The spirit of Karl Marx is alive and well and living in America. That's according to Illinois State University history professor Andrew Hartman whose new book is Karl Marx In America.
Hartman said Marx has had a presence in American thought ever since the Civil War and remains relevant today. Hartman said he was surprised to find how many labor leaders, union members, politicians, academics, and regular Americans have engaged with Marx over the decades. In the middle of the last century for example, public intellectuals such as historians Arthur Schlesinger and Richard Hofstetter, sociologists like Walt Rostow and Daniel Bell, and Hannah Arendt all wrote extensively on Marx, though unfavorably.
“They were using Marx as a sort of antithesis of what they were inventing, and that is an American political tradition that was liberal, that they believed had defeated fascism and communism for once, once and for all," Hartman said.
Marx goes back all the way to Lincoln. He was a journalist who covered the Civil War and favored abolitionism as a precursor to throwing off the yoke of capitalism. Hartman said that blended into his later writings.
“He had lots of friends and comrades, specifically those Germans who had fought in the 1848 revolutions, who had to go into exile like him, many of them ended up in the United States. They're known as the 48ers. They fought in the Civil War on the side of the Union, usually on the Western Front, and they were radical abolitionists. Marx kept up correspondence with them … and they helped shape his views,” said Hartman.
He would have disagreed with Republicans like Lincoln that there was such a thing as free labor in a capitalist society, said Hartman.
“Marx believed that there could not be working-class liberation or socialism as long as some workers were slaves. He was against slavery as a moral proposition, much like Lincoln, but he also believed tactically that if workers were ever going to gain liberation against the capitalists, they were going to have to end slavery because it was impossible to compete with slave labor,” said Hartman.
There’s a lot of pre-existing scholarship about socialism and the New Deal and that one of the reasons President Franklin Roosevelt pushed forward was to avoid a real rupture in civil order. Roosevelt was of a mind that “it might be time for the nation to become radical, at least for a generation or so.” Hartman said that FDR comment could indicate he might have thought of the move leftward as a temporary measure, to avoid the main threat of fascism, but also communism.
“He was trying to pump the American capitalist system with small doses of socialism or social democracy, a welfare state in order to save American democracy as he understood it,” said Hartman.
That compares in interesting ways to the present moment which could be seen as a repudiation, not only of a great society, but of in some part, the New Deal.
“One of the reasons why there's been so much more attention paid to Marx in the last 15 or 20 years than there has been since the 1960s or perhaps even the 1930s is because there's been a re-emergence of what you might describe as Gilded Age conditions, and that is extreme economic inequality, with extremely wealthy people having an over-preponderance of political power. I guess that's never seemed truer than in our current moment, with some with the richest man in the world having a direct line to the President,” said Hartman.
That also calls into question the conclusion of the mid-20th century intellectuals who thought Marxism was irrelevant because the New Deal had saved American life.
“It seems now that we've returned to conditions that Marx would have understood very well. I think Marx's ideas about capitalism, labor and freedom, have become quite relevant once again,” said Hartman.
That shows up in non-academic circles with things like "Occupy Wall Street." Hartman said it’s hard to see where renewed attention to Marx goes, but the ideas resonate.
American understandings of Marx mirror those in the rest of the world, said Hartman, at the start because of the influences of immigrants on the nation and later in homegrown evolutions.
“People were mixing Marxism with various forms of Christianity, with populism, with pragmatism, with Black nationalism, with feminism, the list goes on. If you look at how Americans have read Marx, it's almost a catalog of how Marx has been read across the whole world, save for the fact that the United States, unlike some other nations, has never had a communist form of government or a Marxist society,” said Hartman.
The historian Martin Hagglund has written "capitalism, in addition to being hostile to individual freedom, is also against reason. Under capitalism all questions of what we need, what we want and what is durable must be subordinated to the question of what is profitable."
Hartman said in the book the system's devotion to profit prevents us from improving human life, which also resonates with the present moment.
“During the 20th century, particularly during the Cold War, you could not find too many Americans who would link Marx and Marxism with the notion of freedom. If you did find such people, they were on the far, far left. A growing number of people are returning to the sort of kernel of freedom in Marx's philosophy, and that is the notion that if in order for humans to flourish, they can't be forced to sell their labor in order to survive, especially under conditions of oppression and exploitation and alienation,” said Hartman.
From the Gilded Age up through the 1930s Americans who looked at Marx were mostly engaging with questions from his most famous work Das Kapital. That appealed to radical unionism, the Socialist Party of Eugene V. Debs, and working-class movements, said Hartman. Earlier writings of Marx did not make it into U.S. translation until the 1940s, things he wrote even before the Communist Manifesto.
“He was much more focused on the question of alienation, and why it seemed like the capitalist market economy sort of separated humans from themselves, from their labor, from each other,” said Hartman.
