The Marxists are Coming

Karl Marx in America by Andrew Hartman. The University of Chicago Press, 600 pages. 2025.

Condensing the history of Marxist thought in the United States to one volume is an unenviable task. For those immersed in Marxism, the result is bound to be woefully inadequate, and it risks alienating the merely Marx-curious with its vastness and complexity. It’s a tall order to produce something thorough yet accessible, succinct but rigorous, without coming off as yet another short introduction to Marxism (of which there are no end) or as a dense tome only appropriate for the initiated. Fortunately for all comers, Andrew Hartman has pulled off this feat, more or less, with Karl Marx in America. Hartman’s book is now the best available on the subject, though admittedly it is a small field, displacing Paul Buhle’s Marxism in the United States (published 1987, updated 2013) and John Nichols’s The “S” Word: A Short History of an American Tradition . . . Socialism (2011, updated 2015). Hartman’s specialization as an intellectual historian serves him well, having previously chronicled the political battles over education in the United States during the Cold War, as well as the history of the culture wars since the 1960s.

Hartman adheres to a basic schema: Marxism is a pillar of American political thought—not always as an explicit tradition but rather as the ghost in the machine—a powerful, often oppositional force influencing Americans of all political persuasions. As Hartman puts it, “Americans have long articulated their various notions of freedom in conversation with Marx.”  For Hartman, Marx’s explicit absence makes for implicit and far-reaching influence, as “our very understanding of America as it developed across the twentieth century is underwritten by a subterranean Marx.” Confronted with the rebooted Red Scare we are living through presently, Marxism is more visible than it has been for decades, while Marxists are harder to find. Just this May, the Trump administration issued a statement on a new budget proposal, one item of which was to “Defund the Harmful Woke, Marxist Agenda.” The virtue of Hartman’s book is to show us that such mobilizations against rumors of a new red dawn are nothing new. In 1877 there was a major national railroad strike, partly organized by the first political party influenced by Marx in the United States, the Workingmen’s Party of the United States (WPUS). Allan Pinkerton, the founder of the famous detective and anti-union agency, wrote in the aftermath of the strike that there was a “communistic spirit” now in America, which “must be crushed out completely, or we shall be compelled to submit to greater excesses and more overwhelming disasters in the near future.”

According to Hartman, Marxism in America operates on a cycle of booms and busts, similar to the classical pattern of reform vs. reaction laid out by Richard Hofstadter in his 1955 work The Age of Reform. Karl Marx in America identifies four Marx booms in America, beginning with the Gilded Age, during which radical inequality and an explosion in labor organizing and unionization lead to violent confrontations with the state and the forces of capital. There was also the wave of immigration to the United States from Europe, including Yiddish socialists, Italian anarchists, and German labor organizers; with our entry into World War I came the first Red Scare and state repression. Fears of the Soviet Union, the crushing of unions, the deportation of labor activists and Marxists meant a lull in Marxism in the 1920s while the economy proverbially roared. The Great Depression prompted a rush back to Marx now that the end of capitalism seemed nigh. The mobilizing forces of the New Deal also provided momentum; the second Red Scare of the late 1940s and 1950s was the predictable response to the theorists, politicians, and communists who had mobilized during the FDR presidency.

The third Marx boom came packaged with the 1960s New Left, part of the general revolutionary wave of that decade, before the era of Reagan snuffed it out to such an extent that Friedrich Hayek would receive the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1991. Marxism was at its nadir, seemingly defeated in the neoliberal aftermath of the Cold War. A small uptick in left wing activism in the late 1990s in response to the aggressive globalization of NAFTA was crushed by the American response to 9/11 and the global war on terror. Hartman ends with the by-now-rote emphasis on the 2008 financial crisis and its aftershocks, with Occupy Wall Street signaling the beginning of a fourth Marx boom in our current moment, curiously spliced with a new fearmongering at the highest offices in which Marxism functions as convenient catch-all boogeyman. Hartman’s breakthrough is in perceiving how each boom/bust is attended by a different avatar of Marx, as each facet finds its operative political atmosphere, hence his choice of chapter names: “Bolshevik,” “Prophet,” “False Prophet,” “Humanist Liberator,” etc.

As an analytic, Hartman’s rise-and-fall approach means a tidy cross-section of personages and shared traditions, with the major figures of one boom becoming mentors to the next. But for Hartman the essence of the Marxist tradition appears to be a book-driven affair, such that Karl Marx in America sometimes risks textual digression in building its continuities across readings rather than coherently tracing personalities and the evolution of ideologies. Hartman keeps things together, but the price he pays for strictly limiting the subjects to what can be easily streamlined into intellectual history is curious omissions and occasionally baffling inclusions. There is hardly any discussion of the Marxism of the Black Panthers, or of the broader influence on American Marxist thought of Maoism, or of American Marxist responses to major international upheavals such as the Sino-Soviet split, but Hartman has plenty to say about New Left critics of Marxism, such as Harold Cruse and Shulamith Firestone.

Hartman is at pains to keep everything manageable by staying American-centric, sometimes to a fault, given that Marxism in the United States has been highly characterized by its receptivity to influences from abroad and many prominent American Marxists have been either immigrants or refugees, such as John Keracher, Abraham Heller, Paul Baran. Hartman does not mention Louis Althusser even once, though the French Marxist had vast influence on the American New Left reading of Marx in the 1960s. Marcuse is emphasized but not Adorno. Most egregiously, there is an extended discussion of Ward Churchill and a 1983 volume he edited, Marxism and Native Americans, meant to establish the relationship between radical politics and indigenous peoples. This is bizarre, given that Churchill is most well-known for academic controversies regarding his disputed claims to Native American ancestry and the quality of his scholarship rather than as a sophisticated critic of Marx. Surely Hartman could have engaged with the work of a more respected theorist whose work touches on Native identity and sovereignty and their relationship to various interpretations of Marx, such as Mahmood Mamdani, Mae Ngai, or Jodi Byrd.

The tension between the personalistic vs. scholastic approaches in the book is an outgrowth of the country’s tension regarding Marxism itself: as compared to the rest of the world, the United States has never had a mass communist party or even a mass-member, expressly left-wing, viable political party. There have been transformative Marxist politicians, like Eugene Debs, whom Hartman covers in great detail, but there have not been transformative Marxist political parties in the United States on a scale to impact national policy. The backlashes against Marxism have tended to have far more political significance since World War II than the actual inciting theory. What this means for the book is that Hartman devotes a substantial part not to Marxism and American Marxists per se, but to the powerful anti-Marxist political forces and intellectuals of the twentieth century. Chapters five and six, “False Prophet: Midcentury Liberalism,” and “Red Menace: Postwar Conservatism,” are overwhelmingly focused on anti-Marxist intellectuals and the forces of American liberalism and the American right that were united in their mutual anticommunism after World War II. At times it seems the book would be more appropriately titled Anti-Marxism in America.

The history of Marxism then in the United States is then by definition not an institutional one. The Communist Party of the United States of America, even at its height in 1947, never had more than approximately 75,000 members. As a distinct political tradition, there is the American labor movement, in which Marxism had a strong influence beginning in the Gilded Age. The late 1940s, however, saw Walther Reuther purge communist influence from the ranks of organized labor, and the AFL-CIO was founded in the mid-1950s on an explicit anticommunist basis. Hartman’s discussion of organized labor is expansive on the pre-World War II era, but after the war unions recede from his story, beyond brief acknowledgement of the failure of Operation Dixie by the CIO to expand unionization in the South in the latter 1940s and early 1950s, and the passage of the anti-union Taft-Hartley Act in 1947. From this point on in Hartman’s narrative, Marxism retreats to the purely intellectual realm, only becoming active seemingly as a political mobilizing ideology until after the 2008 financial crisis, outside of again brief mention of the work of Cesar Chavez and the anti-Vietnam War movement.

Individualized, fraught by upheavals, the country’s left is a leading site of Marxist theory. Ironically so, given Marxism’s lack of an institutional and organizational U.S. basis. Marxist intellectuals have been the primary conduits for the spread of leftist sentiments in the United States, and American Marxism is particularly, even primarily, a matter of writing. This provides Hartman with plenty of intellectual groupings to study and track, such as the journal Studies on the Left, founded by a collective of Marxist-oriented graduate students at the University of Wisconsin in 1959, many of whom went on to have prominent careers as historians. Per this example, the book is at its strongest when it can most closely track an organization or at least a movement, due to being able to ground itself more concretely. Yet again, however, the question of the rubric of inclusion is unclear for many of the groups and individuals that Hartman discusses in the postwar era. Why does Studies on the Left merit inclusion and extended discussion, but not say the Students for a Democratic Society, outside of a mention on a single page, the Weather Underground, or Paul Sweezy and Paul Baran’s Monopoly Capital? And with such prominent Marxist figures as the economist Ernest Mandel and the scholar-activist Hal Draper being excluded from the book, why is there a discussion of the filmmaker and rapper Boots Riley in the last chapter? Hartman would have benefited from a much clearer analytic laid out at the beginning of the book that explained the terms of who he did and did not decide to include and why.

When there is a clearer narrative to follow, Hartman has a knack for cutting to the chase. The roughly first half of the book, from the Civil War and Gilded Age up through to World War II, is the best. These were the heroic years of Marxism in the United States, and Hartman’s narrative has a novelistic touch as we follow immigrant socialists and workers in their struggles to translate, proselytize, and organize. The highs and lows of the International Workers of the World, John Reed, Big Bill Haywood, Eugene Debs, the sewer socialists of Wisconsin, and the formation of the first Marxist political parties and unions up until World War I show how close the United States actually got to a mass Marxist movement. Hartman revels in the details of how numerous popular groupings, such as the period of dominance of socialists in Oklahoma in the early twentieth century, mixed Marxism with domestic trends, creating a hybrid Marx. Between 1910 and 1914, the Oklahoma Socialist Party “outpaced the Republican Party as the Democratic Party’s chief rival in the state. In 1914, Oklahoma Socialists won 175 state and local offices.” The Marx boom of the Gilded Age channeled Populist anger over access to land, and industrial and mining labor struggles into a coherent class warfare paradigm for Americans.

There was then an expansion of Marxism during the Great Depression via the CPUSA and its leader Earl Browder, forming the Popular Front against Nazism and fascism, and with Marxists at large coming to support the New Deal and even carry it out. Hartman argues that the true strength of Marxism in the United States is when it is able to synthesize with prior existing political cultures, producing a Marxism grounded in American currents. With the Second Red Scare and the defeat of the revolutionary hopes of the 1960s, Marxism has yet to return to this former high point of influence when it was most hybridized. Though Hartman does note at the beginning of the book that at present, “Americans are thinking about Marx to a degree not matched since the 1960s, or perhaps even the 1930s.”

As the book progresses Hartman becomes more autobiographical, charting his own intellectual path within the Marxist tradition. By his own admission being a rare Gen X Marxist, Hartman’s beginnings within the tradition were through a very American source—the rock band Rage Against the Machine. Hartman worked his way as a teenager through a series of left-wing books featured in a photo in the liner notes to the band’s second album Evil Empire. These included Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth and Che Guevara’s Guerilla Warfare. But the major work for Hartman’s youthful development was Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States, with Hartman characterizing Zinn as one of the few keepers of the flame from the 1960s to the beginnings of the fourth Marx boom of today. Hartman is attempting to historicize himself then, the proper instinct of a good intellectual historian and a good Marxist. Yet who is the Marx that Hartman aligns himself with? Who is the Marx of the fourth boom if he is neither, per Hartman’s avatar paradigm, the “American Revolutionary” figure of the era of the Civil War nor the Red Menace figure of the postwar American right during the Cold War?

Hartman occasionally references Kevin Anderson’s 2010 book Marx at the Margins, which appears already to be a classically representative work of the fourth Marx boom. The book focuses on Marx’s later notebook writings in which he advanced suggestive new ideas and revisions of his theories of society and revolution. The Marx of scholars like Anderson—as well as Kohei Saito, Vanessa Christina Wills, and Martin Hägglund, to name just a few—is one concerned with ecology, republicanism, a cosmopolitan and open engagement with alternative forms of living, and a concern with how to structure human lives beyond the strictures of capitalist value. The goal of this cadre, in which I would include Hartman, is in building Marxism into a mass democratic movement and party through electoral and cultural political engagement, precisely by showing Marxism’s accessibility and applicability to our lives. I like this Marx. I hope he manages to gain a firm footing in the United States. Karl Marx in America is a start in building the narrative of how a generation of American intellectuals are beginning to analyze the history of Marxism in the United States not as a failure but as a continuing tradition, with the present being an historically important moment in its development and to which we can contribute. After all, we have nothing to lose.