Over the past few weeks several articles in as many high-brow media outlets all took Cultural Marxism as a topic for discussion.
Several days after Samuel Moyn wrote an opinion articlein The New York Times calling the term “Cultural Marxism” a dog-whistle for conspiracy-minded racists that was too loaded for use, David Brooks published an opinion article in The New York Times whose topic was intergenerational economic struggles at the workplace over meliorism. One of his explanations as to why such conflicts happen was that Cultural Marxism is the lingua franca of the universities that had educated those workers.
Brooks use of this term caused a brouhaha on Twitter, and lead him to link to a series of articles related to the subject recently published on Tablet by historian Alexander Zubatov. Like me, he responded critically and at length to Moyn, which Ben Alpers publishing a blog for the Society for United States Intellectual History group on Facebook, who reiterated Moyn’s case.
Given my subject area knowledge mastery of the subject and as I’m currently researching and publishing about Kultural Marxism– a modern variant of the Cultural Marxism project — I decided to weigh in on this conversation as well.
In short, while I agree with David Brooks and Alexander Zubatov that Cultural Marxism exists and view the historiographical methodology of Ben Alpers and Samuel Moyn as fundamentally unsound — I also take issue with Zubatov’s periodization.
My claim is simple: before a single member of the Frankfurt School was even born, Cultural Marxism already existed in America.
Defining & Historicizing American Cultural Marxism
What exactly is Cultural Marxism?
I find Alexander Zubatov’s definition, which I now paraphrase here, to be suitable.
Cultural Marxism is a worldview that sees cultural productions (Films, TV shows, books, as well as the institutions which help them come to be), and ideas as emanations of underlying power structures. To understand them genuinely, rather than just on the surface, an honest reader must scrutinize and judge all culture and ideas based on their relation to economic and political relations. Following from this premise, advocates for the persecuted and oppressed must also attack forms of culture that re-inscribe the values of the ruling class, and also disseminate culture and ideas that support “oppressed” groups and “progressive” causes.
Why do I find this definition suitable? Because it matches the perspective Perry Anderson presents in his books In the Track of Historical Materialismand Considerations of Western Marxism. These works historicize the discourse of a number of leading Marxists and traces the shifts in the school’s practical concerns and theoretical innovations.
How do I know Cultural Marxism existed in the United States prior to the 20thCentury?
Because Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels said so, for one.
Secondarily, there were numerous Socialist political and cultural organizations operating in the United States that were avowedly Marxist in orientation prior to the arrival of the Frankfurt School. The legal response of the existence of these organizations was censorship, jailing and deportation and the extra-legal included large private police forces and spy networks that were accountable often only to those paying them (Preston).
Last, but not least, there are myriad examples of American citizens creating their own cultural works which contested the legitimacy of America’s political and economic institutions as well as criticizing cultural works as being counter-revolutionary.
I’ll now illustrate each point in the order just presented.
Marx’s Assessment of American Politics
While Karl Marx is more often associated with Russia than the United States given the successes of the Bolshevik Revolution and the Red Scares, when periodizing Cultural Marxism in America it’s important to remember that he also wrote for the New York Daily Tribune, corresponded with Abraham Lincoln, considered moving with his family to Texas after the American Civil War, and worked directly and indirectly with socialist organizations in America. While these facts indicate that there was an organized effort by Karl Marx and his associates to propagate communist beliefs via various distribution channels in the United States — Karl Marx understood an inchoate Socialist movement to have existed in America since he was a teenager.
In Marx and Engels’ view of American history, it was the Workingmen’s Parties of the early 1830s that quickly rose to prominence across across the country and then dissolved was the first iteration of America’s “own social democratic school.”
Marx believed this was so because the Workingmen’s Parties were the first class-oriented political organization in America that stated in their literature that the interests of Capital were intrinsically opposed to the interests of Labor. This briefly lived organization, however, wasn’t the only iteration of such a “social democratic school”.
Marxism in 19thCentury America
The Knights of Labor were founded in 1869 and by 1886 they had over 700,000 dues-paying members as well as their own membership cards, arcane initiation rituals, newspapers and associated meeting halls. After the Knights had disbanded The Industrial Workers of the World were founded in 1905, and had all the same trappings as well as comics in their news publications, like Mr. Block, and songbooks by musicians like Joe Hill, who would later be assassinated for his political activity. They even published their own catechism that clarified the positions from which they opposed capitalism. Both groups sought to organize workers regardless of race, sex or skill level of occupation. Their goals were to create One Big Union and thereby extend the meaning of democracy such that it included what transpired at the workplace (Montgomery).
These weren’t the only Socialist organizations operating in the United States prior to the Frankfurt School’s arrival. There were also the Modern Schools, which operated in New York, Chicago, Milwaukee and other cities that founded on the educational principals of the Spanish Anarchist Francisco Ferrer (Higham).
There were also a variety of state and national political parties organized as well — from Daniel DeLeon’s Socialist Labor Party to Victor Berger’s Socialist Party of America. In the 1930s Communist Party Members in Alabama consistently put their jobs, reputations, and in many cases there very lives on the line. Like a print version of Glassdoor — their newspapers contained information on prices of jobs in different regions; first person accounts of bad behavior by employers as well as the trials and tribulations faced by Communists (Kelley). These newspapers also shared stories of hope of what life could be like without the racism so endemic to the South (Horne). So desirable was the Grand Narrative presented through these media outlets that in 1936, when the Spanish Civil War began, Leftists and Blacks from throughout Africa, the Caribbean, and America volunteered to join the International Brigades to fight against the fascist forces of Spain, Germany, and Italy — much as contemporary Leftists have made cause with the Kurdish people in Rojava (Robinson).
There were also international socialist organizations operating in America. The International Working Persons Association, an organization once headquartered in Marx’s adopted home of London, which moved to New York in 1872. The IWPA was able to so successfully address themselves as able to help with the needs and concerns of workers that in Chicago alone in 1885 they had over 20,000 members that were of the mind that reforming capitalism would never be a sufficient means of improving their conditions and that a peaceful transition to socialism was not possible (Foner).
In fact, it’s in part because of the IWPA’s activity related to the legal defense of the group of radical political activists that came to be known as the Haymarket Martyrs, which included publishing their private correspondence and encouraging affiliated socialist groups to demonstrate on their behalf, that the first international holiday for workers — Labor Day — came in to being (Hill).
Such political projects were not monolithic, and the conflicts between the Marxists, Lasalleans and other tendencies played out in party debates, the pages of their theoretical and news publications and the policies they adopted. In Brian Lloyd’s book Left Out: Pragmatism, Exceptionalism, and the Poverty of American Marxism, 1890–1922, the author provides an intellectual history of early socialist thought in America. After claiming that too much of the historical writings on this period has taken for granted the Marxist nature of American Socialists by simply categorizing the two major tendencies into Reform and Revolutionary Socialism — he subjects the writing of socialist journals published during the 1890–1922 time period — such as The Massesand The New Republic– as well as the books by leading intellectuals to a close examination. By doing so Lloyd is able to illustrate how William James and John Dewey exhibited a marked influence on the intellectuals then writing for the socialist press.
Lloyd demonstrates how Spencerian notions of social/cultural development; Veblenian economic stages; Nietzschean and Bergsonian concepts of the Will and Interest as well as Darwinian determinism Socialist discourse and practice. The “Farmers faction” of the Socialist Party, for instance, propagated small-producer ideologies in order to act as an organizing principle.
By limning the conceptual limits of quasi-Marxist thinkers that he alternately denigrates as hayseed empiricists; practical idealists; inchoate liberals; “great men” followers; economic monists, etc. he shows that the intellectual framework of the “American Marxists”, and those within the Second International, was not always aligned with Marx even if he was often used as a referent.
Examples of Early American Cultural Marxism
Given the role that literature plays in the oeuvre of Karl Marx, that Marx did write a number of romantic poems and his impact on aspects of so many national cultures, it’s perhaps most appropriate to say that he is the first Cultural Marxist. And yet he never wrote a novel that had the same radicalizing effect that William Morris’ News from Nowhere or Tressell’s The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists had for British Marxists or that Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward had for radicals on the other side of the Atlantic. Edward Bellamy’s novelization of a man seeing the future illustrated the dynamic tensions between what was and what could be in a way that appealed to many Americans by showing how a Socialist organization of industry and governance could benefit them.
Bellamy’s book was a certifiable best-seller that sold millions of copies in America and the Socialist Party advertised it in conjunction with The Communist Manifesto. Eugene V. Debs, five-time presidential candidate for the Socialist Party, cited conversations with Victor Berger and reading the novel as highly influential to his political development and was part of a large body of literature which recorded American’s thoughts, experiences and fantasies as they came to terms with industrial capitalism. Indeed, there was a flourishing trade in books and articles that addressed the dynamic tension between what was and what could be possible in the present.
Between the Haymarket Riots of 1886 and the Bryan McKinley election of 1896 in over 100 works of utopian fiction were produced by politicians, literary authors, businessmen, and journalists in response to the struggles of their time. Not all were revolutionary — indeed some were conservative or outright regressive — but they were so successful that the Charles Kerr Publishing house was able to specialize in selling Leftist Utopias. According to Mary Jean Pfaelzer, the Kerr utopias included:
Anonymous — The Beginning , A Romance of Chicago As It Might Be, 1893
Anonymous — Man or Dollar, Which?, 1896
Frederick Adams’ President John Smith: The Story of Peaceful Revolution, 1897
Zebina Forbush’s The Co-opolitan: A Story of the Cooperative Commonwealth, 1898
W.H.Bishop’s The Garden of Eden USA: A Very Possible Story, 1895
James Galloway’s John Harvey: A Tale of the Twentieth Century, 1897
19th century literary works aren’t the only novels that could be categorized as Culturally Marxism. The Jungle, published serially in the avowedly socialist magazine Appeal to Reason by Upton Sinclair in 1906 depicted the difficulty of production line work in the Chicago abattoirs. While modern Socialists look with disdain on the Socialism of renowned American novelist Jack London, in 1908 his novel of revolution in Chicago, The Iron Heel,was seen as a classic — even garnering praise from Leon Trotsky. Then there was the comics that were published and distributed in order to raise class consciousnes.
Though it’s difficult, if not impossible, to empirically determine the social impact of such Cultural Marxist works — just as it is hard to measure the impact Ayn Rand has had on Objectivists and Libertarians or The Turner Diarieshas had on White Nationalists — clearly they exist.
Towards A New Periodization of Cultural Marxism in America
While it is true that both Antonio Gramsci and György Lukács both wrote significant, innovative works in the Marxist canon; both worked at the ComIntern in order to propagandize on behalf of the Soviet government and International Communism; and both have had their theories applied to various cultural projects — to not include people such as John Reed; Morris Hillquit; Victor Berger; Eugene V. Debs; Joe Hill; Edward Bellamy; Bill Haywood; Charles Kerr; August Spies; Albert Parsons; Lucy Parsons; Jack London; Hosea Hudson; Stan Weir; Marty Glaberman; Ted Wellman; William Z. Foster; Clarence Hathaway; W. E. B. DuBois; George Padmore; Max Shachtman; and myriad other native and immigrant Americans in an accounting of Cultural Marxism the United States is to cover up the country’s rich history of political and cultural radicalism.
Ben Alpers’ and Samuel Moyn’s claims that Cultural Marxism is nothing more than a baseless conspiracy theory intertwined with far-right anti-Semitism can only be made if one excludes American history from the end of the American Civil War until members of the Frankfurt school arrived in New York City. Indeed, so pervasive, violent and ruthless was the legal and extra-legal suppression wrought against the members of the above described and similar themed organizations that it proves anyone who uses the term political correctness to refer to the “intolerant left” is themselves guilty of Orwellian irony (Preston).
Bibliography
Alpers, Ben. A Far-Right Anti-Semitic Conspiracy Theory Becomes a Mainstream Irritable Gesture. U.S. Society…
Anderson, Perry. Considerations of Western Marxism
Anderson, Perry. In the Track of Historical Materialism
Brooks, David. Liberal Parents, Radical Children: The Generation Gap Returns. New York Times.
Crawford, Margaret. Building the Workingman’s Paradise. New York: Verso. 1996.
Foner, Philip S. History of the Labor Movement of the United States. New York: International Publishers, 1979.
Higham, John. Strangers in the Land: Patterns of American Nativism 1860–1925. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2002.
Hill, Rebecca. Men, Mobs and Law: Anti-Lynching and Labor Defense in U.S. Radical History. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2009.
Horne, Gerald. Race to Revolution: The United States and Cuba During Slavery and Jim Crow
Kelley, Robin. Hammer and Hoe: Alabama Communists During the Great Depressions.
Kipnis, Ira. The American Socialist Movement: 1897–1912. Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2005.
Lears, T. J. Jackson. No Place of Grace: Antimodernism and the Transformation of American Culture, 1880–1920. Chicago: University Of Chicago Press, 2004.
Lipset, Seymor Martin & Marks, Gary. It Didn’t Happen Here: Why Socialism Failed in the United States. New York and London: W. W. Norton & Company, 2001.
Lloyd, Brian. Left Out: Pragmatism, Exceptionalism, and the Poverty of American Marxism, 1890–1922. Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997.
Montgomery, David. The Fall of the House of Labor: The Workplace, the State and Labor Activism, 1865–1925. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989.
Pfaelzer, Mary Jean. Utopian Fiction in America, 1880–1890: The Impact of Political Theory on Literary Form. University College, London, 1975.
Preston, William. Aliens & Dissenters: Federal Suppression of Radicals 1903–1933. Cambridge: University of Illinois Press, 1994.
Robinson, Cedric J. Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition.
Westad, Odd. The Global Cold War and the Making of Our Times: Third World Interventions and the Makings of Our Times. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005.
Zubatov, Alexander. Just Because Anti-Semites Talk About ‘Cultural Marxism’ Doesn’t Mean It Isn’t Real. Tablet Magazine.