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Mike Davis said that academic Marxist theory "seemed to take a monstrously obscurantist turn towards the end of the century." (Enzo Figueres / Getty Images)
American Marxism Got Lost On Campus
In defiance of predictions, American Marxism has survived and even flourished, notably in universities. This institutional base has produced plenty of good scholarship, but it’s also encouraged hyper-specialization and the use of impenetrable jargon.
Mike Davis said that academic Marxist theory "seemed to take a monstrously obscurantist turn towards the end of the century." (Enzo Figueres / Getty Images)
Excerpted from the The Wiley Blackwell Companion to Chinese Communism, edited by Wang Gungwu and Richard Yarrow (Wiley, 2025)
“American Marxism exists, it is here and now, and indeed it is pervasive.” So laments Mark R. Levin in his 2021 book American Marxism. He explains that American Marxists “occupy our colleges and universities, newsrooms and social media, boardrooms and entertainment, and their ideas are prominent within the Democratic Party, the Oval Office and the halls of Congress.”
Marxists might be surprised, but Mr Levin, a right-wing commentator, finds Marxism everywhere in the United States, past and present. Marxists inspired the establishment of public schools in the nineteenth century and the Sixteen Amendment to the US Constitution in 1913, which legalized a federal income tax. The ideas of John Dewey, the twentieth-century educational reformer, emerged from “the Marxist womb.”
Unlike Levin, students of Marxism have pondered the sharp limits of American Marxism, not its reach. Of course, a definitional issue hangs over the subject. Where does American socialism stop and American Marxism begin?
Sombart’s Paradox
Karl Marx himself sought to distinguish his ideas from other forms of socialism, for instance what he called bourgeois socialism, which was advanced by “economists, philanthropists, humanitarians, improvers of the condition of the working class, organizers of charity, members of the societies for the prevention of cruelty to animals, temperance fanatics, hole-and-corner reformers of every imaginable kind.” These socialists want “the existing state of society” without its “disintegrating elements.” They want a “a bourgeoise without a proletariat.”
Yet a symbiotic relationship exists between socialism and Marxism; they thrive or decline in tandem. That Marx spent much effort — in The Communist Manifesto and in books such as The German Ideology and The Poverty of Philosophy — denouncing other socialisms, suggests that Marxism and socialism swim in the same sea.
In the United States, however, that sea has not sustained a robust socialism. For well over a century, commentators have remarked on the relative weakness of American socialism; and this in a country that lacked a feudal past or an aristocracy — a country that might be considered a pure case of capitalism. While Britain could claim a labor party and Germany a vigorous socialist movement, the United States had neither.
This absence struck a German socialist, Werner Sombart, a colleague of Max Weber. Sombart, who never traveled to the States, wrote in 1906 the classic book on the subject, Why is There No Socialism in the United States?, where he described the United States as “the country where the model of the Marxist theory of development is being most precisely fulfilled.” But the American worker was not embracing “socialism with a Marxist character.” Sombart offered various explanations of this paradox.
For well over a century, commentators have remarked on the relative weakness of American socialism.
He believed the American worker “emotionally” had a “share in capitalism.” In fact, “he loves it.” Moreover, the ethos of equality and democracy gave respect to the worker, unlike in Europe where he was stigmatized. In America, “he carries his head high, walks with a lissome stride and is open and cheerful in his expression as any member of the middle class.” Finally, the relative prosperity of the American worker doomed Marxism. In a sentence that would be endlessly quoted, Sombart declared: “All Socialist utopias come to nothing on roast beef and apple pie.”
Sombart’s short treatise looms over any discussion of American Marxism across the decades. A half century later, Daniel Bell’s 1952 survey, Marxian Socialism in the United States, opened with “the melancholy question posed” by Sombart, which remained for Bell “the basic question confronting all the students of American Marxism”: “In the most advanced capitalist country of the world, there has been no Labor Party, little corporate class consciousness and feeble intellectual leadership from the Left.”
Bell, himself a man of the Left, recognized the past successes of socialist parties and groups in the United States. But he concluded that by 1950, “American socialism as a political and social fact had become simply a notation in the archives of history.”
Renaissance
Yet history harbored some surprises; Marxism refused to stay in the library stacks. In an updated preface to Marxian Socialism in the United States from 1967, Bell observed that in the years since his book appeared, “a New Left has appeared in the United States.” Bell did not alter his earlier analysis but admitted that “clearly the ideas [Bell’s italics] of Marxism” are now “the common coin of American intellectual life.”
This is astonishing. In 1952, Marxism was dead. In 1967, Marxism was alive and well, indeed everywhere. Bell may have overstated the situation, but what became known as the New Left, itself part and parcel of the political ’60s, led to a renaissance of Marxism unprecedented in the United States.
A renaissance of what sort and significance? Paul Buhle, himself a ’60s activist and scholar, offered an appraisal in his own Marxism in the United States (1987). “We New Left Marxists” were “the first generation of American radicals born into the television era and the all-embracing mass culture.” Moreover, the “god” of the Russian Revolution was dead and “the Chinese Revolution unconvincing to all but a small minority.” Marxism evolved into “something scarcely recognizable to older generations of American Marxists,” something closer to the young humanist Marx than to the Marx of Vladimir Lenin and Mao Zedong.
Was the renaissance successful? “New Left Marxists” appeared not only in the United States but across Europe and faced kindred issues of how to reinvigorate a desiccated Marxism. A glance at British Marxism might illuminate the American situation.
In 1968, the youthful and formidable editor of the New Left Review, Perry Anderson, published an acid appraisal of British culture, “Components of the National Culture.” While it hardly existed in England, Anderson declared, Marxist culture flourished in France, Germany, and Italy. “In every important continental country, the impact of Marxism was deep and lasting; it left an indelible imprint on the national culture.” But not in England, the sole exception that “produced no important Marxist thinker.”
Nor had the situation changed in recent decades:
The fifties and sixties saw the proliferation of Marxism on the continent: Althusser in France, Adorno in Germany and Della Volpe in Italy all founded important and divergent schools. England remained unaffected. Marxist theory had never become naturalized.
England, he judged, did not give rise to “a national Marxism.”
Much is wrong with these declarations of Anderson, almost everything in fact. He was wrong about France, Italy, and Britain, and only half right about Germany. And yet Anderson’s pronouncements do suggest criteria to evaluate Marxism: its yield of outstanding thinkers and the emergence of a “national Marxism.”
What Anderson stated about Britain could be said of the United States, at least prior to the ’60s: it lacked Marxist thinkers and culture. The situation in the United States was both worse and better than that in Britain. It was worse because unlike Britain, the States did not witness the appearance of a group of Marxist historians like Eric Hobsbawm, which Anderson had ignored. It was better because of the presence of a robust, if small, group of Trotskyist Marxists.
Agencies of Change
A history of American Trotskyism would take a student down many alleys, including the emergence of American neoconservatism. In part because of their anti-Stalinism, some Trotskyists became anti-communists pure and simple, and finally defenders of American foreign policy. But a history would also note Trotskyist themes that imprinted American Marxism.
For instance, James Burnham followed a familiar path from Trotskyism of the 1930s to conservativism of the 1950s; he became a key contributor to the right-wing National Review founded by William F. Buckley. In 1941, he published The Managerial Revolution, a book that highlighted the emergence of a new class of technocrats, managers, and intellectuals that ran society; this class stood outside the capitalist-worker nexus. The idea of a new class had a past in German sociology and a future in American Marxism, where it would take on both a positive and negative valance.
The career of C. Wright Mills illuminates the trajectory of American Marxism in the postwar years.
The career of C. Wright Mills, who wrote about this new class, illuminates the trajectory of American Marxism in the postwar years. Mills both reflects that trajectory and departs from it; and his very departure throws light on American Marxism. He incarnates the transition from an older Communist Party Marxism of the 1930s and ’40s to that of the New Left Marxism of the 1960s.
In 1960, Mills wrote a “Letter to the New Left” and, two years later, published his last book, The Marxists. In his “Letter to the New Left,” Mills raised several issues that left their stamp on American Marxism. He asked what was the “historic agency” of change.
In the past, socialists focused on the working class. But for Mills, this was “a legacy from Victorian Marxism that is now quite unrealistic.” While Mills called for further study of the working classes, he believed that intellectuals might constitute a “radical agency” of change: “Forget Victorian Marxism. We’ve got to study these new generation of intellectuals around the world as real live agencies of historic change.”
The issue of intellectuals bedeviled American radicals and Marxists, including Mills, who vacillated between contradictory positions. Intellectuals were both agents of change and servants of power. Mills himself published an essay on intellectuals in 1944, titled “The Powerless People,” and reworked the essay into 1951’s White Collar: The American Middle Classes. In these writings, intellectuals were less revolutionaries than employees. But by 1960, Mills changed his opinion and considered intellectuals as agents of radical change.
1962’s The Marxists contained excerpts from Marxists with commentary by Mills. The book reflected the times since it concluded on an anti-imperialist and utopian note with an excerpt by “Che” Guevara, who posited that in Cuba, “a new type of human is being created.” But Mills carved out his own path. He set forth three types of Marxism: vulgar, sophisticated, and plain.
About vulgar Marxists, Mills had little to say, except they cling to just one aspect of Marxism. Sophisticated Marxists privilege Marxism as a model of society and often descend into “sophisticated sloganeering.” Mills identified with the third type, plain Marxists: “I shall try to work as a plain Marxist, avoiding the ways of sophisticated and vulgar Marxists.”
But what is plain Marxism? The plain Marxists believe in the centrality of Marx but also that his work “bears the trademarks of the nineteenth century.” The plain Marxists stressed the humanism and youthful writings of Marx, which focused on philosophy and alienation. They emphasized the role of the superstructure — culture and ideas — in history and objected to “economic determinism” that turns man into a passive abstraction.
Plain Marxists highlighted “the volition of men in the making of history.” These ideas would not only mark American Marxism in the postwar years but define the larger movement of Western Marxism of which it was a part. However, American Marxists did not stick with the vocabulary of Mills. No one and no group adopted the idiom of “plain Marxism.” In an era of high theory and professorial posturing, “plain” Marxism was too plain.
Western Marxism
Western Marxism might be characterized as a political-intellectual current that sought to separate itself from Soviet Marxism, including Leninism, by returning to the more philosophical and humanist writings of the young Marx. In the United States, refugee scholars who fled from Nazism and kept their distance from Stalinism abetted this project. Herein lies a fact and feature of American Marxism, the extent to which it bore the imprint of refugee scholars devoted to a nondogmatic Marxism — to a Marxism less focused on political economy than on culture, sociology, and art.
Mills again serves as an exemplar; he completed his doctorate at the University of Wisconsin under the supervision of Hans Gerth, with whom Mills collaborated on several books. Gerth, a German refugee and student of the sociologist Karl Mannheim, served as a conduit of the Marxism of Frankfurt to the Marxism of Madison, where the University of Wisconsin is located.
In the German city of Frankfurt, a number of scholars assembled under the sponsorship of the Institute for Social Research to forge a new Marxism. (Mannheim stood on the periphery of the grouping.) With the onset of Nazism, virtually all its principals ended up in the United States, and to this day they are designated informally as the Frankfurt School.
During World War II, many Frankfurt School affiliates worked for government agencies that aided the war against Nazi Germany. By the 1950s, several had become professors in major American universities — for instance, Herbert Marcuse, Franz Neumann, and Leo Löwenthal, as well as Paul Baran, Marcuse’s friend. Baran joined Monthly Review, founded in 1949, which continues to publish to this day. These academic appointments are not just stray facts, because the 1950s witnessed cataclysmic shifts that rendered the universities central to American life.
By the mid-1950s, McCarthyism, a familiar anti-Communist paranoia that regularly sweeps the United States, had peaked; this allowed universities to hire leftist professors. At the same time, the GI Bill, a law that subsidized war veterans to enroll in college, led to college expansion, followed by a large “baby boom” generation that flowed onto campuses. The percentage of youth attending college jumped from 9 percent before the war to 30 percent by the ’60s.
Between 1963 and 1973, when the baby boomers arrived in college, total enrollment doubled from 4.7 million to 9.6 million. Sleepy schools on the margins of society became huge institutions. Moreover, a civil rights movement, anti-nuclear protest, and the war in Vietnam altered the timber of American politics. John F. Kennedy, elected president in 1960, symbolized both youth and a new politics.
Eddies of Marxism existed outside of the universities, for instance in Detroit with a group led by C. L. R. James and Raya Dunayevskaya, which sought a presence among autoworkers. But American Marxism largely unfolded on campuses. Nor is it surprising that two key journals that furthered New Left Marxism were founded by graduate students, Studies on the Left in 1959 at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, and Telos in 1968 at SUNY Buffalo. With occasional self-doubts, both periodicals remained orientated toward an academic audience.
The first sentence of the first issue of Studies on the Left declared: “As graduate students anticipating academic careers, we feel a very personal stake in academic life.” As Michael Burawoy, a Marxist sociologist, has commented, unlike elsewhere in the world, the renaissance of Marxism “in the United States was more confined to the academy.” This fact had both negative and positive consequences.
Marxism and the Academy
On the positive side, this fact meant that Marxism could be studied untethered by the urgencies of immediate politics. The opening words of Negative Dialectics (1966) by T. W. Adorno of the Frankfurt School alluded to Marx’s oft-quoted eleventh thesis on Ludwig Feuerbach: “The philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it.” For Marxists across the decades, this edict served to short-circuit philosophy in favor of practical politics.
However, Adorno turned this proposition on its head. “Philosophy, which once seemed obsolete, lives on because the moment to realize it was missed.” He believed that “after the attempt to change the world miscarried,” the “summary judgment” that philosophy had “merely interpreted the world” crippled reason. In effect, he advanced the notion that since the revolutionary effort to change the world failed, philosophers can still interpret it.
Philosophy here means more than professional philosophy, about which Adorno harbored reservations, but thinking and theory in general. If this gave a lease to Marxist theorizing unrestrained by immediate politics, the campus setting also exacted its costs. Despite talk about broad theory, Marxism assumed the imprint of disciplinary divisions. Marxism thrived but subdivided by departments.
Despite talk about broad theory, Marxism assumed the imprint of disciplinary divisions. Marxism thrived but subdivided by departments.
A cross section of the state of Marxism in the 1980s can be found in the three-volume anthology The Left Academy: Marxist Scholarship on American Campuses. The first sentence of the introduction reads: “A Marxist cultural revolution is taking place today in American universities.” For instance, there were “over 400 courses given today in Marxist philosophy,” compared to none earlier. Marxists led several scholarly organizations. The future for Marxist studies seemed promising.
To be sure, the editors observed that “up to the present time, the progress of university Marxism has taken place in the absence of any corresponding political development in the working class.” Moreover, Marxism flowered within the confines of disciplinary boundaries, the organizing principle for the volumes. Volume two offered chapters on Marxism in literary studies, art history, geography, classic antiquity, education, and the law. Volume three added communications, feminist scholarship, black studies, and criminology.
The amount and quality of this scholarship can be celebrated — or for conservative critics, decried — but the question here is, does it possess a distinct identity? And what is its impact? An identity to this academic Marxism is difficult to outline since little links the Marxist literary critic and the Marxist sociologist, except left-wing sympathies and occasional shared vocabulary.
Something links them extrinsically, as it were, which bears on their impact: both partake of academization or professionalization. Marxism becomes a series of fields with specialized jargon, magazines, and conferences.
For numerous academic Marxists, this confirms success. In an essay on literary studies in The Left Academy, the late Fredric Jameson, perhaps the leading Marxist literary thinker, announced that “Marxist discourse” necessarily entails specialized language. “Specialization of theoretical discourses” for studying literature “should be no more surprising” than it would be for studying subatomic physics, declared Jameson.
But specialization also entailed thorny jargon that became endemic in academic Marxism, even a badge of seriousness. One result was that Marxist scholars like Jameson himself and other leftist professors like Gayatri Spivak or Homi Bhabha loomed large in the academy but lacked visibility outside the campus.
Of course, this is not just something that affected Marxist thought. Massification allowed the university’s denizens to subsist solely within its borders; they addressed themselves to colleagues and graduate students.
In an earlier era, American philosophers sought and found an audience outside the campus. William James and John Dewey wrote for and were read by the educated public; Dewey, in fact, taught in China and influenced Chinese educational reform. Today, however, philosophers prosper within departmental confines. A recent listing of the most influential philosophers begins with Sally Haslanger, Daniel Dennett, and Linda Martin Alcoff. How many laypeople could identify their contribution? Their impact remains within the profession.
Academic Marxists from the 1980s to the present have more or less prospered, but in separate fiefdoms. Marxist economists debated the transition to capitalism and the state; Marxist historians debated working-class militancy; Marxist literary critics debated anti-imperialist novels; Marxist feminists debated wages for housework; Marxist anthropologists debated colonialism; Marxist educators debated schooling.
Mike Davis, an independent Marxist, commented about these developments:
I lost interest in Marx studies as it turned from the modes-of-production debate to microscopic battles over the value form, the transformation problem, and the role of Hegelian logic in Capital. “Theory” in general, as it became disconnected from real-life battles and big historical questions alike, seemed to take a monstrously obscurantist turn towards the end of the century.
He added that he could not imagine that his father’s left-wing friend, who had guided his own education “imploring anyone to ‘read Jameson, read Derrida,’ much less to wade through the morass of Empire.”
Millennial Socialism
A 2019 conference on “Marx and Marxism in the United States” can give a measure of the state of American Marxism in recent years. Its sponsors observe the setback to Marxism caused by resurgence of the New Right in the 1980s and “the end of socialism” after 1989. But those “doldrums” have been “broken” by a “recent renaissance” of Marxism. Where? It is revealing that the book based on the conference contains very little information about this renaissance.
Ten of the eleven chapters are historical; only one chapter — titled “Will the revolution be podcast? Marxism and the culture of ‘millennial socialism’ in the United States” — deals with the current situation. It claims that the “millennial generation” shows socialist sympathies as evidenced by the candidacy of Bernie Sanders for president and by a few new magazines and leftist podcasts. But the author admits that Marxism often seems more symbolic than real: “Witness young online socialists using the microblogging site Twitter to post birthday greetings to Marx on the two-hundredth anniversary of his birth.”
Meanwhile, academic Marxists have pursued their disciplinary studies which, if important, remain insular and technical. In general, they adopted postmodern ideas about social constructionism — the idea that everything is discourse or artifice, including gender. In addition, they stapled to their contribution the label “critical,” a term borrowed from the Frankfurt School.
When the Frankfurt School introduced “critical theory,” it served as a code word for Marxism. As insecure refugees in the United States, they did not want to flaunt their Marxism. With little understanding of its original parameters, American academics attached “critical” to such terms as critical race theory, critical pedagogy, critical sociology, critical geography, and critical readings.
But where is the Marxism? “Critical race theory,” the most public and successful of these endeavors, shows little evidence of (or interest in) Marxism. It is an ideology of anti-racism.
The postmodern bent of Marxism turns it into a sludge of miscellaneous concepts and issues. A working class vanishes. Take a recent contribution by Kathi Weeks, a Marxist feminist based at Duke University, who has the bona fides that she coedited a volume of Frederic Jameson’s work: “The most useful Marxist work today theorizes capitalism in its historical development as a system best characterized as colonial, settler, racial, heteropatriarchal capitalism.”
This is from a piece in which she counts the number of references to women in the book she is reviewing. “Not only were Marxist feminists missing from the analysis,” only thirteen women were cited in the book. This Marxism has devolved into a string of separate causes and loyalties.
Or consider the writings of the late Erik Olin Wright, a leading Marxist sociologist. His final books, such as How to be an Anti-Capitalist in the Twenty-First Century and Envisioning Real Utopias, consisted of jerry-rigged categories, vapid diagrams, and thick jargon. He improved Marx with eleven basic criticisms of capitalism. Number five is “Capitalism is inefficient in certain crucial respects.” This is a formula so empty it could just as well as be reversed: “Capitalism is efficient in certain crucial respects.”
Olin Wright offered a four-part theory of the transformation from capitalism to socialism that breaks down into two forms, three claims, four mechanisms, and two configurations; and these eleven components only constitute the first of the four parts. Academic Marxism here has lost its backbone and lucidity.
Beyond the Academy
The statement of Daniel Bell from 1952 that American Marxism had moved into the archives of history has proven wrong. From the 1960s to the present, Marxism flourished in various quarters, but mainly on campuses. The three-volume anthology of Marxist scholarship from the 1980s, if updated, would be thirty volumes. And yet Bell’s larger judgement on the weakness of American Marxism may not be so easy to dismiss.
While exemplary Marxist scholarship has been done, much is also narrow, even jargon-filled, destined to be confined to graduate seminars. Apart from the works of the Frankfurt School, which belong more to German than American Marxism, where are the great works of American Marxist scholarship? The possible contenders emerged on the edges of the academy: Monopoly Capital by Paul Sweezy and Paul Baran, Labor and Monopoly Capital by Harry Braverman, and City of Quartz by Mike Davis.
To return to Perry Anderson’s criterion, where or what is American Marxism? Short answer: lost in the academy. Of course, the story is ongoing — and the larger economic-political situation is hardly stable. A shift therein might enliven the gray academic Marxists. “All theory, dear friend, is grey, but the golden tree of actual life springs ever green.”
It is often missed that when Sombart wrote his analysis about why there is no American socialism, he closed on the opposite note. He believed the economic conditions that prevented socialism “are about to disappear.” The days of ample roast beef and apple pie were ending: “In the next generation Socialism in America will very probably experience the greatest possible expansion of its appeal.” Stay tuned.
