[[link removed]]

MARX IN AMERICA: THE FOURTH BOOM  
[[link removed]]


 

Devin Thomas O’Shea
May 27, 2025
Los Angeles Review of Books
[[link removed]]

*
[[link removed]]
*
[[link removed]]
*
*
[[link removed]]

_ Hartman is a Gen X Marxist, pilled by the revolutionary politics of
Rage Against the Machine. “Until the freedom of some no longer
required the unfreedom of others,” he writes, “Marx would carry
on, no matter how ... his enemies try to erase him." _

,

 

_Karl Marx in America_ by Andrew Hartman. University of Chicago
Press, 2025. 600 pages.

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: “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.

¤

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
[[link removed]] 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,
[[link removed]] 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.

¤

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, [[link removed]] and another
on the intellectual history of the United States.
[[link removed]]

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.”

¤

_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 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.

_LARB Contributor Devin Thomas O’Shea has written for Chicago
Quarterly Review, The Nation, Boulevard, Slate, The Emerson
Review, and other outlets.\_

_The Los Angeles Review of Books [[link removed]]
is a magazine covering culture, politics, and the arts. Considered a
“pillar of West Coast literary culture with national impact,” LARB
publishes reviews, essays, and interviews online every day, as well as
a quarterly print journal [[link removed]],
which also features original fiction, poetry, and art._

_The Los Angeles Review of Books is a nonprofit, reader-supported
organization. Donate [[link removed]] or Become a
LARB Member [[link removed]]._

* Karl Marx
[[link removed]]
* Marxism
[[link removed]]
* Cultural Marxism
[[link removed]]

*
[[link removed]]
*
[[link removed]]
*
*
[[link removed]]

 

 

 

INTERPRET THE WORLD AND CHANGE IT

 

 

Submit via web
[[link removed]]

Submit via email
Frequently asked questions
[[link removed]]
Manage subscription
[[link removed]]
Visit xxxxxx.org
[[link removed]]

Twitter [[link removed]]

Facebook [[link removed]]

 




[link removed]

To unsubscribe, click the following link:
[link removed]