Marx's American Journey with Andrew Hartman

America's hidden Marxist history reveals a country where radical ideas took root in ways we've deliberately forgotten. Dr. Andrew Hartman takes us on a journey through this erased past, uncovering how deeply Marx's ideas penetrated American society from the Civil War through today.

Marx himself was surprisingly connected to America, writing hundreds of articles for the New York Tribune—the world's most-read newspaper in the 1850s—and developing key theories about labor and freedom through his analysis of American slavery. These writings would profoundly shape his masterwork, Capital, yet few Americans know this historical connection exists.

The real revelation comes when we discover how widely Marx's ideas spread across America's heartland. Oklahoma socialists outnumbered Republicans for a decade. Mining towns in Montana and Colorado witnessed class warfare that rivals any European struggle. Jack London wasn't just writing adventure tales but promoting Marxism through passionate speeches and novels like The Iron Heel. These weren't fringe movements but significant political forces shaping American life.

What makes American Marxism distinct is its remarkable hybridization—merging with evangelical Christianity in the South, populism in the Midwest, and civil rights activism in Black communities. Far from a rigid foreign ideology, Marxist thought provided analytical tools that diverse Americans adapted to understand their specific struggles against exploitation.

Through economic crashes, war, and cultural upheaval, Marxist ideas have resurged repeatedly in American life—most recently since the 2008 financial crisis. By recovering this deliberately obscured history, we gain insight not just into our past but into the persistent appeal of radical critiques when capitalism fails to deliver on its promises of freedom and prosperity for all.

Musis by Bitterlake, Used with Permission, all rights to Bitterlake

Chapters

• 1:35 Introduction to Dr. Andrew Hartman
• 4:47 Marx's Writings for American Publications
• 16:05 Marx on the American Civil War
• 26:06 Gilded Age Marxism in America
• 40:55 Black Socialism and Marxist Influence
• 50:02 Academic Marxism and the 1930s Renaissance
• 58:53 Cold War Liberalism vs Marxism
• 1:12:54 The New Left and Marxist Revival
• 1:29:07 Contemporary Marxism and Future Outlook

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:48

Hello and welcome to VarmBlog. And returning to us today is Dr Andrew Hartman, author of Education in the Cold War. War for the Soul of America, history of the Cultural Wars, intellectual Labyrinth, intellectual History for Complicated Times, where he was a co-editor for us. Marx in America or Karl Marx in America I forgot the good old Karl which is a history of exactly what it sounds like. It's about Marx's writings in the United States, which are extensive, believe it or not, even though they were not primarily in English.

Speaker 1: 1:30

Dr Hartman is a professor of history at Illinois State University and you write on cultural, intellectual and political history. We are co-members of an intellectual society of which I am a non-historian member, which is kind of funny Society for intellectual historians, of which I am not really a historian but write on intellectual history related stuff. So I'm a member. So there's my bias. And while there have been some recent works on I'm thinking of the work of Spencer Leonard on Marx's American journalism because it's under read you are pretty much writing one of the more accessible books on what Marx was up to in writing for publications in the United States, which has been much more extensive than I realized. I was going through some Hal Draper notes and I found all this stuff where he was commenting on Marxist encyclopedia entries, particularly a pretty bitter one he wrote on Simon Boulevard, and they were all written for a publication in the United States, and it just reminded me that this has been sort of blocked out of history.

Speaker 1: 2:53

Your book is coming out from University of Chicago Press right? Yes, is it out now or is it coming out? I can't remember. No, it's out in May 2025.

Speaker 1: 3:04

So a few more months this will literally be coming out right when it comes out, so we timed it perfectly for once. Awesome, be coming out right when it comes out, so we timed it perfectly for once. So let's talk about it. Why did Marx write so much for publications in the United States, a place that he didn't always understand super well and that he didn't ever visit?

Speaker 2: 3:31

That's a good question. Yeah, and that's. Marx's writings about the US and his correspondence with people in the US form chapter one of the book. So he was, to begin with, fast, like many European writers in the 19th century, fascinated by the United States. It just was different enough from anything he was seeing in Europe that it allowed him to sort of expand his imagination when it came to thinking about the big questions related to capitalism, capitalism, democracy. And so, for example, he had read from various travel logs about the Workingmen's Party and about what, at that time, was the most mass democracy, and thought well, maybe, just maybe, the US is the place where the working class, because they have the right to vote, at least some of them will usher in socialism from below. And so this fascinated him, while at the same time the more he learned about the US, especially after 1848, when the failed revolutions in Europe led to many of his friends and comrades emigrating to the United States, the 48ers. He continued correspondence with them, and their perspective was less sort of sanguine when it comes to thinking about American politics, sanguine when it comes to thinking about American politics. They wrote back to him about how capitalistic or how bourgeois or how conservative or how reactionary the US was in many ways not entirely, and so even as early as Marx's writings, for example on the Jewish question, he was circumspect about American democracy. There's this ongoing dialectic or contradiction Marx had when it came to thinking about the possibilities of socialism or communism in the United States. They ebbed and flowed, but he wrote extensively for US publications. Now, some of this would have been in the left-wing socialist press, especially the German-language socialist press that was being published in cities like New York, cincinnati, milwaukee, chicago, st Louis, because he had a lot of his friends, the 48ers, there, who would publish his works in German.

Speaker 2: 6:15

But the most writing he did in the US, and really the biggest body of work he did outside of maybe capital or the capital sort of like Grundris, sort of big sort of 1850s and 1860s writings he did on capitalism, were when he was a correspondent for the New York Tribune. This is Horace Greeley's New York Tribune. He wrote hundreds of articles for the New York Tribune as a European correspondent, as a European correspondent, and in doing so had to think a lot about his audience, republican Americans, and learned more about the US from this perspective. I was, I think, impressed and excited by the fact that he had such a large audience. The Tribune at that time was the most read newspaper in the world, two times as many people read the New York Tribune as the London Times in the 1850s. And so Marx wrote for the Tribune throughout the 1850s. When the Civil War started, the Tribune had to cut costs and they fired him essentially. And then he but he.

Speaker 2: 7:37

Then he continued to write about the U S, particularly on the issue of the civil war, for an Austrian newspaper and exchanged many, many letters with angles and many of his, his comrades in the U S, about the civil war and so like.

Speaker 2: 7:48

For example, his civil war writings are collected, collected in a book that was originally published by the international press, by the international publishers that came out, edited by Angela Zimmerman, a former professor of mine, and so readers interested in what he had to say about the Civil War really interesting writings can read that.

Speaker 2: 8:48

And because he was kind of depressed about world politics during the 1850s, especially after the failure of the 1848 revolutions, the Civil War gave him this optimism that he hadn't had since the 1848 revolutions. He really did see it as sort of like a spark for potential socialist revolution in the US and elsewhere, and the more he wrote and thought about chattel slavery in the US and in the context of capitalism, a sort of capitalist nation of capitalist nation, the more it helped him sort of conceptualize what it meant to be free in relation to somebody's labor, in relation to a person's autonomy over self, over time, over their own bodies. And so I think these writings are really important in terms of understanding how he came to his theories in volume one of Capital, especially the kind of famous chapter on the working day, which to me is one of the most important things that Marx ever wrote.

Speaker 1: 9:50

Yeah, I think it's crucial to understand that he was watching events in America. Ingalls was watching events in America even more closely and sometimes, reading Ingalls, I think the dialectical tensions in American society were a little bit more obvious to Ingalls than Marx obvious to Ingalls and Marx. But it is interesting to me how important those Civil War writings are and yet even amongst communists they're relatively under-read. You know, when I've seen them discussed outside of the books that you mentioned, it's either to kind of have Marx be a proto-liberal mention. It's either to kind of have marx be a proto-liberal or it's to deal with his views on race, which we would not consider super enlightened. But we also would looking at the opinions of race on the day that the civil war actually affected his view, um, of what was otherwise a pretty politically dark time for him after 1848 went up and you know, uh flames more or less.

Speaker 2: 11:16

Yeah, so his interpretation of the Civil War in some ways liberal? I don't know. That to me, doesn't? That is an argument that Eugene Genovese made in the 1970s when he was writing about Marx's writings in the Civil War. This is at a time when Eugene Genovese, the famous historian of the American South, was still on the left, still considered himself, if not a communist, definitely a leftist, a Marxist. And by this point Genovese, who really was an expert on the antebellum South but also infamously a little bit too celebratory of the antebellum South, the Confederacy included as being, to his mind, one wayvese's perspective the United States in the context of the Civil War was. He was extremely sort of dismissive of like articles coming out of the Economist at the time that made the claim that the Civil War wasn't about slavery because the Economist was an apologist for the Confederacy, in part because of their very real material interest in sort of like British capitalists, british merchants needing all that cheap cotton for their textile manufacturing.

Speaker 2: 12:59

Marx is writing to an English and British working class trying to keep them on the side of abolition, on the side of the United States against the Confederacy, on the side of the United States against the Confederacy, and to me like okay, in the context of the 20th and 21st century that might sound liberal, but in the 19th century to me was anything, but I think it's more sort of like where the 19th century communists and the 19th century smaller Republicans sort of met.

Speaker 2: 13:34

I don't know if you've had a chance to read Bruno Leopold's new book Citizen Marx, which is about Marx's republicanism or his various writings and exchanges with 19th century Republicans, and I would argue that if you wanted to say that Marx's interpretation of the Civil War was not how a Marxist should look at things, which is kind of funny and ironic, maybe it was closer to 19th century Republicanism, but he definitely famously thought that it would be impossible for there to be socialism as long as Black people were enslaved as a class of the working class, a sort of caste of the working class was in a worse condition than the rest of the working class, because it would prevent solidarity of the sort necessary for socialism, because it would prevent solidarity of the sort necessary for socialism and whatever else you'll say about Marx's views on race in the 19th century, that was to my mind correct and pretty advanced radical, whatever you want to call it.

Speaker 1: 14:46

Yeah, absolutely. I mean the anti-racist writings. The anti-racist writings, even if you read them in the context of the 19th century German left romantic movement or something. He's still very progressive in that he's he believes that intermarrying is good. There's all kinds of things that they actually believe that we'd be like oh, that's not something we associate with racists. He does say some not unproblematic things, but I think his writings on slavery are pretty insightful.

Speaker 1: 15:27

And one of the things I've always been confused by Genovese and a few other people who have been Marxist defenders or at least apologists for parts of the Confederacy. Not just that doesn't square with anything I know about Marxist politics in the United States and so much of what he was writing for Marx seemed to think that capitalism could incorporate some quote pre-capitalist, unquote forms like chattel slavery and still be capitalist. And I think his writings on the Civil War make that clear. And that's an answer to people like Genovese, who for me is echoing the super racist, ultra problematic George Fitzhugh, who is the guy who wrote Sociology for the South, which is the first time the word sociology appears in English where he argues that basically slavery is anti-capitalist in 1854. And it was weird reading stuff from the 60s and 70s from Marxist. Now we know where Genovese ultimately ends up. Yeah, it's like an ultra reactionary, but anyway.

Speaker 2: 16:47

Yeah, so the late great historian Leo Raboffo, who was my PhD advisor and good friend, was an undergrad student of Genovese's and loved Genovese even up until his Genovese's death and so of course, remained good friends with him when he became a far-right Catholic, with him when he became a far-right Catholic, and he said that really, more than being a leftist or a Marxist, genovese just always hated liberalism.

Speaker 2: 17:21

That was the most important aspect of his political identity or his understanding of politics. And so, fitzhugh, if you go back and read his writings on the mudsill theory, you could say he definitely hates liberalism, he hates equality, but he also is very critical of what we would understand as free market capitalism, or free labor as it was known in the 19th century. And Genovese just thought that that was like maybe, I mean, that was an attitude to be celebrated. So Genovese never apologized for slavery, even if his critics might've made that assumption. But he was a little too enamored with the anti-liberalism of some of the antebellum apologists for slavery, even while he was a Marxist, and he thought that there was potentially more affinity for a leftist like him with them than with you know like the Republican Party of the 19th century prior to the Civil War.

Speaker 1: 18:43

Yeah, I mean, I find it interesting because he wrote a bunch of defenses in his late Marxist period, early reactionary period, of the Southern Agrarians who are. You know they're not studied much outside of the South. I actually, being from Georgia, got them shoved down my throat. So I've read most of the Southern agrarian writings and some of them are very good poets. I wouldn't adopt any of their politics, thank you, alan Tate, but nonetheless it's very strange for that to come up from a Marxist. But I guess we're going to have to talk about the very strange nature of Marxism in America, one of the things I have recently learned, and because America has this rightful view post the whatever if red scare whether we consider it the second, third or at my count it's like the sixth, but of the 1950s, it is interesting how the US socialists were actually at a lot more of the forefront of things pretty early on.

Speaker 1: 19:53

I remember, for example, the Socialist Propaganda League, which was an American association writing I can't remember if it was Lenin or Kowski about clarifications of what democratic centralism meant, and then also Daniel de Leon, who you write a lot about in your book, for example, got a translation of the Critique of the Goethe Program published in America to critique the Espe de I believe in like 1907. Like it's like ridiculously early gilded age socialists, uh, and marxists who really did pick up on certain trends of marxism and were incredibly gross readers of marx, before we really think about that scholarship happening. Because in english, because, uh, for example, it seems like the american branch was often asking questions that it would occur to some of the European branches like 20 years later. So what did you learn in the research, particularly in your second chapter of the book on Gildeday's Marxism that surprised you about the Marxist reception in America and how many of them there may have been in the late 19th century?

Speaker 2: 21:09

Yeah, good question. Because there's so much of this book, I mean and it's a big book, as you figured out, and took a long time to research and write there's so much in it that I just didn't know what I would find. How Americans have read and thought about Marx from the time of Marx's life up until the present, and I knew I was already, before starting research on this book, very familiar with like lots of that type of thought in the 1930s, on through the 1960s and, just being a sort of left wing person in the 21st century, I knew that there was stuff I could deal with now. But I had no idea what I was going to find when it came to like the late 19th and early 20th century. And I was surprised not only by the volumes of writings about Marx in the United States at the time and the depth with which so many people not only read Marx but tried to put his ideas into action at this time period. That was surprising because I guess I had previously worked from the assumption that, well you know, they might have gotten some tangential ideas from, say, german immigrants who had maybe been more familiar with Marx, coming from a German working class labor radical context, and that was true. But even more so they were reading Marx, translating Marx, a vibrant Marxist socialist culture in New York City that was first German and then Jewish. Tony Michaels writes this great book on the Jewish left in New York City and makes the case that when lots of these Jews assimilated to the United States in the late 19th and early 20th century in New York City, they weren't assimilating to the US, they were assimilating to sort of Jewish socialist culture in New York City, or I should say German socialist culture in New York City, and part of what was so important to that culture was reading Marx, being familiar with Marx, reading Marx being familiar with Marx, including capital or parts of capital.

Speaker 2: 23:58

Capital in its German translation was pretty widely circulated in these communities, not so much in English at first, but as you see sort of the expansion of socialism across the continent into places that were at first heavily German or Jewish, like Chicago, st Louis, cincinnati, you then find people who are very serious about translating these into English and spreading the gospel, so to speak. The most important publishing house was the Charles Kerr Company, which was affiliated with the Socialist Party, came out of Chicago. They hired Ernst Ernst Unterman, who had written, wrote a lot about Marx but also translated all three volumes of Capital in the early 20th century. And then this begins also what I would call sort of like a cottage industry of helper manuals, like books ranging from 50 to 300 pages that helped Americans understand Marx in terms that Marx could understand. So Unterman himself wrote a book like this. Lawrence Grunland, the Danish socialist who was very active in the US, wrote a book like this.

Speaker 2: 25:27

Even books that we don't necessarily associate with Marxism, like Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward, books that we don't necessarily associate with Marxism, like Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward, had Marxist connotations because he had read Marx, and so this just becomes extremely common in the culture.

Speaker 2: 25:47

Jack London, most famously remembered for his novels or novellas like white thing Um, he was a Marxist, a pretty hardcore socialist Marxist, and gave tons and tons of speeches on Marx and Marxism and then wrote a book, the iron heel, that was really deeply rooted in Marx's ideas.

Speaker 2: 26:13

And what I found so fascinating was not only that all of this was happening, but it was being written and circulated amongst people in the various socialist parties, including the socialist party, but also in labor unions, amongst the working class.

Speaker 2: 26:32

It's kind of a romantic ideal to think that Marx's writings have always been read by working class people, given that those of us who have spent time with Marx's ideas know how difficult it is to read Marx, especially capital. And I'm not saying that like a bunch of uh like socialists and wobblies were hanging out in their tents reading Marx after a hard day's work in the mind. But, uh, more working class Americans were reading Marx or trying to read Marx or reading some of the Marx pamphlets, than you would think, than you probably expect, and that was surprising, pleasantly surprising, and so it made me rethink the sort of like formation of some of the Marxist ideas that came to fruition in the socialist party of America and then eventually the Communist Party. It wasn't just that they had sort of like gotten these ideas through osmosis or through their friendships and comradeships and work with, maybe European socialists and communists who had read Marx, but they were actually doing the reading and translating and sort of making sense of Marx themselves.

Speaker 1: 27:55

Yeah, one of the things that I was interested in that your book does cover a bit in the second chapter is the relationship between Marxist social movements and other left-wing social movements that we kind of know about today. I mean, if you're a certain kind of libertarian weirdo, you probably know about henry george although you probably don't understand henry george to have been received that in his time as a socialist, yeah, um, yeah, uh, because I remember learning about his uh, uh, henry george from libertarians because he was an advocate of, like a land tax, um, and that was like the only tax he wanted or whatever. But like, um, george and marx knew about each other. I think marx critiqued george, uh, but george wrote nice things about marx when marx died.

Speaker 1: 28:49

But one of the things I was learning from reading your book is that doesn't end there, that there's a history of Marxist and Georgist interacting in the United States that I didn't know about, like you know, like the relationship between the Georgist and Daniel de Leon, who you know is a delightful weirdo that takes a pull out of your second chapter. Uh, is a delightful weirdo that takes a pull on the mark of your second chapter. So what did you find interesting there? Because I I was really surprised by some of your findings yeah.

Speaker 2: 29:39

So the main upshot is that in the US as elsewhere, but especially in the US, as a problem Because it relied upon workers or it relied upon the exploitation of people Marxists would say workers but all sorts of people were finding that life was getting increasingly difficult, and so they started looking for solutions political, sometimes philosophical solutions to this problem. And this is at a time when these problems seemed new. Nowadays they seem like old and it seems like there's no alternative. But at the time these were people who might, have, say, been peasants from Sicily, from Sicily, or they might have been like small land holders in Kansas, and all of a sudden they're sort of thrown into a capitalist labor market that seems highly exploitative, and people are looking for all kinds of solutions to this problem that seems to be making their lives hell. And they have lots of different people and ideas from which to grab, from Henry George being a classic example.

Speaker 2: 31:05

Anarchism a little bit later, but still one of those ideas.

Speaker 2: 31:12

Labor, organizing of various sorts, including the Knights of Labor, most famously in this time period, and then populism, which becomes probably the most popular and most powerful because so many of the people being negatively impacted by industrial, corporate capitalism at the time were small farmers across the prairie and south ideas.

Speaker 2: 31:38

The one that ultimately comes to shape the left the most by the time you get to the progressive era, other than liberalism or progressivism and the mainstream political parties, is Marxism, various forms of Marxism, and you see this in the Socialist Party, various forms of Marxism.

Speaker 2: 32:31

You even see this in some. You see this in the Wobblies, especially the industrial workers of the world, and I don't think it's too linear to say that Marxism won out. For a time Marx's ideas became kind of like the winning formula for lots of disgruntled, alienated people amongst the working class. Which is not to say there was anything ever near communist or socialist revolution not in the US by any stretch but but so many people found their way to marks, to Marxism or to the Socialist Party or various groupings that had a Marxist framework of understanding the problem that they were situated in, and to me that's like it's super interesting. I didn't know that I would find that or make that case, but it's in a way it makes perfect sense because Marx had so pinpointed the problem that people being thrown into the proletariat were suffering from.

Speaker 1: 33:52

Yeah, and I think it's interesting in that there's not, like in France or Germany, a whole lot of competing socialisms in the same way. Yes, we had 40 AS yes, we had ONI. It's like and yes, yes, we had 40 as yes, we had on nights like um, and yes, we had henry george. But I was actually like when I went back and I dug into, like the marxist party, the history of the spd, um, the socialist democratic, uh, the democratic socialist party for those of you who don't get annoyed when I pronounce one set of letters in German and no others but I found more non-Marxist currents actually in the Espe Day than I even did in the American Socialist Party, I mean the Socialist Party of America, because there wasn't other competing traditions to pull from. There wasn't like in France.

Speaker 1: 34:52

You had the Pospolites, you had the Blanquists, you had all kinds of groups.

Speaker 1: 34:56

You had the Blanquists, you had about five different forms of anarchism. We didn't have all of that. To the same extent, we did have a lot of french influence, uh, utopian socialists trying to start communes into various places in the 19th century, but in fact ingalls even wrote about them in like 1842, um, but we didn't have, you know, the same kind of mass movement and one of the things that makes our revolution a little different from, say, the French is there was not an obvious proto-socialist correlate in the American revolution the way that there was in the French and even at some ways in the English civil war. But I it was interesting to find out how influential it was, because even marx friendly historians in the middle of the 20th century kind of don't mention it, like I've read. I love christopher lash and christopher laugh is no enemy of marxism at all, but I was surprised to learn how much marxist activity there was in the late 19th century, because Lash doesn't even mention it and he writes a lot about 19th century radicalism.

Speaker 2: 36:10

What I see happening is, as I mentioned previously, marxist ideas kind of winning out to a certain degree amongst alienated workers and various Americans. But what I see happening is a sort of mixture of Marx's ideas with other sort of more famously, maybe better studied American traditions. So, for example, you get various forms of Christian socialism that emerge in the early 20th century, various forms of Christian socialism that emerge in the early 20th century, some of which you might not categorize as Marxism, but some of it's very Marxist, including a number of like. So you know, the state with the largest number of socialist party members in like the 1910s is Oklahoma. In like the 1910s is Oklahoma, so much so that the socialist party in Oklahoma becomes the second, like the challenger in terms of political parties to the state's democratic party. There are more socialists than Republicans for about a period of 10 years, and most of these people who became socialists in the Oklahoma Socialist Party were previously populists and so previously didn't necessarily have a Marxist framework from which to work, but because the Socialist Party was heavily invested in a sort of like grassroots educational mission, many of the Oklahoma socialists and many of these people are evangelicals and Native Americans. They come from a very different tradition than the German and Jewish New Yorkers who were joining the Socialist Party at the time. They started reading Marx and started understanding Marx as a key to them getting freedom, and in fact many of them sort of like pushed the Socialist Party, at least in Oklahoma, if not nationwide, to take a different position on land, because of course the socialist party worked from a very like 1840s marx marxist perspective and, like the only people who owned land were aristocrats or proto-capitalists and recognized that well, in the context of rural ok Oklahoma, having a piece of land was like one way to ward off exploitation, and so they had a theory of land that Marxists across the 20th century in places like Cuba and China would later adopt.

Speaker 2: 39:02

And then, of course this is alongside. And then of course this is alongside, say, milwaukee socialists very rooted in German Marxism. And yet these were the famous Victor Berger sewer socialists who became kind of social democrats, democratic socialists, but still were heavily invested in a Marxist interpretation of labor value, alongside Marxist women who were challenging the suffrage movement for being too bourgeois. Alongside some Black socialists like Hubert Harrison, alongside some Black socialists like Hubert Harrison who were obviously in favor of civil rights for Black people and were pushing the Socialist Party to take a more pronounced position on that, but were also heavily critical of the Black nationalist perspective of Marcus Garvey or someone like that at the time. What I find is that in an American context, marx's ideas gain this cachet and then they take new life in various hybrid, mongrelized approaches, mixing with various other American traditions Christianity, populism, black nationalism, feminism. The list kind of goes on.

Speaker 1: 40:30

Yeah, when I was reading your book, particularly with the populist, I was struck by something that always fascinates me with the populist. That people don't talk about with them is the proletariatization of sharecroppers and how that would have led a lot of former populists to end up in the socialist party. And I also think people forget how powerful the People's Party was, even though they didn't really contest for national elections but they stormed state houses and stuff. It's not stuff you read that much about. And then if you look at where they were powerful, where they didn't subsude themselves to the Democrats like when when I was Brian and you look at where, let's say, the not quite as German immigrant centered socialists emerged, so clearly the New York socialists are Jewish and immigrant. A lot of these who are socialists are fairly German immigrant tied. I'm not saying that as a critique, it's just what it is.

Speaker 1: 41:29

But then, and like 1905, and this is something that your book reminded me and I looked up, I was like, oh, there were major socialist parties.

Speaker 1: 41:37

Okay, oklahoma is huge, but there was a big one in utah, which is not something I was expecting there. There's a big one in Montana. Basically, the mountain West and the Midwest was highly sympathetic, particularly after the, the, the people's party kind of you know dissolved and you know, we know like people expect to find it in new york and they expect to find it in california and like uh, during the height of the popular front in the late 1940s, that was also. Those are the two uh concentration areas. But if you look at the early 20th century, like particularly between like 1905 to like 1920, like there's socialist mayors in montana and like there's a major socialist movement in ogden utah, and you're just like finding it in places you absolutely wouldn't expect to find it now and yeah, so like uh, probably the most militant and radical workers in the whole US in the early 20th century were miners in the Rocky Mountains and that's because they were the most exploited and these were mostly immigrants coming from like syndicalist traditions.

Speaker 2: 42:59

Many of them had joined the Wobblies. A good portion of them joined the Socialist Party, as you said, and they had some of them might have read Marx, but they just had a sort of like innate Marxism. They understood that capital was the enemy and that they had to get organized against capital. And you know, mostly they lost these struggles. It was very, you know, very infamously brutal time to try to organize unions in the Rocky Mountain West. Most infamously, the Ludlow Massacre is a sort of part of this struggle.

Speaker 2: 43:35

But out of this you probably don't get the formation of the industrial workers of the world, or at least you don't get its popularity in the West, if you don't have these radical miners unions, in particular in Colorado and Idaho and Montana and this was as real as class warfare has been in the US. People were killed routinely by police and people were set up, including Bill Hayward and other leaders of the union, and arrested and put on trial for murders they did not commit. This was like a. This was if we had a more class conscious Hollywood industry. There's some great, great film to be made of some of these struggles.

Speaker 1: 44:27

Yeah, unfortunately, we got mate one and they stopped there. Um, good, great film. Uh, don't have any problem with it, but, like you know, you don't get a lot about the Rocky mountains, where the fighting was even high, at a higher pitch. Um, I guess this brings me to you know, one of the most charismatic figures of American socialism, which is Eugene Debs, and he's also kind of a transition figure between this gilded age Marxism and the Marxism that exists after the liberal response to the Russian revolution, and I wanted you to talk a little bit about devs.

Speaker 1: 45:08

But one of the things I learned I learned this from reading chris for lashes, uh, a dissertation on liberals in in america and their response to the russian revolution is that let's call it proto-left liberalism, because I don't have a good way to describe it. But this we're not really dealing with progressives yet, we're not really dealing with socialists. Um, but it is unclear at the early 20th century up to 1917, where a lot of the liberals are gonna land in relation to the bolshevik revolution. Um, how is Debs kind of a transitionary figure between these two time periods? And then we can talk about the liberals.

Speaker 2: 45:52

Sure, yeah, one of the. There's just so much I learned researching and writing this book. But you know, I had read a couple of biographies of Debs, but doing more primary source research and finding Debs in the archives was really revealing. And he's sort of representative of these Americans who were grasping for solutions to the problems of industrial capitalism and he tried out a whole bunch of solutions, including utopian socialism, including just what I would consider a more sort of like non-Marxist Christian socialism. And he eventually lands on Marx, in part due to the influence of Victor Berger who was bringing him capital while he was in prison in Woodstock Illinois.

Speaker 2: 46:51

So various socialist parties in the late 19th and early 20th century were sort of vying for, I guess, what you would say hegemony over what appeared to be a growing left-wing working class America, and all of them wanted Debs as their sort of figurehead Well, more than figurehead, but they wanted Debs as their spokesperson because he was a legitimate working class hero after Homestead. And eventually Debs decides he is a marxist and that the solution to the problem of industrial capitalism is for the working class to not only gain power, including political power, but also that power over the point of production, like autonomy at the factories. And so he takes the Socialist Party, or he's part of the Socialist Party, moving towards a very explicitly Marxist position. But there had been like 50 years of debates on the left about whether or not and you know, some of these debates might sound familiar whether or not socialists, marxists, should merely just focus on organizing the working class, or if they should rather focus or, in addition, focus on the American political system, like trying to get people elected. And Debs was the key figure in moving the Socialist Party towards a sort of hybrid approach. They're going to continue to try and organize the working class, but they're also going to run for election. Organize the working class, but they're also going to run for election, especially at the local level, in places like Milwaukee and Oklahoma and other places, but also at the national level. And so part of the appeal of socialism at the national level was the fact that they had, in many people's eyes like a viable presidential candidate.

Speaker 2: 49:05

You know Debs runs for president five separate times. In 1912, the kind of famous election of 1912, he gained several million votes. Now, he didn't come anywhere close to he was. He was a distant fourth in that election to Woodrow Wilson and Teddy Roosevelt and Howard Taft, but winning millions of votes then, and also in 1920 running from prison, still winning millions of votes, he becomes a legitimate alternative to American progressivism. It wouldn't have been called liberalism yet. Well, some people called it liberalism, but mostly this is like progressivism and that is rather than sort of like tinkering at the edges and in efforts to regulate corporations. He really truly wanted working class people to have full, full power over the country and there becomes a bit of a divide that gets much, much, much more pronounced after the Bolshevik revolution.

Speaker 1: 50:16

Yeah, I think that's important. The various progressive responses to Marxism are interesting because, like I said, both your book and I'm also thinking about Christopher Lash's first book about this too there was more sympathy initially than one would expect, but I think that sours for some people even before the Russian Revolution. But it sours for a bunch of people after the Russian Revolution but it sours for a bunch of people after. How does the Russian Revolution move progressivism and socialism into more an antagonistic movement? That I think also today people don't really think about progressives and socialists as being antagonists to one another exactly. But it seems like progressivism in some ways was born to be a left liberal response and eventually competing ideology set to Marxism.

Speaker 2: 51:16

Yeah, and there were always hints of this division, but they weren't as pronounced and they didn't sort of take concrete form, I think, until the Bolshevik Revolution. So the Russian Revolution happens and Marxists for the most part in 1917 were celebratory Like this is great, this is what they want in the US, this is what they've been fighting for, this is what they want in the US, this is what they've been fighting for, whereas liberals thought that the Kerensky government, the provisional government that was democratic that's what they wanted and the Leninist, in their eyes, coup or takeover of that particular post-Tsarist Russia was in a way sort of like bastardized return of Tsarism. And then, you know, as events play out in the Russian Civil War over the next three or four years, they just become increasingly horrified. I mean, this is a long history of liberals flirting with the left but then demonstrating their horror at the results of any type of leftist victory or power, working class victory or power, 1848 revolutions that Marx wrote so much about afterwards and that completely tainted him towards alliance with liberalism. But this has a dialectical effect that I think harms the left, harms Marxism in the US. Because left harms Marxism in the US? Because by sort of recognizing that socialists or communists could come to power in a state, understandably so. Lots of American Marxists want to model their movement in the US on the Bolsheviks and they create close ties with the Communist Party and the Soviet Union. And that's when you see this sort of breakdown of the Socialist Party, which had a much wider base, and the formation of a couple of different Communist Parties that eventually ends up being the Communist party of the USA.

Speaker 2: 53:47

And um, you know, I write about it historically, so I'm not like a polemicist or a sectarian on this issue. But I just think that was probably a mistake because the situation in the US was so much different than it was in Russia and it failed. So I guess in retrospect you could say it was a mistake, although I'm not sure anything would have succeeded. But this had a sort of like double, a doubly problematic effect, because it created sectarianism, whereas the Socialist Party had not solved but had alleviated a lot of sectarian issues in the American left, and it also led to massive, massive backlash. So like the Red Scare following the First World War, following the Bolshevik Revolution, I would argue was almost as damaging to the left as the Red Scare, the more famous one, following the Second World War, what we call McCarthyism. It just wrecked the left. And I'm not saying that had the left not adopted the Bolshevik model, that there wouldn't have been a Red Scare, because the reactionary capitalist class doesn't worry itself with these distinctions.

Speaker 2: 55:11

Um, but being such sort of like open defenders of the bolshevik revolution and also creating close ties with the soviet communist party made it much easier for the federal government on down to state and local governments to crack down on communists, socialists, wobblies, I mean basically the Bolshevik Revolution and the American sort of sympathy the American left, sympathy for it allowed, helped, allow the state to completely and utterly crush the Wobblies, a longtime objective. And so you know, like the 1920s is one of the worst periods for the US left for all of these factors, periods for the US left for all of these factors. And again, I'm not sure they're like you know, historians don't always deal in counterfactuals. I think it's healthy to think about this counterfactual. I'm not sure there's a better alternative left in the 1920s.

Speaker 2: 56:18

Had we had had, like, the Debsian Socialist Party just maintained its perspective, had it would it have been different? I mean, part of the problem is the debsey and socialist party was cracked down on debs was in prison, um for opposing american entry into the war. So um, lots and lots of historians have argued that the American sort of alignment with the Bolsheviks was the wrong move. To me it was like an understandable move, maybe the wrong move, but I'm not sure there was a better move as well. But it wasn't a good development. I'll say that.

Speaker 1: 57:05

Well, it does seem, particularly after Debs dies, dies leads to the SPA taking a more and more accommodationist, if not outright. The SPA in the 1920s and the 1950s is like the SPA does not participate in the red scare of the 1920s, they're victims of it, but in the 1950s they actually side with the government. So it's, it's a. It's a. It's an interesting problem. But I do think your book reminds me, because when we often talk about the first red scare and I would put that in quotation marks, because I don't actually think it's the first red scare, um, uh, which I, which I show in my book there are many, many red scares, yeah yeah, the 19th century is full of them, like it's um, but I was always taught that it was mostly aimed at anarchists and the anarchists, kind of, were the most high profile people that they went after.

Speaker 1: 58:11

But, um, you know, and I I don't even know why, I didn't put it together, but I was like, yeah, oh yeah, debs is in prison, right, and you're always sold that, oh, it's about his anti-war activism, which is technically true, that, oh, it's about his anti-war activism, which is technically true, but also misses the point because, like, even in the 1950s, you're not dealing with like key, like gus hall, or are anybody in the socialist workers party being in prison while they're, like, the head of a party. That's not a thing that you read about. So it is sort of like, hmm, there's a big difference here.

Speaker 1: 58:52

um, yeah, and that's a race from the memory.

Speaker 2: 58:57

So much go ahead yeah, the what historians, what many people refer to as first red scare. I agree with you, it's not the first, but it's the first like Scare. I agree with you, it's not the first, but it's the first widespread. Well, no, I wouldn't even go that far. It is an extremely, extremely damaging, repressive Red Scare, in many ways worse than the second Red Scare, because the left had a lot of vibrancy and was gaining political power in various places.

Speaker 2: 59:29

So during this time period, for example, victor Berger, who had been elected to Congress as a socialist out of Wisconsin, was kicked out of Congress, not voted out. Kicked out was kicked out of Congress, not voted out. Kicked out. Debs is thrown in prison. The Wobblies are just crushed, many of them are killed.

Speaker 2: 59:55

There are instances of hundreds of Wobblies being put on a train in one state and just trucked to another state just to get them out of a state. You know, a thousand anarchists and socialists and communists or whatever marxists are deported to russia, the soviet union famously. Um, there are in new york city and chicago and other big cities where there were lots of Russian immigrants. There were like organizations that had close ties to the Soviet Union that were just completely gutted, hundreds of people thrown in prison. And then that's not even to mention the the crackdown on any type of civil rights activism, which the federal government conveniently linked to anarchism, socialism, communism. I mean at the time they just called it Bolshevism Anything that the reactionary powers that be deemed threatening they called Bolshevism or said it was the result of Bolshevist influence. So that I mean that was a really damaging Red Scare. It wasn't as high profile as the second one, it didn't have such a famous face as Joseph McCarthy, but it was a really, really damaging one.

Speaker 1: 1:01:26

I mean, in many ways it was bloodier. I mean, that's something that I think we we don't for sure we don't talk about as much like they didn't kill that many people in the 1950s like, but they, they just.

Speaker 2: 1:01:39

There's thousands dead in the 20s like, famously, the rosenbergs, few others, but no like lots of people were killed and deported in the like three or four years following world war one, during and following world war one um, your book actually goes into the beginning of what we might call, uh uh, black bolshevism, which we, I think it's finally being kind of talked about.

Speaker 1: 1:02:08

You know, hammer and hoke came out, I don't know, now 30 years ago or 40 years ago, I can't remember, but it's, you know, a bit of a while yeah, um, which talks about it in alabama, where it was a serious contender amongst the black community, um, but you know, you actually find that there's a they're black socialists with sympathies to bolshevism, like earlier than I thought we would. And so you read about a philip randolph and chandler owen, you know, declaring for it in the messenger, like from day one, like you know, as early as 1917. So how is Marx influential on the intersection between, say, black radicals in the civil rights movement and socialists?

Speaker 2: 1:03:05

Well, there's always been. So, like the black left is quite diverse and always has been diverse. And I think one of the sort of like problems, the horse blinders of white American liberals going back to the early 20th century, is the assumption that, like black, radicals are all cut from the same cloth and sometimes it's a bad cloth and sometimes it's a good cloth, but it's always the same cloth. But since forever there's been as much diversity amongst Black activists.

Speaker 2: 1:04:20

Civil rights was a major, major, maybe the barrier to them enjoying freedom in the US.

Speaker 2: 1:04:28

They lacked it because of the various institutions that prevented Black people from being free.

Speaker 2: 1:04:34

But these people also, in reading Marx and Marxist literature, thought that true freedom was impossible in a capitalist society and that they linked up their unfreedom as Black people with their unfreedom as humans or as workers.

Speaker 2: 1:04:59

And so there's just always been that tradition on the Black left, which is why there have been Black people in every major Marxist party who have been active and sometimes even have been famous as intellectual or political leaders in various Black Marxist I mean various left-wing Marxist parties or Marxist organizations in US history. It's just a really to me important strain of Marxism in the US. To me, every era has at least a couple of interesting of these types of figures that I examine in the book, starting with Peter Clark in the 1870s in Cincinnati but also extending to, as you mentioned, a Philip Randolph and Chandler Owen, the publishers of the Messenger, both of whom, especially Randolph, become famous for other things later in ways that people would probably not categorize them as Marxist. But he got his start. They both got their start at city college reading marks together and that really shaped their understanding of the world.

Speaker 1: 1:06:20

Yeah, I mean, one of the things I always credit the CP USA for is, like, like, the reason like we had a black intellectual tradition after the first Harlem Renaissance is largely because the communists were continuing to fund it, which is something that is often missed when we're reporting on this, because I'm like you know, yeah, some of them become ex-Marxist. Some of them, like Richard Wright and Harry Cruz, become ex-Marxists. Some of them, like Richard Wright and Harry Cruz, even become anti-Marxists.

Speaker 2: 1:06:51

And they're always the ones who are most famous, because American intellectuals, especially liberals, celebrate them for turning against Marxism. But others are forgotten, and there are often lots of these others who stuck with Marxism.

Speaker 1: 1:07:12

Oh yeah, are forgotten. And there are often lots of these others who stuck with marxism. Oh yeah, I mean even even ones that you can't drop. Like you can't talk about black american culture. We're talking about web du bois.

Speaker 1: 1:07:17

Um, I was taught him in middle school but you best am will believe they did not mention he was a marxist. Like you know, they mentioned that he was more radical than george washington carver and pretty much left it at that. Yeah, and you know, they mentioned that he was more radical than george washington carver and pretty much left it at that. Yeah, and you know. And so even the ones that stayed marxist we don't hear about but baldwin and richard wright and even harry cruz those are often celebrated, I think harry, because it was black nationalism and maybe anti-Semitism, but maybe, yeah, I read the book and I'm like it's possibly deniable but it don't look good. But but you know a lot of the ones that stayed, even the ones that are important. So, like lorraine hansberry, who's very important to like black theater, I don't remember until I was in university, no one mentioned that she was a marxist.

Speaker 2: 1:08:19

Her entire life she had a relationship to the, the communist party of america and, like you know, well, I mean, even so, I've been, I've considered myself a leftist and a marxist now for uh, I don't know 25 plus years, and as a trained us historian, I read, I've read dubois. I've you, I've read a lot of Du Bois. But I guess, until I really dug into this book and read Black Reconstruction and learned more about the sort of background of him writing that book, I just didn't think of him quite to the extent as I now do as a Marxist, and that was a really fun, revealing part of researching and writing this book as well.

Speaker 1: 1:09:09

So another thing that you do talk about is the idea of the academic Marxist or the communist intellectual is something that developed in America earlier than I thought, like I usually associate it with the end of the new left, where we all give up and like fuck it, the trade unions didn't do what we want, so we're just going to go be professors now, which is a profoundly unfair generalization, but one that's kind of true in addition to being unfair. But reading your work, I was like, oh, there werexist intellectuals in america that I didn't even know about as early as 1920. So, um, you want to talk about some of them, like like, see what some of the people you found that surprised you um, maybe not surprising, but you know the 1930s were just such a rich time for Marxism.

Speaker 2: 1:10:07

Marxism explodes in the US during the 1930s, you know, for obvious reasons, but in not always the most obvious places. So the philosophy department at NYU becomes a hotbed for Marxism, especially with Sidney Hook and James Burnham. I really enjoyed reading the works and about the production of these works in the 1930s when these people who became much more famous as conservatives or neoconservatives after World War II, during the Cold War, when they were just like gung-ho Marxists who wanted communist revolution and were really thinking in creative ways especially Sidney Hook, thinking in creative ways about how to blend Marxism with American traditions in ways that would make sense to more and more people. But also, hilariously, once he becomes a conservative. So Sidney Hook, you know he really is a conservative. By the 60s he kind of goes from Marxism to a little bit of Trotskyism to liberalism, cold War liberalism to Republican Party conservatism and writing for the National Review During this trajectory.

Speaker 2: 1:11:31

By the 1960s, when there's a bunch of new young leftists all over the place growing interested in Marxist literature and Marxist philosophy, someone wants to bring out his famous book Towards an Understanding of Karl Marx, which was written and published in 1933, wants to bring out a new edition and he forbids it because he doesn't want to associate with his younger self I mean, even if that's just amazing to me.

Speaker 2: 1:12:04

Or Kenneth Burke, who I found an equally fascinating Marxist figure from the 1930s who wrote a lot about culture and ideology. He was one of these many intellectuals who recognized that maybe the economic conditions were right for socialism but that not enough Americans were buying into it and so maybe culture and ideology were the real problem they had to solve. This becomes a whole cottage industry in the 1930s Kenneth Burke's one of the more interesting figures of these people trying to figure this out and he writes a number of really great Marxist books in the 30s and even into the early 40s. But by the time you get to the 1950s he doesn't become conservative, not even close, but he becomes a kind of famous academic writing about literature and philosophy and new editions of his book he censors out certain words, including references to Marx. All of this was just fascinating and I think one of the things I hope my book does is just sort of like if anyone thought that there wasn't Marx and there wasn't Marxism in various points in American history. This, hopefully, will teach them otherwise.

Speaker 1: 1:13:30

Yeah, I mean you do actually spell out that even a lot of the dreaded mid-century liberals, like the Niebers and Schlesinger, are actually in some ways products of this 30s Marxist renaissance.

Speaker 1: 1:13:49

That happens and they're kind of, you know, part of this mass defection in the early 50s and which I think is part of where the myth and I do think it is a myth of like, oh well, all the Trotskyists became neoconservatives, because, yes, a lot of them are Trotskyists. But actually if you go through the actual I've gone through the numbers of like 50s uber conservatives who were communists in the 30s, from James Burnham to even Whitaker Chambers, and I'm like there's not one tendency I can actually pull them from, like there's a lot of just straight up Marxist-Leninist who flip too. It's actually surprising how thorough this seems to be. So, you know, we talked about this kind of dialectically antagonist relationship between progressivism and Marxism as first maybe a little friendly, but we we should know better from European history and then it going South pretty thoroughly in the twenties. Um, why do you think so many of these intellectuals turn on their earlier selves in the forties and fifties? Many of these intellectuals turn on their earlier selves in the 40s and 50s?

Speaker 2: 1:15:09

well, yeah, that's the big question of chapter five of my book.

Speaker 2: 1:15:16

Um, what I argue is, marx was so central to intellectual life, high intellectual and mid-intellectual life in 1930s America that anybody, no matter what position they were taking in the 40s and 50s, whether they were trying to carve out a new type of left, whether they wanted to stick to Marxism which is not very many of those whether they had become a liberal or were continuing as liberals, because lots of these liberals in the 50s were liberals in the 30s but weren it was like I think I used the metaphor that they had it's but they had to exercise their demons right, and liberals in particular in this time period were creating, fabricating, like a new american political tradition.

Speaker 2: 1:16:23

They didn't think it was new, but it's very new when you look at it, as this pragmatic, centrist liberalism that is was not fascism, was not the conservatism of the South and also was not Marxism or communism and was better, more revolutionary. It offered more freedom and it had defeated fascism and was on the verge of defeating communism as well. But they defined this American political tradition almost entirely against Marxism, whether it was Schlesinger, whether it was Niebuhr who was exercising his own Marxist demons, whether it was Walt Rostow who kind of formulated a theory of American global development that was anti-Marxist but explicitly in a Marxist tone. I mean, he he titled, subtitled his most famous book about deliverment, about development stages of growth, subtitled it a non-communist manifesto, the list goes on and on. Like every single liberal intellectual of the mid 20th century whom you've read and know about or heard about wrote about Marx, oftentimes extensively, in ways that helped them sort of formulate a whole political philosophy that they believed represented American liberalism.

Speaker 1: 1:18:11

So I guess that brings me to the second half of your fifth chapter and also your chapter six, which is about the New Left, which for, I hate to say, for most american marxists today they study european history until about 1950. Then we we jump over and start caring about america, which is also, I think, a problem why it's so hard to talk about the american marxist history, because marxists themselves often don't study it. But they do know this time period a little better, partly because the baby boomers come from there, so we all get this shoved down our throats more, but partly because, I think, also there's more mass media, it's a more relatable mass media to us. The media environment post-war is closer to our own. I mean barring the internet really changing things, but at least closer to the one. I mean barring the internet really changing things, but at least closer to the one that you and I grew up with. How do you think these perceptions of it's? There's the post-war conservatism is that is dominant throughout American life in the 1950s, but how far people take it varies dramatically.

Speaker 1: 1:19:37

Um, and then you also, when you go back and write about the reception of Marx, and then you left imagination actually work out some things that I find surprising. Like you know, I often joke that today a lot of people have been so influenced by anti-communism they think communism is what happens when you just flip that on its head. Um, just, whatever, the whatever. The anti-communist said that we did it was bad. Well, no, we did it, but it was good. But I think your book actually indicates to me this tendency is not particularly new. We see this even in some of the new leftists in the 1960s. So how does the American reception of Marx change with the one-two of post-war conservatism and then the new left?

Speaker 2: 1:20:27

So post-war conservatism was deeply embedded in the Red Scare, and so it was an attempt to rid the US of Marxism. Of course, the US of Marxism of course. But even more than that, it was an effort to fight and diminish liberalism, which of course was the most potent and powerful political philosophy in mid-century America. And so, whereas liberals at the time were arguing against Marx and Marxism in an effort to sort of firm up their own political philosophy, conservatives were writing about and arguing with Marx and Marxism, not just as part of this sort of like Red Scare effort to crush communism, like Red Scare effort to crush communism, but even more so to lump it together with liberalism, to make the case that in fact, the new deal was like Marxism in liberal clothing, liberal sheep's clothing. And this is a tendency that runs straight through to the present. With the right. The right has I mean, they did this in the first Red Scare, first Red Scare, in which they labeled anything they disliked Bolshevism. The second Red Scare, mccarthyism was really an effort to not just crush Marxism, because it wasn't very vibrant at that time, but also to crush the labor movement or certain elements of the labor movement and in particular to diminish New Deal liberalism.

Speaker 2: 1:22:18

So I think liberalism is hegemonic, but conservatism is on the rise and making a lot out of the Cold War and the Red Scare, and when a new left emerges in the 1960s, it both.

Speaker 2: 1:22:39

It emerges in a context in which liberalism has been under attack and is still, but is still powerful. And so then you combine that with, like the vietnam war, which was a liberal's war, and young new leftists um see nothing redeemable in liberalism, even though though I would argue, and many historians have argued, that much of the new left was very closely akin to liberalism. And so, like the, I would say, a lot of people on the left now, some people on the left now and some historians would argue that the new left was not Marxist. The new left was rooted in the liberation movements of the 60s and the counterculture and the anti-war movement, which was not always Marxist. Lots and lots and lots of new leftists were engaging with Marx during the 1960s and after, and this wasn't necessarily surprising to me. But the ways in which they were engaging with Marx, I think, is not widely understood. So I'm hoping people will pick that up from my book.

Speaker 1: 1:23:57

So like, for example, what are some of the?

Speaker 2: 1:23:59

go ahead go ahead.

Speaker 2: 1:24:13

No, I just want to ask you what are some of the misconceptions that you see really flower with, for example, I don't know like the various liberal criticisms of the Bernie Sanders campaign. You know, like these are the debates that lots of people on the left contemporaneously are very familiar with. That's kind of how the new left has often been sort of like red, um, not a serious left, not a marxist left, not a sort of like labor first left. But so many new leftists were reading marx, um, you know, like I focus, for example, on left studies, which is a magazine that was published out of madison by a bunch of grad students at the university there, mostly history grad students. That became highly sort of influential amongst the New Left and they were writing extensively about Marx and Marxists and doing Marxist interpretations of various things, of various things um and met.

Speaker 2: 1:25:26

They and many others had like been a part of this rediscovery or new discovery of the young marks. And so in the 1940s and 50s there's this, uh, these people coming out of detroit, like raya dunai, skava, grace lee andLR James, who are doing a bunch of translations of the Young Marx. Now some intellectuals in the 1930s, like Sidney Hook, who could read German had read the Young Marx and had incorporated on the Jewish question and German ideology and theses on Feuerbach. They've incorporated that into some of their analyses. But for the first time in the 1940s these texts were translated into English for an American audience and they become widely circulated amongst the New Left in the 1960s who are not necessarily a Labor Left, the way the Gilded Age Left was not necessarily a labor left, the way the gilded age left was, uh, more like a kind of ragtag. Many college students, many civil rights activists, just various anti-war protesters who felt alienated from the liberal society. And this young marx, especially his writings about alienation, really spoke to them. So that's part of it.

Speaker 1: 1:26:43

But then the Vietnam War leads people further and further on the left and so there are just many explorations of Marx and other Marxist writings due to the war itself and the resistance to the war. Yeah, I find the new left to be fascinating for one thing. I think one thing that is in play with marxist in the new left that is not in play with marxists prior to the 1950s is divisions in the global communist world which didn't exist in the 1920s. Basically, I mean, you had russia, and that was pretty much it, and then the soviet blo, and that was pretty much it, and then the Soviet bloc, but that was pretty much it. So the Sino-Soviet split really I think confounds things.

Speaker 1: 1:27:30

And then the other thing I think that confounds things is that what we call the New Left in my mind has three different phases. And there's like this Marxian beginning and then there's like the, the like intermixed period, and then by the seventies you're getting to the new communist movement where the communists have kind of come back into the four. And I'm not saying it went well, Well, you know, but it was actually Marxist. It wasn't just like namby-pamby liberal identity politics or anarchism. It's actually surprising how little anarchism there is in the new left. When I actually studied them I was like you guys are wrong. There's not that much anarchism in the new left at all.

Speaker 1: 1:28:22

So some liberalism maybe, but there's not a lot of anarchism, um well to go.

Speaker 2: 1:28:27

It's like to go back to my earlier uh discussion of the socialist party and how what I found was like marxism sort of mixing in hybrid form with all these other different american traditions. You see this extensively in the New Left. You have Black Panthers who are sort of interpreting Marx in their own way. You have countercultural, hippie, anti-war protesters interpreting Marx in their own way. The list goes on. You have robust debates amongst feminists about Marx in a sort of new left context, and so anytime there's what I call a Marx boom. That is, I see there are four periods in American history in which there's like a huge uptick in Americans reading Marx favorably.

Speaker 2: 1:29:24

He gets read in a wide assortment of ways, and that was especially true in the 1960s. Part of it is like there's just so much sort of anger at quote, unquote the system and people are grasping for all different sort of like traditions or ways to think about how to oppose the system and, of course, capitalism, even at its sort of, even in the 1960s, when it's sort of like at its apex in terms of the golden age for western capitalism, and a lot of these people were not as sort of poor, precarious or exploited as people would be before or after. They sort of connect the system that they hate to capitalism, and so of course, they're going to find Marx, even if, for example, the Marx of capital, the Marx of the working day chapter and capital is not really the marks they're latching on to. They're latching on to different forms of marks which is in many ways understandable.

Speaker 1: 1:30:33

I mean, one of the things that I've always found interesting is the new uf does happen at the tail end of what is like the high point of not just capitalism but also capital integration. Like workers actually are fairly well integrated into the Fortis apparatus, are the social democratic apparatus in Europe I use that in quotation marks advisedly, and so you know it does seem like it does seem odd actually for that to be a high point of Marxism, but there's almost there's so much discontent. The international empires are really beginning to unravel the role of the U? S as the replacement for the British empire. It seems to be dawning on americans actually finally what that is and means.

Speaker 1: 1:31:27

Um, and I find that fascinating. I think your book covers it relatively well and it is interesting, and it's one of these things I think about. You keep on hinting about all this syncretism, and I was thinking about this in regards to any movement. On one hand, as I'm not a true orthodox marxist, I don't even know what that actually means, but in so much that it is a thing you know, I would like to pretend that I was that. Um, and yet, uh, it would be weird if somehow there was an idea set that could remain so pure that it never hybridizes with anything.

Speaker 2: 1:32:05

That would be very weird.

Speaker 2: 1:32:06

That's not how history works at all, right.

Speaker 2: 1:32:16

But there's like a kernel of the Marxist idea in Capital from the working day about how our labor in a capitalist system is exploited that people return to and again and again, especially during times when labor exploitation seems especially pronounced gilded age, 1930s now like there's been a just to sort of jump ahead a little bit, but there's been a serious return to that.

Speaker 2: 1:32:58

Marx in a lot of writings, in writings on marx, is not only sort of focused on the sort of labor marks so they're focused on the ways in which capitalism explicitly exploits people, but also focused on how people in such a, under such arrangements, cannot be free. So there's this real focus on freedom which to me seems like a sort of post-Cold War way to return to Marx that maybe sheds the baggage of the Soviet Union, although the Soviet Union is not really pronounced in a lot of the new literature because it's now 35 years in the rearview mirror. But there is. It's sort of like a oh, all you people talk about freedom. Well, why aren't we free and why especially are we so repressed at the place where we spend so much time, that is, at work? So much of the new marxist literature that I write about in the final chapter is pitched in those terms and I find that, I guess, fascinating and also really sort of like resonating, not just with me but with lots of people in this current moment.

Speaker 1: 1:34:25

Yeah, one of the things I will say about Marxism today, and I'm not necessarily saying we're at a high point right now, although it does seem interesting that I have Zoomer kids claiming to be Marxist-Leninist to when I asked them what they think that means, give me all kinds of wild answers, which I actually don't necessarily think should be unexpected or is necessarily bad either. But you know, this March revival after 2007,. We're looking at it hitting almost a generation long. So, um, it's like it's not going away anytime, real soon, and it did seem in the beginning to even catch the, the, uh, the, the conservatives off guard because they're like oh, oh wait, it's harder to tar these guys as liberals and we've kind of fallen off of our cold war game, so we're not as good at it.

Speaker 2: 1:35:31

I tentatively say we're in our fourth Marx boom in American history. But I say tentative because there's not really an organizational or institutional structure for it the way there was in the previous Marx booms, but there's just been a full flowering of literature on Marx and a return of lots of people reading Marx. That can be measured in book sales, in book groups, in like organized readings, in book sales in book groups and like organized uh readings, um, and there's just like a whole library of books that have been written about marx and marxist ideas in the last 15, 20 years, um, and that was not true in the 80s and 90s yeah, I do think your, your book is interesting because, I will admit, the chapters on the 80s and 90s are a downer, if you like Marx at all.

Speaker 1: 1:36:28

It's just like, yeah, there's Marxist ideas. They get really weird, though, and they barely exist. I mean, you know to really unfairly gloss those chapters, but that's when the idea of the marxist theorist it's a primary form of marxist engagement really seems to come out. I mean, it does have a kind of popular explosion in 1999 when hart and negri's empire comes out and like you're now in history. That I remember, um, and I do remember that book when I was a either a freshman in college or a senior in high school being on the new york times bestseller list and me picking it up as a freshman in college or a senior in high school and going what the fuck is this garbity gook and how is this selling so well?

Speaker 2: 1:37:18

um it was all the rage. Um, I read it like three times in three different reading groups and my rereading of it as research for this book was a pretty wild experience, because I'm like huh, I liked this right doesn't speak to me the same way now, but that's the way things work.

Speaker 1: 1:37:45

I mean one thing you do document is the 90s. It's funny when I hear people kind of claim the New Left was anarchistic because I'm like no, the left of my childhood was anarchistic. That was the 90s. Anarchists and movementists were the only people I met, and then occasionally slightly annoying Trotskyist from British tendencies, like it was. That was it. Like you didn't really meet a whole lot of other people. I guess occasionally if you got through international answers front you maybe it would meet the PSL or the WWP, but like in general you didn't really meet Marxist groups. But you did encounter Marxist theorists but even then it was like through Hart and Negri or through Derrida or through the French post-Marxist or whatever. It was like looking through a mirror darkly and being like I think there's some marks here, but like I just read the manifesto and I don't know what the fuck this has to do with that.

Speaker 2: 1:38:47

Um, yeah, I mean that. So, as I try to articulate in the final chapter, um, where I do just a tiny tiny bit of biography, autobiography, um, you know I'm gen. X was a not a propitious time to grow up to be a marxist no at all and yet I still became one.

Speaker 2: 1:39:12

So I'm, but I would consider myself in a way a sort of like child of the academic marks of the 80ies. That was so dark, but clearly I think I was looking for something more. But like Marxism to me when I first discovered it was about reading groups. I mean, there was, there were radicals doing other things, and that kind of came to the forefront, especially with, like the anti world trade organization protests in Seattle and DC and elsewhere. But mostly if I wanted to go partake in an action, it'd be like a Columbus Day parade, we'd be protesting or something like that.

Speaker 2: 1:39:58

It was hard to see Marxism in action, at least for me. I'm sure it was out there. So that's what is so interesting is, after especially the financial collapse, 2007 and 2008, of seeing like a real flowering of it. And it's still here, but where it goes, I don't know. And it's still here, but where it goes, I don't know. And there's not. To me there's not really an org form, but there's a lot of books to read and a lot of ideas to talk about with people, and that's not nothing.

Speaker 1: 1:40:33

Yeah, I mean it is interesting because I do agree with you it doesn't feel like there's an org in yet. The DSA is the equivalent size adjusted for population, even after losing a bunch of people of the SDS in the sixties, so like there's something there. But I agree with you, there hasn't been. I mean, honestly, it was kind of lacking in the sixties too, because the sectarian fragmentation amongst the new left was pretty thorough.

Speaker 2: 1:41:03

um, but yeah, but in the 60s everyone knew there was in the left and everyone knew that it was making it difficult for the state to wage war in vietnam like these are. That's a pretty important thing that I don't know that the current left can't really claim anything like that as an accomplishment.

Speaker 1: 1:41:28

No, not even, not even with, uh, palestine. Um, one thing I would say is, in general, I I will say, whatever the tactics and you left developed to handle things, they've been so normalized and routinized that the state has a total grasp on how to deal with them at this point, like mass protest walks, just they might serve a purpose, but they're not the purpose that you think they are. This is, let me put it that way, I'm not gonna say they're purposeless, but like they don't change policy, not, and they don't even signal real mass opposition the way that they kind of did in the 60s. And I think part of that isn't to do with marx, it's to do with larger changes in American society, like the end of the draft, the increasing like, yes, democrats cry about democracy ending all the time, but like everyone's been ending democratic institutional responsiveness for like 40 years really, since the new left. So I do agree with you Go ahead.

Speaker 2: 1:42:45

I mean this is to agree with you, but I would just say that it's hard to know if or whether the current Marx boom, as I call it and I'm tentative about claiming that is going to take any type of substantial political form. But even in researching this history I came across so many surprising things. I hope to be surprised again in the future. Things happen that are surprising. Nobody expected the left to emerge in the 1960s. Nobody expected that, especially after the McCarthy era. And it happened. So it's good to keep hope, even in these dark, depressing times.

Speaker 1: 1:43:37

Right To be fair, no one expected the marx resurgence after 2008 either.

Speaker 1: 1:43:45

even the weird bacterians who benefited from it were kind of surprised yeah, like, yeah, exactly you know, I was sauntering towards marxism after a brief stint as a reactionary in my early 20s and like even I was like wait, there are people who agree with me. I remember like feeling shocked because I was like I only thought like some weird english professor and like the history, the historians, where you're for some reason marks, I will say one of the as a, as a boon to the field of history Marxist historiography during all these periods has never been totally wiped out. Marxist economics, that's a different story.

Speaker 2: 1:44:36

I say this proudly as a historian. Historians are usually slower to respond to academic trends, theoretical trends, and so we do eventually respond, and those responses are not always great. But it's allowed Marxism. It's allowed some of us to remain Marxists as historians with Marxist approaches. There's never been a time since Du Bois when there hasn't been, there haven't been, a few Marxist historians here or there.

Speaker 1: 1:45:10

Right and, like you know, yeah, there are some like there are heterodox economic schools, but even though, like university of Utah, where I live, is actually heterodox, for some weird reason the Mormons invited all the communists to like, come here when they wouldn't sign the anti-communist pledge in berkeley and like we're like the mormons, like I don't, we don't really care what you teach, just come over here and teach, which I find fascinating, but even it's not consistently Marxist, like it's, it's some Keynesians thrown in.

Speaker 1: 1:45:43

Yeah, some, some, some Neo and post Keynesians and some MMT years and some, you know, other kinds of heterodox, whatever, whatever. Whereas Marxist historiography at least even certain conservative historians will like, nod some kind of respect to it. I remember marshall poe saying like, like he couldn't totally throw marxist history out, like like he was just, like they were at least trying to be scientific. And who else is doing that? Um, right now, as you know, we can talk about this in terms of history, but like, uh, historians are kind of stuck between, like the marxists are the only people who still try to maintain a systemic, and they're not only people, but we're, we're pretty close because most everybody else is kind of seem freaked out about grand movements of history, so they just kind of write about micro history now, like yeah, it's unfair, but also true.

Speaker 2: 1:46:43

Yeah, that was definitely true 10, 20 years ago. I feel like we're moving in a different direction now. But so hey, derek, we've been talking for almost two hours.

Speaker 1: 1:46:56

Yeah, we can cut out.

Speaker 2: 1:46:59

I've enjoyed it a lot.

Speaker 1: 1:47:02

So where can people find your work, Andrew?

Speaker 2: 1:47:07

Well, this book, as well as my last book, the University of Chicago Press website will have links to them. I'm still on the old ex thing, or blue sky, just find me. Um yeah, any place books are sold, including the ultimate capitalist institutions owned by Bezos and Musk and the like.

Speaker 1: 1:47:36

Yep, Uh, I guess Powell's is still kind of in. I mean, it's a capitalist institution, but I guess it's still kind of independent. I don't know.

Speaker 2: 1:47:46

You can buy my book directly from the University of Chicago Press, which is nonprofit and which, interestingly enough, I think you know as a nonprofit press. Their mission is to publish work. I mean, I think my book will sell enough to make the press get out of the red, but most academic books don't turn any profit, and so academic presses, in order to survive, have to have some books that turn a profit. Have to have some books that turn a profit. The University of Chicago Press has a bunch of works from Hayek and Friedman that really keep the engine running. So Hayek and Friedman are helping with the publication of this book on Karl.

Speaker 1: 1:48:33

Marx. That's a very funny thought in this conversation. Thank you so much, Dr Hartman.

Speaker 2: 1:48:40

Yeah, thanks, derek, it's really fun.