Marx: The Fourth Boom

IN HOWARD ZINN’S 1999 play Marx in Soho, the bearded Rheinländer addresses the audience: “I’ve been reading your newspapers […] They are all proclaiming that my ideas are dead! It’s nothing new. These clowns have been saying this for more than a hundred years. Don’t you wonder: why is it necessary to declare me dead again and again?”

As Andrew Hartman points out at the end of his new book, Karl Marx in America, while the German philosopher had played a pivotal role in American politics since the Civil War, by the 1990s very few Americans were reading him. Flash forward to 2024, when Hartman was writing the book: “[S]ix years removed from the philosopher’s two hundredth birthday, we are living through the fourth Marx boom,” Hartman writes. “Americans are thinking about Marx to a degree not matched since the 1960s, or perhaps even the 1930s.”

Hartman’s nine chapters periodize how Marx has been thought of in American history, from “Bolshevik” and “Prophet” to “False Prophet” and then “Red Menace.” 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.

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Slavery in the United States had a clarifying effect on Marx’s thought concerning where value comes from. Marx famously declared that “labor in the white skin can never free itself as long as labor in the black skin is branded,” because they are the same. Labor is labor, and this remains one of the most important philosophical observations of the last couple centuries.

The bloody work of emancipation greatly affected Marx’s examination of the squalid (yet waged) conditions in England’s sectors of industrial capital. “Marx was antislavery from early on,” Hartman writes:

He disagreed with all impositions on free labor, especially literal shackles. Marx’s abolitionist zeal was a moral position, consistent with his hatred of most forms of hierarchy. It was also strategic. He believed workers everywhere were limited in their freedom so long as workers anywhere were in bondage.

Most of Marx’s work was unpublished in his lifetime, but in conjunction with Hamburg publisher Otto Meissner, American printers were the ones who first set Capital, Volume I to binding (in German). An important fact about the early history of Marx in America is that he was known as a popular rabble-rouser among immigrants—the first wave of Marxism in the United States consisted of German “forty-eighter” revolutionaries, who wanted to tear down the European monarchies and dethrone the medieval archbishops but ended up exiled to the New World after the 1848 revolutions, arriving just in time to help decapitate the Slave Power.

Marx’s journalism and political writing was suppressed by a wide variety of European censors. The right-wing Prussian government banned the socialist newspaper Rheinische Zeitung (“Rhineland News”), which Marx wrote for, and in France, Prussia again got Vorwärts! (“Forward!”) closed down after one of his colleagues wrote an article praising an assassination attempt on King Friedrich Wilhelm IV.

It took decades for the full body of Marx’s magnum opus to find publication. Capital, Volume I didn’t make it into English until 1887, four years after his death. Marx’s family lived in severe impoverishment in the UK, and he never had the means to visit the United States in his lifetime—though his daughter did. American readers would have primarily encountered the living Marx in his correspondent work for the New-York Daily Tribune, which helped keep the family afloat for years.

Hartman’s approach blends reader-friendly explanations of Marx’s work, and why he thought the way he did, with descriptions of the legion of skanks who have sought to disprove, ban, and expunge Marx’s philosophy. But, as Hartman notes, were you to vanish Marx from every library, you’d destroy the central interlocutor around which most of capitalism is built.

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There has long been a denial that the United States has a class system, which is often followed by “and if it does, it’s actually good, and is totally distinct from other stodgy, illogical class systems.” This exceptionalism has served to protect US political science from criticism with, for example, the Geneva School of the 1920s asserting that capitalism had to be privileged, and politically protected, because the free market was “the only economic system that did not spawn tyranny,” as Hartman paraphrases their view. This was in opposition to decrepit European monarchism, the Bolshevik revolution underway in Russia, and the various brands of fascism brewing in Europe.

Hartman’s takedown of this exceptionalism argument is particularly satisfying, and he is in a good position to deliver it, having written his first book on the history of the US education system in the Cold War, and another on the intellectual history of the United States.

What is stark in the study of Marxism in America is how well-resourced the haters are. In 1958, Walt Whitman Rostow, “by then a professor of economic history at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, won a Carnegie Corporation grant to spend a year at Cambridge University developing what would become The Stages of Economic Growth”—a book meant to reorient Marx’s work away from a progression of history whose end goal was a classless society and toward a “teleology of five historical stages that began with a traditional society, the equivalent of feudalism, and ended with American-style liberal capitalism, or what he termed ‘the age of high mass-consumption.’”

Rostow represents only the beginning of a long succession of Cold War liberals and libertarians who echoed some version of what Daniel Bell said: “Americanism, with its creed of egalitarianism, was a surrogate for socialism.” As Hartman notes, this is a pretty confused idea. US capitalism—especially in a crisis like the Great Depression—has always been propped up by controlled dosages of socialism: “Progressivism wasn’t going to bring down capitalism,” Hartman notes of FDR’s New Deal; “it injected small doses of socialism to render it slightly more humane, and significantly more effective. By borrowing from socialism, progressivism galvanized a new, mightier form of capitalism.” The Congress of Industrial Organizations and the Communist Party USA are representative of the second boom.

A key defense of the US class system dates back to John C. Calhoun, a man championing state’s rights as a way to protect slavery and the Slave Power. Funny that Calhoun’s thought ended up resonating strongly with various Cold War figures such as Walt Rostow and the economic theorist James M. Buchanan—especially with the latter’s concept of “public choice theory,” which “turned the Marxist theory of the state on its head,” Hartman writes. “As opposed to wishing to free the masses from a state controlled by the capitalist elite, Buchanan wished to free the capitalist elite from a state controlled by the unruly masses.” This paved the way to all sorts of contemporary thinking, like school voucher programs, which present as “the freedom to choose,” but in actuality, they empower the rich and the racist to hoard resources and segregate.

Well-funded libertarians of the Chicago school of economics and beyond have been pumping out extreme caricatures of Marx for a century, and they define their pro-capitalist philosophies in explicit contrast to the foundations of Capital, which actually causes Marx’s ideas to persevere as “if through a dark mirror,” as Hartman explains it.

But there’s still no shaking the philosopher. “Until the freedom of some no longer required the unfreedom of others,” Hartman writes, “Marx would carry on, no matter how intently his enemies tried to erase him.”

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Karl Marx in America, published by the University of Chicago Press, is not a book that gets too deep in the weeds. It moves breezily through familiar names like Eugene V. Debs and Leon Trotsky, while also exploring lesser known (yet very important) figures between. As Hartman notes, Raya Dunayevskaya was “one [of] the most important if overlooked twentieth-century American Marxists” due to her work delivering to the US audience a humanist Marx who was distinct and dissociated from the Stalinist Soviet Union. Dunayevskaya’s work would then be picked up by the counterculture of the 1960s, marking the third boom of Marxist thought in the US.

No matter how much the right wing hallucinates the presence of acidic cultural Marxism, politics in the United States is generally an unbroken tradition of rejecting the labor theory of value—the idea that when you go to work, you create value by committing time, energy, and attention to a task. That value is then siphoned off by the boss and added to the overall value of the company, with a fraction of it returning to the laborer in the form of wages.

As opposed to centering working people as the engine of American excellence, or recognizing that the workplace is where free citizens should exercise control over their lives, almost none of our politics in the United States revolves around that. Hartman cites C. L. R. James’s argument that the American workplace is a totalitarian institution: “The modern worker is a cog in a machine […] All progress in industry consists of making him more and more of a cog and less and less of a human being.” The hyper-surveilled Amazon warehouse comes to mind as Hartman notes: “James wrote about American society through the lens of Marx, who conceptualized human happiness as deeply bound up with autonomy. People who lack control over their own labor remain unfree.”

In the United States, we officially credit people who own stuff, and spend most of their lives playing golf, or dining at the country club, as the purveyors of excellence—and look where that has gotten us. The US now has wealth disparity on par with the Gilded Age and the monarchies of yore, because our politics is the end result of a systematically sabotaged landscape: in the 1920s, members of the Industrial Workers of the World were jailed and membership fell into permanent decline; the Palmer Raids of 1919–20 bagged thousands of communists, including Emma Goldman, and deported them to Russia; the First Red Scare ruined the lives of a generation seeking to reorient American politics around people who go to work for a living, who have to clock in and labor under a boss. Hartman’s chapter detailing the advent of the entrepreneur in midcentury America hits hard—having crushed the “un-American” Left, the Cold War–era US government sponsored the idea that lone-genius businessmen are where innovation comes from, and that has proved to be a nice costume for a battalion of con men, with Elon Musk and Donald Trump just the newest iteration.

And yet, there is hope in the fourth boom. Hartman, a professor of history at Illinois State University, is one of the rare Gen X Marxists, pilled by the revolutionary politics of rock band Rage Against the Machine: “A thousand years they had the tools, we should be takin’ ’em / Fuck the G-ride, I want the machines that are makin’ ’em.”

“Rage appreciated Marx’s theory that power derived from command over the means of production,” Hartman writes, pointing to the advent of Jacobin magazine, the podcast Chapo Trap House, and the Democratic Socialists of America as the new communicators of fourth boom Marxism, with 9/11, the Iraq War, and the 2008 financial crisis signaling the return of Marx’s predicted cycles of economic bust and imperial conquest.

Still, the fourth boom has been shut out of power, and wildly underfunded compared to the money one can make studying Friedrich Hayek at the Mises Institute. Contemporary American socialism is treated as unserious by centrist figureheads, and on the right, the fights for universal healthcare and free college are accused of being secret nihilist movements toward enforced unfreedom. This socialist contingent is explicitly ignored (and resented) by Democrats, but as Hartman notes, “reducing millennial socialism to a generational tantrum ignores the fact that many young Americans have been pushed leftward by deeply entrenched historical pressures.”  According to him, “Marx has remained relevant in the United States across more than 150 years because he suggested an alternative perspective on freedom. In a nation long obsessed with the concept, why were so many Americans relatively unfree?”

Young Americans are only being pushed harder by these entrenched historical pressures. Accelerationists argue that worsening material conditions will force people to confront these questions no matter what, and the Right has a clear and bloody answer: it’s also a hapless and stupid one that just so happens to protect power and wealth. The left has a better response, with a liberatory future to win, and it’s rooted in the work of a guy named Karl.