American Marxist Research Articles

Sweezy in Perspective

Paul M. Sweezy was, in words of his contemporary John Kenneth Galbraith, the most distinguished of present-day American Marxists.1 A Harvard-trained economist, his writings spanned some seven decades from early 1930s to closing years of twentieth century. For more than half a century he was coeditor of Monthly Review, subtitled An Independent Socialist Magazine, which he founded along with Leo Huberman in 1949. Although first and foremost an economist, Sweezy was also a social scientist in a much broader sense. His impact on political science, sociology, history, and other disciplines was profound. He took entire globe as his field of analysis, helping to enlarge our understanding of imperialism and of necessity of revolution, particularly in third world… This article can also be found at Monthly Review website , where most recent articles are published in full. Click here to purchase a PDF version of this article at Monthly Review website.

The Early American Marxism Website

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Additional informationNotes on contributorsTim Davenport∗∗Tim Davenport is an Independent Scholar from Corvallis, Oregon, specializing in 1920s American radicalism who maintains the Early American Marxism Website and is a volunteer for the Marxist Internet archive. ∗Tim Davenport is an Independent Scholar from Corvallis, Oregon, specializing in 1920s American radicalism who maintains the Early American Marxism Website and is a volunteer for the Marxist Internet archive.

Le marxisme en amérique latine de José Carlos Mariategui aux zapatistes du Chiapas

José Carlos Mariagegui, the first major Latin American Marxist thinker, who died in 1939, considered socialism to be the sole alternative to the domination of Latin American by US imperialism. He dreamt of an Indo-American socialism which would not be the mere carbon-copy of precedents elsewhere; which, on the contrary, would be the heroic creation of the peoples of the continent. Because of the hegemony of Stalinism within the Latin American left, it was in fact the « carbon-copy » which was to dominate thinking for many years. The renewal of Marxism was to come about in the 1960s, with the Cuban revolution and the rise of Guevarism, whose repercussions include the theology of liberation and movements such as the Mexican Zapatist movement of the 1990s.

Theory and the "Chunnel": Cultural Studies and the Retreat of Ideology

In the fall of 1992, a group of French students disguised as a film crew snuck into that virtually complete and much touted link between France and Great Britain, the tunnel under the English Channel, popularly known as the Chunnel. While an obvious proficiency in the Gallic systeme D allowed the students to talk their way past the presumably lax French authorities, their more disciplined British counterparts intercepted and detained the mock filmmakers, as the inimitable language of the Associated Press specifies, before they reached the English side (Sacramento Bee). Above and beyond whatever implications the completed Chunnel may have on relations between continent and island, Fifth Republic and United Kingdom, and between so-called continental and analytic schools of philosophy, the silly incident recounted above stands as a possible caricature of the relation between (French) theory and (Anglo-American) cultural studies.1 For at least the last four decades, American French departments have had the prestige and luxury of being at the forefront (or at least of being perceived as being at the forefront) of the most innovative intellectual developments in the humanities, from existentialism through the various structuralisms and their successors. In more recent years, students of (French) theory have been obliged to defend it against the American Marxist questioning of its political relevance or irrelevance, on the one hand, and the accusation of

Workers as Reason:The Development of a New Relation of Worker and Intellectual in American Marxist Humanism

Workers as Reason:The Development of a New Relation of Worker and Intellectual in American Marxist Humanism

Marxism for our times: C.L.R. James on revolutionary organization

Rarely as in the collection here can one encounter an essayist, novelist, historian, and political leader like the late C. L. R. James in the working throes of forming and then fomenting personal political theory. In Marxism for Our Times, editor Martin Glaberman has gathered the writings and theoretical discussions of this noted Caribbean writer. These pamphlets, mimeographs, letters, and lectures by James were nearly inaccessible until now. Within these works, James works to situate himself within the classical Marxist tradition while rejecting the Vanguard Party as unsuitable for our times. The writings in this collection begin in the 1940s, when Marxists were wrestling with acts that many deemed betrayals of the revolution, Stalin's pact with Hitler and the war in Europe. They end in the late sixties just before the dissolution of Facing Reality, the final form of the American Marxist organization founded on James's principles. For many years James, born in Trinidad and Tobago, was leader of the Trotskyists in the United States. He continued his work even after his exile from America. Of great value to scholars of Marxism are the papers in which James examines Marx, Lenin, and Trotsky and applies their theories to the class conflicts he was witnessing at mid-century and to changes he foresaw in the future. James argues for the rejection of historical principles and theories and urges Marxists to adapt themselves to changes occurring in capitalism and the working class. Glaberman worked alongside James but sometimes disagreed with him in the movement James founded. They were close associates for 45 years. With Marxism for Our Times Glaberman not only has preserved and made available the political theories of a noted writer but he also has created a window on a turbulent period of optimism and failure, a failure Glaberman calls, rich in meanings and lessons for anyone interested in a democratic, revolutionary Marxism. C. L. R. James is the author of the novel Minty Alley and The Black Jacobins, the classic history of the Haitian Revolution, and many other works. Martin Glaberman is a professor emeritus at Wayne State University in Detroit. He joined the socialist movement at age thirteen and worked for twenty years in the auto industry and as an active union member.

Left Out: Pragmatism, Exceptionalism, and the Poverty of American Marxism, 1890-1922.

Journal Article Left Out: Pragmatism, Exceptionalism, and the Poverty of American Marxism, 1890–1922. By Brian Lloyd. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997. xiv, 472 pp. $45.00, ISBN 0-8018-5541-1.) Get access R. Alan Lawson R. Alan Lawson Boston College Chestnut Hill, Massachusetts Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Journal of American History, Volume 86, Issue 2, September 1999, Pages 804–805, https://doi.org/10.2307/2567129 Published: 01 September 1999

Left Out: Pragmatism, Exceptionalism, and the Poverty of American Marxism, 1890-1922

Left Out: Pragmatism, Exceptionalism, and the Poverty of American Marxism, 1890-1922

Young Sidney Hook: Marxist and Pragmatist

This book is the best treatment of the best American Marxist philosopher-and the best philosopher to emerge from American slums. Young Sidney is essential reading for anyone interested in democratic theory and practice in America.---Cornel West A very detailed, and fascinating account of Hook's formative years . . . [a] first-rate contribution to the history of American leftist intellectual life.---Richard Rorty, Raritan Fascinating . . . well researched and packed with information.---Times Literary Supplement Succeeds in establishing the young Hook as a dedicated revolutionary Marxist.---Amos Perlmutter, Washington Times A brilliant, lucid portrait of a scholar, adversarial by temperament, who turned his extraordinary powers of analysis and polemic successively against capitalism, Stalinism, and the New Left.---Alan Wald, Monthly Review The best study of Hook's thought. . . . Supersedes all earlier treatments.---David A. Hollinger and Charles Capper, The American Intellectual Tradition A major contribution to our understanding of Hook and the American Marxist tradition. . . . Extremely insightful.---American Studies Persuasive. . . . Discovers not just a brilliant interpreter of Marx and the Russian Revolution, but a remarkable advocate and practitioner of the Americanization of Marxism.---In These Times Phelps's effort to uncover, explore, and analyze Hook's forgotten leftism must be judged unqualified success.---Left Penetrating, closely argued, and lucid. . . . An important contribution to the history of American radicalism in the 1930s.---Labor History One of the most controversial figures in the history of American philosophy, Sidney Hook was an intellectual street fighter, who began his career as a brilliant Marxist thinker and probably the greatest polemicist of [the 20th] century (Edward Shils) before breaking with the Communist Party in the late 1930s. Turning in his later years to allegiance with American conservatives including Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan, Hook is now widely known as intellectual father of the neoconservative movement.

Left Out: Pragmatism, Exceptlonallsm and the Poverty of American Marxism

Left Out: Pragmatism, Exceptlonallsm and the Poverty of American Marxism

Marxism and Romanticism in the Work of José Carlos Mariátegui

Jose Carlos Mariaitegui is not only the most important and most inventive of the Latin American Marxists but a thinker whose work, in its power and originality, is of universal significance. His heretical Marxism has deep affinities with that of such important Western Marxist writers as Antonio Gramsci, Gyorgy Lukaics, and Walter Benjamin. At the heart of Mariateguist heterodoxy-of the specificity of his Marxist philosophical and political discourse-we find an irreducibly romantic kernel. In a celebrated 1941 article, V. M. Miroshevsky, the eminent Soviet specialist and adviser of the Latin American Bureau of the Comintern, denounced Mariategui's populism and romanticism, and for the advocates of (Stalinist) orthodoxy to accuse him of this mortal sin was sufficient to expose his thought as definitively and irrefutably foreign to Marxism.1 However, it is time we recognized-and the example of Mariaitegui is an admirable illustration of this-that, far from being contradictory, romanticism and Marxism are perfectly compatible and can be mutually enriching. Romanticism is a cultural movement originating at the end of the eighteenth century as a protest against the development of modern capitalist civilization and industrial bourgeois society, which are based on bureaucratic rationality, market reification, the quantification of social life, and the disenchantment of the world (in the famous phrase of Max Weber). Once it had emerged with Jean-Jacques Rousseau and the German Friihromantik, romanticism never vanished from modern culture and remains one of the main structures of sensibility of our epoch. Nothing is more wrong and superficial than to reduce romanticism to a literary style. As a worldview in the fullest sense of the term, romanticism emerges in all aspects of cultural life: the arts, literature, religion, politics, social science, historiography, philosophy. Its

Left out: pragmatism, exceptionalism, and the poverty of American Marxism, 1890-1922

Left out: pragmatism, exceptionalism, and the poverty of American Marxism, 1890-1922

F. O. Matthiessen and the Future of American Studies

Now that the Soviet empire has collapsed, it is time for a fresh look at the victims of the oppositional “Cold War criticism” that came to dominate American Studies in the 1980s. Hoping to stem the tide of the Reagan Revolution, the “New Americanists,” as Frederick Crews dubbed the academic heirs of the New Left, instigated a sweeping critique of their own discipline, charging the founders of American Studies with complicity in imperialism abroad and McCarthyism at home. Of all the founders, none was interrogated more thoroughly than F. O. Matthiessen, long regarded as the very model of a critic for whom radical politics and academic criticism were not mutually exclusive commitments. As late as the early 1980s, critics were still hailing Matthiessen as a pioneer in the development of American Marxist criticism. Frederick Stern, for example, asserted that Matthiessen's “methodology as a critic, though not in any pure sense Marxist…, comes closer to some of the distinguished efforts of the Marxist critics of Europe than does the work of just about any other major American critic of Matthiessen's time” (44). Similarly, Leo Marx argued that “in his subtle treatment of the interplay between literature and society, Matthiessen in a sense anticipated the development of a more supple Marxist cultural and literary theory since its liberation from the rigid doctrinal cast of the Stalin era” (256). Yet it was also in the early 1980s that the first blow to Matthiessen's reputation was struck inThe American Renaissance Reconsidered, a collection of papers from the English Institute whose title, echoing that of Matthiessen's magnum opus, announced the beginning of an ambitious campaign to revise the history of American Studies – a campaign that proved to be quicker and easier than anyone could have expected.

Keeping Faith: Philosophy and Race in America.

Preface: The Difficulty of Keeping Faith. Cultural Criticism and Race 1. The New Cultural Politics of Difference 2. Black Critics and the Pitfalls of Canon Formation 3. A Note on Race and Architecture 4. Horace Pippin's Challenge to Art Criticism 5. The Dilemma of the Black Intellectual. Philosophy and Political Engagement 6. Theory, Pragmatisms and Politics 7. Pragmatism and the Sense of the Tragic 8. The Historicist Turn in Philosophy of Religion 9. The Limits of Neopragmatism 10. On Georg Lukacs 11. Fredric Jameson's American Marxism. Law and Culture 12. Reassessing the Critical Legal Studies Movement 13. Critical Legal Studies and a Liberal Critic 14. Charles Taylor and the Critical Legal Studies Movement 15. The Role of Law in Progressive Politics. Explaining Race 16. Race and Social Theory 17. The Paradox of the African American Rebellion Notes Index

Mariategui and Latin American Marxist Theory.

Mariategui and Latin American Marxist Theory.

THE AMERICAS

European Encounters with the New World: From Renaissance to Romanticism. By Anthony PagdenSettlements in the Americas: Cross‐cultural Perspectives. Edited by Ralph BennettThe ‘Underclass’ Debate: Views from History. Edited by Michael KatzThe American Stage: Social and Economic Issues from the Colonial Period to the Present. Edited by Ron Engle and Tice L. MillerThe Lincoln Persuasion: Remaking American Liberalism. By J. David GreenstoneChildren in the House: The Material Culture of Early Childhood, 1600–1900. By Karin CalvertThomas Holme 1624–1695: Surveyor General of Pennsylvania. By Irma CorcoranNew England's Generation: The Great Migration and the Formation of Society and Culture in the Seventeenth Century. By Virginia DeJohn AndersonSojourners in the Sun: Scottish Migrants in Jamaica and the Chesapeake. By Alan L. KarrasJonathan Carver's Travels through America, 1766–1768: An Eighteenth‐Century Explorer's Account of Uncharted America. Edited by Norman GelbEmblems of American Community in the Revolutionary Era: A Study in Rhetorical Iconology. By Lester C. OlsonThe Privileges of Independence: Neomercantilism and the American Revolution. By John E. CrowleyPatriarch: George Washington and the New American Nation. By Richard Norton SmithRedeeming the Republic: Federalists, Taxation, and the Origins of the Constitution. By Roger H. BrownThe American Deists: Voices of Reason and Dissent in the Early Republic. By Kerry S. WaltersEnd of an Era: The Last of the Great Lakes Steamboats. By David PlowdenUnfinished Business: The Railroad in American Lift. By Maury KleinMasters to Managers: Historical and Comparative Perspectives on American Employers. Edited by Sanford M. JacobySocialism in America: From the Shakers to the Third International. Edited by Albert FriedStrained Sisterhood: Gender and Class in the Boston Female Anti‐Slavery Society. By Debra Gold HansenEvangelicals and Politics in Antebellum America. By Richard J. CarwardineHunting Lieutenant Chadbourne. By Jim W. CorderAntebellum Natchez. By D. Clayton JamesVictorian America and the Civil War. By Anne C. RoseTumult and Silence at Second Creek: An Inquiry into a Civil War Slave Conspiracy. By Winthrop D. JordanWilliam Howard Russell's Civil War: Private Diary and Letters, 1861–1862. Edited by Martin CrawfordGrant and Lee: A Study in Personality and Generalship. By J. F. C. FullerLetters Home: Henry Matrau of the Iron Brigade. Edited by Marcia Reid‐GreenNelson A. Miles and the Twilight of the Frontier Army. By Robert WoosterCharles Jonas (1840–1896): Czech National Liberal, Wisconsin Bourbon Democrat. By C. Winston ChrislockWales in America: Scranton and the Welsh, 1860–1920. By William D. JonesBetween Race and Ethnicity: Cape Verdean American Immigrants, 1860–1965. By Marilyn HalterWhen Bosses Ruled Philadelphia: The Emergence of the Republican Machine, 1867–1933. By Peter McCafferyOur American Cousins: Being Personal Impressions of the People and Institutions of the United States (1883). By W. E. AdamsGender and American History since 1890. Edited by Barbara MeloshAn Unwanted War: The Diplomacy of the United States and Spain over Cuba, 1895–1898. By John L. OffnerOf Law and Limitations: An Intellectual Portrait of Louis Dembitz Brandeis. By Stephen W. BaskervilleAmerica's Century: Perspectives on US History since 1900. Edited by Iwan W. Morgan and Neil A. WynnA Bloc of One: The Political Career of Hiram W. Johnson. By Richard Coke LowerThe Centralia Tragedy of 1919: Elmer Smith and the Wobblies. By Tom CopelandAmerican‐Soviet Relations: From the Russian Revolution to the Fall of Communism. By Peter G. BoyleAnxious Decades: America in Prosperity and Depression, 1920–1941. By Michael E. ParrishControlling the Waves: Dean Acheson and US Foreign Policy in Asia. By Ronald McGlothlenThe Slaves' Economy: Independent Production by Slaves in the Americas. Edited by Ira Berlin and Philip DThe Penguin History of Latin America. By Edwin WilliamsonRegion and State in Latin America's Past. By Magnus MornerMaximilian and Juárez. By Jasper RidleyAguirre: The Re‐creation of a Sixteenth‐century Journey across South America. By Stephen MintaSociety, Economy and Defence in Seventeenth‐century Peru: The Administration of the Count of Alba de Liste (1655–61). By Peter T. BradleyTrade, War and Revolution: Exports from Spain to Spanish America 1797–1820. By John FisherMariátegui and Latin American Marxist Theory. By Marc BeckerLand without Evil: Utopian Journeys across the South American Watershed. By Richard Gott

Marc Becker, Mariátegui and Latin American Marxist Theory (Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Center for International Studies, Latin American Series No. 20, 1993), pp. xxv + 214, £16.60, pb.

Marc Becker, Mariátegui and Latin American Marxist Theory (Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Center for International Studies, Latin American Series No. 20, 1993), pp. xxv + 214, £16.60, pb.

Marx and Veblen on Human Nature, History, and Capitalism: Vive la Différence!

There has been a long-standing controversy over the relationship between Marx's and Veblen's social theories. At the turn of the century, within the covers of one journal one commentator claimed that major differences existed between Marx and Veblen, whereas another emphasized the Marxian character of Veblen's economic thought [Walling 1905; LaMont 1905]. A similar range of interpretations has persisted,' but the majority have concluded that Veblen was not an 'American Marxist'.2 However, this orthodoxy has come under increasing attack, first by Arthur K Davis, whose position on the Veblen-Marx affinity debate seems to have hardened over the years, notwithstanding his detailing of

Remaking Marxism in the 1990s

Manning Marable's "Remaking American Marxism" (MR, January 1991) is among the most compelling of recent efforts by theorists and activists to reconceptualize an effective socialist strategy for the 1990s. Manning acknowledges that there are profound changes in the world and national situation. Yet he resists the temptation to embrace the fashionable new slogans of retreat, including the most tragic-comic of them all: "Marxism and Leninism are dead! Long live post-Marxism and post-Leninism!"This article can also be found at the Monthly Review website, where most recent articles are published in full.Click here to purchase a PDF version of this article at the Monthly Review website.

MARXISM, FEMINISM, AND THE STRUGGLE FOR DEMOCRACY IN LATIN AMERICA

While discussions of dissolving the hyphen between Marxism and feminism were put on the back burner in the United States and England in the 1980s, the author argues that changes in Latin America during the same decade favor a possible convergence of contemporary Marxist and feminist theory and practice. These conditions include the emergence of a second-wave feminist movement in many Latin America countries, the central role of women in contemporary social movements, and an internal critique within Latin American Marxism. Key issues pointing toward a convergence of thinking include a reevaluation and redefinition of democracy, the concept of “a plurality of social subjects” or potential revolutionary actors, the importance of autonomy for popular movements in relation to political parties and the state, and a new understanding of the importance of daily life in the struggle for socialism.