What America Made of Marx

The larger message of Marxism wasn’t getting through: As Hartman remarks, “Either there was something wrong with their theory, or there was something wrong with the working class.” The literary critic Kenneth Burke argued that paying closer attention to how Americans actually talked about their problems could help Marxists appeal to them in terms they might grasp. Poetic discourse, he mused, would advance the class struggle better than alien-sounding jargon. In his landmark 1935 history of the Civil War and Reconstruction, W.E.B. Du Bois hailed Black people for engaging in the biggest “general strike” in U.S. history when they fled to Union lines, depriving Confederate planters of their labor. If white workers had only shed their racial privilege, he contended, they could have forged a potent alliance across the color line. Alas, “not enough … were familiar with Capital,” Hartman says, and so they embraced the new Jim Crow order.

Du Bois remained a Marxist all his life, but some talented younger leftists soon abandoned their faith in what they took to be a failed theory and became liberal proponents of American exceptionalism. In his immensely popular 1948 book, The American Political Tradition, the historian Richard Hofstadter maintained, a bit sadly, that radical dissenters had never made much headway against a consensual culture that was “intensely nationalistic and for the most part isolationist … fiercely individualistic and capitalistic.”

Whereas the Marxists of the ’30s and ’40s may have failed to convert the working class, their successors in the ’80s and ’90s didn’t even attempt as much. As conservatives from Ronald Reagan to Donald Trump tore away at the legacies of the New Deal, the Great Society, and the New Left, American Marxism entered a newly insular phase. A number of scholars took refuge in spinning out new versions of Marxism whose only audience was inside academia. The literary theorist Fredric Jameson sought to unmask the alienating function of “commodity fetishism” with “real thought” that “demands a descent into the materiality of language and a consent to time itself in the form of the sentence.” Hartman aptly comments, “Cultural theory made a fetish of difficult language.” In their tome Empire (2000), Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri aimed to give left anti-globalizers an updated version of The Communist Manifesto but managed only to float an abstract hope that “the multitude’s ultimate demand for global citizenship” would be realized through discrete acts of resistance in locations scattered around the world. “While the Right has been busy taking the White House,” Todd Gitlin quipped about such fanciful notions, “the left has been marching on the English department.”