Excerpted from the The Wiley Blackwell Companion to Chinese Communism, edited by Wang Gungwu and Richard Yarrow (Wiley, 2025)
“American Marxism exists, it is here and now, and indeed it is pervasive.” So laments Mark R. Levin in his 2021 book American Marxism. He explains that American Marxists “occupy our colleges and universities, newsrooms and social media, boardrooms and entertainment, and their ideas are prominent within the Democratic Party, the Oval Office and the halls of Congress.”
Marxists might be surprised, but Mr Levin, a right-wing commentator, finds Marxism everywhere in the United States, past and present. Marxists inspired the establishment of public schools in the nineteenth century and the Sixteen Amendment to the US Constitution in 1913, which legalized a federal income tax. The ideas of John Dewey, the twentieth-century educational reformer, emerged from “the Marxist womb.”
Unlike Levin, students of Marxism have pondered the sharp limits of American Marxism, not its reach. Of course, a definitional issue hangs over the subject. Where does American socialism stop and American Marxism begin?
Karl Marx himself sought to distinguish his ideas from other forms of socialism, for instance what he called bourgeois socialism, which was advanced by “economists, philanthropists, humanitarians, improvers of the condition of the working class, organizers of charity, members of the societies for the prevention of cruelty to animals, temperance fanatics, hole-and-corner reformers of every…
Auteur: Russell Jacoby
