Denning - Marxism in the United States: Remapping the History of the American Left by Paul Buhle.pdf

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Marxism in the United States: Remapping the History of the American Left by Paul BuhleReview by: Michael DenningInternational Labor and Working-Class History, No. 34, Religion and the Working Class (Fall,1988), pp. 118-120Published by: Cambridge University Press on behalf of International Labor and Working-Class, Inc.Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/27671785 .Accessed: 12/02/2015 11:16

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118 ILWCH, 34, Fall 1988

Paul Buhle, Marxism in the United States: Remapping the History of the American

Left. London: Verso, 1987. 299 pp.

Paul Buhle's long-awaited history of U.S. Marxism is neither a tightly knit scholarly monograph nor another of those textbook overviews of the American left; rather it combines a rich sampling of Buhle's efforts over more than two decades to recover the

legacies of the left through oral history, archival research, and the editing o Radical America and Cultural Correspondence (work that has made him the left's unofficial house historian), with a powerful and idiosyncratic interpretation of American

Marxism. Rather than pose Marxism as a foreign ideology against the indigenous strains of Utopian socialism, radical republicanism, and feminism, he argues per

suasively that U.S. Marxism is a product of the continuing dialectic between American

utopianism-the tradition that, from the millenarians of the radical reformation to

those of the New Left, united abolitionism, spiritualism, and women's rights-and the

"ghetto socialisms" (47) of immigrant communities from the German 48ers to

contemporary Latinos and Asian-Americans. "Marxism is as Marxism does" (16), Buhle writes, anticipating Marxist critics uncomfortable with such Catholicism

(though he does not respond to the likely objections of those Utopian socialists, anarchists, and radical feminists reluctant to be incorporated as Marxists).

One might take as an emblem of Buhle's book the First International in the U.S., the apparently unholy alliance of German-American socialists led by Friedrich Sorge (and personally affiliated with Marx and Engels), and the spiritualist socialists and

reformers organized around Victoria Woodhull's weekly journal, Woodhull & Claf linys Weekly. Despite the ending of this oft-told tale-Sorge's group, with Marx's

approval, drove out the "American Sections"-Buhle sees both sides as "Marxist"

(reminding us that the Communist Manifesto was first published in English in the U.S. in Woodhull & Clafliris) and finds the promise of U.S. Marxism in that brief and unstable alliance, one that has been repeated at various moments in U.S. history. Several powerful corollaries follow from Buhle's argument: he judges the health of

U.S. Marxisms in different times and places by the degree to which women's rights are

central to them; his emphasis on the Reformation's dual legacy-"exterminist Calvinism" (14) and "spiritualistic socialism" (68)-implicitly answers the argument that the Puritan legacy disabled socialism in the U.S., an argument recently elaborated in Irving Howe's Socialism and America; and he lays to rest the still-common notion that Marxism is somehow more "foreign," more "imported," than the rest of U.S.

culture.

In Buhle's account, the two streams-"millennialism of the indigenous radical forces and cultural alienation of the immigrants" (258)-are united by the centrality of

culture, a magnetic term that attracts a variety of energies in this book. It has at least three distinct, if interrelated, meanings. First, culture is a synonym for ethnicity or

race, the "National Question." Buhle argues that "in its most organized, coherent

dimension, Marxism in the United States has been a class manifestation of the National Question" (13). Thus by culture, Buhle means the alternative public spheres


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Book Reviews 119

of fraternal associations, benefit societies, newspapers, labor schools, and recreation

al clubs that characterized the various German, Yiddish, black, Finnish, and Italian

"ghetto socialisms." Buhle's second meaning of culture encompasses the concern for

sexuality and spirituality that energized the Utopian tradition and the movements for

dress reform, avant-garde art, and free love from Woodhull to the New Left.

Third, culture is mass culture or popular culture-the "popular mainstream

newspapers and magazines . . . mass entertainments, music, stage, and sports" (50)

that transformed working-class culture at the turn of the century. "

'Culture,' for the

first time, would be treated as necessary leisure and recreation rather than the uplift that elder radicalism had apotheosized" (97). Buhle is fiercely critical of American

Marxists who ignored or denigrated this culture-"it is staggering to think that during the Golden Age of popular culture, with glorious phenomena from Bebop to Hank

Williams, Sr., to Mad Comics to Sid Caesar, New York intellectual conversation

remained centered on Flaubert and Henry James" (210)-and finds his inspiration in

the dance criticism of the young Louis Fraina, the sports writing of Lester Rodney and

C. L. R. James, and the popular culture experiments of the Popular Front Commu

nists and the New Left.

These three different senses of culture come together to form the heart of Buhle's

US. Marxism. To amend his own formula slightly, Marxism is, for Buhle, the class

manifestation of the question of culture. Marxism's central role in American life has

been in establishing working-class cultural institutions, elaborating visions of cultural

transformation, and understanding the promise of mass culture. "Mass culture has

educated the masses, in ways not yet fully understood," Buhle concludes, "Paradox

ically, mass culture which saps and destroys the folkish remnants that bourgeois

exploitation has left alive is also a prime source of universal consciousness" (272,

274). Though Buhle's specific arguments may leave many unpersuaded, his "remap

ping" of the American left will surely change the way we see the historical landscape. Like American Marxism, however, Buhle's book is split between two contrary

projects-and prose styles-it finds difficult to reconcile. One half of the book is a

"collective autobiography, a family history of the left" (4), organized by successive

generations. Buhle is at his best telling tales of individual Marxists (from August Otto

Walster and C. Osborne Ward to John Watson and Fredy Perlman) and sketching

portraits of anonymous leftists. With each figure, he offers a sense of their theoretical

and political accomplishments as well as their limitations. Thus they emerge not as

heroes, traitors, or eccentrics, but as emblems of the central contradictions in the

American left. By drawing on the work of the Oral History of the American Left

Project, Buhle succeeds in breaking away from "English-language, book-centered"

views of U.S. Marxism and finds a richer heritage than a survey of U.S. Marxist

"classics" might suggest. For example, his fine discussions of the influence of

progressive historiography and social science on several U.S. Marxisms draw out the

ambiguous consequences ofthat encounter. His attention to the writings of DeLeon, Austin Lewis, Louis Fraina, and C. L. R. James illuminates a distinctive US.

Marxist theory of revolutionary industrial unionism, developed out of the experience



120 ILWCH, 34, Fall 1988

of the IWW and the CIO, that was, Buhle argues, "the first American doctrine to win

political adherents in virtually every large-scale industrial center" (100). The other half of Buhle's work is in a different key. The introductory and

concluding passages of each chapter surround his "collective autobiography" with a

dissonant prose and historical argument. Here one finds a kind of vernacular

Hegelianism, whose self-generating abstractions recall not an academic philosophical

style, but the combative dialectical rhetoric of those underground Marxist pamphlets like James's Notes on Dialectic or Debord's Society of the Spectacle. Here the history of U.S. Marxism is conceived less as a "family history" of successive generations than as the unfolding of an inner dialectic: "whatever the outcome," Buhle writes at the

end, "one cannot escape a sense of inevitability in the larger drift of events, theory and

popular consciousness discussed in this book. . . . We have come to this stage

because we could come by no other path" (273-74). This form of rhetoric and

argument is the least useful aspect of Buhle's work, more impenetrable and less

persuasive to the uninitiated than the academic Marxisms of the last decade that he

criticizes.

Nevertheless, one might say of Buhle what he says of V. F Calverton: he is "the

prototype of the intellectual as organizer of intellectuals, the jack-of-all-trades

generalist, and the social scientist as Utopian. In his faults as well as his strengths, he

summed up the Marxist intellectual of his generation" (159). In many ways, this book

is the culmination of the New Left's never fully realized project of recovering a U.S.

Marxist cultural criticism. When a Marxist cultural studies emerged in the U.S. in the

1970s, it came more from the translation of the "Western Marxists" than from the

American thinkers like Fraina and V. F Calverton that Buhle, Lee Baxandall, and

David Peck (among others) labored to revive. Buhle's history, however, may serve to

bridge the gaps between that tradition and the international work represented in the recent Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture (Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg, eds. [Urbana: 1988]); together, they may begin to answer his Utopian call for a

"revolutionary culturalism," in which, as Buhle writes, "the interpretation of cultural

symbols has become a potentially subversive and unifying global project" (5).

Michael Denning Yale University

Gwendolyn Mink, Old Labor and New Immigrants in American Political Develop ment: Union, Party, and State, 1875-1920. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1986. 301 pp.

Gwendolyn Mink's important study will be of immediate interest to two groups of

historians: those concerned with the impact of immigration on American labor, and

those interested in the evolution of American labor politics. Old Labor and New

Immigrants not only examines the link between immigration and labor politics, but

argues that "immigration . . . played the decisive role in formulating an American



Article Contentsp. 118p. 119p. 120

Issue Table of ContentsInternational Labor and Working-Class History, No. 34, Religion and the Working Class (Fall, 1988), pp. 1-144Front MatterEditor's Notes [pp. 1-2]"Citizens of the Kingdom": Toward a Social History of Radical Christianity in Latin America [pp. 3-21]The Transforming Power of the Machine: Popular Religion, Ideology, and Secularization among Polish Immigrant Workers in the United States, 1880-1940 [pp. 22-38]Religion and Trade Union Politics in the United States, 1880-1920 [pp. 39-55]The Sexual Crisis and Popular Religion in London, 1770-1820 [pp. 56-69]Review EssaysReview: Catholic Working-Class Movements in Western Europe [pp. 70-85]Review: Popular Religion and the Laboring Classes in Nineteenth-Century Europe [pp. 86-91]

Reports and CorrespondenceThe Ninth Annual North American Labor History Conference [pp. 92-94]The American Historical Association, Part 1 [pp. 94-97]The American Historical Association, Part 2 [pp. 97-98]Labor and Industrialization Meeting of the Social Science History Association [pp. 98-99]Women in Dark Times [pp. 99-100]Women's Worlds: The Third International Interdisciplinary Congress on Women [pp. 100-102]Custom and Commerce in Early Industrial Europe [pp. 102-103]Fifteenth Annual Conference of the Western Society for French History [pp. 103-106]

Book ReviewsReview: untitled [pp. 107-109]Review: untitled [pp. 109-112]Review: untitled [pp. 112-115]Review: untitled [pp. 115-117]Review: untitled [pp. 118-120]Review: untitled [pp. 120-123]Review: untitled [pp. 123-127]Review: untitled [pp. 127-130]Review: untitled [pp. 130-134]Review: untitled [pp. 134-136]Review: untitled [pp. 137-139]Review: untitled [pp. 139-141]Review: untitled [pp. 141-143]

News and Announcements [p. 144-144]Back Matter

Documents

Denning - Marxism in the United States: Remapping the History of the American Left by Paul Buhle.pdf