Mark R. Levin is a former advisor to several members of President Ronald Reagan’s cabinet, chairman on the Landmark Legal Foundation and a syndicated commentator on television and radio. His stated goal for writing American Marxism is to examine the history of Marxist activist networks operating in the United States. Having sold over one million copies since its publication in 2021 it is likely the most widely read of all “history” books on Marxist political groups in the United States. This is unfortunate. While Levin’s analysis of discourse is skillful and his knowledge of the political efforts led by Communist Party state, the book largely fails to achieve the goal of a distinctly American network analysis and historiography of American Marxists. I’ll alternate my commentary on what’s praiseworthy and what’s blameworth.
Levin deftly highlight how different movements, such as degrowth, environmental justice, racial justice, gender justice, etc. are political projects that are frequently directed by self-avowed or crypto Marxists whose claims justifying the necessity for political change have no social/scientific validity and whose demands are just thinly coded Marxism.
In chapter after chapter Levin shows how the zero-growth movement is anti-capitalism in different language, how Critical Race Theory discourse of authors such as Ibram X. Kendi and Robin DeAngelo is a variant of Marxism that uses racial language and pulls quotes from numerous books such as Laura Miles, a contributor to Social Review magazine and author of Transgender Resistance: Socialism and the Fight for Trans Liberation, Professor of Economics at Pepperdine University George Reisman’s book Capitalism, and professor of Environmental Justice at University of California David Pellow’s essay What is Critical Environmental Justice? to highlight how the ‘trans liberation, ‘economic justice’ and the degrowth wing of the ‘environmental justice’ movement is really socialism.
He also cites research articles such as one showing that the New York Times and Washington Post’s meteoric rise in the percentage of instances that “white” and racial privilege” has appeared in their publications – 1200% and 1500% respectively, case studies by the Media Research Center and highly publicized events such as the suppression of Project Veritas’ Twitter account and the Hunter Biden laptop story to demonstrate mainstream media’s role in promoting conspiracy theories (i.e. there is no effort in Big Tech to limit speech and the story about Hunter Biden’s laptop is Russian disinformation) in the name of discouraging conspiracy theories.
Levin deftly shows how legislation linked to the Green New Deal is an effort at refashioning the individual rights framework of the U.S. Constitution to a collectivist definition of rights; how reparations legislation legitimizes racial discrimination that undermines the meritocratic structure of social, educational and financial institutions; how the legislative movement to “protect” people from “hate speech” which occurs online is a trojan horse for massive government intervention in the Free Speech arena, how colleges are increasingly locations for political recruitment, etc.
This is all to say that there is a lot of good research here. And yet despite this to me the book feels as if themes/topics were collected, examples were chosen to cover the themes/topics, and little thought was given to explication of the connection between. One example of this could be how several years before the current “attack” on standardization in testing a similar process was ongoing in Venezuela, how several of the books now promoted in the teaching of “math justice” cite attendance at the World Social Forum or cite Communists such a Angela Davis as their inspiration, and that high ranking members of unions in Chicago, Los Angeles, Boston, Texas, etc. have all gone to Venezuela for consultations with members of their government. This would allows to maintain the frame within which he operates – people pursuing the above agendas are indeed utopians, AND the first which sustains their actions was galvanized in part by foreigners with their own political ends. In other words, by establishing the linkages to foreign inspiration, gives us cause to then assess whether or not what we see there is truly all that venerable and if not to highlight how those within borders X must even more fervently resist the effort of internal groups to change conditions so they approximate those in borders Y.
One example of this is returning focus on the thoughts and actions of Marx, Mao, Marcuse, and Stalin, for example, rather than detailing the contemporary activities of Socialist sections of various academic professional organizations and their linkages to international networks results in an analysis – such as the Cuban developed Network of Artists and Intellectuals in Defense of Humanities – or their indicators – such as the number of socialists philosophers cited within academic literature or the number of self-avowedly socialist presidents of professional academic organizations – means that he fails to capture a full picture of their undertakings. Furthermore, examples depicting how these groups have co-operated organizationally within the context of recent history is not examined, the few details of links to foreign governments highlights are only to a few events that are sensationalist but of minor importance, and the funds which these groups rely on to operate are only slightly analyzed.
To summarize, Levin foregoes extensive engagement with Marxist sociology: the examination of the histories and primary texts of actually existing parties and movements and instead focuses on texts claimed as seminal to these movements and events that occurred in other countries. While knowledge of “what happened elsewhere” is clearly useful for developing insight on the U.S. groups, there’s clearly no formal methodology shown to be informing his particular mode of investigation.
American Marxism is definitely worth reading for getting an overview of the deceptive practices of various justice movements – these are largely wings of a popular front – and yet the definitive book about U.S. Socialist movements since the collapse of the Soviet Union has yet to be written.