American Marxism Got Lost on Campus
In defiance of predictions, American Marxism has survived and even flourished, notably in universities. This institutional base has produced plenty of good scholarship, but it’s also encouraged hyper-specialization and the use of impenetrable jargon.
Mike Davis said that academic Marxist theory “seemed to take a monstrously obscurantist turn towards the end of the century.” (Enzo Figueres / Getty Images)
“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?
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