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American Marxism: Theory Without Tradition
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12658 |
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Section : |
Modern Thought
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| Issue
Date : |
6 / 1987 |
2,716 Words |
| Author
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John B. Judis
John B. Judis just completed a voluminous biography of William
F. Buckley, Jr. (Doubleday, 1988). |
An intellectual tradition presupposes not only continuity between past and present, but the development of present thought through reflection on a defined body of past thought. In Europe, and in most European countries, a tradition of Marxist theory began with Marx and Engels and continued--to a name a few prominent thinkers-through Karl Kautsky, Lenin, George Lukacs, Antonio Gramsci, members of the Frankfurt School, Jean Paul Sartre, Louis Althusser, and down to today's Eastern European Marxists, particularly Rudolf Bahro, Alex Nove, and Branko Horvat.
In the United States, there have been Marxist philosophers and political theorists since the turn of the century, but they have never formed part of a sustained tradition in which past efforts have informed present ones. Instead, American Marxists have tended either to look abroad toward European Marxists--many of whose concrete assumptions were irrelevant to American history--or to non-Marxists like Dewey or Keynes or Freud. In a certain sense, there is no such thing as American Marxism.
It is not hard to figure out why American intellectuals have not had a Marxist tradition. Traditions of political theory--whether liberal, conservative, or Marxist--are grounded in a perception of political possibility. This is axiomatic with Marxism, which is a philosophy of political action whose verification rests upon the possibility of capitalism being superseded by socialism.
In the United States, socialist movements have had a fitful and largely dismal experience. The American Socialist Party, founded in 1901 and led by Eugene V. Debs, reached its peak in 1912, when Debs received almost a million votes for president and socialists held hundreds of municipal offices. It declined precipitously, however, after World War I as a result of a bitter split fomented by socialists who wanted to tie the party to Bolshevik Russia. The American Communist Party, which resulted from the split, never achieved popular political success. It has its greatest success in the late 1930s when it subordinated its socialist politics to the urgency of liberal reforms. It ceased to be a significant force in American politics after World War II, except in the fevered imagination of former communists and of the far Right. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, several new socialist organizations arose out of the new Left, but their formation was more a reflection of the popularity of Marxism among the new middle-class intelligentsia than of newfound revolutionary solidarity among American workers. This checkered history of American socialism does not necessarily invalidate socialism--Marxism, for instance,
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