Cal Turner: What are the main inflection points in US history in terms of American attitudes toward Marx?
Andrew Hartman: There have been four periods in US history when lots of Americans were reading Marx favorably. The first period was the first Gilded Age, when you see the emergence of mass socialist parties and radical labor parties.
The second period was the 1930s, which saw the worst crisis that capitalism has ever gone through, the Great Depression. Unemployment rates were 30 percent at certain points during that decade. It saw the emergence not only of the Communist Party USA, but also lots of offshoots of the communist movement. People were thinking both domestically and internationally through a Marxist lens.
The third Marx boom was the 1960s. This might be surprising, because the US economy had never been doing better, and there was a wide swath of people, especially white people, who were part of a middle class. But due to the civil rights movement and a growing left-wing movement in opposition to the US war in Vietnam, lots of people in the 1960s were reading Marx in addition to other left-wing theorists.
The fourth Marx boom is right now, since the 2008 financial crisis, Occupy Wall Street, and the Bernie Sanders campaigns. There’s been a surge of people reading Marx, writing books about Marx, participating in Marxist reading groups, and downloading David Harvey’s lectures on Capital. It’s hard to know where all this interest will go, but in all the other times in which people were reading Marx, there’s a particular way in which the Left helped change history.
Sara Van Horn: Are there aspects of Marx’s influence on US history that you think would surprise readers?
Andrew Hartman: Marx spent ten years of his life writing for the New-York Tribune. In the 1850s, it was his main source of income, in addition to gifts from Friedrich Engels. He authored over five hundred articles for the Tribune, which at that time was the most read newspaper in the world, with 200,000 subscribers. The Tribune was the Bible of the emerging Republican movement and the Republican Party. Abolitionists had all read Marx’s take on European politics.