WE TEND to think of Marxism as a political doctrine which emerged altogether from European experience, and which was then exported to the United States. There was an astonishing unity of experience and aspiration, however, common to America and Western Europe during the eighteen-forties. Young men in Germany, France, and England who found themselves drawn into the new, strange, and stirring communist movement listened eagerly and avidly to the reports from the American continent that communist communities were practicable and prosperous. They drew from the American experience the evidence for their view that communism, indeed, was the next stage of human society. Friedrich Engels was the leader in expounding to his fellow Germans the significance of the American communist experience. In later years he was to ridicule Utopian thought and action. But as he and Marx were forming their standpoint in The Holy Family and the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, what the word communism meant for them was the kind of society which was being created by the American communist communities. The overcoming of man's alienation was then their central aim; what this signified in practical terms was the establishment of communist communities in the American style. This story has not previously been told how Friedrich Engels in 1844 and 1845 brought the glad tidings of the American communities to his German comrades, and how they proposed to show they were communists who could be practical, too, by founding a community similar to the American pattern? The whole episode has important bearings for our understanding of the development of Marxism.
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Mar 1, 1980
Nelson Lichtenstein 
