Karl Marx in America: Hartman, Andrew

Karl Marx in America  Hartman, Andrew: Amazon.com.au: Books


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Table of Contents

Introduction: Karl Marx, Ghost in the American Machine
1. American Revolutionary: The US Civil War
2. Working-Class Hero: The Gilded Age
3. Bolshevik: The Russian Revolution
4. Prophet: The Great Depression
5. False Prophet: Midcentury Liberalism
6. Red Menace: Postwar Conservatism
7. Humanist Liberator: The New Left
8. Theorist: Academia in the Age of Reagan
9. Specter Haunting: Twenty-First-Century Capitalism

Acknowledgments
Notes
Illustration Credits
Index

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Andrew Hartman

Karl Marx in America Kindle Edition
by Andrew Hartman (Author) Format: Kindle Edition


4.6 4.6 out of 5 stars (7)

The vital and untold story of Karl Marx’s stamp on American life.

To read Karl Marx is to contemplate a world created by capitalism. People have long viewed the United States as the quintessential anti-Marxist nation, but Marx’s ideas have inspired a wide range of people to formulate a more precise sense of the stakes of the American project. Historians have highlighted the imprint made on the United States by Enlightenment thinkers such as Adam Smith, John Locke, and Thomas Paine, but Marx is rarely considered alongside these figures. Yet his ideas are the most relevant today because of capitalism’s centrality to American life.

In Karl Marx in America, historian Andrew Hartman argues that even though Karl Marx never visited America, the country has been infused, shaped, and transformed by him. Since the beginning of the Civil War, Marx has been a specter in the American machine. During the Gilded Age, socialists read Marx as an antidote to the unchecked power of corporations. In the Great Depression, communists turned to Marx in hopes of transcending the destructive capitalist economy. The young activists of the 1960s were inspired by Marx as they gathered to protest an overseas war. Marx’s influence today is evident, too, as Americans have become increasingly attuned to issues of inequality, labor, and power.

After decades of being pushed to the far-left corner of intellectual thought, Marx’s ideologies have crossed over into the mainstream and are more alive than ever. Working-class consciousness is on the rise, and, as Marx argued, the future of a capitalist society rests in the hands of the people who work at the point of production. A valuable resource for anyone interested in Marx’s influence on American political discourse, Karl Marx in America is a thought-provoking account of the past, present, and future of his philosophies in American society.

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Review
"Hartman is a really clear writer. He sums up Marx and debates about Marx in really clear ways. That's perfect for post-Cold War generations ready for Marx."-- "Left Voice"

"Karl Marx in America is about as comprehensive a history of its subject as one could want. It is a book many of us had long hoped would one day arrive, and now it is here and the hopes are vindicated. Whether Marx will ever get a fair hearing in the United States is an open question; that he has been and will remain an important figure in its discourse is now a closed one."-- "Damage Magazine"

"What we need more than ever is a Marx for the age of Trump, a time when the brilliance of Marx's understanding of capitalism is widely acknowledged even as the political solution of the Marxist project (working-class revolution) seems to be in question. In Hartman's scholarship, we find confirmation that it is in Marxist critiques of Marxism that one can find the most thought-provoking avenues for possible explanations and guidance. In Karl Marx in America, this is achieved through a double exposure: A kind of presentation of the past in the present, a process of relearning what we have forgotten or perhaps never knew. After all, if we don't first interpret the world, we sure as hell can't change it."-- "New Politics"

"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."-- "The Baffler"

"Hartman sweeps with gusto through over a century and a half of U.S. history, revealing the influence of Marxism on dozens of institutions, individuals, and events, obscure and famous. . . . to show that both liberal critics and right-wing demonizers got his favorite thinker terribly wrong."-- "The New Republic"

"Karl Marx in America significantly contributes to our understanding of the twists and turns of the periodic Marx booms. Throughout its 500 pages and nine chapters, the text adroitly historicizes a wide range of American readers' uses of Marx since the mid-19th century."-- "Foreign Policy"

"If you've never read about Marx's life, Hartman's book doubles as a short biography; if you've never read The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (1852), Hartman's book is a primer on a variety of Marx's most cited and important philosophy. If you've never read Marx's interpreters--who are many, from Kenneth Burke to Frantz Fanon and David Harvey--Karl Marx in America is a road map. But the most interesting insight in the book comes from the laundry list of Marx's haters, and their complete inability to land a good punch on our boy."-- "Los Angeles Review of Books"

"Students of U.S. history and thought will benefit from this study."-- "Library Journal"

"Recent books on Marx have oscillated between presenting him as a singularly nineteenth-century figure or as a timeless savant whose ideas are applicable across all of the spaces and times of capitalist modernity. Hartman's approach, disaggregating the man from the posthumous deployment of his later ideas, allows him to stand on both sides of that divide. The result is an astute and politically useful book about a vital strand of American intellectual thought."-- "Jacobin"

"Karl Marx in America is a fascinating and long overdue book. As Andrew Hartman notes, not only was Marx an active participant in American political debate as a correspondent for the New York Tribune for the crucial decade leading up to the Civil War; he has been a specter haunting American political debate since the Gilded Age. Much American social reform discourse--from fin de siecle meliorist socialism and Progressivism through postwar industrial and interest-group pluralism, as well as Cold War liberalism, to a neoliberalism experiencing legitimation problems--has been shaped in typically unacknowledged debate with, or opposition to, Marx and Marxism. The topic is important, and it is particularly well treated by a deft intellectual historian like Hartman."--Adolph Reed, Jr., University of Pennsylvania

"A nimble study that sheds new light on Marx's thought and enduring influence."-- "Kirkus Reviews, starred review"

"From Brussels to London and across the Atlantic, Karl Marx's revolutionary ideas traversed the borders that once presumed to divide American liberals from conservatives, free market boosters from believers in the welfare state, the left from the right. Given Marx's enduring influence on American thought, we owe a debt of gratitude to Andrew Hartman for reconstructing this important history and presenting it in compulsively readable prose."--Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen, University of Wisconsin-Madison

"Marx was in exile for most of his adult life, so he was a kind of foreign import wherever he got read. But his studies of the United States, what he called the "most modern form of bourgeois society," reshaped his thinking at a critical moment, and this thinking, Andrew Hartman claims, found a home here. That sounds unlikely, almost ridiculous, in view of the way Marxism has been treated by American intellectuals and activists from Left to Right--as an exotic essence from the other shore which must be spoon fed to the masses or handled as a deadly contaminant, either way appearing as something counter to American values. But Hartman proves the point in this comprehensive, convincing, and yes, even entertaining book, Karl Marx in America. It's a brilliant tour de force that might persuade Americans that we are the other shore, inhabitants of the place that Marxism was made for."--James Livingston, Rutgers University

"'As long as capitalism persists, Marx cannot be killed.' So writes Andrew Hartman in a capacious, captivating, and learned study that demonstrates why every generation of Americans, on the right as well as left, has been compelled to grapple with and reinterpret Karl Marx and all his works. This is a brilliant, provocative, and highly readable history, essential to an understanding of American capitalism and its critics, past and present."--Nelson Lichtenstein, author of 'A Fabulous Failure: the Clinton Presidency and the Transformation of American Capitalism' --This text refers to the hardcover edition.
About the Author
Andrew Hartman is professor of history at Illinois State University. He is the author of A War for the Soul of America: A History of the Culture Wars, published by the University of Chicago Press, and Education and the Cold War: The Battle for the American School. He is also the coeditor of American Labyrinth: Intellectual History for Complicated Times. --This text refers to the hardcover edition.

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Karl Marx in America

Publisher ‏ : ‎ University of Chicago Press
Accessibility ‏ : ‎ Learn more
Publication date ‏ : ‎ 29 May 2025
Print length ‏ : ‎ 602 pages

Customer Reviews:
4.6 4.6 out of 5 stars (7)


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About the author
Andrew Hartman


Andrew Hartman is Professor of History at Illinois State University, where he teaches courses in U.S. intellectual, cultural, and political history, as well as courses in the philosophy of history, historiography, and pedagogy. His first book, Education and the Cold War: The Battle for the American School, was published by Palgrave Macmillan in 2008. Hartman’s second book, A War for the Soul of America: A History of the Culture Wars, was published by the University of Chicago Press in 2015 and has been widely reviewed in popular and academic journals ranging from The Wall Street Journal and New Republic to the American Historical Review. Hartman is currently at work on his third book, Marx and America, which is being represented by the John Wright Literary Agency.

Hartman was the Fulbright Distinguished Chair in American Studies at the University of Southern Denmark for the 2013-14 academic year, and is an Organization of American Historians (OAH) Distinguished Lecturer for the 2015-2018 period. He was the founding President of the Society for U.S. Intellectual History (S-USIH), and he continues to write for the Society’s award-winning blog. Hartman has been published in a host of academic and popular venues, including The American Historian, The Journal of American Studies, Reviews in American History, Journal of Policy History, The Chronicle of Higher Education, Salon, Jacobin, Bookforum, and In These Times. Hartman received his BA in History from the University of New Mexico (1994) and his PhD in History from the George Washington University (2006). Prior to attending graduate school, he taught high school history in his hometown Denver.

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Customer reviews
4.6 out of 5 stars
Amazon Customer

5.0 out of 5 stars Excellent book!Reviewed in the United States on 18 June 2025
Format: HardcoverVerified Purchase

Andrew Hartman is an excellent historian and definitely worth any reader’s time.

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Richard Ficek

3.0 out of 5 stars Trotsky 's American Marxism.Reviewed in Canada on 3 July 2025
Format: HardcoverVerified Purchase

American Marxism largely from the eyes of Trotsky and thinkers influenced by him.Very little about the CPUSA and it's work on the cultural front- example ,nothing about Guthrie and the promtion of the folk tradition.Little about the Party's work re.democratization within American unions and no mention about MLK and the Marxist (,and Party) support,tactical and ideological in his campaign.A broad overview ,somewhat disappointing

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Karl Marx in America

by Andrew Hartman

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University of Chicago Press, 600 pp., $39.00

That erstwhile cigar maker was Samuel Gompers, founder and longtime president of the American Federation of Labor—the organization that evolved into the AFL-CIO and has dominated American unionism for well over a century. Gompers became a harsh critic of Marxian radicals: He thought their desire to yoke the labor movement to the fate of a socialist party would violate the independence of unions and lead them into a dead end of sectarianism, repression, and defeat.

Still, the inspiration the young Gompers drew from the Manifesto appears to support the argument Andrew Hartman makes in his sprawling, often provocative new survey, Karl Marx in America: “Marx gained purchase in American life because he offered a powerful theory of freedom—one that doubled as a map of an alternative American future.” If the bearded German icon left a strong imprint on organized labor—the movement he believed would be pivotal to overthrowing capitalism—then it must have shaped the views of millions of ordinary Americans who burned to change their society in fundamental ways.

Hartman sweeps with gusto through over a century and a half of U.S. history, revealing the influence of Marxism on dozens of institutions, individuals, and events, obscure and famous. Did you know that the revolutionary sage wrote or co-wrote nearly 500 articles for the New-York Tribune during the Civil War era, when it was one of the most popular newspapers in the nation? Or that at least two of his disciples were officers in the Union Army? Or that Franklin D. Roosevelt’s “political philosophy rhymed with Marxism”? While Hartman might overstate the importance of these political details, he largely succeeds at a different, if lesser, mission: to narrate how vital arguments about Marxist thought were to men and women who spent their lives battling about ideas.

For two distinct clusters of well-educated Americans, Marxism has long been a fruitful subject— either a set of ideas to think with or a cudgel to wield against ideological foes. In the first camp are radical and reform-minded intellectuals who take Marx’s ideas seriously—even as they ceaselessly dispute, revise, and apply them to explain the evolving forms of American culture, economics, and politics. In the second camp thrive officeholders and propagandists on the right. For them, the old Rhinelander’s name and a crude or false version of his doctrines serve as a perennial bogeyman to scare the public away from a welfare state and movements on the left. The Trump administration’s recent vow to cancel federal funding that allegedly promotes some evil known as “Marxist equity” fits a line of attack that has been around since Lenin occupied the Kremlin.

Hartman’s treatment of both left literati and right-wing witch-hunters brims with insight, cogently presented. In his most original foray into the burned-over ground of left intellectual history, he brings to life a number of thinkers about whom even most academics know little or nothing. There was Friedrich Sorge, who immigrated to New York from exile in Europe after fighting in the revolution of 1848 and “was arguably better versed in Marx’s writings” than anyone in his new country. Sorge, who helped found the nation’s first socialist party—the Workingmen’s Party of the United States—in 1876, argued that competing in elections would accomplish nothing unless wage earners first organized into powerful unions.

Although neither of the parties that flew the Marxist banner across the country in the twentieth century won more than a handful of offices beyond the local level, both the Socialist Party and the Communist Party stamped their mark on American thought and culture. The SP nurtured such writers as Jack London and Helen Keller. During his five campaigns for president on the Socialist ticket, Eugene Debs articulated the need for a “cooperative commonwealth” in terms borrowed from the Bible as well as the gospel of historical materialism. And while American Communists never abandoned their fealty to the tyrannical rulers of the Soviet Union, they did inspire such famous critics of class oppression and white supremacy as Woody Guthrie, Dorothea Lange, and Angela Davis.

Among the more obscure figures whom Hartman profiles is Raya Dunayevskaya, a Ukrainian émigré, who created, after World War II, a fresh variant of the old doctrine she called “Marxist humanism.” Her aim was to rescue a philosophy of human liberation from the Communists who had converted it into “the theory and practice of enslavement.” Together with the great Trinidadian writer and organizer C.L.R. James, Dunayevskaya argued that Marx had sharply criticized all forms of labor under capitalism—enslaved or waged—as assaults on individual freedom. Departing from an orthodox focus on white industrial wage earners allowed them to broaden the definition of the exploited to include women, racial minorities, and students. “Her Marxist theory of revolution was tailored for the 1960s,” Hartman aptly observes. But the radical feminists who coined the phrase “the personal is political” grasped the same insight without seeking legitimacy in Marx’s Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844.

Both James and Dunayevskaya arrived in the United States in the 1920s, before the Great Depression, when Marxists of all stripes understandably viewed that long downturn as proof of the chaos and misery endemic to capitalism. Surely, Americans would be open to a theory that would now seem like common sense. Organizers who happened to be Communists or Socialists played a major role in mobilizing the big strikes that birthed the unions of the Congress of Industrial Organizations in the factories where cars, steel, and refrigerators were made: Members of the Communist Party were the chief architects of the sit-down strike in Flint, Michigan, during the winter of 1936–1937 that established the United Auto Workers as a power in the land.

Yet Marxists gained more influence among writers and artists in the 1930s than among ordinary people. For all their fervor, leftist intellectuals struggled to understand why their message often failed to resonate more widely. At the polls, workers spurned Marxist candidates in favor of those from the party of Franklin D. Roosevelt, the patrician-turned-populist. One worker acclaimed FDR as “the only man we ever had in the White House who would understand that my boss is a sonofabitch.” Bowing to reality, Socialist and Communist organizers narrowed their goals to union recognition, job security, and higher wages instead of a society run by and for the working class.

The larger message of Marxism wasn’t getting through: As Hartman remarks, “Either there was something wrong with their theory, or there was something wrong with the working class.” The literary critic Kenneth Burke argued that paying closer attention to how Americans actually talked about their problems could help Marxists appeal to them in terms they might grasp. Poetic discourse, he mused, would advance the class struggle better than alien-sounding jargon. In his landmark 1935 history of the Civil War and Reconstruction, W.E.B. Du Bois hailed Black people for engaging in the biggest “general strike” in U.S. history when they fled to Union lines, depriving Confederate planters of their labor. If white workers had only shed their racial privilege, he contended, they could have forged a potent alliance across the color line. Alas, “not enough … were familiar with Capital,” Hartman says, and so they embraced the new Jim Crow order.

Du Bois remained a Marxist all his life, but some talented younger leftists soon abandoned their faith in what they took to be a failed theory and became liberal proponents of American exceptionalism. In his immensely popular 1948 book, The American Political Tradition, the historian Richard Hofstadter maintained, a bit sadly, that radical dissenters had never made much headway against a consensual culture that was “intensely nationalistic and for the most part isolationist … fiercely individualistic and capitalistic.”

Whereas the Marxists of the ’30s and ’40s may have failed to convert the working class, their successors in the ’80s and ’90s didn’t even attempt as much. As conservatives from Ronald Reagan to Donald Trump tore away at the legacies of the New Deal, the Great Society, and the New Left, American Marxism entered a newly insular phase. A number of scholars took refuge in spinning out new versions of Marxism whose only audience was inside academia. The literary theorist Fredric Jameson sought to unmask the alienating function of “commodity fetishism” with “real thought” that “demands a descent into the materiality of language and a consent to time itself in the form of the sentence.” Hartman aptly comments, “Cultural theory made a fetish of difficult language.” In their tome Empire (2000), Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri aimed to give left anti-globalizers an updated version of The Communist Manifesto but managed only to float an abstract hope that “the multitude’s ultimate demand for global citizenship” would be realized through discrete acts of resistance in locations scattered around the world. “While the Right has been busy taking the White House,” Todd Gitlin quipped about such fanciful notions, “the left has been marching on the English department.”

Since the Great Recession, young activists on the left have turned to a more demotic style of Marxism to make sense of economic inequality as well as to protest it. Hartman points to the “maximally accessible” prose in Jacobin, the magazine founded in 2010 by Bhaskar Sunkara, and to podcasts like Chapo Trap House, in which “more than a hint of Marxism” flavors relentless put-downs of deluded liberals. This new generation has failed to gain more than a few slivers of political power: Its electoral victories in Washington have been limited to a handful of candidates endorsed by the Democratic Socialists of America, notably Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Rashida Tlaib, and the increased prominence of Bernie Sanders. To paraphrase the famous line chiseled on Marx’s gravestone in London’s Highgate Cemetery: American Marxists have only analyzed the world in various ways; the point, however, is to change it.

Unfortunately, Hartman doesn’t capture why Marxists have found difficulty in spreading the word in the United States, and often claims victories for his cherished tradition when the story is more complicated. Take the example of Samuel Gompers. What the AFL leader learned from Marx convinced him to oppose the political strategy adopted by American Marxists. A socialist attorney once called Gompers “the most class-conscious man I know.” But that mindset drove the labor leader to avoid using socialist rhetoric or making big promises about destroying capitalism. He knew such stances would turn off most working men and women in his nation, who demanded higher wages and better treatment on the job—not a proletarian revolution.

What was true of labor was even more the case for other movements on the American left whose adherents were drawn from a variety of classes. From abolitionism to the heyday of the civil rights crusade in the 1960s, most Black organizers sought legitimacy and inspiration from such texts as the Bible and the Declaration of Independence—not the words of the Manifesto. Few feminists who were not also socialists took their cues from a nineteenth-century patriarch who wrote little about women besides noting the cheap labor they provided to factory owners. And environmentalists who yearn to do away with fossil fuels know the Soviet regime that made Marxism its state religion developed some of the filthiest carbonized industries on Earth.

Even those prominent American activists who did praise what Marx wrote—who included Martin Luther King Jr. in his grad-uate student days—did not employ his language or endorse his ideas as they built powerful social movements. The “freedom” from class exploitation that Hartman heralds was not the type that motivated many Americans, other than those who joined a socialist or communist party. And the membership and electoral clout of their organizations paled beside those of parties inspired by Marxism in nearly every other industrial nation.

Through most of U.S. history, influential dissenters have spoken in registers more indigenous to the republic—democratic, Christian, and populist. “The people” was a more common, inclusive term than “the working class,” and urgent calls to realize the promise of self-government resonated far more widely than stern attacks on the power of the homegrown “bourgeoisie.” “To make everything depend upon economic forces,” wrote the progressive thinker Richard T. Ely in 1894, “is shutting one’s eyes to other forces, equally great and sometimes greater.” He added, “one must be blind to historical and actual phenomena who would make religion merely a product of economic life.” Hartman tends to disparage this tradition as “moral leftism,” but it has been a major driver of nearly every insurgency of consequence in U.S. history.

For the right, however, the M-word has long proved an effective weapon in its perpetual war against anyone branded as enemies of liberty and the nation itself. This assault began during the presidency of FDR. “So help me God,” Father Charles Coughlin vowed in 1936 to his huge radio audience, “I will be instrumental in taking a Communist from a chair once occupied by Washington.”

But invocations of Marx became routine during the Red Scare after World War II and have rarely been absent since then. Senator Joseph McCarthy denounced a “religion of immoralism … invented by Marx … and carried to unimaginable extremes by Stalin.” Reagan gave Richard Nixon some advice about how to campaign in 1960 against his Democratic opponent for the presidency: “Shouldn’t someone tag Mr. Kennedy’s bold new imaginative program with its proper age? Under the tousled boyish haircut is still old Karl Marx—first launched a century ago.” In recent years, Trumpist hacks with big followings gleefully slap the label “cultural Marxism” onto any phenomena they detest, from critical race theory to teachers’ unions to the alleged bias of the liberal media. In a 2021 book, the talk-show jockey Mark Levin called on all Americans “who love their country, freedom, and family” to fight back against Marxists who “pursue a destructive and diabolical course for our nation, undermining and sabotaging virtually every institution in our society.”

What makes such attacks plausible to millions of Americans was—and remains—the public’s ignorance of what Marx actually wrote and believed. Hartman takes pains to show that both liberal critics and right-wing demonizers got his favorite thinker terribly wrong. He argues, with persuasive quotations, that Marx was opposed to neither free speech nor democracy, and thus the tyrannical regimes run by his would-be followers would have appalled him. But if far more Americans think Castro, Stalin, and Mao were genuine Marxists than will ever read a page of Capital, The Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts, or even the Manifesto, that is just further proof of the small impression his American disciples have made on their fellow citizens.

Despite the right’s hostility, some of Marx’s ideas still have great value almost 150 years after he died. As I wrote in these pages back in 2016, Marx “brilliantly captured the propulsive dynamic” of the capitalist economy that has now conquered the entire world. What’s more, “our credulous addiction to the magical little computers in our pockets and purses demonstrates the wisdom of the section about ‘the fetishism of commodities’ in the first volume of Capital.” Anyone who cares about the multiple injuries of class can also learn from Marx’s thorough dissection of the system of labor and production that generates so much wealth and so much pain.

Yet, at the core of his thought is the determination that capitalism, like all earlier forms of class society, will inevitably fall victim to its own contradictions. After helping dig its grave, proletarians will begin to construct a world of caring and abundance for all. In 1938, George Orwell wrote that “to the vast majority of people, Socialism means a classless society, or it means nothing at all.” But the gospel of self-reliance and the unions that struggle mainly for better pay and shorter hours have appealed to far more Americans than has the future predicted by Marx and echoed by his disciples. In the twenty-first century, a lot more working women and men have been willing to vote for an authoritarian billionaire who relishes destruction of the welfare state than have rallied to gain a measure of economic power for themselves. A theory that does not unravel that contradiction can do little to defeat Trumpism or build a more egalitarian society for Americans or anyone else.

Michael Kazin

Michael Kazin’s most recent book is What It Took to Win: A History of the Democratic Party. He is a professor of history at Georgetown University.

Read More: Magazine, June 2025, Culture, Books & The Arts, Books, Karl Marx, Communism, Socialism, Samuel Gompers, History

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https://www.thenation.com/article/society/karl-marx-in-america-marxism-in-us/

Books & the Arts / October 13, 2025

Books in review

Karl Marx in America

by Andrew Hartman

To Free Labor

The triumphs and travails of American Marxism.

Robin Blackburn

This article appears in the November 2025 issue.

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 1848 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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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Robin Blackburn

Robin Blackburn, distinguished visiting professor at the New School for Social Research and former editor of New Left Review, is the author of The Making of New World Slavery, The Overthrow of Colonial Slavery and, most recently, Age Shock and Pension Power: How Finance Is Failing Us (all by Verso).

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https://jacobin.com/2025/05/karl-marx-us-legacy-capitalism

Karl Marx’s Legacy in the United States

Interview with  Andrew Hartman

For nearly two centuries, Karl Marx’s ideas have had a significant impact on US politics and intellectual life. In turn, Marx’s close study of the US informed the development of his ideas about capitalism and human freedom.

Painting of Karl Marx in his study, ca. 1875. (Imagno / Getty Images)

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Sara Van Horn

Marxist theory is often assumed to be fundamentally alien to US history. But when a memo from Donald Trump’s Office of Management and Budget says federal resources are being wasted on advancing “Marxist equity,” it’s impossible to deny that Karl Marx looms large in American political life. Whether as beacon or bogeyman, Marx, whose 207th birthday was May 5, has had a significant impact on the United States over the past two centuries.

In Karl Marx in America, Andrew Hartman, professor of history at Illinois State University, traces the life and afterlife of Marx in the United States, from his extensive correspondence with Union troops during the Civil War to the Marxist-inspired labor revolts of the twentieth century and the contemporary right-wing trope of “cultural Marxism.” Hartman explores the reciprocity of Marx’s relationship with American political organizing and intellectual life, illustrating not only how Marx has shaped US politics but also how close study of the United States deepened Marx’s understanding of human freedom.

Cal Turner and Sara Van Horn spoke with Hartman for Jacobin about how US history shaped Marx’s thought, why liberals and conservatives continue to scapegoat Marx, and the ways Marx’s ideas are booming today.

Sara Van Horn

Why is this book important? What are the dominant narratives around Marx’s relationship to the US, and which narratives fall short of historical fact?

Andrew Hartman

There is an overriding notion that you can’t put Karl Marx and the United States together: that Karl Marx can’t tell us anything about US history, and US history can’t tell us anything about Karl Marx. Before I started this research, I knew that notion to be wrong, but the more research I did, the more wrong I realized it was.

I want to demonstrate that Marx can help us make sense of US history, politics, economics, and the present moment. I discovered that everybody who was anybody in American history since his time — intellectuals, labor activists, politicians, writers, and ordinary Americans — had read Marx, thought about Marx, written about Marx, or tried to put Marx into action.

The number of characters in my book grew and grew. Putting Marx and US history together reveals something important about both.

Cal Turner

What are the main inflection points in US history in terms of American attitudes toward Marx?

Andrew Hartman

There have been four periods in US history when lots of Americans were reading Marx favorably. The first period was the first Gilded Age, when you see the emergence of mass socialist parties and radical labor parties.

The second period was the 1930s, which saw the worst crisis that capitalism has ever gone through, the Great Depression. Unemployment rates were 30 percent at certain points during that decade. It saw the emergence not only of the Communist Party USA, but also lots of offshoots of the communist movement. People were thinking both domestically and internationally through a Marxist lens.

Putting Marx and US history together reveals something important about both.

The third Marx boom was the 1960s. This might be surprising, because the US economy had never been doing better, and there was a wide swath of people, especially white people, who were part of a middle class. But due to the civil rights movement and a growing left-wing movement in opposition to the US war in Vietnam, lots of people in the 1960s were reading Marx in addition to other left-wing theorists.

The fourth Marx boom is right now, since the 2008 financial crisis, Occupy Wall Street, and the Bernie Sanders campaigns. There’s been a surge of people reading Marx, writing books about Marx, participating in Marxist reading groups, and downloading David Harvey’s lectures on Capital. It’s hard to know where all this interest will go, but in all the other times in which people were reading Marx, there’s a particular way in which the Left helped change history.

Sara Van Horn

Are there aspects of Marx’s influence on US history that you think would surprise readers?

Andrew Hartman

Marx spent ten years of his life writing for the New-York Tribune. In the 1850s, it was his main source of income, in addition to gifts from Friedrich Engels. He authored over five hundred articles for the Tribune, which at that time was the most read newspaper in the world, with 200,000 subscribers. The Tribune was the Bible of the emerging Republican movement and the Republican Party. Abolitionists had all read Marx’s take on European politics.

Marx also wrote extensively about the Civil War. Many people who fled Europe after the 1848 revolutions came to the United States. While Marx landed in London, many of Marx’s closest friends ended up in the Union Army. They were vehement abolitionists and believed that the Union would only win the war if it made the fight about abolition. A lot of them were fighting on the Western front along the Mississippi, and Marx corresponded with them.

The Tribune was the Bible of the emerging Republican movement and the Republican Party. Abolitionists had all read Marx’s take on European politics.

If you read his writings on the war, they’re pretty astute. They’re consistent with a lot of recent historiography, in terms of being extremely anti-slavery and rooted in the notion that Abraham Lincoln had to take the fight to the Confederacy and that if the war was about abolition, the Union would easily win.

I discovered that Marx’s close attention to the US Civil War — to the condition of slave labor and how enslaved people in the United States joined the Civil War effort — fully convinced Marx that one of the key aspects of capitalism was not just that profit derived from the exploitation of the worker, but that freedom required that humans have control over their bodies, their time, and their labor. You get this sense from Marx that there was a spectrum of labor from free to enslaved, and that what the Republicans called “free labor” wasn’t slave labor, but it wasn’t fully free either. For humans to be fully free, the working class would have to overthrow capitalism.

Although Marx had long understood that capitalism was dehumanizing for the worker, and although Marx and many others in Europe and the US had long compared wage labor to slave labor, a close study of chattel slavery in the United States — and even more so, recognition of the risks enslaved Americans took to get free from that odious labor regime — made their theories seem more concrete than ever.

Marx was inspired by the enslaved workers who, when they dropped their tools and fled the plantations for Union lines during the Civil War, undertook what W. E. B. Du Bois later described as a general strike. He was inspired by the abolitionists and antislavery freedom fighters who took up arms in the US Army, including many of his former comrades, the German ’48ers, and also many of the formerly enslaved. He was also inspired by the English workers who supported the Union and antislavery causes even when it threatened their own interests, a true showing of international working-class solidarity. In short, the US Civil War helped transform Marx’s theory of labor into praxis.

Cal Turner

Where else did the United States enter Marx’s analysis?

Andrew Hartman

The young Marx read a bunch of travelogues written by Europeans who had come to the US. From reading those, he came to think that socialism would come to the United States first, because in the US, all white men, even poor workers, had the right to vote. If the working class had the power to vote, why wouldn’t they vote in socialism, which would empower them?

Karl Marx with his daughters and Friedrich Engels in the 1860s. (Wikimedia Commons)

Although Marx didn’t ever disagree with that original premise, the more he studied the United States, the more he came to realize that democracy in the US was very limited. Because of the power of capital, it didn’t extend to the lives of most of the working class. This idea always informed his work: that political democracy was bourgeois, in the sense that it offered a veneer of freedom, but until workers had control over their time and labor, they would never truly experience democracy in the full notion of the word.

Sara Van Horn

You write that three distinct versions of Marx emerged in American politics. Can you walk us through those?

Andrew Hartman

The most potent version of Marx in US politics is centered on his notion that we can’t be free as human beings unless we have control over our labor. That is a key kernel of Marx that you can see across much of his writings, but in particular in the chapter on the working day in Capital, which was published in pamphlet form and circulated among nineteenth-century socialists and radical labor unionists.

That idea really informed the American labor movements in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. You see this idea reemerge at various points — for example, in the 1930s, during the Great Depression. It’s also been key to the reception of Marx since the 2008 recession.

The second version is the hybrid Marx. Since the Civil War, there have been lots of Americans who have read Marx favorably, as somebody who they can learn from, but who is often seen through other lenses: through a Christian lens, which has always been extremely prevalent in the United States, or a feminist lens, or a black nationalist lens, or the lens of populism.

There was a moment in the 1930s when lots of well-regarded American philosophers were reading Marx intensively as a way to improve the world through pragmatism, which is probably one of the most important American philosophical traditions. There’s been a moment from the 1970s onward where lots of people have combined Marx with indigenous traditions. The United States is such a large and diverse country, and at almost every point, you see Americans trying to meld Marx with other political traditions.

The more Marx studied the United States, the more he came to realize that democracy in the US was very limited.

The third version is Americans reading Marx seriously because they are anti-Marxist. Lots of people do this: libertarians, a few anarchists, communitarians, but most prevalently, liberals and conservatives. When liberal hegemony was at its peak in the early Cold War, you could not find a liberal intellectual who wasn’t reading Marx as a way to invent a liberal American political tradition. They couldn’t invent this American political tradition without disproving Marx, because Marx had been so important to the intellectual discourse.

Then you had conservatives who have always talked about Marx while not always reading him. Some of the more serious conservative intellectuals have taken his writing seriously. Others just use him as a boilerplate demon, which is incredibly common nowadays. But these conservatives have read and written about Marx not to disprove Marx — that was a foregone conclusion for them — but rather because they are interested in demonstrating that liberalism and Marxism are closely intertwined, and that the problem with liberalism is its close proximity to Marxism.

Cal Turner

Could you talk more about Marx as a scapegoat for both liberal and conservative Americans? How does the Right use the canard of cultural Marxism, for example?

Andrew Hartman

One thing I hope the book makes clear is that there’s nothing new here. Historians categorize periods in US history of deeply irrational anti-communism as Red Scares.

The First Red Scare immediately followed World War I and the Bolshevik Revolution. During that period, thousands of people were deported — which sounds very familiar. They might have been immigrants, but they were also deported for their political beliefs: their associations with socialism, communism, Marxism, or anarchism, most famously Emma Goldman. Thousands more were rounded up and put in jail. Some were lynched or executed by vigilantes. Lots of people are rightly very afraid of our current political moment, but it’s nothing new.

What historians refer to as the Second Red Scare — McCarthyism during the early Cold War — happened on a larger scale. Tens, perhaps hundreds, of thousands of people lost their jobs. Many people went to prison if there was any notion that they had ever been members of the Communist Party or associated with communism. Thousands of federal workers lost their jobs because they were gay, precisely because at that point you couldn’t be out of the closet and have a job. So petty bureaucrats working in the federal government would look at somebody and say, “That’s a prime target for blackmail.” Marx is always associated with these Red Scares.

At almost every point, you see Americans trying to meld Marx with other political traditions.

We’re living through something similar now. In the last twenty years, anything that the Right hates, like critical race theory, is labeled Marxist, even though it’s not Marxist. The Green New Deal is labeled as Marxist, even though it’s essentially a social democratic project. The list goes on and on, and it’s gotten so bad that even Trump himself is constantly talking about Marxists. He talks about Marxist DEI [diversity, equity and inclusion] bureaucrats in the university.

There’s this widely held assumption among the Right that to be Marxist is to be anti-American. That can lead to lots of different forms of political repression against not just Marxists, but anyone who in some way can be labeled as such.

Sara Van Horn

You write that we’re currently in a “Marx boom.” What does that mean? Are there specific lessons from Marx or other Marxists that could be helpful?

Andrew Hartman

The billion-dollar question. Around the time of Occupy Wall Street, there were lots of young people developing what was known as millennial socialism — including the people who created Jacobin — who took a renewed interest in how Marx could explain the present world and help us overcome the neoliberal hellscape and get to something better. Some of those politics came out of the Bernie Sanders campaign.

There’s continued interest in Marx. I’ve probably read fifteen recently published books on Marx in the last decade, and if there’s a theme in these books, that theme is freedom. We’re returning to this original kernel of Marx in the United States, going back to the Civil War, which is that having to work for a living in contemporary capitalism — which is not that dissimilar from late-nineteenth-century capitalism — is a deeply alienating, deeply exploitative existence for most people. And it only seems to be getting worse. It’s really hard to claim that we’re free people, that we’re flourishing, and that we’re living up to our full potential in this context.

Lots of people have turned to Marx to understand what it is about capitalism that makes us unfree. And a time-tested answer to where we go from here is labor organizing. My faculty union finally formed two years ago, and we have a contract, and we have so much more power and autonomy over our work lives now because of that. This is just a starting point. Millions of people have to find these starting points from which to work.

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Contributors

Andrew Hartman is a professor of history at Illinois State University. He is the author of A War for the Soul of America: A History of the Culture Wars, Education and the Cold War: The Battle for the American School, and Karl Marx in America.

Cal Turner is a writer based in Philadelphia.

Sara Van Horn is a writer living in Serra Grande, Brazil.

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Marx’s America
 https://jacobin.com/2018/05/marx-america-lincoln-slavery-civil-war


Marx’s America
ByAndrew Hartman

Marx is thought of as a purely European phenomenon. But his radical politics were indelibly shaped by his encounters with American life.


A Marx art installation in Trier, Germany. Cordylus / Flickr


Jacobin‘s winter issue, “Municipal Socialism,” is out now. Follow this link to get a discounted subscription to our beautiful print quarterly.


In the early years of radio, the BBC aired a series about famous exiles in London. One episode included an interview with an elderly man long retired from his job in the British Museum’s reading room. The man was asked if he remembered a patron by the name of Karl Marx, who for many years toiled at the museum on what would become his masterpiece, Das Kapital.



At first the retiree drew a blank, but after he was given several clues — Marx sat in the same seat every day, wore a thick graying beard, endured painful boils, and endlessly requested materials about political economy — the man’s memory came alive. “Oh Mr Marx, yes, to be sure. Gave us a lot of work ’e did, with all ’is calls for books and papers. And then one day ’e just stopped coming. And you know what’s a funny thing, sir? Nobody’s ever ’eard of ’im since!”

Marx himself half expected Capital to tumble into oblivion. As he was preparing to send it to press in 1867, he suggested that his friend Friedrich Engels read Balzac’s The Unknown Masterpiece. It was a sardonic recommendation. The Unknown Masterpiece tells the story of a painter who spends decades laboring on a single painting in an effort to render a perfectly accurate representation of reality. When a fellow artist scorns the piece as unintelligible, the painter hastily destroys it in a blaze of fire, and dies soon after.

Yet despite Marx’s cautious expectations, his masterpiece was not doomed to oblivion. Capital unfolded the workings of capitalism in such a profound fashion that people across the planet have been reading it since the Gilded Age, when Marx’s theory that capitalism was a system that pitted capital against labor seemed to have revealed itself as the truth. Marx’s fate, in this way, has been tied to the fate of capitalism.

To read Marx is to wrestle with the modern world that capitalism has made. This includes modern America — especially modern America. Because the US is the nation in world history most committed to capitalism, and because Marx is the world’s most enduring theorist of capitalism, Marx is a veritable American alter ego.

And indeed, Marx often had the United States on his mind. Some of his grandest ideas were formed with the United States in view, and some of America’s greatest thinkers later drew on his rich work to give their own accounts of capitalism and American life. Two hundred years after Marx’s birth, delving into the relationship between the famed radical and the United States provides us with a deeper, more intimate portrait of Marx and his ideas.
Marx and the Civil War

The United States began playing an outsized role in Marx’s thinking in the 1850s, when he was hired as the European correspondent for the New York Tribune, a paper that at the time boasted more subscribers than any other in the world. Writing for an American audience compelled Marx to focus his attention on events across the Atlantic, a task made easier by his ongoing correspondence with several comrades who had emigrated to the US following the failed 1848 revolutions in Europe. With the help of fellow radicals like Joseph Wedemeyer — later a general in the Union Army — Marx furnished insights for Tribune readers through much of the 1850s.

Marx lost his spot with the Tribune amid the crisis of the Civil War. Impoverished and in desperate need of another means of income, the exiled revolutionary sought out journalism work elsewhere. He found it in a Vienna-based newspaper, which hired him to write about the Civil War. Marx’s Civil War writings would prove influential not only in shaping European radicals’ attitudes towards the titanic conflict, but in how Marx himself thought about capitalism.

Those thoughts were formed in the hothouse of British politics. At the outset of the war, many British elites wanted to ally with the Confederacy, recognizing that the booming English textile industry relied on the South for cheap, plentiful cotton. Most of the English working class, by contrast, were partisans of the Union cause. This was particularly true of those with radical politics, including Marx and his fellow members of the International Workingmen’s Association (later known as the First International).



Marx’s stance was at once moral and strategic: he abhorred slavery full stop, while also seeing the Union cause as an important step towards working-class emancipation. A nation built entirely on free labor, he reasoned, would create more favorable conditions for organizing workers.

It was through this lens — the close connection between the abolition of slavery and working-class struggle — that Marx viewed Lincoln, at least in his writings for public consumption. As he commented in a letter to Lincoln on behalf of the International: “The workingmen of Europe consider it an earnest of the epoch to come, that it fell to the lot of Abraham Lincoln, the single-minded son of the working class, to lead his country through matchless struggle for the rescue of an enchained race and the reconstruction of the social world.”

Marx was often more circumspect in his private correspondence. There he described Lincoln’s celebrated oratory as “the trite summonses that one lawyer sends to an opposing lawyer,” and called Lincoln an “average man of good will.” But in a strange way, this was a compliment. “Never has the New World secured a greater victory than in the demonstration that with its political and social organization,” Marx wrote, “average men of good will suffice to do that which in the Old World would have required heroes to do!”

Marx carried his views on slavery and capitalism into his more theoretical works. In Capital — first published in 1867, two years after the Union victory — Marx used the rise and fall of American slavery as a metaphor for the rise and what he assumed would be the eventual fall of capitalism. The Civil War, Marx argued in the introduction, was a “harbinger of socialist revolutions to come.”

In thinking about the impact the Civil War had on Capital, some Marx scholars have gone a step further, focusing on how it structured Marx’s most famous book at a deeper level. The slaves who freed themselves during the Civil War, and the English workers who supported emancipation, recognized that control over time was central to autonomy. And autonomy was the ultimate aim for the working class — the precondition for living the good life.

As a result, Capital connected the abolition of slavery to the working day. “A new life,” Marx wrote, “immediately arose from the death of slavery. The first fruit of the American Civil War was the eight hours’ agitation, which ran from the Atlantic to the Pacific, from New England to California, with the seven-league boots of the locomotive.”

What happened in America, Marx recognized, had worldwide implications.
Marx and Du Bois

Marx’s Civil War writings did not die with him in 1883. They helped shape W. E. B. Du Bois’s 1935 landmark book Black Reconstruction in America, which expanded on Marx’s work by more fully accounting for the plunders of slavery.

In Capital, Marx had observed:


The discovery of gold and silver in America, the extirpation, enslavement and entombment in mines of the indigenous population of that continent, and the conversion of Africa into a preserve for the commercial hunting of blackskins, are all things which characterize the dawn of an era of capitalist production. These idyllic proceedings are the chief moments of primitive accumulation.

Elsewhere, Marx argued that as capitalism expanded its reach across the globe it would consign slavery and other forms of “primitive accumulation” to the dustbin of history. In the Civil War, it was the Union side that represented the forces of capitalism, and thus the Union side that was also positioned to destroy slavery. Not only bad at an ethical level, slavery was also bad because it slowed the expansion of a capitalist labor system and, thus, the development of revolutionary socialist consciousness.



Du Bois did not take issue with this analysis, per se. But, he noted, it failed to account for the role of black slaves who were soon to be free. Building on Marx’s argument that the Civil War was a revolutionary opening — a proletarian revolution within a bourgeois republic — Du Bois then added an important revision: black slaves, not industrial workers, represented the proletarian vanguard. To Du Bois, black resistance during the Civil War was nothing less than a “general strike.” By refusing work on Confederate plantations, and by swamping approaching Union battle lines, slaves helped win the Civil War and in the process freed themselves. This was, in the words of Du Bois, “one of the most extraordinary experiments of Marxism that the world, before the Russian Revolution, had ever seen.”

Why Marxism? Because, in Du Bois’s words, “black labor was the foundation not only of the Southern social structure, but of Northern manufacture and commerce, of the English factory system, of European commerce, of buying and selling on a world-wide scale.” When black slaves revolted against slavery, they were revolting against global capitalism — and fulfilling Marx’s historic vision for the working class.

But class struggle cut both ways. When the Union armies deserted the South in 1877, the revolution the slaves had inaugurated was smashed and black labor came under white control once again. The national elite had decided that it needed a chastened black labor force, and it discovered that it could turn the Southern white working class against blacks to keep them in their proverbial chains. Reconstruction was no more.

Du Bois’s grand historical narrative, though brilliant and original, owed much to Marx. Du Bois might not have reached his conclusions — might not have written a book that would later revolutionize American historiography — if Marx had not helped him grapple with the forces of modern history. And in turn, Du Bois’s position as an American at the margins allowed him to mine Marx’s ideas for alternative means of understanding modern history — enlarging our understanding of capitalism in the process.
Marx and American Exceptionalism

The United States was a case study in Marx’s theory of modernization. Here, he wrote, capitalism developed “as in a greenhouse”; here, he saw the first fully realized bourgeois country, which conditioned its people to the idea that “work is the key to wealth, and wealth the only object of work.”

Yet what was most remarkable to Marx was that even though the United States had become one of three industrial giants in the world, it had not yet developed fixed class distinctions. In Marx’s view, this was largely because the United States lacked a feudal past — as well as the pathologies that accompanied it.

To Marx’s critics, America has often served as proof that his theory of capitalism does not stand up to the weight of evidence. How can one look at American history and find confirmation of Marx’s theory that everyone in a capitalist society would become either a member of the bourgeoisie or the proletariat?

But his analysis in some ways prefigured what later came to be called “American exceptionalism.” During the Cold War, liberals like Louis Hartz would make American exceptionalism central to their thinking. In his 1955 book, The Liberal Tradition in America, Hartz contended that any analysis of American political thought had to begin with the “storybook truth about American history” — that the United States had no feudal past. According to Hartz, this “storybook truth” helped explain why the United States, unlike Europe, lacked “a genuine revolutionary tradition.” The philosopher who embodied America was not Marx, but rather John Locke. This was one way to answer the question Werner Sombart famously asked in 1906: “Why is there no socialism in the United States?”

Marx had a different answer to this question — an answer that became the central theme of the final, crucial chapter of the first volume of Capital. Turning Alexis de Tocqueville’s formulation on its head, Marx argued that Europe was America’s future, not vice versa. American exceptionalism was a temporary condition. Unlike in Europe, there was not yet a surplus population. But with the onset of massive European migration — a persistent fact for much of Marx’s life — the United States would soon gain its own surplus population.


Marx also predicted that another aspect of American exceptionalism — the frontier — would eventually wither. Anticipating Frederick Jackson Turner’s “frontier thesis,” Marx argued that European immigrants would no longer be welcomed with land, and more importantly, the autonomy that came with land ownership. This, he divined, would mark the death of the nineteenth-century American dream. New immigrants would be obligated to work for wages, thrown into the blossoming American proletariat.

With this, Marx negated the view of the United States as an exception to his rule — he negated the negation — and elevated the United States to the center of his famous dialectal mode of thought.
American Freedom

In his Civil War writings, Marx often painted himself as an ally of Lincoln, which is perhaps curious since the perception has long been that they were ideological opposites. Whereas Lincoln championed the free labor system under development across the North, Marx equated free labor with “wage slavery” because workers had no choice but to sell their labor to survive. But the perception of the two as opposites is a product of the Cold War: in reality, they had some important commonalities, especially their hatred for chattel slavery. And Marx, as we’ve seen, saw the attainment of free labor as a fundamental step toward workers’ emancipation.

Socialist revolution didn’t rise from the ashes of the Civil War. But we can still learn from Marx’s ruminations on freedom — so informed by his observations of American slavery, so shaped by his analyses of the Civil War — as we think about it in our own time. Since Marx’s day, one of the Left’s primary missions — one of the reasons for its existence — has been to expand the idea of political freedom to include economic freedom. Without control over our work, our bodies, and our time, human potential is stunted and democracy is stillborn.

“Freedom” remains a fixture in the American political lexicon. But we’d be better off looking to Marx for a definition.
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Contributors

Andrew Hartman is professor of history at Illinois State University. He is the author of A War for the Soul of America: A History of the Culture Wars, and is currently writing a book about Karl Marx in America.

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<한국어: 약 1,000단어 요약+평론>

<무엇을 다룬 책인가>
Andrew Hartman의 <Karl Marx in America>는 “미국은 본질적으로 반(反)마르크스주의 국가”라는 통념을 정면으로 뒤집는다. 마르크스가 미국을 방문한 적은 없지만, 남북전쟁 시기부터 21세기까지 미국의 정치·노동·지식·문화·우파 담론 속에서 마르크스가 반복해서 “불려 나오고(소환되고), 오해되고, 재해석되고, 때로는 전략적으로 이용”되어 왔다는 것이 핵심 주장이다. Hartman은 마르크스를 단지 사회주의자의 ‘성인’으로도, 냉전 우파의 ‘악마’로도 고정하지 않고, 미국 사회 내부의 여러 집단(좌·중도·우)이 각자의 필요에 따라 마르크스를 어떻게 읽었는지 “수용사(受容史)”로 풀어낸다. University of Chicago Press+1

<구성과 전개(핵심 내용)>
책은 “미국 기계 속의 유령(ghost in the American machine)”이라는 도발적 비유로 시작한다. 이후 9장으로 시대를 나눠, 각 시기 미국이 마르크스를 어떤 얼굴로 만들었는지를 따라간다(목차 자체가 논지를 요약한다). Barnes & Noble+1

1. <남북전쟁: “미국 혁명가”로서의 마르크스>
   남북전쟁은 단순히 미국 내부의 정치사건이 아니라, 자본주의·노동·노예제라는 세계사적 쟁점이 충돌한 장이었다. Hartman은 이 시기에 마르크스가 미국을 “해방/노동”의 렌즈로 읽는 방식, 그리고 미국 내부에서도 그가 “해석 자원”이 되는 과정을 다룬다. (책은 마르크스 자체를 해설하는 ‘프라이머’ 역할도 일부 수행한다는 평가가 있다.) Los Angeles Review of Books

2. <도금시대(Gilded Age): “노동계급 영웅”>
   기업권력이 팽창하던 시기, 이민자 노동운동과 사회주의 전통 속에서 마르크스는 “자본의 본성”을 설명하는 언어가 된다. 어떤 서평은 이 대목에서 Hartman이 “미국에서 마르크스가 ‘폭정’이 아니라 ‘자유(시간·삶의 자율)’의 문제로 읽힐 수 있었던 조건”을 잘 추적한다고 요약한다. Calirb

3. <러시아 혁명: “볼셰비키”라는 표상>
   마르크스는 미국에서 ‘사상’이기 이전에 ‘세계사적 사건(1917)’과 결합해 상징이 된다. 이때부터 우파와 국가권력이 마르크스를 “외부 위협/전염”으로 프레이밍하는 경향도 강화된다.

4. <대공황: “예언자(Prophet)”>
   경제 붕괴는 마르크스의 ‘위기’ 진단을 현실 정치의 언어로 끌어올린다. 공산주의자·노동운동은 물론, 더 넓은 공적 담론에서도 마르크스가 재등장한다. New Books Network

5. <중기 자유주의: “거짓 예언자(False Prophet)”>
   냉전으로 가기 전후, 미국의 중도 자유주의는 복지국가·케인스주의로 “자본주의를 수선”하는 길을 택하면서, 마르크스를 불편한 급진성으로 밀어낸다. 마르크스는 “필요할 때만 호출되는” 존재가 된다.

6. <전후 보수주의: “붉은 위협(Red Menace)”>
   매카시즘과 냉전 질서 속에서 마르크스는 ‘분석’이 아니라 ‘낙인’이 된다. Hartman이 보여주려는 핵심은, 이 시기 마르크스가 단지 좌파의 유산이 아니라 우파 정치의 동원 장치이기도 했다는 점이다(우파의 강박/과잉 해석). Jacobin

7. <신좌파: “인본주의 해방자(Humanist Liberator)”>
   1960년대 이후 마르크스는 계급 환원주의의 도식만이 아니라, 소외·해방·인간해방 같은 언어로 ‘재번역’된다.

8. <레이건 시대 이후 학계: “이론가(Theorist)”>
   정치적 대중운동이 약화되는 국면에서 마르크스는 학술장(이론·비평)의 중심 참조점이 된다. 마르크스는 거리의 깃발이기보다, 강의실과 저널의 언어가 된다.

9. <21세기: “다시 떠오르는 유령(Specter Haunting)”>
   불평등, 금융위기, 플랫폼 자본주의 등은 마르크스를 다시 호출한다. Hartman은 “지금의 자본주의를 이해하는 데 마르크스가 여전히 유효한 질문틀”을 제공한다고 본다. Barnes & Noble+1

<평론: 장점>

• <수용사의 힘>: 이 책의 미덕은 “마르크스가 미국에 ‘있었다/없었다’”가 아니라 “미국이 필요할 때마다 마르크스를 어떤 도구로 만들었나”를 보여준다는 점이다. 그래서 마르크스주의 사상사라기보다, 미국 정치문화사·지성사·이념투쟁사의 한 형태로 읽힌다. thesis eleven+1

• <좌·우를 함께 다룸>: 좌파 전통만이 아니라 우파의 ‘반마르크스’ 동원이 책의 중요한 줄기라는 점이 설득력을 만든다(“좌의 귀환”과 “우의 강박”을 함께 엮는 방식). Jacobin

• <대중 독자를 의식한 서술>: 여러 평이 “명료한 문체”와 “마르크스 입문서 같은 기능”을 언급한다. 마르크스 텍스트에 익숙하지 않은 독자에게도 시대별 핵심 논점을 잡아준다. Society for US Intellectual History+1

<평론: 한계와 질문>

• <‘마르크스’의 확장 문제>: 마르크스(본인)·마르크스주의(운동/정당)·마르크스적 어휘(비평/이론)가 한 묶음으로 움직일 때가 있다. 수용사라는 형식이 장점이지만, 때로는 “그건 마르크스라기보다 당대의 반공주의/개혁주의/학계 담론 아니었나?” 같은 경계 문제가 남는다.

• <평가의 균형>: 어떤 비평은 흥미로운 주장에도 불구하고 “판단의 논쟁성, 공백, 가정의 문제”가 약점이 된다고 지적한다. 즉, 풍부한 사례를 엮는 만큼, 무엇을 빼고 무엇을 넣었는지의 선택이 더 크게 보인다. Society for US Intellectual History

• <미국 특수성의 해석>: 미국에서 마르크스가 반복해 소환되면서도 제도정치로는 제한적으로만 번역된 이유(양당제, 인종/이민/지역 분절, 노동조합 제도, 냉전 국가형성 등)를 독자가 더 구조적으로 묻고 싶어질 수 있다. 이 책은 그 질문에 “부분 답”은 주지만, 독자에 따라 “구조 분석이 더 필요”하다고 느낄 여지도 있다.

<한 줄 평가>
미국을 “마르크스가 없는 나라”로 보는 시선을 깨뜨리고, 미국이 마르크스를 ‘필요에 따라 만들어 온 방식’을 추적한, 읽을거리 많은 지성사/정치문화사다. 마르크스를 좋아하든 싫어하든, “미국이 자기 자신을 설명하기 위해 마르크스를 어떻게 사용해 왔는가”를 확인하게 만든다. University of Chicago Press+1

<English: summary + review>

<What the book is doing> Andrew Hartman’s <Karl Marx in America> argues against the cliché that the United States is uniquely “anti-Marxist.” Marx never visited America, Hartman notes, yet Marx has functioned as a recurring presence—a “ghost in the American machine”—from the Civil War to twenty-first-century capitalism. The book is less a straight history of American Marxism than a reception history: how Americans across the spectrum (left, liberal center, and right) read, repurposed, caricatured, and mobilized Marx for their own projects. :contentReference[oaicite:12]{index=12} <Structure and core narrative> Hartman organizes the story into nine periodized chapters whose titles announce the shifting American “faces” of Marx: “American Revolutionary” (Civil War), “Working-Class Hero” (Gilded Age), “Bolshevik” (Russian Revolution), “Prophet” (Great Depression), “False Prophet” (midcentury liberalism), “Red Menace” (postwar conservatism), “Humanist Liberator” (New Left), “Theorist” (Reagan-era academia), and “Specter Haunting” (twenty-first-century capitalism). :contentReference[oaicite:13]{index=13}

Across these eras, Hartman shows a repeating pattern: moments of capitalist rupture or legitimacy crisis create openings for Marx as an explanatory language; moments of geopolitical confrontation (especially the Cold War) turn Marx into a symbolic enemy; and periods of movement decline often relocate Marx into universities and cultural theory. A notable payoff is that Hartman treats right-wing anti-Marxism as part of Marx’s American story rather than as mere “background noise”—a political technology that frequently defines itself through an exaggerated or distorted Marx. Jacobin

<Strengths> 1) <A persuasive reframing> By putting “reception” at the center, the book makes Marx’s influence in America visible without claiming America was ever straightforwardly Marxist. That is analytically cleaner than arguing about whether the US “really had” Marxism. :contentReference[oaicite:15]{index=15}

2. <Readable, pedagogical style>
   Multiple reviewers note the clarity and accessibility of Hartman’s prose and the way the book doubles as a primer on key Marx texts and ideas for general readers. Society for US Intellectual History+1

3. <Wide canvas, many actors>
   Hartman ranges across political movements, intellectual currents, and institutions over a long sweep of time. A recent review essay highlights the book’s breadth (roughly 500 pages, nine chapters) and its ability to connect disparate American “uses of Marx.” thesis eleven

<Limitations and open questions> 1) <Boundary blur: Marx vs. Marxism vs. “Marx-ish”> Reception history can sometimes slide from Marx (as a thinker) to Marxism (as organizations and regimes) to “Marxian vocabulary” (in cultural critique). Readers may want sharper distinctions, especially when explaining why Marx becomes a symbol of tyranny in some American narratives while appearing as a language of freedom and autonomy in others. :contentReference[oaicite:18]{index=18}

2. <Selection effects>

As one scholarly commentator suggests, the book’s strengths—its plentiful figures and contexts—also amplify debates about judgment calls, omissions, and assumptions. That’s the trade-off of writing a big, synthetic narrative. Society for US Intellectual History

<Bottom line> <Karl Marx in America> is best read as American political-cultural history told through a surprising protagonist: Marx as recurring reference point, scarecrow, toolkit, and diagnostic language. Whether you approach Marx with sympathy or suspicion, Hartman makes it difficult to keep saying “Marx doesn’t belong to the American story.” :contentReference[oaicite:20]{index=20} ::contentReference[oaicite:21]{index=21}

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<Karl Marx in America> 요약 및 평론

1. 요약: 미국사 속의 마르크스라는 유령

앤드루 하트먼은 <Karl Marx in America>에서 칼 마르크스의 사상이 미국이라는 토양에서 어떻게 변주되고, 오해받으며, 동시에 미국적 정체성을 형성하는 데 기여했는지를 추적한다. 흔히 미국은 강력한 반공주의와 자유주의적 개인주의로 인해 마르크스주의의 불모지로 여겨지지만, 하트먼은 마르크스가 미국 지성사와 정치사에서 결코 사라진 적 없는 <유령>과 같은 존재였음을 증명한다.

1) 19세기: 혁명의 동반자와 노예제 폐지

마르크스는 생전 미국 상황에 깊은 관심을 가졌다. 그는 뉴욕 데일리 트리뷴의 유럽 통신원으로 활동하며 미국 독자들에게 자신의 분석을 전달했다. 특히 하트먼은 마르크스가 미국의 남북전쟁을 단순히 지엽적인 갈등이 아닌, 자본주의 발전 과정에서 노예제라는 거대한 장애물을 제거하는 <역사적 진보>로 파악했음을 강조한다. 당시 독일계 이주민들을 중심으로 한 초기 마르크스주의자들은 링컨의 공화당과 결합하여 노예제 폐지 운동의 이론적, 실천적 토대를 제공했다.

2) 20세기: 레드 스케어와 냉전의 그늘

20세기에 들어서며 마르크스는 미국의 <공공의 적>으로 전락한다. 하트먼은 1910년대의 붉은 공포(Red Scare)와 냉전기 매카시즘을 통해 마르크스주의가 어떻게 <비미국적(Un-American)>인 것으로 타자화되었는지 분석한다. 그러나 이 시기에도 마르크스의 분석 도구는 대공황기 뉴딜 정책의 비판적 지지자들이나 노동운동가들 사이에서 생명력을 유지했다.

3) 문화 전쟁과 현대적 재해석

하트먼의 분석이 빛을 발하는 지점은 현대 미국의 <문화 전쟁>이다. 보수주의자들은 인종 비판 이론(CRT)이나 젠더 갈등을 <문화적 마르크스주의>로 규정하며 공격한다. 하트먼은 이것이 실제 마르크스의 경제적 토대 분석과는 거리가 멀지라도, 미국 우파들이 자신의 정체성을 확립하기 위해 마르크스를 끊임없이 소환하고 있음을 지적한다. 동시에 2008년 금융위기 이후 샌더스 열풍과 함께 부활한 민주사회주의 담론은 마르크스가 여전히 미국적 불평등을 설명하는 가장 강력한 언어임을 보여준다.

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2. 평론: 미국이라는 거울에 비친 마르크스

<Karl Marx in America>는 단순한 사상사가 아니라, 마르크스라는 렌즈를 통해 미국 민주주의의 한계와 가능성을 투영한 역작이다.

지적 탁월함: 타자화된 사상의 복권

하트먼의 가장 큰 업적은 마르크스를 외래의 불청객이 아닌, 미국 지성사의 내밀한 구성원으로 복원시킨 점이다. 대개 미국 예외주의(American Exceptionalism)는 미국이 계급 갈등이 없는 기회의 땅이라 주장하지만, 하트먼은 미국 역사 곳곳에 마르크스주의적 계급 분석이 숨 쉬고 있었음을 드러낸다. 이는 미국의 역사를 더욱 입체적으로 바라보게 만든다.

문화적 통찰: <문화적 마르크스주의>라는 허상과 실재

하트먼은 오늘날 우파가 사용하는 <문화적 마르크스주의>라는 용어의 형질 변화를 날카롭게 포착한다. 이는 실제 마르크스의 텍스트와는 무관한 정치적 수사에 가깝지만, 역설적으로 마르크스가 미국 정치 담론에서 얼마나 강력한 상징적 권력을 가졌는지 반증한다. 저자는 이를 통해 이데올로기가 어떻게 역사적 맥락에 따라 왜곡되고 재탄생하는지를 설득력 있게 제시한다.

한계와 시사점

다만, 이 책은 지성사에 치중한 나머지 실제 노동 현장에서의 구체적인 마르크스주의 실천이나 소수 인종 공동체 내의 자생적 사회주의 흐름에 대해서는 비중이 다소 적다는 아쉬움이 있다. 그럼에도 불구하고, 하트먼은 마르크스를 <박물관의 박제>가 아닌 <살아있는 대화 상대>로 호출하는 데 성공했다.

결론

결국 하트먼이 말하고자 하는 바는 명확하다. 미국이 마르크스를 증오하든 찬양하든, 그를 통하지 않고서는 미국의 자본주의와 민주주의를 온전히 설명할 수 없다는 것이다. 이 책은 미국이라는 거대한 실험장이 마르크스의 사상을 어떻게 소화하고 거부했는지를 보여주는 훌륭한 지도이며, 오늘날 극단화된 미국 정치를 이해하기 위한 필수적인 참고서다.

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이 요약과 평론이 도움이 되었기를 바랍니다. 혹시 특정 챕터에 대한 더 상세한 분석이나, 하트먼의 다른 저서와 비교하는 내용이 필요하신가요?

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