According to Hartman, Marxism in America operates on a cycle of booms and busts, similar to the classical pattern of reform vs. reaction laid out by Richard Hofstadter in his 1955 work The Age of Reform. Karl Marx in America identifies four Marx booms in America, beginning with the Gilded Age, during which radical inequality and an explosion in labor organizing and unionization lead to violent confrontations with the state and the forces of capital. There was also the wave of immigration to the United States from Europe, including Yiddish socialists, Italian anarchists, and German labor organizers; with our entry into World War I came the first Red Scare and state repression. Fears of the Soviet Union, the crushing of unions, the deportation of labor activists and Marxists meant a lull in Marxism in the 1920s while the economy proverbially roared. The Great Depression prompted a rush back to Marx now that the end of capitalism seemed nigh. The mobilizing forces of the New Deal also provided momentum; the second Red Scare of the late 1940s and 1950s was the predictable response to the theorists, politicians, and communists who had mobilized during the FDR presidency.
The third Marx boom came packaged with the 1960s New Left, part of the general revolutionary wave of that decade, before the era of Reagan snuffed it out to such an extent that Friedrich Hayek would receive the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1991. Marxism was at its nadir, seemingly defeated in the neoliberal aftermath of the Cold War. A small uptick in left wing activism in the late 1990s in response to the aggressive globalization of NAFTA was crushed by the American response to 9/11 and the global war on terror. Hartman ends with the by-now-rote emphasis on the 2008 financial crisis and its aftershocks, with Occupy Wall Street signaling the beginning of a fourth Marx boom in our current moment, curiously spliced with a new fearmongering at the highest offices in which Marxism functions as convenient catch-all boogeyman. Hartman’s breakthrough is in perceiving how each boom/bust is attended by a different avatar of Marx, as each facet finds its operative political atmosphere, hence his choice of chapter names: “Bolshevik,” “Prophet,” “False Prophet,” “Humanist Liberator,” etc.