Image by Hennie Stander.

Andrew Hartman, Karl Marx in America. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2025. 572pp, $39.00

Back in the 1890s, when American Marxism was young, some socialist intellectuals in the US had already begun to complain that the American Left just did not understand what Marx had written. Louis B. Boudin (still called “Budynov”), later to write a noted defense of Capital and still later a three volume history of American law, must have stunned Yiddish readers of the Tsukunft (“the future”) with his claims made in strident tones. Or not: in the midst of the 1890s literary conflict between Yiddish anarchist and Marxist publications in the Lower East Side, everybody seemed to enjoy a good scrap.

If the US, the most industrially advanced nation, nevertheless lacked a working class grasping for Marxist ideas and socialist transformation, something had to be wrong, but what was it? Andrew Hartman has written a very large and interesting book full of people and ideas, very much within this framework, making choices sometimes inevitable to the subject, sometimes bewildering to this reviewer. It is not necessarily a criticism of this reviewer—the author of Marxism in the US and co-editor of the Encyclopedia of the American Left—to remark that I have seen (and lived within) a different American Marxism. I hope the reader will indulge me as I describe this other Marxism a bit, along the way.

Non-US anti-Marxists whose ideas have arrived, stayed, departed or not among steadfast conservatives and repentant former Marxists alike, find a place in Karl Marx in America, but many Americans writing about Marx or attracted to Marx seem oddly missing here. The author of The Theoretical System of Karl Marx—so admired at the time that even the Germans produced their own translation—Boudin would be among the prominently missing. Likewise, on the other side of the fence, the late Hoover Institute savant, Bertram D. Wolfe, whose insightful Marx and America (1934) made a splash in his days when his group, the Lovestoneites, had not yet defected to CIA-financed activities in the global labor movement.

Boudin’sand Wolfe’s successors have, at any rate, been at it ever since and even continue today, with a familiar conclusion: if only Americans had REALLY understood Marx, the history of the Left would surely have been very different.Neither Boudin, Wolfe nor a........

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