Karl Marx never visited the United States, but he was long fascinated by the lure—and contradictions—of American freedom. As a young man, he applied for permission to emigrate to Texas. But he couldn’t tear himself away from the debates gripping the Young Hegelians as Europe’s old order crumbled in the 1840s. Later, he would correspond with many of his contemporaries who traveled across the Atlantic, including a set of comrades who would go on to publish two of his outstanding early works: The Communist Manifesto, coauthored with Friedrich Engels, published in German and French in 1838 and in English in 1850, and The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, first published in German, in New York, in 1852.
More surprisingly, Marx’s gifts as an essayist and social observer led The New York Tribune to appoint him as its London correspondent. Between 1853 and 1861, he contributed 487 articles to the Tribune, a journal with around 200,000 subscribers in the 1850s, making it the second-most-read American newspaper.
In the years that followed, movements and parties would rally under the banner of his socialist politics. While Marx did not necessarily become a household name in the United States, he would nonetheless motivate generations of radicals to take up the cause of socialism.
In Karl Marx in America, Andrew Hartman provides us with a kaleidoscopic vision of Marxism in the United States in the 19th, 20th, and 21st centuries. Responding to Marx’s fiercest critics—Mikhail Bakunin, Friedrich Hayek, Leszek Kołakowski, Isaiah Berlin—as well as his staunchest admirers and collaborators—Engels, Jack London, John Reed, C. Wright Mills, Howard Zinn, and Fredric Jameson—Hartman tells the story of how Marx and his followers “put their stamp” on American life and thought. Taking the Civil War as his starting point for this trenchant survey of the American left, Hartman offers us dozens of portraits of Marxism’s main protagonists—including Eugene Debs, W.E.B. Du Bois, Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, Louise Bryant, Harry Haywood, Daniel De Leon, Mother Jones, Claude McKay, Oliver C. Cox, and C.L.R. James—and charts their triumphs and travails all the way up to the present.
The North America that Marx once contemplated moving to was defined by industrialization, labor unrest, and the expansion of slavery. The United States of the 1840s was not yet industrialized, but it was moving in that direction with the construction of roads, canals, and railroads and the emergence of a large, mobile, and varied workforce. At the same time, the country’s increasingly commercialized agricultural sector—farms as well as plantations, storekeepers as well as merchants, indebted producers as well as addicted consumers—also began to channel a rural labor surplus to the advancing frontier of commodity production and wage labor.