Where does American socialism stop and American Marxism begin?

January 9, 2025 12:46 AM

The amount and quality of this scholarship can be celebrated — or for conservative critics, decried — but the question here is, does it possess a distinct identity? And what is its impact? An identity to this academic Marxism is difficult to outline since little links the Marxist literary critic and the Marxist sociologist, except left-wing sympathies and occasional shared vocabulary. from American Marxism Got Lost on Campus [Jacobin; ungated]
posted by chavenet (24 comments total)

American socialism stops on the border between the college campus and the proverbial Avenue Q. American marxism stops at the same spot.
posted by ocschwar at 4:48 AM on January 9 [2 favorites]

rtfa: Eddies of Marxism existed outside of the universities, for instance in Detroit with a group led by C. L. R. James and Raya Dunayevskaya [workers' liberty]
posted by HearHere at 4:54 AM on January 9 [1 favorite]

Is it strange to hear the editor of The Wiley Blackwell Companion to Chinese Communism talk about Marxism of the 60s without reference to the explosion of Maoism(s)?

Unlike psychoanalysis, which has had brief flourishes but now seems somewhat doomed compared to its more accessible offshoots, Marxism is the victorian invention that continually smothers its children by demanding a return to origins. The new Capital translation is doing extremely well on Amazon, for instance (not quite as well as the corpse and protocorpse of Friedman and Sowell respectively), whereas the more accessible offshoots are...where? There are two or three little primers on socialism published in the past twenty-five years and none of them can draw a straight line between Marx and the thing capitalism is currently becoming. Step back a level to more inaccessible books, and there's a million of them, but that's kind of the article's point I guess? Marxism is hidden from the working class, at a time when they really could use some theory to understand why things are so bad. (Although when people try--well, check out the bitchy little chuckle the article gives to Erik Olin Wright. The recommendation of City of Quartz is doubly weird because that book is thirty-five years old and five hundred pages long.)

I think it's likely that we're done with Marx as a useful tool. He has become a field of esoteric study, and a source of memes (the latter of which probably explains the sales of the new translation), but the change socialism envisions has to involve workers who understand what's happening and can make meaningful decisions, and there's no sign that Marx can provide that to anyone. A resistance to current capitalism is going to have to come from another direction that is easier to read. Or watch. Or listen to.

(You can disprove my point above by asking, "So mittens have you ever heard of the BIBLE?")
posted by mittens at 5:42 AM on January 9 [10 favorites]

You might consider checking out Capitalist Realism by Mark Fisher.

If you want to find people who grappled with the evolution of capitalism to avoid the predictions of the material dialectic, you probably want to check out the critical theorists. Not that that's a particularly accessible oeuvre.

And then wander over to David Graeber (Debt, or, Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology) because the anarchists are here for you.
posted by constraint at 5:59 AM on January 9 [10 favorites]

“The fascists have the outfits
But I don't care for the outfits
What I care about is music
And the communists have the music.”
posted by heyitsgogi at 6:07 AM on January 9 [10 favorites]

Unlike psychoanalysis, which has had brief flourishes but now seems somewhat doomed compared to its more accessible offshoots, Marxism is the Victorian invention that continually smothers its children by demanding a return to origins

Just the other day I was thinking that Freud, like Marx, has become an intellectual period piece and only still a matter of concern to academics and dead-enders.

Maybe there's a flourishing market in both that I'm unaware of, but I have that distinct impression.
posted by Lemkin at 6:21 AM on January 9 [3 favorites]

Marx is relevant because his critique of capitalism still stands. But as an ideology, he seems problematically tied to revolution, and China and Russia stand as two great examples of how that can go wrong (as does France, but that's another story.)
posted by CheeseDigestsAll at 7:41 AM on January 9 [5 favorites]

The article focuses on where Marxism is in the academy, but it's maybe more revealing to look at where it isn't: "political economy", the tradition Marx was writing in and how I imagine he would have described himself, no longer exists as a discipline. Economics and "political science" and the humanities have been split off and separated. Most academic economists have never read Marx in any detail (beyond maybe reading the Manifesto and thinking the labor theory of value is dumb) and only know of e.g. David Ricardo as the originator of a very basic trade model.

When I read The Communist Manifesto back in college it seemed pretty outdated ("we've got a middle class now!"), but Marx and the other 19th-century political economists have a lot of useful analysis of our current condition, both because they were seeing it with fresher eyes and because they weren't limited by our current academic departmental silos and career incentives.

There are core parts of Marx that are still obviously resonant today: take the idea that the ownership of things shapes our interests and how we identify ourselves in the world. (Or more traditionally: our classes are constituted by our relationship to the means of production.) There's a lot more to Marx than that, but just caring about who owns what gets you a good part of the way to a solid politics, because you can't help but to ask why they own it, and the answers the capitalists manufacture in their defense are never as useful as someone uncritically accepting the status quo.

Maybe reading Capital isn't the best way to convey that to people, but at the very least it's important to know the history of the idea.
posted by ropeladder at 7:55 AM on January 9 [13 favorites]

I know eff all about this topic. I have the movie that looks like it is based on Piketty’s Capital on my watchlist, (in case anyone here has feedback on that) and I very much enjoyed Adam Tooze’s recent series on rhe Ones and Tooze podcast about heterodox economists which tells me how new macroeconomics is and how much of the classical influences survived to the recent past at least. I suspect Tooze has more accessible stuff out there…
posted by drowsy at 8:11 AM on January 9 [3 favorites]

American socialism stops on the border between the college campus and the proverbial Avenue Q. American marxism stops at the same spot.

Nah. American socialism exists to service capitalism. The roads/parking lots/etc are mostly socialized, required, and personal stories about facing minor hardships are seriously considered and legislated away. American city design is also mostly socialized but with Marxist guardrails (forced separation by social/income class) that I don't know enough about Marxism to fully understand.

Hilariously, if we'd spent the money we spent to socialize the driving experience on literally (almost) anything else, social causes or capitalism causes, we'd be better off. Approximately $10trillion dollars since 1940 or so.

People have started to notice this, and for example NYC's first shot at congestion pricing has passed and been enacted, some of the funds of which will go to subsidize the transit system instead.

Marxism on the other hand is quite different, and I'm not knowledgeable enough to really even discuss it.
posted by The_Vegetables at 9:24 AM on January 9 [4 favorites]

Thanks for posting this chavenet, you keep bringing stimulating things to read.

I was disappointed by the end of the piece, we got the thesis early on (Marxism in America is found in scholarly work in universities) and it didn’t go much further beyond finding ways to repeat this point. I’d say there are probably groups doing interesting Marxian things with or without the M word, but that they’re bypassing and bypassed-by the academy, meaning they’re unlikely to have registered with the author (and some mentioned authorities) here.
posted by Joeruckus at 9:26 AM on January 9 [5 favorites]

American socialism exists to service capitalism.

I don't think public works constitute socialism. Kingdoms have roads, too.
posted by CheeseDigestsAll at 12:06 PM on January 9 [6 favorites]

Oops, hit return too fast. Even the Nazis had a national healthcare system.

Socialism is about control over the means of production. The closest thing we have are unions, and they don't have much say in anything other than salaries.
posted by CheeseDigestsAll at 12:09 PM on January 9 [3 favorites]

anything other than salaries

[local 812:]

There are five overall issues to be committed to a contract during negotiations, listed here with examples of options:

1. WAGES: (pay, bonuses, stipends for certifications, etc.).

2. BENEFITS: (medical, retirement, dental, optical, life).

3. WORKING CONDITIONS: (work rules and procedures, employee productivity, mechanisms for discussing workplace problems).

4. JOB PROTECTIONS: (right to a fair, independent hearing process if unfairly disciplined or terminated, right to layoff and recall seniority rules, right to negotiate disciplinary procedures).

5. TIME-OFF: (vacations, sick and personal days, holidays, funeral leave, jury duty).

posted by HearHere at 1:18 PM on January 9 [4 favorites]

There are five overall issues...

Ok, point taken, but there's not much related to corporate decision making. In Norway, for example, they are guaranteed a right to representation on the board of directors.
posted by CheeseDigestsAll at 3:21 PM on January 9 [5 favorites]

The bit about Trotskyist’s veering to the right midcentury is fascinating in light of todays tankies and MAGA communists. There’s a book idea right there. One that will never be read outside of academia.
posted by misterpatrick at 5:09 PM on January 9 [1 favorite]

As I've mentioned elsewhere, the Mondragon cooperative in Spain—one of Europe's largest producers of appliances—operates on Marxian economic principles, and the website https://www.communityeconomies.org traces and links non-capitalist enterprises and activities. IMO, Marx's future view of ideal communism was a product of his Industrial Revolution context, just like the 1950s gave us science-fiction views of flying cars. However, I think Marx's critique—that capitalism has an inherent tendency toward crisis, based on the inequality between labor and capital—has been borne out through many, increasingly frequent large-scale economic crises as the volume and speed of capital's flows has increased. Others have different perspectives, I'm well aware. Mondragon and the Community Economies folks both operate on a reading of Volume 2 of Capital that looks at who appropriates the value of different folks' labor: capitalist appropriation is capitalist, but there are plenty of nonmarket and alternative-market forms of appropriation, from barter to gift to government work to feudal and enslavement economies: there's a strong case to be made that patriarchal family organizations where women perform domestic labor are forms of feudalism, and I don't think there's anything one can call American prison labor other than enslavement, which is coerced labor sustained by violence.

IMO, saying Marx is out-of-date is like saying Muhammad and Confucius and Sappho are out-of-date: well, yeah. But we wouldn't think the ways we do today without them, and their ideas are still worth paying attention to.

tl;dr: capitalism isn't forever or default. It was preceded by mercantilism, and it will be followed by something else.
posted by vitia at 6:33 PM on January 9 [5 favorites]

FWIW, Piketty's big book essentially offers historical documentation confirming Marx's thesis: returns on capital accumulate faster than returns on labor.
posted by vitia at 6:38 PM on January 9 [4 favorites]

OK, last comment, I promise: the author, Russell Jacoby, went to U of Wisconsin at Madison, he's in the humanities, and he operates—as does his article—more as a cultural critic of academia than as a critic of Marxian economics. (C'mon, he calls himself a "rogue academic." LOL.) So he cherry-picks the hell out of his examples. He offers a glancing reference, for example, to the gender dynamics of academic Marxism, but has zero insight about how the Marxian critique led to aspects of feminist economics that have had profound effects on studies of GNP and other phenomena—see, for example the work of feminist economist Duncan Ironmonger, development economist Timothy Mitchell, and even (I admit I'm reaching a bit here, but not much) the anti-Malthusian work of Elinor Ostrom. Jacoby dismisses Marxism because he isn't looking very hard for it.
posted by vitia at 6:54 PM on January 9 [5 favorites]

Whether the study of Marx is relevant to everyday life and people only has a merit-based connection to whether Marx is treated prominently in academia if you see the incentive structure driving academia as having a clean separation with the political economy as it exists, a political economy where, for example, most university income is sourced from financial speculation over endowments, and grant income is highly conditioned on both friendliness to those endowments and to the overall State that controls their disbursement. I, personally, think that is a nonsense idea, despite being common to the point that most people probably have no idea they hold that assumption to begin with.
posted by Slitherrr at 8:34 PM on January 9 [4 favorites]

Marx is outdated as an economist and a social critic. He reflected the dominant metalism of his time, which was an international contest that led to Africa being targeted for its gold. Marx was a metalist himself, and a colonialist. He believed communism was the next stage of modern industrial society, so everyone should advance sequentially. He was racially critical of Africans. His main economics was rejected for institutionalized central banking and modern currency where redistribution of money was a social goal and is democratically achievable. But even this progress has been stymied by bad associations with the confiscation of real property to be held in common, or Marx's outdated conception of redistribution. His sociology of class opposition promoted the term proletariat, which literally translates as "breeders" or those who produce offspring. His academic feud with Malthus led to his lifelong efforts to remove any blame from overpopulating. His main prophecy of inevitable communism was ill-founded on a dialectic that he invented, as a pseudo-logic. Marxism gave rise to a categorical hate and violence commonly seen between fanatical dogmatic sects, whether he intended it or not. His net influence on the human attitude towards each other has been firm opposition from adherents of faith against social reform, and the demonizing of atheism as synonymous with adherence to Marx.
posted by Brian B. at 11:09 AM on January 11

Ha. Christianity didn't need Marx to demonize atheism. And nowadays they take that literally. But Marx's comment about religion being the opiate of the masses wasn't a call to atheism, it was decrying the passivity brought on by believing your reward was in the next world. Marx didn't believe you should suffer injustice, but rise up against it, not wait for a better life in the hearafter.
posted by CheeseDigestsAll at 3:11 PM on January 11

CheeseDigestsAll, as far as Marx is quotable that's pretty much the one line that most people recall, and one I can agree with. (His slogan outlining the utility of the individual from abilities to needs describes slavery, though intended to describe communism). Christian fundamentalism owes its modern existence to Marx. They responded to an existential threat by demanding that people take their own beliefs literally and politically, because communism replaces Christianity, per your comment. But where Marxism was disproved on the details, such as the labor theory of value or diminishing returns on profit or state central planning, these failures are beside the main feature, which is a belief in a structured authority that establishes reward and punishment for loyalty against a constant foe, the defeat of which brings salvation or utopia.
posted by Brian B. at 6:56 AM on January 12

I'm not sure I buy that. I'd guess that it's much more a response to Darwin than to Marx. That's why you see the Catholics move away from biblical literalism whereas the evangelicals doubled down. Marx's call to activism doesn't threaten faith, believing man is just another animal dies.
posted by CheeseDigestsAll at 6:02 PM on January 12