Exploring Marx for the USA

Francis Shor

Karl Marx in America
Andrew Hartman
The University of Chicago Press, 2025
594 pages, $39 hardcover.

ANDREW HARTMAN’S KARL Marx in America intends to probe “the meaning of Karl Marx in America.” Situating that investigation, both historically and sociologically, Hartman begins “by asking why Marx looked to the United States as a rich source of material about capitalism.” (2)

Hartman then explores the application and implication of Marx’s work from the late 19th century up to the present, especially alert to the numerous uses and misuses of Marx’s critical insights into capitalism in general and the specifics of the political economy in the United States.

Incorporating numerous interpretive inquiries into Marx’s perspectives and the movements that Marx and his interpreters inspired, Hartman’s book makes a highly valuable contribution to understanding the impact of Marx and Marxism in the United States.

Indeed, as many reviewers of Karl Marx in America already noted, undertaking such a sweeping historical and critical investigation of Marx and Marxism in the United States is intended to challenge the “mistaken perception that Marxism is marginal to U.S. intellectual history,” as Alan Wald argues in his insightful and lengthy review in New Politics.

Indeed, Wald goes on to contend that Hartman’s “embedding of the Marxist tradition in episodes of U.S. history is remarkable because he is shining a light on the past to help us rethink the present. Therefore, instead of experiencing a whistle-stop tour of 175 years of intellectual engagement, one is continually gripped by a sense that all this is a precondition to the imagining of possible futures.”

As the reviewer in The Baffler notes, Karl Marx in America is a start in building the narrative of how a generation of American intellectuals are beginning to analyze the history of Marxism in the United States not as a failure but as a continuing tradition, with the present being an historically important moment in its development and to which we can contribute.

The Reviewer’s Journey

My own contribution to this discussion of Marxism in the United States over the 175 years covered in Hartman’s book may appear as something of a whistle-stop on the important decades, movements, and intellectual interventions carefully analyzed throughout this book.

It should be obvious that in constructing such a sprawling narrative, it is inevitable that Hartman would miss or misconstrue certain threads in the tapestry he weaves. In order to highlight a few of the oversights, I want to start with my own engagement with Marx and his interpreters.

I had read many of Marx’s works during my time in grad school as an antiwar and antidraft activist (1967-1972), exclusive of the volumes of Capital. I was particularly taken, as were others of my New Left comrades, in the “young Marx,” especially the 1844 Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts with their compelling presentation of the role of alienation.

In addition, it was hard not to come into contact with various political organizations claiming to be conveyors of the “true” Marx and his most notable political disciples, Lenin, Trotsky, and Mao.

However, it wasn’t until I arrived in Detroit in 1974 and immediately joined a Marxist study group that I became more aware of significant applications of Marx into work and labor.

We read and discussed Harry Braverman’s Labor and Monopoly Capital: The Degradation of Work in the Twentieth Century (1974) and Stanley Aronowitz’s False Promises: The Shaping of Working Class Consciousness (1973).

Both books opened my eyes to the continuing relevance of Marx, not only for their implications for left politics, but also for the insights into work and workers.

What I took from our group’s conversation about these two significant texts would also inform the kind of pedagogy that I, along with other leftwing faculty, developed in service of the working adults who were the main constituency of my classes at Wayne State University.

Perhaps my own blinkered personal experience finds fault with Hartman for not including either book in his massive study. In addition, one of the key members of that study group was David Herreshoff, a professor of English at Wayne State and a veteran of the Trotskyist movement. The author of an important book on Marx’s influence in 19th-century America, he, too, does not find any mention in Hartman’s book.

Broadening the “Meaning”

My references to these oversights are not intended to diminish the massive accomplishment of Hartman’s book. Rather, what I hope to achieve in my review are some corrections and additions in order to broaden the “meaning” of Marx in America.

I will undertake a brief highlighting of those historical moments and movements where Hartman either misperceives the specifics of the American context, or overlooks and misinterprets the variegated engagements with Marx by his advocates or opponents. In this way I want to expand the conversation initiated by Hartman’s masterful book.

His first chapter is a valuable explication of Marx’s writings on conditions in the United States, many of these rendered directly through the citation and explanation of Marx’s pre-Civil War columns as the European correspondent for The New York Daily Tribune.

Following the opening chapter, Hartman then turns to Marx’s impact on American political culture in the late 19th century, noting in the process Marx’s insights into persistence of white supremacy in the heterogeneous working class.

 Discussing the importance of utopian texts, such as Lawrence Gronlund’s The Cooperative Commonwealth (1884) and Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward (1888), Hartman identifies the ways such texts provided an opening to Marx’s works while, at the same time, deflecting from some of Marx’s more compelling critiques of capitalism.

 On one hand, that’s why middle-class reformers championed such utopian works. On the other hand, both Gronlund’s and Bellamy’s books would have a profound impact on the developments in American socialism into the early 20th century, especially the Debsian variety.

While Hartman makes a case that the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) “came closer to representing the Marxist ideal than any other labor organization” (108), he neglects the degree to which the IWW was more than a labor organization and, in turn, embodied evident syndicalist tendencies.

Those tendencies were not only alive in the United States, but also were globally pre-eminent among industrial workers throughout the early 20th century.

Hartman might be excused for overlooking these syndicalist expressions since they detract from his narrative. Yet this neglect leads him to diminish the anti-electoral positions evident throughout the IWW and other syndicalist currents elsewhere.

Moreover, in his discussion of the remarkable achievement of socialism in Oklahoma in the pre-WWI years, he does not cite the importance of the IWW’s organizing of agricultural and industrial workers in Oklahoma as a key component, ironically, of the electoral successes there.

Contradictory Consciousness

When Hartman turns to the rank and file labor insurgencies of the 1930s, he misses an opportunity to develop further what contradictions remain alive in the U.S. working class of that and later eras. While he does account for the insights of Black Marxists, such as Hubert Harrison and W.E.B. DuBois, into the “wages of whiteness,” these and other contradictions lack a fully realized analysis.

To give a few examples, one of the key union organizers in Flint, Wyndham Mortimer, recounts in his memoir how he could hear radios blaring the voice of Father Coughlin, the anti-Semitic priest from Royal Oak, Michigan’s Shrine of the Little Flower (sometime referred to as the “Shrine of the Little Fuhrer”).

Applying Gramsci’s analysis and understanding of “contradictory consciousness” to account for this phenomenon would have helped here and elsewhere throughout Hartman’s book. Refusing to take account of the “race strikes” in the 1940s in auto factories is another oversight, compounded by the lack of any mention of the essential work of Dave Roediger and others on the persistence of white supremacy among workers — a persistence that also explains the later role of Trump and his MAGA minions.

With the advent of the Cold War, Hartman does an excellent job of identifying and analyzing those anti-Marxist ideological screeds of the period. However, when Karl Marx in America talks about the revival of Marx in the 1960s, it falls into its own ideological trap by relegating Marxist scholars and activists like Staughton Lynd and Howard Zinn into the category of “moral leftists.”

This diminishes the important role that Lynd and Zinn had in helping with the Freedom Schools in the South during the Civil Rights Era. Moreover, it overlooks how Lynd would reformulate his Quakerism and Marxism into a praxis that could help both displaced factory workers and prisoners.

Moving from the Sixties to the end of the 20th century and the rise of the antiglobalized “multitude,” he misapplies “moral leftism” to the work of Hardt and Negri (469), diminishing in the process the continuing emergence on an insurgent and radical democratic Marxist-inflected international movement.

On Ecological Marxism

Turning to the vibrant emergence of an ecological Marxism, Hartman does take account of the divergent interpretations that fuel the debates. However, I would argue that he doesn’t fully comprehend the work of Kohei Saito (404-407), one of the foremost scholars in demonstrating how the late Marx can become the basis for both socialist ecology and a more profound critique of power relations.

As Saito points out in Marx in the Anthropocene: Towards the Idea of Degrowth Communism:

“The current changes in the climate are tightly linked to power relations under the hegemony of global neoliberalism and reflecting upon climate justice requires us to take hierarchies consisting of class, race, and gender into account.” (105)

Certainly Hartman is well aware, as demonstrated throughout Karl Marx in America, how the hierarchies of class, race and gender pervade U.S. political culture. His mostly adept analysis of Marx-inspired texts and movements provides an important reminder that Marx is not dead.

If there are gaps and missteps, this book is not only a testament to the persistent influence of Marx, but, perhaps, an apt prologue to the mayoral victories of Zorhan Mamdani in New York and Katie Wilson in Seattle and, as Hartman hopefully concludes, “an alternative…to dreaming of a better future.” (510)

March-April 2026, ATC 241