review

David Montgomery

Marxism and Utopianism

in the USA

For more than a century and a quarter Marxism has occupied an

important position in American social criticism, but never a dominant
one. For most socialists between the 1870s and World War One, Marx
had set forth primarily an analysis of the laws of capitalist exploitation
and accumulation, which predicted the downfall of a social system that
most of the literature advertised in their journals condemned on moral
grounds. The ascendency of Leninism produced parties looking to
Marxism for theoretical guidance on physics and painting, as well as
the road to power, and precipitated earnest quests for a correct position
on each and every issue. None of those parties, however, captured a
hegemonic role in the workers movement, let alone in the countrys
intellectual life. The New Left arose on campuses that were devoid of
any form of class analysis. Only in the civil rights movement were there
significant continuities of personnel and styles of thought from Marxist
movements of the thirties, and even they were carefully disguised.
White student activists, scanning bookstores for critiques of a society
that had alienated them, usually discovered Marxism either in little red
books of exhortations to struggle or in fat, ponderous volumes of
cultural criticism. Those two very different forms of presentation,
however, proved to be as well suited to the needs of the revolutionaries
of 1967 as Wage Labour and Capital had been to their predecessors in
1907 or Left-Wing Communism: An Infantile Disorder in 1937. Once again
Marxism had assumed an historically specific role in American radical
discourse, without providing the dominant mode of thought.
Paul Buhle is well situated to analyse the long and complex interaction
between Marxism and radical social movements in the United States.1
A prominent activist in Students for a Democratic Society during the
sixties, he was a founder of the monthly Radical Americawhich has
promoted non-parliamentarian social struggles and investigated their
historical rootsand was the guiding spirit behind the occasional issues
1

Paul Buhle, Marxism in the United States: Remapping the History of the American Left, Verso/Haymarket,
London 1987.

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of Cultural Correspondence. From C.L.R. James, Buhle learned to view

popular culture as a source of confrontations with hierarchical authorities as important as conflicts at the point of production, and indeed
inseparable from them. From his comrade Mari Jo Buhle, author of the
path-breaking Women and American Socialism, 18701920, he learned to
consider womens liberation and womens solidarities as central to the
struggle for socialism, rather than tangential as most American Marxists
had thought.2 From his years of directing the Oral History of the
American Left project he learned to appreciate the diversity of American
Marxisms and their deep roots in immigrant cultures. All these experiences have helped Buhle write a history of Marxism in the United States
that is simultaneously committed to the heritage of the American Left
and critical of it. It is both a highly personal (at times idiosyncratic)
encounter with that heritage and a perceptive analysis designed and
demanding to be shared with others.
Buhle sets out on a path different from most existing histories of socialist
thought because he dismisses Engelss Anti-Dhring out of hand. Unlike
Marxist chroniclers from F.A. Sorge and Morris Hillquit to the present,
Buhle refuses to think in terms of a utopian phase that was subsequently
repudiated, followed by a protracted struggle to create a true vanguard
party.3 On the contrary, he argues: Immigrant Marxism and utopian
radicalism . . . came to share a common ground neither could have
anticipated (p. 14). Nineteenth-century American workers and middleclass reformers who interpreted industrial degradation and centralized
financial power as rents in the social fabric to be repaired by still further
democratization (p. 23), learned to think about class and socialism from
their immigrant comrades. That does not mean that the former came
to accept the view that the sole object of the movement was to organize
workers to capture the machinery of state, so that it might expropriate
the expropriators. The Americans efforts to instruct the largely-German
bearers of Marxism in the decisive importance of the battle against
racial oppression, of womens struggles for citizenship, and of popular
self-activity within civil society made a major contibution to the worldwide movement for socialism. Not only did they contribute significantly
to the ambience of Debsian socialism; they also anticipated by as much
as a century the new social forces that have surfaced in European
Marxist writings during the last two decades.
Although I am not persuaded of the distinctly American origins of this
encounter, I do share Buhles evaluation. Even the GermanAmerican
social revolutionaries of Chicago and elsewhere in the 1880s escaped
the Kautskyian mould that was then being impressed on the Social
Democrats in their homeland. Buhles narrow and negative assessment
of the German influence prevents him from exploring this comparison,
but it would seem to underscore, rather than challenge, his argument
that there was no historic defeat of utopian by scientific socialism.
2

Mari Jo Buhle, Women and American Socialism, 18701920, University of Illinois Press, Urbana, 1981.
Philip S. Foner and Brewster Chamberlin, eds., Friedrich A. Sorges Labor Movement in the United
States: A History of the American Working Class from Colonial Times to 1890, Greenwood, Westport 1977;
Morris Hillquit, History of Socialism in the United States, 5th ed., Funk, New York 1910.
3

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The Impact of Modern Science

Buhle has no interest in Engelss philosophy of nature. On the contrary,

he celebrates the persistent influence of religious sensibility, spiritualism,
temperance, Christology, and liberation theology, positing, as the goal of
the popular struggle against capitalism, a universal cultural experience
rendered both holy and fun (p. 263). Buhles insistence keeps the readers
mind focused on the motivations that have impelled individual men
and women to rebel against social injustice. Few of us will die for the
sake of a correct analysis of economic forces, much as we need it to
keep us from a futile death. Nevertheless, Buhles dismissive attitude
toward Marxist conceptions of science (and toward the intellectual
impact of modern science itself) obscures the importance of the Enlightenments heritage, of personal battles against religious obscurantism,
and even of Darwin in the process by which those who would change
the world have changed themselves. Just think how many Italian
anarchists named their sons Bruno, or consider the liberating effect of
Robert Ingersolls agnosticism on late nineteenth-century radicals in
the Middle West. All that is part of the common ground, whose
configuration is traced in this book.
What Buhle identifies as the historic contribution of immigrant socialists
to the international development of Marxism appears in the link they
forged between the social relations of production and national identity.
The immigrant journalists, pamphleteers, poets, and playwrights who
propagated the socialist gospel in the New World were as deeply rooted
in their sense of ethnicity as they were in their sense of class. Although
most historians have detected only self-isolation in this phenomenon,
Buhle rightly argues that the ethnic bases of German, Jewish, South
Slavic, Italian, Finnish, and other Marxists in America forced them to
reject the illusion of abstract, universal class consciousness . . . to be
achieved by imposing a dominant culture over subordinate cultures
(p. 19), and thus to anticipate debates over nationality and class that
have become essential to twentieth-century Marxism. The early life of
the Communist Party was also intensely localistic and was based on the
language federations that had broken away from the Socialist Party.
Communists sensitivity to the National Question occupied a special
place in the history of American socialism and of world communism.
It prepared the party to come to grips specifically with the liberation
of Afro-Americans.
The interwar encounter of Marxism with Black American radicalism
yielded a new assessment of industrialization and of the bourgeois
democratic revolution in the United States, which was provoked by
W.E.B. Du Boiss magisterial work Black Reconstruction in America. Du
Bois denounced the pervasive intellectual blindness that discerned no
part of our labour movement; no part of our industrial triumph; no
part of our religious experience in Black Americans struggles against
slavery and wage labour on the land.4 Here was a book that shattered
the mould in which both progressive and socialist historians had
previously cast their images of the American past. It appeared, moreover,
4

W.E.B. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction in America, Harcourt, Brace, New York 1935, p. 727.

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just at the time when the Popular Front was opening new debates over
the path to socialism and the critical analysis of culture and nationality
was assuming an increasingly important place in Marxist discourse.
The spectacular rise of industrial unions, the ability of the New Deal
to incorporate the new unionism into its reformist response to the Great
Depression, together with the intense loyalties of immigrant workers,
and especially their children, to both the CIO and Roosevelt, lent a
distinctive cast to the Popular Front in the United States. The Communist Party captured a dominant position within the American Left
primarily through its role in the new unions and its recruitment of
youth from the ethnic communities most strongly attracted to the New
Deal. This meant, writes Buhle, that no basis for a Socialist constituency
seemed to exist outside the Popular Front, and no cultural prefiguration
of the new society within the old seemed to be possible except the idea
. . . of a radical modernism (p. 146). The Communists repudiated the
revolutionary syndicalist part of their own heritage, but they made no
attempt to derive from their Popular Front experience a new pluralistic
vision of how diverse social groupings, fighting in factories, neighbourhoods and legislative chambers, might achieve socialism in an advanced
industrial country. On the contrary, their strategic vision remained
defensive, their conception of the road to socialism transfixed by the
storming of the Winter Palace. Neither they nor anyone else reread the
pioneering analyses of the modern capitalist state that had been produced
on the eve of the Great War by William English Walling, Charles
Ruthenberg, Louis Fraina, and others. The Socialist Party of the thirties
fared far worse: it was bogged down in a hopeless generational split.
Trotskyists and Lovestoneites warned against labours surrender to
bourgeois politics, but they focused their alternative strategies on
the point of production and on battling the Communists for union
leadership.
Popular Front Communism celebrated Americas music, film and literature, where it found and encouraged rich democratic traditions. The
party abandoned its earlier search for proletarian literature, which had
been futile in any case, because it had neglected the ethnic (multi-class)
character of the cultures in which American workers actually lived.
Although the Lefts literary output of the late 1930s suggested that
current popular struggles would give American democracy a new lease
on life, and thus prevent reactionaries from turning back labours gains,
they seldom so much as hinted at a socialist outcome. Outside the
Communists orbit important Marxist critiques of culture did emerge
and circulate among a small, well educated readership, that was intensely
curious about itself (p. 160).
V.F. Calvertons Modern Quarterly (19231940) made literary criticism
the main vehicle for its analysis of contemporary society. Although its
contributors were steeped in the Great Tradition of intellectual history
and contemptuous of mass culture, they converted the study of literature
into a form of social criticism, aimed verbal barrages at Victorian sex
codes, and kept the journals pages open to fresh ideas of all sorts. The
most influential progressive intellectuals of the day often moved in this
orbit. Among them were Mary and Charles Beard, Vernon Parrington,
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Granville Hicks, and John Dewey. The failure of American labour to

produce a new political movement, the Moscow Trials, the Molotov
Ribbentrop Pact, and the coming of war in Europe and renewed
repression of the Left in the USA brought their discourse with Marxism
to a halt. Nevertheless, argues Buhle, it was their critique of Americas
cultural life and development, rather than the workplace-oriented Marxist parties, that turned out in retrospect to have provided the intellectual
bridge to the New Left.
Communism and the New Left

The postwar years proved to be very inhospitable to the Communist

Party and to workerist conceptions of a revitalized American democracy.
The party lacked the prestige that sustained the French and Italian
parties through the attacks of the fifties, a prestige based on the
combination of union struggles and leadership of a domestic battle
against fascist rulers. The greatly enlarged population of university
students in the fifties and sixties considered the Communists alien and
manipulative, perceived no heroism or creativity in the working class,
and, if they were social critics, believed both existing capitalism and
existing socialism to be dominated by ruthless power elites. Buhle is at
his best when he reconstructs the intellectual climate of those years.
Marxist faith in historical progress had foundered on the prospect of
annihilation by nuclear war. Moreover, the students had been immersed
in mass culture all their lives and shared none of the historic Marxist
reverence for the printed word and dialectical argument. Sons and
daughters of Communists drew political inspiration from scholars like
C. Wright Mills and William A. Williams, who offered them a middleAmerican critique of America, oblivious to class and scornful of the
thirties celebration of the people, but advocating personal resistance
to commercialized, repressive and imperialistic conformity. Their base
of operations was not the factory but the campus. Their call to action
came from the civil rights movement.
Out of the sit-ins, freedom rides, voter registration drives, and the
Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party emerged uncompromising hostility toward the state and toward bureaucracy in all its forms, a
determination to expose and root out the poverty that had been carefully
hidden by postwar urban renewal, a hunger for participatory democracy,
and an assertion of revolutionary Black nationalism. The network
of underground newspapers, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating
Committee, the Students for a Democratic Society, and an insatiable
appetite for critical analyses of society were energizing student struggles
even before the governments initiation of all-out war against Vietnam
brought in its wake massive and ever angrier peace demonstrations, the
murders of Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, and four summers of
urban insurrections.
It was in this context that Marxism returned to American political
discourse, arguably making its most influential appearance ever. All
aspects of life were subjected to critiques that at least employed neoMarxist vocabularies. Revived Marxism, however, addressed an intellectual agenda with deep, if little known, historic roots. In Buhles words:
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The New Left began where the Old Left had halted: with the race
question, and with popular culture. It reinvented the Woman Question
on the very terrain where the Socialist Party had failed. It absorbed the
moral and spiritual critique of imperialism that no Leninist movement
had been able to formulate. Most of all, it recuperated a Utopianism
which had been regarded since before 1920 as pathetic and unworthy of
revolutionary consideration, but which remained deep in the American
character (pp. 2567).
A major turning point arrived between 1970 and 1972one which
deserves closer analysis than this book provides. White, Black and
Chicano workers entered into industrial struggles that disrupted established collective bargaining. Challenges to social hierarchies and to
womens subordination appeared far beyond the campus boundaries. In
the wake of the US invasion of Cambodia and the Kent State and
Jackson State killings, the peace movement spread to the factory gates
and military camps. Richard Nixon overrode the constitution to retain
the presidency, only to be dramatically evicted from office. But it was
at this very moment that the New Left fragmented. Marxist sects, each
with its own guru, abandoned the campus for industrial organizing,
but with little of the unitary sense that had formerly characterized the
Communists. New Politics parliamentarians escorted the widespread
popular outrage into the Democratic Party. Urban reform movements
based on Afro-American constituencies began to capture city after city,
only to find themselves captives of finance capital. The greening of
America became literary and sartorial high fashion. In time only the
feminist movement had kept alive the vital link between personal life
experience and political struggle that had earlier sustained in various
ways both the New Left and its Marxist predecessors.
Buhle describes the several academic forms of Marxism that survived
the declining movement of the seventies, devoting special attention
to historians, and somewhat slighting comparable developments in
economics, literary criticism, sociology, law and philosophy. At times
his arguments in the concluding chapters become obscure. What, for
example, does a confrontation between historicism and the universal
semiotic mean (p. 263)? Like earlier American militants who have
watched their once mighty movements shrivel, Buhle looks in the end
for inspiration from abroad. Not from the Soviet Union or China, this
time, but from Latin Americas liberation theology. Todays revolutionaries in every industrialized country, however, are searching for secure
political footholds in societies that seem more and more like quicksand.
Buhle has offered them a glimpse of a past in which the new social
forces of our time were far from absent, in hopes that he might assist
a continuation of the interchange between Marxism and the analysis of
race, gender, nationality and culture that was so important a part of the
American (and, let me add, not only American) experience. But renewed
social analysis, he concludes, must await renewed social action.

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