Marxism and America: New Appraisals

For a brief historical moment in the 1990s and early 2000s, few people in the United States seemed particularly interested in Marxism. Having found a way to make political hay out of “terrorism” perpetrated by putative religious zealots, conservative politicians retired the anti-Marxist rhetoric that had riled their constituents against a foreign enemy for most of the twentieth century. Meanwhile, the radical left, while never a unitary movement, fragmented even more than usual. Radicalism didn't go away, but it took a more ad hoc approach, cropping up periodically in support of justice for specific groups, to oppose environmental degradation, or in a rearguard action against the steady neoliberalization of the Democratic Party. Here too Marxism seemed passe, replaced by poststructuralist ideas that better suited the moment.But times have changed. The MAGA wing of the Republican Party has mostly scrapped antiterrorist rhetoric in favor of good old-fashioned Cold War anticommunism. The radical left, having spiritually digested the experience of the Great Recession, is more attuned to structural explanations anchored in political economy than it has been in the recent past. Young would-be radicals are at least Marxist-curious, and conservatives hysterically denounce even the most centrist Democrats as if they were leading a Stalinist cell in a Marxist coup. If making America great again means returning to the 1960s, the MAGA movement appears to have succeeded.Christopher Phelps and Robin Vandone intentionally situate their edited volume Marxism and America: New Appraisals within this present moment by making two points: Americans have found a renewed interest in Marxism; and Marxists, dating back to Marx and Engels, have a long-standing interest in the United States. This aptly frames the focus of the eleven essays gathered in the volume, as does the word and in the title. Rarely does the most common coordinating conjunction in the English language get a chance to do the heavy lifting it's doing in this title. Marxism and America is not another history of Marxism in but not of the United States, focused on a political vanguard without a movement. Rather, both terms, Marxism and America, represent cultural and intellectual poles; contributors to the volume explore the ways these poles have interacted with, permeated, and mutually influenced one another as they vie for influence over the program and orientation of social movements on the left. Contributors to the volume reframe Marxism and Americanism as a two-way street. For Marxist-curious progressives, this volume might help clarify the relationship between Marxist and non-Marxist positions on issues they care about, while the hysterical conservative will likely seize on moments in the essay to say, “See, it all traces back to Marxism.”Most of the essays in the volume deal directly or indirectly with the relationship between Marxism, on the one hand, and not-explicitly-Marxist movements around race and gender, on the other. Essays with this focus aim either to uncover an unacknowledged intellectual debt of gratitude that identity politics owes to the Marxist tradition or to identify a moment in which “orthodox” Marxists delineated questions of race, gender, and sexuality as outside the proper purview of Marxism and, thus, politically unimportant. Jesse Battan and Sinead McEneany represent the latter group, while the essays by Matthew E. Stanley, Jodie Collins, Paul M. Heideman, Mara Keire, and—more indirectly—Nick Witham all, in one way or another, make a case that Marxist ideas have informed social justice movements around race, gender, and sexuality.While there is no space to cover all essays, some points of intersection, and contrast, are worth touching on briefly. Battan and Collins, both focusing on the interwar period, offer directly contrasting analyses of the value of Marxist theory to gender and sexual liberation movements. Battan contrasts 1920s Marxist intellectual “sex boys” with feminists and heterodox Marxists. Rigidly committed to Marxism, the former group dismissed sexual liberation as petty bourgeois. The latter group, willing to adulterate their Marxism with insights from Freudian psychology, put sexual liberation at the center of their revolutionary program. Collins, on the other hand, argues that orthodox Marxism, dating back to Marx and Engels, already contains the conceptual tools for a progressive program of gender liberation. Dogmatic Marxism did not stunt the women's movement in the 1920s. Women flocked to communism because they believed Marxism in general, and the Soviet Union in particular, offered a more radical version of feminism than they could find outside the party. Mara Keire would likely side with Collins here. Revisiting 1970s debates between pro-sex and anti-porn feminists, Keire argues that the latter were more influenced by Marx, and more skeptical of Freud, than the former. Concepts from Capital and Origins of the Family, Private, and the State informed anti-porn feminists’ theory of gender. Rooted in sexual violence, patriarchy is sustained, in part, through the commodification of women as sex objects. For Keire the anti-porn feminists were both more Marxist and more radical in the 1970s, and would be remembered differently if not for an ill-advised strategic alliance with cultural conservativism in the 1980s.The few essays that do not directly focus on gender and/or race fall into three categories. First, essays by Leilah Danielson and Andrew Hartman highlight a moment in which Marxism may have found a way to be more culturally and, ultimately, politically salient than it has been for most of US history. Danielson explores a pre–Popular Front effort to “Americanize” Marxism. Led by labor intellectuals A. J. Muste and Louis Budenz, the Conference for Progressive Labor Action sought to propagate a hybrid of Marxism and Deweyian pragmatism in a plain “American language” to build a social/intellectual base for Marxism within organized labor. Much of the essay uses a rift between Budenz and Muste to explore the complicated relationship between nationalism and internationalism, and Danielson does a lot here in a very short space. Hartman offers an intellectual history of the 1930s to argue that the New Deal and Popular Front worked to “water down the American reception of Marx,” which was particularly unfortunate because it came at a moment when Marxism was receiving a broader audience (126). Like Stanley's and Heideman's essays on the Black Marxist tradition, Hartman's and Danielson's essays deal with similar subject matter and work well together. Second, essays by Nick Witham and Tim Jelfs explore the Marxist dimensions of popular leftist cultural artifacts, Witham by situating Howard Zinn's wildly popular People's History within the Marxist tradition and Jelfs by tracing the performative use of Marxism in the memes and podcasts of 2010s millennial socialism. Finally, Kim Moody offers a sweeping history of the United States to combat the claim that this history “refutes” Marxism.Editors selected essays to cover all chronological periods and for their “new appraisals” (the book's subtitle). The essays are organized chronologically, reaching all the way back to the origins of Marxism and up to the present: the essays by Jelfs and Moody take us up to the 2010s. The real bulk of the substantive history spans the 1920s to the 1970s, which, given the topic, is not surprising. In selecting for “freshness of perspective, not ideology or political stance” (8), the editors may have sacrificed some analytical consistency. The editors address this question head-on in the introduction by providing a baseline definition of Marxism and laying out a series of “antinomies” that frame the questions animating the studies and thus provide cogency to the volume. Despite this effort, authors clearly have no consensus of what, exactly, counts as Marxism, and readers who feel strongly about this question will scoff at some of the inclusions (let alone exclusions). A more serious critique is the total absence here of any consideration of the role of Marxism in economic thought or policy in the United States. Only Moody's essay focuses on political economy, and his is a synthetic overview rather than a more granular historical study like most essays in the volume. Given my own suspicion that economic issues more than anything else are motivating the renewed interest in Marxism, the lack of attention to economics in this volume may have been an oversight.