Marx is back!

He looks as dangerous as ever. Donald Trump can’t keep Marx out of his mouth — he keepsdenouncing us Marxists. But we’re also living in a “Marx renaissance.” Book after book is being published about hisideas. Everywhere you look, people are rethinking everything we’ve been taught about Marx.

I’ll talk about one of those new books: Karl Marx in America, by Andrew Hartman. It’s got all sorts of fascinating things in it. The most interesting is that it leads to a question we’ll have to grapple with as the working class: What do we do with Marx today?

How to Use This Review

No need to read the whole thing, or “in order.” It’s designed to skip around; skip the parts that are useless. Make connections between different sections or paragraphs in your own way; build something else. Like Legos!

What’s the Point of a Book Review?

Most book reviews are like “product reviews” to tell you if something is worth buying. They’ll give a careful summary of everything in it — chapter by chapter — tell you what’s right and wrong — etc. That treats us like we’re consumers. The book could be anything: a hat, a dildo, a Bible. And that tries to do our thinking for us, instead of helping us think for ourselves. That’s fine for capitalist papers and mags. Marx wanted us to be more than consumers. He wanted us to get ready to seize the machinery that makes society and free humanity. So we need different ways to do reviews other than making them ads or tell our class here’s what you mustthink. Marxism is chock–full of experimenters we could follow!

I think book reviews could be more helpful, like raising questions for us to debate among ourselves as a class — workers, oppressed people, unionists, socialists — maybe opening spaces to debate the next steps in our class struggle — what threats are looming — what chances are opening up?

Rescuing Marx

Karl Marx in America is a rescue operation. Hartman points out that the capitalist state, and Cold War America’s anti-Marxist intellectuals, heaped layer after layer of shit on Marx since the Red Scare of the 1950s, and even before (chaps. 4, 5). He asks, What are all the layers of misreadings, distortions, and outright lies heaped on him to try to save “American greatness” from Marx?

By doing this, Hartman helps us dig beneath the layers of piled shit. His book gives a quick intro to Marx’s ideas and major books.

Here’s why the book is so important. Whole new generations of workers and students are getting radicalized after COVID and two Trump terms and the failures of Biden and Harris and the Democrats, the two-party support for Israel’s genocide against Palestinians and the people in the street for Palestine and the fight for Amazon unions — plenty of people are getting into Marx and socialism for the first time.

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.

Marx Is the Name of a Crisis of the Rulers

Karl Marx in America shows us that Marx was never received in any kind of “linear” way.

Early on, Hartman shows that Marx’s ideas, when they become popular again, spark debates: What is Marx saying, and does it apply here? Oftentimes, Marx can become a kind of banner (a kind of “floating signifier”) under which the working class fights for its own political voice and power. The book, at its best, explores these ruptures and debates.

By the later chapters, Hartman has mostly changed his approach. By the time he brings us up to the present, we get a glowing account of people being elected in the Democratic Party who call themselves socialists. Not a word of discussion about the raging debates today over which path Marxists should take.

In other words, at the beginning of the book, Marx is the name of open questions. By the end, the questions mostly disappear. Why?

Is Marx “Foreign” to the U.S.?

One of the standard “lines” about Marx during (and before) the Cold War goes like this: Marx is foreign to America; he’s alien. Hartman cuts right through this.

It turns out, the longest published body of work Marx ever wrote wasn’t Capital, or even all the drafts of Capital put together.

It’s the set of 500 or so articles he wrote for The New York Tribune. He wrote for the most popular newspaper in the world at the time (with help from Engels), in English, from 1851 to 1862. He was read by hundreds of thousands of people every few weeks. Marx’s articles are inventing a whole new genre of radical journalism for a popular audience. (And not many people have read and talked about this huge body of work very seriously for some reason — Hartman’s hinting that it’s just waiting for Marxists to rediscover it!)

When Marx died in 1883, thousands of people came to mourn him at Cooper Union in New York City. Then they sang “Vive l’Internationale,” and everyone received a free copy of the Manifesto; (this is in chap. 1.)

Marx’s debates with other socialists in Europe were part of the American Left scene too. Especially about whether or not socialists can just use a capitalist government for their own purposes. In 1875 Marx writes his “Critique of the Gotha Program.” It’s a criticism of the program for the new German socialist party at the time. It critiques the followers of Ferdinand Lasalle, who see a capitalist government as just “an empty vessel that socialists might capture” (chap. 2, p. 68). If you get elected, they say, you can make the state do what you want.

Marx thinks this is a bad strategy. He calls the idea of getting elected and changing the state from within a “belief in miracles.” He sees the state as a sophisticated machine that was built for managing capitalist profit-making and expansion and stability. It’s not empty. You try to control it, it changes you.

The debate racks the socialist movement in the early 1900s (check out chap. 2). Should we mostly focus on getting elected? Surely, once we get elected, the ruling rich will have to follow our lead? Or —

… and How Foreign Is Lenin?

The Russian Revolution of 1917 supercharged debates about Marx here in the U.S. (check out chap. 3).

There’s something strange in this. A lot of socialists and leftists today like to say, again and again (and again and again) that the Russian example just doesn’t apply here. Lenin’s ideas (taken from Marx) about smashing the state, about a revolution to overthrow the leaders (not just vote them out) — that’s just not relevant. We should follow the example of places like Finland and the democratic path of America’s own Eugene Debs. Glowing references to American socialists like Debs and “Big Bill” Haywood are not hard to find. It’s a kind of “American exceptionalism,” but for socialists.

First thing that’s odd. Hartman’s book helps us see that this way of talking accidentally echoes the conservatives, the anti-Marx liberals, and the repressive U.S. state itself. After the Russian Revolution, the U.S. government and legions of the upper class began a Red Scare. The state cracked down on any kind of leftism and on unions. Today, the left story — that the Russian Revolution simply could not happen here — is a kind of echo of that older line, created around 1919, by the ruling class and the state in a panic.

Second odd thing. Reading Hartman, you start to realize how crucial the Russian Revolution was to shaping America’s class struggle.

It helped spark one of the biggest strike waves in U.S. history in 1919 (and the Seattle Soviet). And it helped stoke the Black radical tradition in the U.S., too. The new workers’ government in Russia brought Black radicals to Moscow in the 1920s to help train them as revolutionaries (check out p. 172). The communist leaders in Moscow saved Big Bill Haywood from a looming prison sentence too; that’s where he met one of the great Black revolutionaries, Harry Haywood. (By the way, these kinds of “reds” were crucial to building the most militant and effective unions of the 1930s that forced the New Deal into existence. Check out the great book Left Out by Stepan-Norris and Zeitlin.)

After the Revolution, Eugene Debs quips: “From the crown of my head to the soles of my feet I am a Bolshevik, and proud of it” (p. 149).

Fairy Tales for the Left

The Left has its own fairy tales. The 1930s loom large in them. Hartman’s book is a great example of this. His account of the 1930s is textbook. The story he tells goes like this: workers started striking during the Great Depression. They were quite radical. Then came FDR. His great compassion and wisdom drove him to the the workers. He gave them the New Deal from on high. The workers flocked to him — and to the Democratic Party, with help from the Communist Party leaders of the time. Marxists had no chance!

Long before, Engels had said, “The first great step of importance for every country newly entering into the movement is always the constitution of the workers as an independent political party, no matter how, so much as it is a distinct workers party.” Maybe American workers aren’t all that keen on Marx after all.

Here’s the problem. Documents from the ‘30s are littered with all sorts of things that just don’t fit. It’s like something else is peeking out from the cracks.

By 1934, two years after FDR was first elected and after the first set of New Deal policies, workers were agitating in droves for their own party and against FDR. Rank-and-file radicals and Marxists surely had roles to play here. (Maybe the New Deal starts to look, in an important part, like a fight to kill this independent push for our own party.)

The workers’ fight for their own party did not die a natural death. It was murdered. Meeting notes of CIO leaders show they were scrambling. The new leadership of the CIO had to organize from above, with the Democratic Party’s officials, and invent all kinds of ruses. Bureaucratic maneuvers at a UAW convention; creating fake labor parties to push everyone back to the Democrats; later, creating the world’s first political action committee, the CIO-PAC, to build support for FDR) to stop it. They had plenty of help from Communist Party leaders to drive workers into the Democratic Party’s arms. Workers had to be cajoled, threatened, and literally beaten into submission.

(But even into the 1940s, the fight was not dead; it resurged and merged with a strike wave during World War II.)

Marxists and historians have almost all accepted the fairy tale. But not everyone.¹Check out Erik Leif Davin, “The Very Last Hurrah? The Defeat of the Labor Party Idea, 1934–1936,” in We Were All Leaders: The Alternative Unionism of the Early 1930s, ed. Staughton Lynd and Nelson Lichtenstein (Urbana; Chicago: University of Chicago Press).

That “other” history still waits to be told in full. Maybe history isn’t over.

Reading Marx in a Neoliberal Corpse

One thing that gets lost in Hartman’s book is the question: So what do we do with Marx today?

The stakes are high. Climate catastrophe is already here. The ruling class and its parties agree: no need for alarm! (Under both Biden and Trump, climate change has been speeding up.) We’re watching a genocide in real time. It’s aided, abetted, armed, and funded by the United States. This is the context Hartman’s book drops into.

The main question for us today, as a class, is a strategic one. What is to be done?

And every question of strategy leads straight through the question of the state. Yes or no, we transform it through getting elected? Will that be enough? Is it just an empty bucket? The old debate between Lassalle and Marx returns. Reading Marx forces us to ask these questions.

The Paris Commune hit Marx like a shell from a cannon. Marx is an old man when he and Engels publish a new edition of the Manifesto. They write, “One thing especially was proved by the Commune, viz., that ‘the working class cannot simply lay hold of the ready-made state machinery, and wield it for its own purposes.’” It’s that lesson that leads him, in 1875, to his “Critique of the Gotha Program.” It’s why he rejects the idea that socialists could just get elected and change capitalism from inside, using the state — instead of smashing it. We have to study our enemy; that means understanding how precisely the state works.

So what about today? Everything hinges on just a few questions. What kind of capitalist state do we have, and how does it work? Is it an empty bucket to be filled with socialism, or something to be smashed? How do we stop capitalism?

Whose Marx?

Hartman’s book is like looking at Marx through a kaleidoscope. He helps us see all the ways Marx has been refracted through all sorts of crucial debates on the Left. He’s been part of the radical feminist movement of the 1970s, the debates on electoral strategy in the early 1900s, the fight for racial liberation in the 1930s and 1960s.

But in the book, Marx seems like he’s left waiting in the wings. Maybe that makes sense for this book. But — is there no red thread guiding his whole life project? A thousand Marxes and no Marx?

Hartman’s book sometimes hints at an answer in the gaps. In Marx’s entire mature life, he’s not just writing radical books; he’s no professor. He’s constantly trying to build political “machines” for revolutionary action: editing and writing for radical newspapers; helping the Communist League with its manifesto; above all, helping build the first International Working Men’s Association in 1864. When Capital comes out, it runs as a serial, so it’ll be easier for workers to read for themselves 

Marx called this project the working class’s “emancipation.” That meant emancipation from being led by the other classes that suck its blood — from being part of the political games of rulers that direct it wherever they will. 

The project is always the same: helping the working class recognize itself as the mover of history — organize itself — act accordingly. What about us?