The Triumphs and Travails of 
American Marxism

Karl Marx never visited the United States, but he was long fascinated by the lure—and contradictions—of American freedom. As a young man, he applied for permission to emigrate to Texas. But he couldn’t tear himself away from the debates gripping the Young Hegelians as Europe’s old order crumbled in the 1840s. Later, he would correspond with many of his contemporaries who traveled across the Atlantic, including a set of comrades who would go on to publish two of his outstanding early works: The Communist Manifesto, coauthored with Friedrich Engels, published in German and French in 1838 and in English in 1850, and The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, first published in German, in New York, in 1852.

More surprisingly, Marx’s gifts as an essayist and social observer led The New York Tribune to appoint him as its London correspondent. Between 1853 and 1861, he contributed 487 articles to the Tribune, a journal with around 200,000 subscribers in the 1850s, making it the second-most-read American newspaper.

In the years that followed, movements and parties would rally under the banner of his socialist politics. While Marx did not necessarily become a household name in the United States, he would nonetheless motivate generations of radicals to take up the cause of socialism.

In Karl Marx in America, Andrew Hartman provides us with a kaleidoscopic vision of Marxism in the United States in the 19th, 20th, and 21st centuries. Responding to Marx’s fiercest critics—Mikhail Bakunin, Friedrich Hayek, Leszek Kołakowski, Isaiah Berlin—as well as his staunchest admirers and collaborators—Engels, Jack London, John Reed, C. Wright Mills, Howard Zinn, and Fredric Jameson—Hartman tells the story of how Marx and his followers “put their stamp” on American life and thought. Taking the Civil War as his starting point for this trenchant survey of the American left, Hartman offers us dozens of portraits of Marxism’s main protagonists—including Eugene Debs, W.E.B. Du Bois, Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, Louise Bryant, Harry Haywood, Daniel De Leon, Mother Jones, Claude McKay, Oliver C. Cox, and C.L.R. James—and charts their triumphs and travails all the way up to the present.

The North America that Marx once contemplated moving to was defined by industrialization, labor unrest, and the expansion of slavery. The United States of the 1840s was not yet industrialized, but it was moving in that direction with the construction of roads, canals, and railroads and the emergence of a large, mobile, and varied workforce. At the same time, the country’s increasingly commercialized agricultural sector—farms as well as plantations, storekeepers as well as merchants, indebted producers as well as addicted consumers—also began to channel a rural labor surplus to the advancing frontier of commodity production and wage labor.

Hartman stresses the impact that slavery in the US had on Marx’s thoughts on labor, freedom, and capitalist exploitation. Recent findings by the economic historians John Clegg and Bonnie Martin have also emphasized the connection between slavery and capitalism, explaining how Southern planters were able to obtain ever-larger loans from merchant bankers by offering their slaveholdings as collateral for further investment in the cotton economy. While the boom phase of the cycle spelled more broken families for the enslaved, the bust phase spelled ruin for those—whether planters, farmers, merchants, or storekeepers—who had overborrowed. Merchant creditors had sought to limit losses by persuading British Parliament to enact the Act for the More Easy Recovery of Debts in 1732, which would allow them to seize slaves and land to satisfy delinquent debts of slaveholders. Under these new creditor-­debtor relations, the supply of credit increased while interest rates decreased, thereby boosting trade in the colonies. The credit regime installed by the act carried over into the post-­colonial era, and while it worked for wealthy planters and the state, who could invest surplus cash into the economy, it led to a new age of speculative fevers and burst bubbles, which both alarmed the heavily indebted slave owners and spurred them—along with all the other colliding factors in the prewar years—to the desperate gamble 
of secession.

Marx followed this war of secession closely when it arrived. He was convinced that labor in a white skin could not be free if labor in a black skin was still in chains. Marx’s ideas became more popular among those wage workers in the North who found that abolition and Reconstruction had not changed employers’ virulent hostility to trade unions and strikes. Yet neither had it fully emancipated the workers in the South. The Civil War marked the end of slavery, and the contours of a multiracial democracy began to emerge in its place, with Reconstruction administrations sponsoring public schools, clinics, and even police. But when the Union forces finally departed, they left behind a vacuum that white Southerners, in particular the Ku Klux Klan and the creators of Jim Crow laws, would exploit to reorganize white supremacy in the South.

Working men and women started to look for answers—and one place they looked was in the writings of Marx, in particular his masterpiece Capital. Published in German in 1867 and in English in the 1880s, it was the cornerstone of Marx’s reputation as a political economist, but it also helped inspire a set of new labor movements and political parties throughout the North Atlantic as more and more workers, frustrated by the modest gains afforded to them under the capitalist system, sought to do something about it.

By the early decades of the 20th century, the United States had two trade union federations, three socialist parties, four socialist publishing houses, at least a half-dozen left-wing magazines, and many scores of American Marxist and socialist authors. First came the Socialist Labor Party, founded in the late 19th century, then the Socialist Party of America, founded in the early 20th century, and the Communist Party of America, which emerged in the wake of the 1917 revolution in Russia. Because of the vast and varied nature of the continental United States, as well as the diverse cultural and religious affiliations of its huge influx of immigrants, the European model of a national social democracy would prove difficult to imitate.

All of these parties were, in one way or another, followers of Marx and Engels, and yet each had its own blind spots and shibboleths. They breathed a spirit of syndicalist resistance and rallied to the defense of strikes, but they also shared a vein of religiosity. They held meetings and social gatherings and circulated magazines and newspapers even as they offered differing views of the same political tradition. Daniel De Leon, the leader of the Socialist Labor Party, lectured on international law at Columbia University, while Eugene Debs was wary of “intellectuals.” Some labor leaders condemned slavery and racism, and a few were radical abolitionists, but they often did not encourage Black self-organization and cultural expression.

Meanwhile, some members of the Socialist Party took a different approach: They responded to the social devastation of capitalism by opting for a municipal or “sewer” socialism—a set of reforms that created mini welfare states within cities that might alleviate the deprivation faced by workers. This development caused Vladi-
mir Lenin some concern: He worried that these socialists would leave behind the grand goals of socialism in the midst of all their reformism and would also forget the imperatives of class struggle, writing that in elevating “municipal socialism to a special ‘trend’ precisely because it dreams of social peace, of class conciliation,” they risked diverting “public attention away from the fundamental questions of the economic system as a whole…to minor questions of local self government.”

Lenin was, of course, wrong to treat sewers as an unimportant component of public health. In many instances they have doubled life-expectancy, and the Bolsheviks did not neglect sewers and positively gloried in the underground, as in Moscow’s magnificent metro. But Lenin’s criticism did signal a larger rupture to come. As most socialists directed their attention to opposing the United States’ entrance into World War I while also attempting to avoid arrest in the midst of a vicious Red Scare in 1919, a group of younger radicals, inspired by the Russian Revolution, formed what became a unified Communist Party, with a membership reaching around 66,000 in the 1930s.

The Communists mounted imaginative recruiting campaigns among auto­workers, miners, textile workers, and the cultural workforce in Hollywood. They also committed themselves to the cause of civil rights and Black independence throughout the Union. In New York, New Jersey, Chicago, San Francisco, and a few other industrial and proto-­industrial enclosures, capitalism was surging ahead, and they were determined to resist it.

As Hartman shows, the term Marxist really belongs to the 20th century, but these growing parties and movements were part of several cohorts willing to reinvent Marxist ideas as well as pay homage to their progenitor. Marx insisted that his socialism was “scientific” and that its values were those developed by the workers’ movement in its resistance to capitalism, and so in a way it was fitting that his ideas were then adapted to meet the exigencies and needs of labor’s continuing struggle against capital. Even the chroniclers of the Roaring Twenties came to find something they could admire in Marx. F. Scott Fitzgerald insisted to his daughter that she read “the terrible chapter in Das Kapital on the Working Day, and see if you are ever quite the same.”

Karl Marx in America includes a photo of Leon Trotsky and a brief account of his 10-week stay in New York in 1917. But Trotsky’s main influence on America came later. As Hartman observes, it was when he went into exile for the second time, in 1929, that Trotsky was adopted as a guide and authority by a generation of New York intellectuals that included Sidney Hook, Max Eastman, James Burnham, Irving Howe, Mary McCar­thy, and many other contributors to left-wing magazines such as The Masses and Partisan Review.

Hartman charts how a revulsion at Stalin’s tyranny motivated many of Trotsky’s American followers, who were drawn to his vigorous critiques of the USSR. But as fascism began to spread in Europe, these American radicals also found themselves drawn to Trotsky’s eloquent warnings of the mortal threat to democracy that Hitler’s rise represented. While the corruptions of “bourgeois democracy” were an unlovely spectacle, Trotsky urged that all sections of the workers’ movement should rally to the defense of representative institutions and freedoms. As his biographer Isaac Deutscher has insisted, this was an important clarification, and one that would be elaborated by George Novack and others who remained aligned with Trotsky.

Parallel to the much-heralded New York Intellectuals, another Marxist tendency also emerged in the United States. Raya Dunayevskaya, a Russian émigré who once served as Trotsky’s secretary, had a special concern for placing Marx’s ideas within the American context. She argued that liberal representative regimes were too distant from the mass of citizens while all too open to the imperatives of capital.

Hartman also examines later Marxists such as Angela Davis, who came of age in the late 1960s, and those who were not Marxists but avowed many of Marx’s ideas in their critiques of Cold War and post–Cold War America. Noam Chomsky, for example, cannot be called a Marxist—he has often pointed instead to his anarchist origins and commitments—but he too has been a vigorous critic of corporate liberalism. And Naomi Klein, with her broad scope and admirable tenacity, has also revisited and updated many of Marx’s concerns in her critiques of globalization and disaster capitalism.

In Karl Marx in America, Hartman sticks mainly to the world of ideas; there is little here on the outcomes of elections, barricades, or battles. But he also considers how Marxism in the United States was both shaped and hindered by more mainstream liberal politics. In a section on the New Deal, for example, he examines how Franklin Roosevelt, a patrician who wanted to “save capitalism from itself,” initiated a series of crucial innovations in the United States, most of them aimed at restoring financial stability, that also ended up buttressing a wave of trade union and progressive mobilization.

While perhaps none of the radi­cals whom Roosevelt had to turn to for support were Marxists, they would eventually hold his feet to the fire and ensure that his Second New Deal of 1935 reached farther than the first. Radicals who were competing for his base of supporters would push him farther to the left as well. The Louisiana politician Huey Long’s “Share Our Wealth” program, premised on a radical redistribution of wealth and massive public works spending, spurred Roosevelt to embrace more audacious approaches to economic planning, including the Works Progress ­
Administration, which went even farther than his earlier works projects in putting millions of the unemployed to work on infrastructure. Meanwhile, a movement led by California doctor Francis Townsend “helped shape Roosevelt’s 1935 Social Security Act,” Hartman notes, and “a rapidly growing and increasingly militant labor movement” spurred the Democratic-­controlled Congress to pass the Wagner Act, or as it was formally known, the National Labor Relations Act, which “forbade employers from interfering with employee efforts to form unions and included the mechanisms to enforce this.”

Hartman describes the Wagner Act as “an unparalleled victory for the American working class.” Yet he notes as well that “the ‘NLRA’ was also a clear means of reducing labor militancy. It brought an unruly working class into the fold of the Democratic Party…. The Second New Deal, even in its most pro-labor form, was by no means Marxist.”

For Hartman, this was part of the quandary that Marxists and socialists faced: The New Deal may have uplifted labor, but it disempowered it as well. Those elements of the New Deal that helped labor—the NLRA, Social Security, the welfare agencies—did not place decision-­making or the means of production into the hands of the working class. Instead, they were highly complex instruments that required intricate, well-­informed, and deliberate coordination by liberal technocrats.

A group of Marxists involved with the magazine Science & Society warned of the dangers of imagining that there could be an enduring alliance with big business. In 1966, Paul Sweezy and Paul Baran’s impressive book Monopoly Capital buttressed this argument by situating it within fascinating debates on the history of capitalism.

But socialists and Marxists also faced new challenges that they had not anticipated and could not fully overcome. The Cold War placed additional pressures on the provision of social goods, saw the emergence of a strident anti-­communism, and marked the gradual erosion of benefits as classical, as well as neo-national, business competition created openings that both neoliberals and neoconservatives would go on to exploit. In the end, some American socialists had to support what they otherwise might have been critical of: Many ended up defending the welfare state as a progressive and worthy cause, even if it did not lead to the further empowerment of labor.

Upon completing Karl Marx in America, I found myself thinking about who else Hartman might have included in a book that already includes so much. William Morris surely had some American followers (and The Masses must have had a cover that he devised?), and Raymond Williams as well. These two men were not American-­born and did not spend much time in the United States, even if they influenced American thought. Simone de Beauvoir, who has only one mention in the book, also comes to mind, though citations of Juliet Mitchell’s and Shulamith Firestone’s work help make up for this. Charlie Chaplin could have possibly been given a cameo, and Bertolt Brecht makes only two, fleeting appearances. These artists had the genius to convey the conflicting moods and responsibilities of the period—and to sound the alarm.

There is also the question of where American Marxism fits in today. Hartman sees the extraordinary perils of a new Cold War, of a dead planet, of the imperatives of social justice, and of irresponsible tech companies all lending great relevance to the story of Karl Marx in America.

The last quarter of the 20th century saw the country moving away from decently furnished public education and health services and toward outrageous inequality, privatization, and reinvented myths of racial destiny. Yet the first quarter of the 21st century has witnessed great arcs of resistance aimed at rescuing the promise of decolonization, democratization, and public welfare. When the great monopolies and cartels begin to destroy themselves and the creativity of the people is put to the test, we can finally say it is redemption time.