Marxism in the United States: A History of the American Left

Marxism in the United States

Marxism in

the United States

A History of the American Left

PAUL BUHLE

Third Edition

First published 1987

Revised second edition published by Verso 1991

This revised and expanded third edition published by Verso 2013

© Paul Buhle 2013

All rights reserved

The moral rights of the author have been asserted

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Verso

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Verso is the imprint of New Left Books

ISBN-13: 978-1-78168-015-5 (PBK)

ISBN-13: 978-1-78168-016-2 (HBK)

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress

Printed in the US by Maple Vail

To the memory of my late interviewees and staff members from the Oral History of the American Left: Harry Brier, Pincus Caruso, Hugo Gellert, Sara Gudelman, Herb Gutman, Anton Kerzic, Bea Lemisch, Sam Liptzin, Luigi Nardella, Joe Norrick, I. E. Ronch, Warren Susman, Arne Thorne, Willard Uphaus, Fred Wright, Steve Zeluck, Amelia Green, Martin Birnbaum, David Burbank, Hal Draper, Joseph Giganti, Maurice Kish, Tom McGrath, Nat Cohen, George Rawick, Nina Rosenburg, Fred Thompson.

Contents

Preface to the Third Edition

Preface

Introduction

Immigrant Socialism, 1865–1900

American Socialism, American Culture

Marxism in the Debs Era

Leninism in America

Rise of the Culture Critique, 1925–1940

Somewhere Beyond Leninism, 1940–1960

The New Left

Conclusion to the Third Edition

Notes

Index

Preface to the Third Edition

The new edition of this book, proposed by Verso editor Andy Hsiao, seems to have come at a propitious historical moment not only for global society but also for phenomena that can still, with many reservations, be called Marxism, Marxist ideas, Marxist-based projects. The particular crises at hand—economic, social, political, and ecological—are so numerous and fast-breaking that headlines will overtake any specifics mentioned here. But crises they are. Hence the renewal of a subject that appeared, according to dominant liberal and conservative narratives since the 1991 edition, to have been dead and gone, following the collapse of the East Bloc. To return to the disappearing century’s most ringing cliché, history seemed to end, and then did not end after all.

The ‘rediscovery of Marx’, not only in the US but in many corners of the world, is bound to be the most intriguing development for new, especially young, readers of Marxism in the United States. Whether this rediscovery is rooted only in the spreading catastrophes, often more acute for the young than the old, or in the perception that hardly any place remains on the planet unconquered by capitalism, may not matter much for our purposes here. Nor do we know very well, at this writing, what the future, near as well as far, will do with the rediscovery. The main point in the entire book below is to make some rapidly disappearing history available to the reader, but also to point out that large chunks of this extended history keep happening, and that they count. It was my own intent, in the launching of the New Left magazine Radical America in 1967, to foster a Marxism worthy of the challenge of US society, neither dogmatic (we used to say ‘mechanistic’) nor sour, but exuberant, creative and linked directly to social movements and activists themselves. Things never work out simply and sometimes they seem not to work out at all. Still, here we are in an explosive new decade yearning for radical, useful interpretations.

All this is so obvious that, at first glance, the absence of a Marxist revival would be more mysterious. The Marxism of today is overwhelmingly a critique of an uncertain, often staggering economic and social system, a central but no longer an altogether self-confident, dominating force within a severely troubled global system. The anti-Hegelians who long ago argued for a Marxism without teleology seemed to have had their point made for them. Except that without teleology, Marxism tends to flatten into a lukewarm social democracy surviving as a political force only by giving up the goal of transcending the system and with it, the social relations of the work that, so far, goes on through one technological development after another, alienated as ever.

The premise of Marxism in the United States, as I began to pore though old newspaper files during the New Left years of the later 1960s—turning, a decade later, to interviewing octogenarian survivors—was the role of Marxist thinkers in relationship with actual mass movements. The political place where I started, struggling to answer or at least reframe questions bearing immediately upon the creation of a campus anti-war movement, led me slightly beyond straight intellectual or political history, where theorists have always had difficulty finding their way or at least their audience. A laconic left-winger of the 1910s quipped that writing books had ruined more socialists than had drink, though each had taken its share. The USA has produced few great Marxist theorists but many effective organizers, popularizers, and strategists of the kind who formulated and developed the unique vision of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW). Stumbling forward myself from a collapsed New Left, trying to understand the deeper histories of the Left in immigrant communities that continued speaking their native tongue, I discovered a creativity of adaptation, from the earliest days in blue-collar neighborhoods to the civil rights era and beyond.

In part, I had been conducting a study all along, often unbeknownst to myself, of what we might call cultural sediments that made the Left real within sections of working-class life. German blue-collar neighborhoods of the 1860s–70s, as well as workplaces, had been the source of a briefly powerful socialist and anarchist (or rather, ‘Social Revolutionary’) movement, as had the emerging Jewish, Slavic and other newer immigrant neighborhoods at the end of the century. The Popular Front, thirty or so years later, depended upon these neighborhoods and their children, as well as upon kinds of culture already different from the cultures of the ethnic clubhouse and union headquarters. To the familiar charge that these groups held ‘foreign’ ideas, they were indeed ‘foreign’ to much of mainstream American culture and society, but responding very much to the conditions in front of them.

I was keenly aware of time running out on my reaching the remnants of historic left-wing movements. The day of the old-time editor and of mostly self-taught Marxist intellectuals was passing, although it had not quite yet passed. I quickly learned that even the works written within private libraries (more often, in public libraries or the back rooms of left-wing newspapers) and cramped apartments had once carried the prospect of reaching thousands of activists in organized branches of parties or at least those sympathetic to them. The writers of these works ventured on speaking tours among fellow old-timers, meeting devotees until the end. By the early 1990s, the memory of this kind of role had faded badly, even while the histories and legends of left-wing thinker-activists in other parts of the world became more thoroughly documented by new generations at home and abroad. To say that these assorted developments have offered me conceptual as well as research problems for the current edition of Marxism in the United States would be a considerable understatement.

Still, there are many items of new as well as renewed interest. When a twenty-something activist—returning to graduate school when a phase of well-paid, unionized blue-collar work ended with the job—emailed me somewhat sheepishly that only attractive left-wing websites held his attention, he captured a bit of the persistent reality. Behind the paucity of grand theory written on these shores has been a rank-and-file reality. Tomes and theoretical journals, from the early years of the century onward to the 1960s, mostly went unread even by Party members loyal enough or ambitious enough to buy them.

True to the left-wing past, activists of Students for a Democratic Society, including those avowing their Marxism within the doctrinaire circles of assorted Leninist factions, were rarely deep readers, nor were the successor cadre-style activists of the 1970s, before that movement faded. Socialist conferences such as the annual events in New York and Chicago up to the present time offer bite-sized theory to good effect, but may possibly measure the depth of understanding for most listeners. An impressive raft of books has indeed appeared since the New Left was created by and for scholars, with a smallish audience beyond—at least until now.

Then again, there is the question of how even the most influential efforts of the American Left have been understood by the outside world. Radical journalist John Nichols performed a remarkable turnabout of the current right-wing slogans with The ‘S’ Word: A Short History of an American Tradition … Socialism (2011). Nichols did not wish to claim that Marxist or Socialist doctrines had ever taken much hold in national policies in their own name, but rather that, at least from Marx’s little-understood (until recent work, that is) correspondence with Lincoln, and arguably earlier, reform notions owed much to the socialist tradition. It would be difficult, indeed, to parse the egalitarian triumphs, separating out the imperial projects abroad that accompanied them, from Andrew Jackson’s war on Indians (simultaneously on the Bank of the United States) to Harry Truman’s GI Bill and onward through the last great burst of reform, during Lyndon Johnson’s tenure, not to mention gay marriage and drones, policies twinned under Barack Obama. Nichols’ point was made for him (and all of us) when the use of ‘Socialism’ as a hate word prompted large numbers of Americans, in recent opinion polls, to say that they would probably like socialism better than capitalism! Not likely, however, the socialism of any older version.

The giant change from the Marxist past, clearly, is that a now largely absent, bemuscled industrial proletariat, long considered destined to seize the factories, is obviously not going to Make The Revolution. At least, not in the USA. Technological workers in every sector, likewise health workers, certainly can shut down the system, but that is something different. The backup to the often defeated and disappointing domestic class struggle has forever been the struggle far away. Today, the renewed presence of a global conflict along class (as well as other) lines, is often marked by tactical innovation, but also by the current absence of some vast and connected international movement for socialism along with a credible ‘socialist homeland’, notwithstanding Cuba, Venezuela, etc.

Snapshot of a moment: At the Left Forum in New York, April 2012, the crowd is more young than old (a distinct change from a decade earlier), the Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek has something like the cult-prestige accorded to Jean Paul Sartre a half-century earlier (with perhaps a similar degree of mystification), and while ‘Marx’ and ‘Marxism’ are not heard in every panel and workshop, their presence is undeniable. Indeed, the workshops outflank the panels (with its famous members) by sheer numbers of participants, overall. People wish to learn what to do, how to do it, quite as much as they are looking for deep, theoretical meanings.

What could Marxism look like, in only a few years, amid occupations, the global struggle for an end to wars and toward a radical democratization and ecologically sustainable economy? That is a query worth posing, even if its answers must remain largely beyond the scale of the present edition. Perhaps, however, this book and its new final chapter will help frame that question for worthwhile answers.

*  *  *

Some avenues were not followed in the first and second editions of this work. Much effort since 1990 has been devoted, as the careful reader will note, to the extension of Marxist ideas into various areas as history, literature, ecology, economics, and so on, as more books (and journals) on these subjects have included Marxists and related left-wingers as subjects. I will rehearse some of these advances below, but to take a case in point from my own subsequent work: I could not, before my extended research and interviewing on the subject of the Hollywood Blacklistees, have appreciated the Hollywood Quarterly in its reddish-pinkish-golden years (1945–49). The dive into film history at large, and the television history to follow, was not mine alone, of course. But the idea that screenwriting and other work on films—marking a real struggle over the content of the single most significant cultural or artistic media of the day—actually had a significant Marxist history in the USA, with left-wing writers, directors, actors, and technicians of all kinds in dialogue, was a revelation.

Now that I look back from a further distance upon the 1960s and ’70s, I see better what I had only begun to glimpse: the power of the trailing penumbra from the Popular Front milieu, as a key trend within popular culture and its study, even as the counterculture seemed to pose a wholly different kind of challenge to the reigning system. The Popular Front’s severe critics, when not vulgar red-baiters, have mostly been, historically, aesthetes who view themselves as radical avant-gardes, treating film as a species of literature and convinced of the corrupting power of popular culture. They naturally would not see film-making from the inside, as a set of socialized work relations with the struggles of a variegated, partially radicalized workforce. The later development of auteur criticism pointed up the artistry of film but often removed the context and history, with similarly stifling results. More recent studies in folk music, modern dance and theater have produced a similar scholarship of nuance, highlighting the accomplishments along with the limitations of the Popular Front impulse.

There are other areas in which the two earlier editions of Marxism in the United States also came up significantly short. The exploration and also the popularization of the criticism of Soviet Communism’s degeneration and the resulting effects upon the global Left fell, at least in a Marxist sense, mainly if by no means only to the Trotskyist movement and its leading intellectuals during the 1930s and ’40s. Socialist and liberal anti-communists for their part largely abandoned Marxist critique wholly and often explicitly. Defense of liberal capitalism and the US role in the world had become their destiny and, for a large number, their occupation as well.

During those two crucial decades, making Trotsky’s own texts available and glossing them could be described as the real contribution of such an indefatigable intellectual and agitator as Max Shachtman, translator and popularist, group leader, stirring orator, and inveterate factional in-fighter. In several important ways, Shachtman followed a favorite of mine, Louis C. Fraina, first US publicist of the Russian Revolution by way of a documentary classic, in 1918. Trapped within the factional brawl of the day, Fraina never reached readers the way John Reed’s Ten Days That Shook the World did, and as noted below, his pioneering work sank quickly into obscurity. Shachtman for his part wrote, translated, and edited even further against the grain: most left-wingers did not want to hear what he had to say or judged it to be the self-serving invention (a criticism at times painfully accurate) of those whose wild imaginations projected their small factions to replace the Communist Party and lead the proletariat to victory. Meanwhile, the intense followers of Trotsky notoriously fell out among themselves on a regular basis.

The tragedy of a Max Shachtman was more than personal, and concerned more than Trotsky or Trotskyism alone: by the time his own creative intellectual work had consolidated, he had slipped so far rightward that ‘Communism’ had become a great bogeyman to be fought with the help of any allies available. His theories of ‘Bureaucratic Collectivism’, a crude version of the critiques of the Soviet degeneration posed by C. L. R. James and others, suited his own career advance into a collaborator with George Meany, the most conservative leader in American labor history, and sadly mirrored the devolution of so many other anti-communist radicals. An oft-heard crack about ‘ex-Trotskyite neocons’ scheming within the distant right wing of the US foreign policy establishment, from Iran Contra to the faked WMD scheme for the invasion of Iraq to highly placed operatives urging new wars in 2012, indeed has its origins here, among the former radical manqué’s final protégés. (Other erstwhile disciples headed several socialist movements still surviving and robustly left-wing.) Shachtman and his ilk obviously outlived their own time, a thought that weighed heavily upon me, a middle-aged radical penning Taking Care of Business, a study of US labor-bureaucratic history with a continuing backstory as strange as that of the deeply conservative Sam Gompers’ youthful Marxism.

Within this general milieu, but hanging on to socialistic ideals, Michael Harrington, whose oratory prompted me to join Democratic Socialists of America in 1984 (seeking to build a branch in Providence, Rhode Island for some years following), was described below, but his larger influence was partially neglected. Harrington gave his best efforts to the global movement of a temporarily revived Socialist International, joining hands with Scandinavians and others in a vision of an egalitarian, global social democracy. His work supporting Jamaican socialists alone would have been a worthy accomplishment, no matter that Michael Manley’s best efforts were thrown off and out by the power of the US State Department and its pawn, the Jamaican Labor Party. This moment is remarkable mainly because European social democracy happened to be in its last phase before going down and out as a threat or even a moral challenge to capitalism. A moment frozen in time, barely remembered but worthy of recollection, this prospect of a different hemispheric Left, a different view of life, remains alive in the music of Jimmy Cliff and Bob Marley.

Harrington’s books, with the exception of The Other America, had a short life. Yet he was the last American socialist of the century to have the degree of respectability to be treated sympathetically in the pages of the New York Times. Radical figures like Noam Chomsky and Howard Zinn, not to mention Edward Said, outside but not too far outside the realm of Marxist criticism, remained beyond the pale, perennially convicted of disloyalty.

On another site of the small left-wing intellectual world, I mistakenly neglected one Jack O’Dell, African-American Marxist and appropriate symbol of the late Popular Front. Nikhil Pal Singh’s 2010 collection of O’Dell’s essays has restored a crucial figure connecting the Left with the civil rights movement and its successors, all the way to the Jesse Jackson presidential campaign of 1988. A leading Black Communist during the 1950s, when the CPUSA was effectively underground, and briefly a key strategist and aide to Martin Luther King, Jr. (until pressured out by the FBI’s squeeze on King), O’Dell went on to work and write unsigned editorials for Freedomways (1963–87) during most of the journal’s existence. Odell’s keen analyses, Marxist in quality without any doctrinal claims, pointed to the building of coalitions, seizing historical opportunities, and working simultaneously inside and outside the Democratic Party, inside and outside Pan-African movements. O’Dell’s insights cannot be reduced to a proper summary, and indeed scarcely reference Marx, but they are part of a legacy that has remained understated, almost underground, and that bears more examination today.

This edition of Marxism in the United States was, it may be noted, prepared against the background of the Wisconsin Uprising, a massive movement during February–April, 2011, and the long months beyond. For perhaps ten weeks, near-daily demonstrations occasionally growing to more than a hundred thousand featured large American flags side by side with ‘General Strike!’ banners and hilarious satirical posters, pro-union chants, tractors and at other times motorcycles circling the capitol in protest, and of course the weeks-long occupation of the capitol building itself. The crowd fused a ‘union’ message with defense of the social state. ‘Marxism’ was invisible, but what to make of the surge of class consciousness posed within social consciousness, on a scale not seen in generations?

What avowed Marxists in groups did make of it was, in large part, overly familiar. Left-wing groups from New York, Chicago, and Detroit came to explain to Wisconsinites what should happen now, and how they were letting down the cause by being duped into supporting a gubernatorial Recall campaign, likewise by yielding to the de facto decisions of a regional labor federation that discussed a General Strike in its press, but lacked the means or will to carry it out.

Behind these deeply sincere complaints, aimed at least in part as a kind of vindication after decades of disappointments, lay the difficulty of outsiders seeking to grasp the unique traditions of the state (beginning with the traditions of Robert M. La Follette, who had established the Recall provisions now deployed) but also the changed nature of the workforce, by this time state government employees, disproportionately women in teaching and healthcare. The horny-handed proletarians on hand, adding an old-time flavor to the struggle, were very often union retirees of industries now gone forever. The labor chorus that sprang up in and around the Wisconsin State House—and became a key force continuing the public spirit of the struggle across the long months from August 2011 to the June 2012 election (and defeat)—recalled a Pete Seeger or Henry Wallace view of American democracy, with civil rights and feminist updates.

The Progressive Party’s failed 1948 challenge to the Cold War briefly revived LaFollettism and prefigured our own movement subtly, in both its slogans and tactics. We were minus the Soviet Union and other such illusions, but plus a population more determined than ever to fight for the real gains made in social welfare, education, and the environment. ‘Solidarity’ was sounded in a new key, the enemy attacked and ridiculed with new means and a new sense of humor. The nation-wide ‘Occupy’ movement, inspired by and following the events in Wisconsin, seemed to create a new and different constituency for change, and for an extended moment actually shifted the national debate from Democrat versus Republican to the one percent versus the ninety-nine percent. Under police attack and unable to go further, Occupy also faded. In the election season to follow, the major-party politicians buried ‘the working class’ and even ‘working people’ in favor of ‘the middle class’. Labor leaders making appeals for votes followed their lead. The working class has, at least in this rhetoric, evidently ceased to exist! Yet the overwhelming class-versus-class character of the struggle against austerity, across wide parts of the world, has been clear, with every age, every race and gender represented. How Marxist? The future will tell.

*  *  *

Perhaps readers will not mind if I add a word more to the story of the personal pre-origins of this study, before my engagement with the local civil rights movement and that living museum known as the Socialist Labor Party. After the age of sixty, as is well known, childhood memories tend to grow closer. The first hardback book (not comic book) bought for me, at my own request, happened to be a pictorial history of the Civil War, almost certainly because my mother’s great grandfather was an Abolitionist farmer who marched with Sherman through Georgia, a strategic campaign dooming the Southern cause and slave system. In her childhood, he lived for a time with the family and with his nephew, an erstwhile drummer boy for the Union troops, and the two reminisced by the hour. Similarly, my only (and deeply beloved) musical ‘album’ (literally, four 78s) was a Johnny Appleseed musical drama, all parts sung by radio personality and Irish tenor Dennis Day, treasured in part because a great aunt of mine claimed to have on her farm an apple tree ‘planted by Johnny’ (in rural Illinois, this farm might actually have received apple seeds from John Chapman, in Ohio or Indiana, although admittedly many such claims have been made). I wanted a past different from the one presented in movies, magazines, and radio programs. Perhaps I was already destined to publish, one day, a journal titled Radical America—although I suspect that an African-American, eighth-grade teacher of mine named Wilborne Bowles also planted the specific love of US history into my head.

One more point in memory, this one largely borrowed. After I joined the small congregation of social historians seeking to tackle the working-class and radical story in more than one culture and, if possible, more than one language, I had another experience or two plunging me in the direction of this book. By marriage, I had come into contact with, and in a removed sense joined, a mostly Slavic, blue-collar community at the northern tip of Illinois, near the Wisconsin border. Here, most amazingly, the remnants of ‘Cooperative City’—as Waukegan, a home of Little Steel, had been known by its activists since the 1910s—still existed in recent memory. By the end of the Second World War, nearly half its residents were in one kind of co-op or another, from milk to banking. The Slovene Hall, less than a block from the Slovene Church but with little overlap of membership, contained a library with portraits of Marx and Ivan Molek. Interviewing old-timers while visiting in-laws in 1981, I found the aging leader, who entrusted me with the printed history of this socialistic institution (he had been waiting, he told me, for someone to ask). My wife, in her childhood, had performed her piano recitals there. Like the nearby Croatian Hall whose leaders had leaned more toward Communism than Slovene-style social democracy, but shared the Slovene enthusiasm for Tito, they were part of a left-leaning blue-collar scene that slipped out of existence within decades after the war. As of 2012, the very setting is largely abandoned, surrounded by neighborhoods of houses with doors boarded.

It did not last very long, this world, but it had been a real world of labor activities and secular radical education for several generations. With as good a claim on ‘American Marxism’ as any other, it has remained, for me, an imperishable memory. As with the erstwhile Jews, Hungarians, Italians, Poles, and other immigrants, and the equally aged African-Americans, hayseed rural radicals and others who were kind enough to spend time with me, they were my windows into the lost age. Their lifetime dedications (in Yiddish a ‘shayner, besere velt’, a more beautiful and better world) have become mine.

Acknowledgments to the Third Edition

It should be noted that longtime collaborator Dave Wagner drafted paragraphs of the new Conclusion, on the theological background to the rise of radical thought. David Berger not only copy-edited the added material but made many useful suggestions. Alan Wald was kind enough to catch some of my foolish errors. Allen Ruff and Robert McChesney have given me many ideas along the way. Lou Proyect read the manuscript and, more importantly, runs the ‘Marxmail’ website that connects old generation Marxists to their young generation counterparts, giving me much to think about. Thanks to all!

Preface

As I sit down with the ninety-four-year-old editor of a Yiddish-language radical weekly in New York, I have the impression of whole eras passing before me. I’m his confidant—mayne touere (‘my dear one’ or ‘dear son’)—not really Yiddish-speaking, not even Jewish, but close enough to the old man’s sympathies in a world that has outlived his time and his milieu. We talk about his problems of the day: raising huge sums from retired garment workers living on Social Security in order to keep the paper going; and his preparing himself, through reading and meditation, for the upcoming Rosh Hashona issue. He’s preoccupied as always with questions of international peace, class struggle, and the unending contest for the Jewish soul (although he is too secular to put it that way). I ask him to analyze the accomplishments of the paper he has worked on since its founding in 1922. He says honestly that it has not been a success, despite its contributions to all those causes. He concludes that the paper discovered its own unique identity and mission within the Left too late. I see his point. I’ve read the old files and winced at the illusions, the hyperbole, the meanness toward competing radical entities and personalities—all seem so tragically mistaken.

But they are mistakes as historically inevitable, in one form or another, as the sectarian blunders Socialists made in 1871 or we New Leftists made in 1971. In the face of the errors (what my old friend would call, including his own mistaken actions, ‘crimes against socialism’), there remains something of overriding importance: the life of radicalism itself, the survival of the movement through all its tragedies.

From a historian’s viewpoint, his paper looks and feels like the last of an amazing tradition. The editor’s own column is spiced with literary and biblical allusions straight out of the Russian nineteenth century where the critic, briefly but gloriously, became the great political voice of a generation. He takes his readers seriously—he knows enough of them personally from his endless lecture tours over the years—but he also cracks jokes of a typically ironic Jewish character. He demands attention and political response from eighty-year-olds barely mobile. He writes beautiful Yiddish in his weekly essay, the prose flowing and crackling over the issues at hand. The rest of the paper divides neatly into politics and culture, with a generous section devoted to death-and-remembrance notices. Like the papers of an older era it has few photographs, but it is animated by vivid prose portraits. Its other surviving writers—arthritic, deaf, straining visibly to complete daily tasks—have never stopped working at their craft.

Through him and through them, their collective memory of the Old World and their struggle as outsiders (even after seventy years!) to understand America, I seem to see a radical German-American editor at his desk in 1875 New York, or Chicago or St. Louis. Himself a capable literary critic, poet or feuilleton writer, this predecessor brings to the political tasks at hand his love of German literature and his understanding of Germanic working-class culture. Equally, I can imagine Italian, Slavic, Hungarian, Finnish or Japanese immigrant editors of whatever era in similar political and cultural situations, with analogous joys and sorrows. The newspapers I can actually read have a common flavor whether they are Anarchist, Socialist or Communist. This is far from the whole world of the American radical. But it has been a real world, larger in its collectivity and deeper in its intellectual character than all the Left political leaders and all the notable historians of the Left have thus far been willing to recognize. It has survived, and with different cultures and changing styles it continues to develop through the endless diaspora of immigrants from impoverished and wartorn societies into a chaotic and ethnocentric American order.

Another friend is my window on a different kind of radicalism. Former longshoreman and sailor who figures as the Trotskyist-syndicalist hero of Harvey Swados’ novel, Standing Fast, he tells of a hundred incidents in his own life from the early 1940s to the present where the struggle for dignity assumed no overt political form, even found itself at odds with the existing ‘progressive’ (Communist or liberal) trade-union bureaucracies and public opinion. He helps me to understand those periodic uprisings and organizational innovations that seem to come from nowhere and disappear again. When I hear him talk, I can envision the unbroken Wobblies in their time, and before them the proud Knights of Labor. In this America, among a persistent rebel stratum of the working class, the wage-system remains unacceptable, economically or morally. Like my immigrant friends, he has seen other eras of accommodation and has learnt to tap the secrets of unobserved restiveness.

My other personal witnesses of the variety of American radicalism include: A retired coal miner from Elvira (he calls it ‘Elvirey’), Indiana, a town that elected Socialist mayors in the pre-1920 days and kept a local of homegrown Marxists going through the Second World War. A Black activist since the thirties in Missouri, converted from the Bible to the Communist Manifesto, who recently joined a Sanctuary church and thereby reconciled the Revolution with the faith of his childhood. A retired garment worker, instinctive feminist with a sharp class edge who honors me with the love and serious criticism she gave her comrades in the shop. All three speak of universals in the history of the American Left.

None of my friends are famous people. They will not be found in the history books. But they and several hundred others have reached directly across the generations to me in interviews, across the lines dividing all sorts of radicals from one another. They helped bring me through the dark, suicidal moments of history when all the dreams of an age seem lost beyond redemption. They were there before, in 1920 and 1950; they have seen the betrayals and the disillusionment. And at their best moments, they know that endurance is not the only saving grace; every age speaks new truths and those who stop listening get old before their time. I like to think that they have made me wise enough to recognize that I belong to the same family as my radical antecedents, all of them.

In illuminating experiences of other generations of the Left, they have helped me understand my own generation. Like so many others in the New Left of the 1960s, I had sought in history what I couldn’t find immediately around me: a Socialist tradition and hard analytical thought. These I had pursued for years, chiefly through mountains of old newspapers, while scarcely making conscious sense of the personal impulses and political tendencies that had brought me into radicalism at the close of the 1950s. In return for relating their lives, my interviewees wanted to know about mine, and they forced me to confront the significance of my own repressed family tradition from the Revolutionary War, to Abolitionism, Spiritualism, Woman’s Rights—and the Ku Klux Klan.

Today, when the excitement of the radical movement of my own youth has receded into the past, replaced (as far as those things can ever be replaced) with the usual variety of quasi-political activities from classrooms to picket lines to journalism, I find myself more like the old-timers than I ever imagined. This book, over the twenty years in which it has evolved, has become more than a reassessment of US Marxism from the wealth of new historical evidence available. It is by now, inevitably, an installment in collective autobiography, a family history of the left that has come to include my own generation.

The few years since the original publication of Marxism in the United States seem to have been centuries in the confirmation of longstanding, world-wide trends. The full effects upon US Marxism as theory or as practical guide to action will not be clear for some time to come. But, negatively speaking, certain tendencies can now be safely ruled out. Others—in the view of this book the deepest in American radicalism—will find new forms of expression.

For the moment, the familiar ‘American Assumption’, endless frontiers of individual opportunity, seems to rule all—including the former holdouts. The collapse of East European communism and the deep erosion of mainstream American trade unionism together end the era of ‘productivism’, with all its visions of industrial-proletarian batallions marching in lockstep toward the promised land. The restructuring of the world economy (its effects too little treated in Marxism in the United States) confounded the last illusions of ‘really existing socialism’. It also sealed top officials of American union into their luxury bunkers, safe from their putative constituency of working people and the impoverished underemployed.

Pax Americana in a world of depleting rainforests and accumulating toxins is a nightmare, one of the worst which the human brain has ever concocted. The potential (by no means yet real) winding-down of the Cold War arms race comes almost as a distraction to other, ongoing catastrophes. No wonder, then, that US hegemonism (now aided by Soviet compliance) in Africa, Latin America, and even the Middle East creates a feeling of helplessness before the apparently unrestrained aggressions of the US military and the market.

The current demonization of Marxism in the commercial press rightly presumes, however, the impending return of serious threats to imperial security. As I hope this book illustrates, it is precisely the combination of the familiar and the unfamiliar, the long repressed and the utterly original, which should catch our attention in any glimpse at the prospects of radicalism today. With recession in the air, the moment for the radicals’ reorganization along new lines may come sooner rather than later. If American history serves as any example at all, a new unrest will sooner or later break out with a suddenness and in forms that will surprise everyone. Some kind of internal coordination will again surely be assembled. Marxist ideas will return, as they have regularly, for use or abuse by people aiming at personal and political clarity.

It would be foolish, indeed, to predict the precise impact of world and national developments on the American Left. But one can say with confidence that the subtraction of ‘communism’ as the antithesis to ‘capitalism’ has brought not the ‘end of history’, but rather history in another key.

The utopian edge of American radicalism comes alive again in the simple notion of protecting the earth and its inhabitants from complete environmental devastation. In the narrow, ‘realistic’ sense of small-scale reform, this goal is unattainable. Reaching out for alternatives, we are not so far from the old spiritual and socialist vision of a ‘Golden Age’ when all lived at peace with nature. Half-measures—such as public-relations programs for preserving tracts amid massive deforestation—will no more satisfy future radicals than territorial compromises satisfied the Abolitionists.

The next ‘new’ Left will have to adapt itself to the novel realities of our time. The worldwide electronic mass culture, incorporating illiterate peasants as well as college intellectuals, is the unavoidable terrain upon which any new movement will fashion crucial elements of its particular consciousness and identity. The Frankenstein’s monster of bourgeois sales techniques and totalitarian control mechanisms evidently has its own life; its own ‘signs’ and meanings. Readers will appreciate, I hope, how grudgingly American Marxists have moved toward interpreting the media world around them. The insularity has nearly passed, and the interpretation of cultural symbols has become a potentially subversive and unifying global project. Only the division of theory from practice (not merely ‘theoretical practice’), and the want of fresh political excitement, delay the interlinking and the drawing of the largest implications.

All this seems to take us rather far from the traditional domain of Marxism: class and class struggle. Or does it? Cultural theory and the constituencies it seeks to understand can no more eradicate concepts of class, and class organizations in some form, than traditionalist Marxisms can impose rigid class determinisms on race or gender. The sixteen-year-old hamburger slinger, the Black or Latin female keypuncher, need to understand the logic of commodity production and its famous ‘mystery’, as much as did Marx’s nineteenth-century factory hands. The pyschic escape from work, now more prevalent than ever before, cannot evade the tyranny of the alarm clock and the paycheck. What will not remain the same, because it has never remained the same, is the self-defense and aggressive recuperation of surplus value. As the following pages show, the ‘labor movement’ has been not one but a thousand things, many quasi-political and quasi-cultural. Capitalism only