“[W]e are living through the fourth Marx boom,” Andrew Hartman notes in Karl Marx in America. “Americans are thinking about Marx to a degree not matched since the 1960s, or perhaps even the 1930s,” two decades notable for their social and political upheavals. Evidence abounds: Trump, Musk, and other members of the MAGA movement routinely decry the “Marxist” infiltration of institutions, while an American (Sen. Bernie Sanders) has become the most famous socialist in the world.
Meanwhile, U.S. academics are engaging Marx at a steady clip. Take Vivek Chibber’s The Class Matrix (2023), which uses Marxist thought to critique the “cultural turn” in social theory and highlight the importance of class structure and the material relations within capitalism. Or consider Princeton University Press’s 2025 English translation—the first in half a century—of Marx’s Kapital: Critique of Political Economy, Volume 1, which presents a “Marx for the twenty-first century.”
Karl Marx in America, Andrew Hartman, University of Chicago Press, 600 pp., $39, May 2025.
As during other Marx explosions in America, the current boom doesn’t—especially among detractors—seek to return us to a pure Marxist ideology. Rather, as in the 1930s and 1960s, it’s driven by a belief that Marx’s critique of capitalism remains a relevant resource for analyzing the volatility and violence of our contemporary society and likely essential to any search for alternative models: economic hardship, the failures of capitalism (like the 2008 financial crisis), social justice concerns, and the destruction of the environment. All those factors are steering readers, activists, and academics to Marx’s writings once again.
Karl Marx in America significantly contributes to our understanding of the twists and turns of the periodic Marx booms. Throughout its 500 pages and nine chapters, the text adroitly historicizes a wide range of American readers’ uses of Marx since the mid-19th century. “[T]he reception of Marx in the United States,” Hartman writes, “is a history of left, center, and right, sometimes all at once. Marx has served as a sounding board for Americans from every imaginable political background.”
Hartman posits that Americans, over time, have positioned themselves vis-à-vis Marx in three main ways. The first mode is noteworthy for “its devotion to his classic theory about labor,” and has been used by such “figures as Eugene Debs, Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, A. Philip Randolph, and Bernie Sanders.” The second approach includes “[t]he creators of a hybrid Marx,” who adapted Marx to a “variety of American situations, by cross-fertilizing Marxism with traditions like Christianity, republicanism, populism, pragmatism, black nationalism, indigeneity, Keynesianism, feminism, and more.” And the third is “the array of unfavorable interpretations,” which “speaks to the exceptional degree to which anticommunism has shaped the United States.”
Karl Marx in America impressively covers a great deal of ground, though Hartman helpfully unearths a key pattern that shaped “the Marx-America dialectic.” Our “very understanding of America as it developed across the twentieth century is underwritten by a subterranean Marx,” he writes. Hartman’s book, he maintains, “offers a corrective” to claims that the “Marx-America dialectic” never happened, “showing that, although Marx’s ideas have not been assimilated into American political traditions, neither have they been purged, despite the best efforts of countless anticommunists.” Neither integrated nor liquidated, so goes Karl Marx in America. For, whether thinking with or against Marx, whether pro-Marx or anti-Marx, whether elevating or attempting to entomb Marx, Americans worked within the conceptual and historical framework that he set. In this respect, Hartman performs interpretive dialectical reversals to write his reception history: Even when there’s a Marx bust, it’s a Marx boom. Such an approach raises questions about falsifiability that have long been asked about Marxist thought itself.
Here is a specific example of the historical pattern that Hartman excavates: “Upticks in Marxism have consistently been followed by red scares.” Even more exact: In Chapter 6, Hartman examines postwar conservatism’s treatment of Marx as a menace, as un- or even anti-American. “With the help of the postwar red scare, [conservatives] nearly succeeded” in erasing Marx. But in an irony of epic proportions, right-wing attention to Marx, even in its most conspiratorial form, helped his ideas persist, if through a dark mirror.” Those ironies of history—or are they dialectical reversals?—are familiar to us today: In the age of the social media, merely talking about the falsity of a rumor spreads it further afield.
In Chapter 8, Hartman also exhumes the irony of how Marx was used in the 1980s and 1990s, particular by historians and cultural theorists. He writes: “In a nation increasingly devoted to a ‘neoliberal’ brand of capitalism that annihilated the regulated New Deal version, a thousand Marxes bloomed. Marxism’s detachment from political channels allowed it to develop in creative ways. History never stops provoking ironies. Especially when Marx is involved.” Put differently: The removal of “Marx” from so-called real politics paradoxically allowed for cultural politicians—for example, Fredric Jameson—to read Marx in inventive ways. But, one wonders, is the withdrawal of Marx from political vehicles necessary for creative interpretations to emerge and be disseminated? And why did Marx particularly incite ironies of history? Might those reversals be because capitalism was “most advanced” in America, and, therefore, Marx and America—like Jekyll and Hyde, Holmes and Moriarty—are but twins, locked in a conceptual and material dance?
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Hartman is not so much interested in answering those questions. However, there are hints in Karl Marx in America that he is partial to a particular reading of Marx. In fact, Hartman seems to want that old Marx of labor—marginalized, one might say repressed, as the 21st century unfolded—to return to and for us. That Marx is a subterranean Marx throughout the text. For instance, in his eighth chapter’s section “A Postmodern Marx?”—note the question mark—Hartman criticizes French philosopher Jacques Derrida for transforming Marx’s materialism into discursive analyses of language. “[I]n a larger sense,” Hartman writes, “Derrida should be understood less as an agent of postmodern esotericism and more as a symptom of the intellectual Left’s abandonment of material concerns in favor of disembodied cultural and textual interests.” What’s clear from this presentation of Derrida is that, for Hartman (and a number of critics he sympathetically quotes from), Derrida harmfully sidelined the Marx known for his “classic theory about labor.” That Derrida did so in 1993, after the fall of the Berlin Wall and collapse of the Soviet Union, reads like capitulation to capitalism.
Hartman’s preference for a certain Marx is also noticeable in his analysis of Empire, the 2000 book by the American literary theorist Michael Hardt and the Italian political philosopher Antonio Negri. “Unlike those academics who viewed Marx as a paradigm provider rather than as a rebel prophet, Hardt and Negri drew inspiration from the revolutionary Marx. Yet they believed capitalism had outlived the Marxist paradigm. Their Marx had been ripped from the material that made his ideas pertinent. Empire is a byproduct of the anti-globalization movement’s detachment from working-class politics.” By the early 21st century, the revolutionary working-class subject, Hartman observes, had been dropped from many readings of Marx in America. The kind of non-materialism espoused by Hardt and Negri’s and other leftisms was righteous but politically lacking, if not altogether toothless: The “American Left at the turn of the millennium,” Hartman writes, “displayed sensibilities rooted in a moral Left tradition going back to abolitionism. The noble goal of the moral Left … has sometimes been achievable. But in confronting neoliberal sovereignty, moral leftism has proven poorly equipped.”
Tantalizingly, the old Marx of labor returns at the end of Hartman’s text. “Although the current strike wave is nowhere near as big as the one in 1934, working-class consciousness is on the rise. Polls show unions are popular for the first time in half a century.” Yet Hartman balks at predicting whether this all will help launch a democratic socialist revolution and finish off capitalism in America. “We may or may not,” he hesitatingly writes, “be living in late capitalism, a once popular phrase among overly optimistic Marxists.” In this respect, Hartman’s in good company, with Fredric Jameson, Slavoj Zizek, and Mark Fisher each having observed, as Jameson put it: “It is easier to imagine an end to the world than an end to capitalism.” Indeed, for Hartman, if capitalism ends, then Marx will, at last, depart; like Holmes and Moriarty they’ll both go over Reichenbach Falls. “[A] truth,” Hartman writes near his text’s end, “revealed by the long history of Marx reception: as long as capitalism persists, Marx cannot be killed.”
Perhaps, then, the political lesson of Karl Marx in America is not so much to be found in the intellectual history of readings of Marx. It instead might be located in the spirit of using Marx, here and now, to finally end Marx booms and busts, thereby putting him to rest. As Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak reminds us in “Global Marx?”: “What is it to ‘know’ what Marx wrote? ‘Knowing’ Marx’s writings preserves the old conviction that the idea of knowledge is knowledge about knowledge… The supplementary task is to try to change the world.” Such practicing of Marxist theory, such exorcising of the subterranean specter of Marx, would accompany the end of capitalism—and perhaps the fulfillment of long-promised and sadly obstructed principles and ideals of the American project.
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