The North American Origin of Marx's Socialism

Abstract

N NOVEMBER, 1847, Karl Marx wrote: Socialism and communism did not originate Germany, but England, France and North America.' To what political developments America was Marx alluding when he said that socialism and communism originated there? And what significance, moreover, did emphasis on a North American origin for socialism have for the structure of Marx's theory? At first sight, it might seem that Marx had mind the National Reformers when he referred to a socialist movement America. For that same article, Moralizing Criticism and Critical Morality: a Polemic against Carl Heinzen, Marx further states: . .. America under the name of National Reformers, the workers are forming a political party, whose slogan is not monarchy versus republic, but rule of the working class versus rule of the bourgeois class.2 Engels, moreover, his catechistic Principles of Communism, a fore-draft of the Communist Manifesto, wrote that in the United States, under its democratic constitution, the communists would work by side with the agrarian national reformers.3 The National Reform Association was very largely the outcome of the organizing efforts of George Henry Evans, who had been a leader of the now-defunct Workingmen's party of New York. Living on a farm New Jersey from 1835 to 1841 virtual political withdrawal, Evans developed his economic philosophy of land reform. The key to solving the problem of the misery of the working classes, he concluded, was to open the public lands freely to settlers rather than to sell them at auction to monopolistic land speculators. The abolition of land monopoly would make it easy for surplus workers to settle on the soil. The depressing effect of the excess labor supply would be removed from the market, wages would rise, and the workingman would receive the full value of his product. Evans began to expound his doctrine the columns of the Radical. Then February 1844, he met with a small group of skilled mechanics New York, and explained his philosophy. Soon afterwards he founded the National Reform Association, and his paper, with its name changed to Young America, became its organ.4 The