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

The Haymarket Series

by Paul M. Buhle

A crown jewel of New Left historiography, this overview of U.S. Marxism was hailed on its first publication for its nuanced storytelling, balance and incredible sweep.

Brimming over with archival finds and buoyed by the recollections of witnesses and participants in the radical movements of decades past, Marxism in the United States includes fascinating accounts of the immigrant socialism of the nineteenth century, the formation of the CPUSA in the wake of the Bolshevik Revolution, the rise of American communism and of the hugely influential Popular Front in the 1920s and ’30s, the crisis and split of the ’50s, and the revival of Marxism in the ’60s and ’70s.

This revised and updated edition also takes into account the last quartercentury of life in the U.S., bringing the story of American Marxism up to the present.

With today’s resurgent interest in radicalism, this new edition provides an unparalleled guide to 150 years of American left history.

Genres: History, Politics, Nonfiction, American History, United States, American, The United States Of America

348 pages, Paperback

First published April 1, 1987

About the author

Now retired as Senior Lecturer at Brown University, Paul Merlyn Buhle is the author or editor of 35 volumes including histories of radicalism in the United States and the Caribbean, studies of popular culture, and a series of nonfiction comic art volumes.

Reviews

[Markus · Rating 4 out of 5]

Shockingly comprehensive

[Geoff · Rating 2 out of 5]

This was written more than 25 years ago ie when Buhle still described himself as a Marxist. His 'Marxism' is a bit eclectic which is not necessarily a bad thing. Indeed his broadchurch approach makes this volume a good companion to more partisan histories eg. Draper's Roots of American Communism or Cannon's First Ten Years of American Communism.

For those who are interested in histories of U.S. radical politics.

[Jason · Rating 5 out of 5]

Contemporary Trotskyists outside James little group regarded this as virtual madness, but the New Left and Black nationalists who recovered James from American obscurity some twenty years later recognized something of his accomplishments: his prescient use of Marx's 1844 Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts as a means to identify fundamental social alienation, on the one hand and his belief in autonomous Black revolutionary potential on the other. They were too late or perhaps too early, to accept the corollary: James' discovery of autonomous work-cultures whose members had instinctively developed their own patterns of resistance and mobilization, not in the interest of any socialist revolution but with their own immediate needs in mind. However limited this tendency might prove, it offered the hope of industrial democracy from the bottom up, out of the lives of ordinary people rather than the plan of experts. (204)

[James · Rating 5 out of 5]

Buhle traces the history of American socialism, first brought to the US in its Marxist form by immigrants in the latter half of the 19th century. It was followed by syndicalism, Debsian populist movements, and finally supplanted by Marxist-Leninist orthodox communists, though the earlier strains remained a part of American socialism. Still, Communist Party politics took a leading role in shaping interwar and postwar radical politics, until the crisis of 1956-57 when the crimes of Stalin were revealed and Hungary was crushed by Soviet tanks. The left reemerged by the 1960s-70s in the form of supporting black nationalism, women’s liberation, and anti-war movements, but it was plagued by infighting and counter-cultural decadence.
The first chapter focused on various immigrant based socialisms, which, though they made little impact in the masses of assimilated Americans, served to bring about radicalism and methods of militant action in immigrant communities. Jewish, German, Slovak, Russian, Irish Polish, and Italian traditions all contained socialist strains. The second chapter looks at naturalized American socialist traditions, like the Knights of Labor, smaller labor groupings, intellectual roots in Radical Republicanism, and finally bringing together with Haymarket. Chapter three moves to the rise of Debsian Socialism, which saw the explosion of militant radical organizations and individuals, notably the IWW, Socialist Party, and Socialist Labor Party. Chapter four moves to the polarization of the American Left by Leninism, as they offered the example of the Russian experience as opposed to the vaguer previous workers’ republics, and moves through the move towards centralization and squelching of independence eventually. Chapter five looks at the cultural engagement in the Popular Front and beyond, as the crushing of the left and fractionalization broke much of the Socialist intellectual tradition, which made it necessary to build new ones that engaged with popular culture. Chapter six than moves to the postwar fall of the radical left, which was already coming apart because of squashing of dissent and the postwar access to materialism. Chapter seven then moves to the rise of the New Left from anti-war, civil rights, and eventually Black Power and Women’s Liberation.
Key Themes and Concepts:
-Buhle redefines Marxism broadly to include all socialist movements who sought to enlarge citizenship for the most oppressed peoples, moving away from sectarian definitions of Marxism, and including Black Power and women’s liberation in his definitions of Marxism, as well as anarchist and syndicalists, Debsian socialists, and immigrant socialist traditions.
-Buhle seeks to “remap” the history of the left away from the pre-Marxist-Leninist unfocused radicalism and then the rise of Orthodox Communist groups, and seeks to bring together all within larger birds eye of socialist traditions.
-The American left is a series of “vanishing moments” of brief rises to effective change before long wanders in the desert after destruction.

[Steven H · Rating 5 out of 5]

A FASCINATING HISTORY OF THE RISE, AND DECLINE, OF MARXISM/COMMUNISM IN AMERICA

Paul Merlyn Buhle (born 1944) is a former Senior Lecturer at Brown University, and author of books such as 'Wobblies!: A Graphic History of the Industrial Workers of the World,' 'Taking Care of Business: Samuel Gompers, George Meany, Lane Kirkland, and the Tragedy of American Labor,' 'Encyclopedia of the American Left,' etc.

He wrote in the Introduction to this 1987 book, "What has been the role of Marxism in American history? How has it been appropriated, construed (or misconstrued), even home-grown by previous generations of American radicals? What has happened to its latest major incarnation, the 1960s New Left, as political veterans entered middle age amid the Reagan Era? And what does the future hold? Can a theoretical system historically rooted in response to Victorian capitalism hope to come to grips with the challenges of the year 2000? This book suggests broad answers to such questions..." (Pg. 9)

He observes that 19th century immigrants, "even those with a Socialist background in the Old World, inevitably saw the situation differently. They had entered... a vastly contradictory reality. It bore disillusioning similarities to the societies that they had left, and which Marxist descriptions fit with considerable accuracy; but the differences also loomed large..." (Pg. 21)

He suggests, "we may divide nineteenth-century immigrant Socialist efforts into two periods. During the first, from the beginning of Radical Reconstruction ... a primitive Socialist movement struggled toward institutional existence. The second reaches... to the Socialist Labor Party in the 1890s, when the foreign-based activists... attempted unsuccessfully to turn their greater resources into a mass revolutionary agency." (Pg. 32)

He said that Daniel DeLeon "entered a Socialist Labor Party in 1890 ripe for a takeover." (Pg. 50) He adds, "Railroad man, reformer and sentimentalist, Eugene Victor Debs epitomized these possibilities, and he effectively dramatized the necessity for Socialism through his own heroic failures to change the system from within." (Pg. 79) Of the 1920s, he concedes that "the Party's new-found popularity did not usually translate into mass recruitment. The ultra-sectarian attacks on Socialist Party members, the bloody charges on police lines or city hall, and the continual internal heresy-hunting, frightened many off or caused them to drop their membership within a few months. The Party captured and held... only those who had consciously or unconsciously sought a single cause for their lives." (Pg. 143) After the New Deal, "Neither could chart the transition through and beyond the New Deal to a different America. Communists lacked the self-confidence, independence from Russian imperatives, and the background to think through the expansion of the behemoth state." (Pg. 154)

This is an excellent, sympathetically-told history, that will be of interest to anyone interested in the history of Socialist/Communist/Marxist ideas in this country.

[Don · Rating 4 out of 5]

Buhle makes the case for a non-dogmatic form of Marxism emerging out of and in response to the cultural form of American society. In this history the the Marxisms of the past rise and floursih (and some US Marxism did flourish) in response to cultural conditions rather than the economic form of capitalism and exploitation. Immigrant Marxisms are succeeded by syndicalism, Debsian populism, and then orthodox Communism, with a New Left emerging from the black liberation and feminism and merging with youth hedonism. He cincludes hopefully, that there will be more Marxisms in the future, and possibly some advice in the direction of liberation and the realm of freedom.