by Alec Israeli
In Karl Marx in America (University of Chicago Press, 2025), Andrew Hartman offers a history of Karl Marx’s role as “ghost in the machine” of American life and thought. Beginning with the significance of Marx’s observations of the United States in the development of the philosopher-revolutionary’s own thought, Hartman moves through the many, often syncretic modes of American Marx reception and considers how material conditions, as filtered through American politics, themselves shaped the possibilities of engaging Marx’s corpus. Ultimately, Hartman shows, this remains as true during today’s “Marx boom” as it was in the nineteenth century. The JHI Blog’s Alec Israeli interviewed Hartman about his book.
Alec Israeli: I want to begin with the structure and method of the book, which sometimes serves as a kind of primer on Marx’s thought, assuming no prior knowledge on the reader’s part. It seems to do so in two registers. Some passages function as an intellectual history, elaborating a given part of Marx’s corpus in relation to a given American intellectual’s engagement with it. Other passages, though, invoke Marx as a crucial theoretical resource for understanding wider aspects of American history, such as the economic dynamics beneath the Great Depression. Of course, these registers overlap: the intellectuals you consider usually invoked Marx to explain their own material conditions, and you go on to suggest that those larger economic and political structures shaped the very ways in which they could invoke Marx.
With these two modes of engagement, you seem to constantly toggle between the realms of the material and the ideal, to insist upon their interrelation without resorting to any kind of reductionism. Does this reflect a more general, conscious methodology? Was this approach a kind of meta-method demanded by the very subject at hand, a thinker who himself spawned a materialist method that shuttles between philosophy and the world?
Andrew Hartman: I’m grateful that you noticed this aspect of my method, which is indeed a conscious choice. At a meta-level, my goal with this book is to provide readers with a new lens for thinking about Marx. Putting Marx in conversation with US history is, I hope, a novel approach. So even Marxologists, theorists deeply familiar with his biography and his corpus of work, might discover new ways to think about the bearded communist philosopher. However, it is also my goal to give readers an alternative perspective on US history. Putting US history in dialogue with Marx, Marxists, and a variety of Marxisms allows for a somewhat different paradigm, so that even US historians might come away with a fresh framework. The “Marx-America dialectic” is both the subject of the book and its method.
Your question also addresses the very contradiction at the heart of Marxist intellectual history. The relationship between the material and ideational realms has always been a paradoxical feature of Marxism writ large, to say nothing of Marxist historiography. As both a Marxist and an intellectual historian, I have never been bothered by this contradiction. Material conditions are self-evidently determinative of most aspects of human life. Yet these conditions are not the only engine of history. How humans process their material conditions, how they make sense of them and act on them, is also self-evidently crucial.
The fourth chapter of the book is about the 1930s, when lots of people in the United States read Marx as a prophet but still had to deal with the problem of “false consciousness.” The question then arose: Why did the material conditions seem objectively ripe for socialist revolution while so many working-class Americans remained opposed to revolution?
This question was often answered with reference to an old Marxist theory of class consciousness. In 1859, Marx wrote that it “is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but, conversely, their social existence which determines their consciousness.” For Marxists who came to believe in this overly deterministic theory of the mechanisms of revolutionary ideology, any workers who failed to identify their existence as inherently opposed to capitalism simply suffered from false consciousness.
Of course, Marx often contradicted himself. In perhaps slight contrast to the above sentiment, in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, one of his opening sentences famously articulated a theory of history premised on what Sidney Hook called “conditional probabilities”: “Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past.” Marxists ever since have toggled back and forth between materiality and ideas; structure and agency.
Given that Marxists were generally understood to believe that culture only superficially reflected the “dull compulsion of the economic,” the abiding concern of Marxist thinkers for culture, especially literature, requires some explanation. Marxist intellectuals felt a measure of anxiety about identifying the working class as the revolutionary subject without coming from it themselves. More importantly, immiseration and crisis had failed to produce the working class’s foretold revolutionary consciousness. This put Marxist intellectuals in an uncomfortable position: if the working class was not in error, then their theory was. Blaming “culture” was one way out.
In other words, people who were Marxists and intellectuals have always had to grapple with the central contradiction at work here. On this matter I take my cues from the Marxist geographer and public intellectual, David Harvey, who theorized in his 2011 book The Enigma of Capitalism and the Crises of Capitalism that our“mental conceptions of the world” are one of several “distinctive activity spheres” that comprise the historical development of capitalism. He writes:
Our mental conceptions of the world… are usually unstable, contested, subject to scientific discoveries as well as whims, fashions and passionately held cultural and religious beliefs and desires. Changes in mental conceptions have all manner of intended and unintended consequences for [the historical development of capitalism]…
In short, Karl Marx in America is my humble effort (if a 600-page book can be described as humble!) to help people see past the contradictions of Marxist intellectual history.
AI: Your opening chapter deals, in part, with Marx’s own conscious engagement with the United States in his lifetime. From the young Marx’s 1843 “On the Jewish Question,” in which the “North American states” serve as an example of a bourgeois state in its “completely developed form,” to the greying Rhinelander’s excited 1867 remarks in the first volume of Capital about the progress of the American labor movement immediately following the Civil War (“after the abolition of slavery, a radical transformation in the existing relations of capital and landed property is on the agenda”), the United States proved useful for Marx to think with as a kind of bellwether of history. Reflections on American slavery, politics, and expansionism pepper his writings; he maintained a lively correspondence with Friedrich Engels on the Civil War. You even go so far as to suggest that this very conflict helped galvanize Marx to finally finish and publish Capital: “The poetry of the future was brought into focus for Marx by the war on American slavery” (31). Could you elaborate on the role of America in Marx’s corpus? Do you think that the nation’s seemingly outsized presence in the thought of a man who had never even visited played a role in his writings’ continued usefulness for Americans themselves?
AH: The United States represented, for Marx, capitalism in its ideal form because the United States did not have a feudal past, which in Europe often distorted capitalist development, and because Americans seemed to live, eat, sleep, breath the commodified life of capitalism. Marx wrote that American capitalism developed “as in a greenhouse,” and he described the United States as the first fully realized bourgeois country because its people were conditioned to the idea that “work is the key to wealth, and wealth the only object of work.” So, although Marx never visited the United States, he read about it constantly, and he often corresponded with people who lived there—especially his German ‘48er comrades. Because for most of his career as a writer be believed that socialism would go through capitalism—that capital was digging its own grave by bringing together masses of exploited workers—he thought the United States was primed for this revolutionary transition. At various points in his life, he even hypothesized that socialism might come to America via the ballot box, since the US was way ahead of Europe when it came to universal (white male) suffrage. Why wouldn’t the working class vote in a socialist system that would empower themselves vis-à-vis the ruling class?
Of course, at various points Marx was also disappointed by the slow development of working-class consciousness in the US and had several theories for this, including the availability of cheap land in the West (anticipating Frederick Jackson Turner’s renowned “frontier thesis”), and the enslavement of a large portion of the working class. As Marx wrote in Capital: “In the United States of America, every independent workers’ movement was paralyzed as long as slavery disfigured part of the republic. Labor in a white skin cannot emancipate itself where it is branded in a black skin.”
This latter recognition, that socialism required solidarity across racial and other divisive lines, is one of the reasons why Marx was so excited about the Civil War. The 1850s were a time of deep political (and personal) disappointment for Marx. The Civil War represented a moment of revolutionary hope. It helped propel him to finish the first volume of Capital. It also inspired his interpretation.
Marx’s close attention to the US Civil War—to the condition of slave labor and how enslaved people in the United States joined the Civil War effort—fully convinced him that one of the key aspects of capitalism was not just that profit derived from the exploitation of the worker, but that freedom required that humans have control over their bodies, their time, and their labor. You get this sense from Marx that there was a spectrum of labor from free to enslaved, and that what the Republicans called “free labor” wasn’t slave labor but wasn’t fully free either. For humans to be fully free, the working class would have to overthrow capitalism.
Although Marx had long understood that capitalism was dehumanizing for the worker, and although Marx and many others in Europe and the US had long compared wage labor to slave labor, a close study of chattel slavery in the United States—and, even more so, recognition of the risks enslaved Americans took to get free from that odious labor regime—made their theories seem more concrete than ever.
Marx was inspired by the enslaved workers who, when they dropped their tools and fled the plantations for Union lines during the Civil War, undertook what W. E. B. Du Bois later described as a “general strike.” Marx was inspired by the abolitionists and antislavery freedom fighters who took up arms in the US Army, including many German ’48ers, and also many of the formerly enslaved. He was also inspired by the English workers who supported the Union and antislavery causes even when it threatened their own interests—a true showing of international working-class solidarity. In short, the US Civil War helped transform Marx’s theory of labor into praxis.
As for the ongoing relevance of Marx’s writings on America: we continue to grapple with life in this country as Marx analyzed it, dealing with issues ranging from labor exploitation, the power and limitations of (somewhat) universal suffrage, racism, and more. Marx’s thought adds something to American political discourse that is otherwise missing.
AI: A thread throughout the book is the various ways that people tried to “Americanize” Marx. Sometimes, the goal was merely to defend against reactionary fearmongering about this German-Jewish radical; as you point out, this tendency goes back to 1871, when some Americans blamed the Paris Commune on Marx himself. At other times, “Americanization” was a means to make his specific brand of radicalism appeal to American workers and thinkers, who had their own longstanding political languages of revolt from which to draw. In your account, “American” versions of Marx synthesized his thought with extant US traditions of republicanism, naturalism, utopian socialism, pragmatist philosophy, black radicalism, and what you call the “moral left.” Do you think that this syncretism—the great efforts that American thinkers and activists took to bring Marx into the US political fold—is somehow unique to the United States? Were these efforts confined to a country whose politics would otherwise have been unamenable to Marxist thought? How might American Marxist syncretism compare with other countries’ reception of Marx (say, the linkage of Marxism with republicanism in France, with old populist traditions in Russia, with various nationalisms in the age of decolonization)?
AH: I don’t think that Marxist syncretism is unique to the US. Ideas never take hold if they don’t speak to issues people are working out in their own specific contexts of time and place. In the modern era, the nation-state is obviously one of the most important contextual factors, particularly since Marxism is a political philosophy and the nation-state is the most important or one of the most prominent political entities. So of course, Marxism had to meld with, say, French republicanism. As a US historian who wrote a book about Marx’s reception in the US, that nation is obviously my focus and my bias, so I don’t want to overstate the case, but I do think there might be more hybridizing work done to make Marx fit the American context. This may be the case because the United States is a larger, more diverse country than most others, with its diversity especially notable in the ideological and ideational realms. Not many other national intellectual histories are rife with so many formative political philosophies and traditions: those you named above, along with Christianity (which takes many forms in the US—both mainline social gospelers and prairie evangelicals sought to relate their ideas to Marx); European Enlightenment political philosophy; English common law traditions; populism; feminism; and more. The American liberal and conservative traditions have many variants as well, and many prominent liberal and conservative thinkers read Marx across the twentieth century, if much less favorably.
Because of the United States’ size and diversity, the American reception of Marx is akin to the global reception of Marx in microcosm. Take the example of how Oklahoma socialists read Marx in the early twentieth century through the lens of their struggles regarding land, a topic I deal with in the book’s third chapter. Oklahoma socialists’ persistent advocacy for land reform contradicted the stance of most early-twentieth century socialists. Since land dominated so many people’s political horizons, such advocacy helped to expand the appeal of Marxism beyond the urban working class. As Marxists around the world soon learned, this expanded base numbered in the billions. It made the Chinese and Cuban revolutions possible.
In the US, along with the dynamics of a capitalist core, you also have settler colonialism and indigenous resistance to it, chattel slavery and resistance to it, racial apartheid and resistance to it, militant Christianity and resistance to it, patriarchy and feminist resistance to it, imperialism and resistance to it… I could go on without even mentioning capitalism and resistance to it! These are the developments of the modern world which are captured in the history of the United States—“as in a greenhouse!” The fact that Marx’s work speaks to such a wide variety of American historical developments reflects the capaciousness of Marx’s thought in relation to modern historical development writ large.
AI: We are currently in a moment of revived interest in the relationship between Marx’s thought and the republican political tradition. Just this past year, Bruno Leipold published his Citizen Marx: Republicanism and the Formation of Karl Marx’s Social and Political Thought, which you recently reviewed for New Labor Forum. In your book’s last chapter, you point to William Clare Roberts’s 2018 Marx’s Inferno: The Political Theory of Capital, which advances a theory of a republican-attuned Marx, drawing on the latest Marx boom’s preoccupation with freedom as an operative concept. Far earlier on, you suggest that Marx and Abraham Lincoln “shared certain republican sensibilities” (41). How might you place your book in the current Marx-republicanism matrix?
AH: I’m sympathetic to the reasons why exciting new Marxist thinkers like Roberts and Leipold want to put Marx in conversation with republicanism. They believe, and I agree, that contemporary socialists should not only prioritize social and economic equality but also, like all good republicans, political freedom. The essence of republicanism was its principled opposition to domination, and more than that, its hostility to people who wielded power arbitrarily, without the consent of those being ruled. In the hands of Roberts, and especially Leipold, Marx was a democratic socialist who believed as firmly in democracy as he did in socialism. And this firm belief in democracy made him a nineteenth-century republican, in sensibility if not in self-identification.
Again, I’m mostly on board with this mission, which is a counter to the Cold War-derived notion that Marx is the grandfather of totalitarianism. But since the Cold War is now thirty-five years in the rearview, I’m not sure it’s that necessary, or that accurate, for Marx to have been a republican to make him into a freedom fighter. A simple, straightforward reading of Marx teaches us that freedom requires that people have independence over their work, over their time, and over their bodies. Since most people in a capitalist society lack such self-rule and must sell their labor to survive, capitalism is incompatible with freedom. Period. That’s where I situate my book. There have been lots of ways in which Marx has been read in America. The one that centers labor and argues that we can’t be free unless we have control over our labor is the one that motivates me as a Marxist person and historian.
AI: One intellectual-historical claim you put forth is a notion that “our very understanding of America as it developed across the twentieth century is underwritten by a subterranean Marx” (249). Marx, you suggest, not only gave ex-Trotskyist neoconservatives the historical-theoretical armature with which they theorized the world, but also served as the shadowboxing opponent for liberal thinkers who insisted upon a coherent “American political tradition” that, in Rooseveltian fashion, could save capitalism from its worst self without any recourse to Marx. “Renouncing Marx,” you write, “helped give the American political tradition meaning” (238–239). Furthermore, you later argue, hatred of Marxism seemed to be one part of the glue holding together traditionalists and free market fundamentalists in late-twentieth-century fusionist conservativism—Marx could be vilified as a zealot of atheist relativism by the former or as an enemy of liberty by the latter. There is an interesting move here: intellectual history by way of negative presence. Could you speak more to this argument?
AH: This is why I like the “ghost in the machine” metaphor for Marx in America. Or, to riff on the most famous line from the Communist Manifesto, Marx is a haunting specter. One of my truly surprising findings is just how many people, from such a wide assortment of orientations all across the American political spectrum, wrote about Marx, talked about Marx, thought about Marx, put Marx into action. It’s why my book is 600 pages and could have been 1,000 if my editor had allowed such insanity. Marx truly does seem to me the most modern political philosopher, and the United States truly does seem the most modern nation. That the two have gone hand in hand should not be surprising, and yet it is!
That every midcentury or Cold War liberal had to write about Marx, both to prove him wrong and to invent the American political tradition, seems to me like convincing evidence that Marx has been a ghost in the American machine. That conservatives since World War One, if not earlier, had to reference Marx, not to disprove him (a foregone conclusion), but rather to link Marxism to their true political enemy of liberalism, seems to me like convincing evidence that Marx is a specter haunting the American political imagination.
AI: I’d like to close on contemporary concerns, as you do in the book. Your penultimate chapter is on the retreat of Marx’s reception into the academy—from his long-held place in American leftist activism and labor politics—in the 1980s and 1990s. This depoliticized Marx of cultural theory, you suggest, was fitting for a period of neoliberal capitalist retrenchment. Yet the end of your last chapter points to the post-2008 resurgence of interest in Marx as a theorist of capitalist crisis, readily called upon by leftist political organizers. And, through movies like Sorry to Bother You and publications like Jacobin magazine (where, I should say, I worked as an editor), you suggest that Marx has undergone a kind of vernacularization: Jacobin articles, you note, studiously avoid the academic argot of the theory wars thirty years ago. Nonetheless, as Marx wrote, we do not make history in circumstances of our own choosing: the academicization of Marx cannot simply be undone, even as a more popular Marx has ascended. Your book, after all, is part of a recent academic Marx boom. How do you see the relationship between the ongoing place of Marx in the university and his more overt political uses in recent years? Are the two bound to progress together?
AH: Another astute question! You’re right that there is no going back to a time before Marx was processed through the academic meat grinder. Although I deliberately wrote a book that will hopefully appeal to academic and non-academic readers, I’m an academic historian who speaks the language of academic history and to some extent academic Marxism. Thus, if I’m a good example, even a vernacular Marx in 2025 is going to be a somewhat academic Marx. But academic politics have shifted since the heyday of cultural theory in the 1980s and 1990s such that labor, academic and otherwise, is much more of an overriding concern. Because of this, even academics writing about Marx will speak to issues (like labor) that better transcend the cloistered world of the seminar room. That is the hope.
Andrew Hartman is a professor of history at Illinois State University. He is the author of three monographs: Education and the Cold War: The Battle for the American School (Palgrave Macmillan, 2008); A War for the Soul of America: A History of the Culture Wars (University of Chicago Press, 2015; 2nd ed. 2019); and Karl Marx in America (University of Chicago Press, 2025). Hartman is also co-editor with Raymond Haberski of American Labyrinth: Intellectual History for Complicated Times (Cornell University Press, 2018).
Alec Israeli is a contributing editor at the JHI Blog and a joint PhD student in the Department of History and Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago. His research considers overlaps of intellectual history, labor history, and the history of capitalism in the 19th-century United States, focusing on contemporary theorizations of free and unfree labor in the realms of political economy, philosophy, and aesthetics.
Edited by Zac Endter
Featured image: “Comrade Debs, Socialist Encampment, Snyder, Okla.,” International Socialist Review 10(3), September 1909, p. 278.
