For more than a century and a quarter Marxism has occupied an important position in American social criticism, but never a dominant one. For most socialists between the 1870s and World War One, Marx had set forth primarily an analysis of the laws of capitalist exploitation and accumulation, which predicted the downfall of a social system that most of the literature advertised in their journals condemned on moral grounds. The ascendency of Leninism produced parties looking to Marxism for theoretical guidance on physics and painting, as well as the road to power, and precipitated earnest quests for a correct position on each and every issue. None of those parties, however, captured a hegemonic role in the workers’ movement, let alone in the country’s intellectual life. The New Left arose on campuses that were devoid of any form of class analysis. Only in the civil rights movement were there significant continuities of personnel and styles of thought from Marxist movements of the thirties, and even they were carefully disguised. White student activists, scanning bookstores for critiques of a society that had alienated them, usually discovered Marxism either in little red books of exhortations to struggle or in fat, ponderous volumes of cultural criticism. Those two very different forms of presentation, however, proved to be as well suited to the needs of the revolutionaries of 1967 as Wage Labour and Capital had been to their predecessors in 1907 or Left-Wing Communism: An Infantile Disorder in 1937. Once again Marxism had assumed an historically specific role in American radical discourse, without providing the dominant mode of thought.

Paul Buhle is well situated to analyse the long and complex interaction between Marxism and radical social movements in the United States. footnote1 A prominent activist in Students for a Democratic Society during the sixties, he was a founder of the monthly Radical America—which has promoted non-parliamentarian social struggles and investigated their historical roots—and was the guiding spirit behind the occasional issues of Cultural Correspondence. From C.L.R. James, Buhle learned to view popular culture as a source of confrontations with hierarchical authorities as important as conflicts at the point of production, and indeed inseparable from them. From his comrade Mari Jo Buhle, author of the path-breaking Women and American Socialism, 1870–1920, he learned to consider women’s liberation and women’s solidarities as central to the struggle for socialism, rather than tangential as most American Marxists had thought. footnote2 From his years of directing the Oral History of the American Left project he learned to appreciate the diversity of American Marxisms and their deep roots in immigrant cultures. All these experiences have helped Buhle write a history of Marxism in the United States that is simultaneously committed to the heritage of the American Left and critical of it. It is both a highly personal (at times idiosyncratic) encounter with that heritage and a perceptive analysis designed and demanding to be shared with others.

Buhle sets out on a path different from most existing histories of socialist thought because he dismisses Engels’s Anti-Dühring out of hand. Unlike Marxist chroniclers from F.A. Sorge and Morris Hillquit to the present, Buhle refuses to think in terms of a utopian phase that was subsequently repudiated, followed by a protracted struggle to create a true vanguard party. footnote3 On the contrary, he argues: ‘Immigrant Marxism and utopian radicalism . . . came to share a common ground neither could have anticipated’ (p. 14). Nineteenth-century American workers and middleclass reformers who ‘interpreted industrial degradation and centralized financial power as rents in the social fabric’ to be repaired by ‘still further democratization’ (p. 23), learned to think about class and socialism from their immigrant comrades. That does not mean that the former came to accept the view that the sole object of the movement was to organize workers to capture the machinery of state, so that it might expropriate the expropriators. The Americans’ efforts to instruct the largely-German bearers of Marxism in the decisive importance of the battle against racial oppression, of women’s struggles for citizenship, and of popular self-activity within civil society made a major contibution to the worldwide movement for socialism. Not only did they contribute significantly to the ambience of Debsian socialism; they also anticipated by as much as a century the ‘new social forces’ that have surfaced in European Marxist writings during the last two decades.

Although I am not persuaded of the distinctly American origins of this encounter, I do share Buhle’s evaluation. Even the German–American social revolutionaries of Chicago and elsewhere in the 1880s escaped the Kautskyian mould that was then being impressed on the Social Democrats in their homeland. Buhle’s narrow and negative assessment of the German influence prevents him from exploring this comparison, but it would seem to underscore, rather than challenge, his argument that there was no historic defeat of utopian by scientific socialism.

Buhle has no interest in Engels’s philosophy of nature. On the contrary, he celebrates the persistent influence of religious sensibility, spiritualism, temperance, Christology, and liberation theology, positing, as the goal of the popular struggle against capitalism, a universal ‘cultural experience rendered both holy and fun’ (p. 263). Buhle’s insistence keeps the reader’s mind focused on the motivations that have impelled individual men and women to rebel against social injustice. Few of us will die for the sake of a correct analysis of economic forces, much as we need it to keep us from a futile death. Nevertheless, Buhle’s dismissive attitude toward Marxist conceptions of science (and toward the intellectual impact of modern science itself) obscures the importance of the Enlightenment’s heritage, of personal battles against religious obscurantism, and even of Darwin in the process by which those who would change the world have changed themselves. Just think how many Italian anarchists named their sons Bruno, or consider the liberating effect of Robert Ingersoll’s agnosticism on late nineteenth-century radicals in the Middle West. All that is part of the ‘common ground’, whose configuration is traced in this book.

What Buhle identifies as the historic contribution of immigrant socialists to the international development of Marxism appears in the link they forged between the social relations of production and national identity. The immigrant journalists, pamphleteers, poets, and playwrights who propagated the socialist gospel in the New World were as deeply rooted in their sense of ethnicity as they were in their sense of class. Although most historians have detected only self-isolation in this phenomenon, Buhle rightly argues that the ethnic bases of German, Jewish, South Slavic, Italian, Finnish, and other Marxists in America forced them to reject the ‘illusion of abstract, universal class consciousness . . . to be achieved by imposing a dominant culture over subordinate cultures’ (p. 19), and thus to anticipate debates over nationality and class that have become essential to twentieth-century Marxism. The early life of the Communist Party was also intensely localistic and was based on the language federations that had broken away from the Socialist Party. Communists’ sensitivity to the National Question occupied a special place in the history of American socialism and of world communism. It prepared the party to come to grips specifically with the liberation of Afro-Americans.

The interwar encounter of Marxism with Black American radicalism yielded a new assessment of industrialization and of the bourgeois democratic revolution in the United States, which was provoked by W.E.B. Du Bois’s magisterial work Black Reconstruction in America. Du Bois denounced the pervasive intellectual blindness that discerned ‘no part of our labour movement; no part of our industrial triumph; no part of our religious experience’ in Black Americans’ struggles against slavery and wage labour on the land. footnote4 Here was a book that shattered the mould in which both progressive and socialist historians had previously cast their images of the American past. It appeared, moreover, just at the time when the Popular Front was opening new debates over the path to socialism and the critical analysis of culture and nationality was assuming an increasingly important place in Marxist discourse.