marx was responding to Bruno Bauer, who argued that Jews in Germany could only become free citizens by giving up their religious identity. Marx disagreed and used the debate to develop a far larger argument about the nature of rights and citizenship itself.

Marx drew a crucial distinction between two kinds of freedom. The first is political emancipation, which means winning equal legal and political status: equality before the law, the right to vote, freedom of religion, and protection regardless of one’s private characteristics. The second is human emancipation, which means transforming the actual social and economic relations that shape people’s lives. Marx’s central claim was that political emancipation itself is not human emancipation.

The twofold life of the modern citizen 🔗

Marx observed that the modern individual leads a divided existence. In the political community, a person is treated as an equal member, a citizen sharing in collective sovereignty. But in civil society, that same person acts as a private, self-interested individual competing against others. Political emancipation, in Marx’s words, reduces a person on one hand to a member of civil society, an egoistic individual, and on the other hand to an abstract citizen.

The “rights of man” celebrated by the French Revolution, Marx argued, were largely the rights of this isolated, egoistic individual. They protected private property, security, and freedom understood as separation from others rather than connection to them. He pointed out the paradox that revolutionaries reduced citizenship and the political community to a mere means for maintaining these so-called rights of man. The citizen, who should embody collective life, ends up serving the egoistic private individual. For Marx, this revealed how far liberal citizenship falls short of true freedom.

What would the citizen become in a classless society? 🔗

This critique points toward a striking conclusion. If citizenship is a status defined by one’s relationship to the state and the legal claims one can make against it, then in a fully classless and stateless society the category would lose its purpose. With no political state standing above society and no class divisions to mediate, the individual would have no separate political institutions through which to claim rights or owe duties. Some Marxist readings therefore suggest that in a genuinely communist society, the status of citizen would no longer be needed because human relations would no longer require this abstract mediation.

The other side: citizenship as a weapon for change 🔗

If Marxism only criticised citizenship, the relationship would be simple rejection, not ambivalence. The deeper point is that Marxism also values what citizenship makes possible. The same rights that mask class relations also give social agents the tools to fight back.

Marxist thought appreciates the human agency that citizenship furthers, precisely because exercising citizenship rights can sharpen the contradictions within capitalism itself. Rights of speech, assembly, association, and the vote allow workers to organise, form unions, mobilise politically, and demand reform. Citizenship can therefore be a political device that activates social agents to subject public institutions to critique and to search for alternatives. The very freedoms granted to legitimise the system can be turned into instruments for challenging it.

Citizenship rights as products of struggle 🔗

This insight is developed further by sociologist Anthony Giddens, a major figure in the Marxist-influenced theory of citizenship. Giddens challenged the idea that citizenship rights were simply handed down by a benevolent state in neat historical stages. He argued instead that the unprivileged won citizenship rights primarily through struggle rather than a natural unfolding, often during moments such as wars when subordinate groups could shift the balance of power.

Giddens distinguished between rights won against the old feudal order and economic rights fought for by workers against capitalism. In this view, citizenship is not a gift but a battleground. Every expansion of rights records a victory in class conflict. This reframing is important because it treats citizenship as something dynamic and contested, not as a fixed possession that pacifies the working class.

The Marshall debate that Marxism answers 🔗

To appreciate why Marxists engage so seriously with citizenship, it helps to look at the theory they are arguing against. The British sociologist T. H. Marshall offered the most influential modern account in his 1949 lecture, Citizenship and Social Class. Marshall divided citizenship into three elements that he believed developed across three centuries: civil rights such as liberty and equality before the law, political rights such as the vote, and social rights such as welfare, education, and economic security.

Marshall’s hope was that the third element, social citizenship, could soften the harsh inequalities of capitalism. He defined social rights as everything from the right to a modicum of economic welfare and security to the right to share fully in the social heritage of a civilised society. In other words, the welfare state would use citizenship status to guarantee a basic standard of living to everyone, regardless of their position in the market.

Where the Marxist reading parts ways 🔗

This is exactly where the Marxist critique bites. Marshall himself conceded a vital point: the extension of social rights does not destroy social classes or end inequality. The welfare state can ease the symptoms of class division without curing the disease. A worker may receive education, healthcare, and a pension as a citizen, yet remain a worker in an economic system built on the extraction of surplus value.

There is a further problem that Marxist and critical scholars highlight. Because social rights are tied to the status of the citizen, they automatically exclude those who fall outside that category. When welfare and inclusion are linked only to formal citizenship, certain populations within the boundaries of a nation can be left out of its protections entirely. The category of citizen results in excluding certain people from its ambit even within a nation-state. For a country like ours, with vast internal migration, informal labour, and contested questions of belonging, this is far from an abstract concern.

Holding both truths at once 🔗

So where does this leave us? The Marxist position on citizenship refuses to collapse into a single verdict. It insists that citizenship is, at the same time, a mechanism of ideological concealment and a real resource for collective struggle.

On one side, citizenship recasts class relations as relations between equal individuals, masking exploitation and helping sustain capitalist ideology through the everyday institutions of the state. On the other side, citizenship rights are essential for organising the working class, building movements, and pushing for social change. The contradiction is not a flaw in the analysis. It reflects a genuine tension in how rights actually function under capitalism. They can pacify and they can empower, sometimes through the very same institution.

This is why many on the Marxist side argue not for abandoning citizenship but for expanding its zone. The demand becomes one of enlarging rights so that cultural communities, political minorities, and the economically marginalised can claim protections suited to their specific situations. Citizenship, on this reading, is unfinished business. It is a terrain to be expanded and democratised rather than a finished structure to be defended or simply discarded.

The lasting value of the Marxist approach is that it stops us from taking citizenship for granted. It asks us to look past the equal status printed on our documents and to examine the unequal society that status sits within. Citizenship is neither pure liberation nor pure illusion. It is a contested space, and what it becomes depends on who is willing to struggle over it.

What do you think? If citizenship can both conceal class inequality and provide the tools to fight it, should movements for social change invest their energy in expanding citizenship rights, or in transforming the economic system underneath them? And in a society marked by deep inequality, can the promise of equal citizenship ever be fully honoured without first addressing the conditions that make people unequal in the first place?

References

1. https://egyankosh.ac.in/bitstream/123456789/23687/1/Unit-8.pdf
2. https://kurdishstudies.net/menu-script/index.php/KS/article/download/1414/1033/2602
3. https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1844/jewish-question/
4. https://www.academia.edu/37809751/Marxism_and_Citizenship
5. https://www.academia.edu/12755912/Marxist_theory_of_Citizenship_Anthony_Giddens
6. https://pages.nyu.edu/jackson/analysis.of.inequality/Readings/Marshall%20-%20Development%20of%20Citizenship.pdf
7. https://ebooks.inflibnet.ac.in/soc15/chapter/t-h-marshall-citizenship-and-social-class/