Why is this book important? What are the dominant narratives around Marx’s relationship to the US, and which narratives fall short of historical fact?

There is an overriding notion that you can’t put Karl Marx and the United States together: that Karl Marx can’t tell us anything about US history, and US history can’t tell us anything about Karl Marx. Before I started this research, I knew that notion to be wrong, but the more research I did, the more wrong I realized it was.

I want to demonstrate that Marx can help us make sense of US history, politics, economics, and the present moment. I discovered that everybody who was anybody in American history since his time — intellectuals, labor activists, politicians, writers, and ordinary Americans — had read Marx, thought about Marx, written about Marx, or tried to put Marx into action.

The number of characters in my book grew and grew. Putting Marx and US history together reveals something important about both.

What are the main inflection points in US history in terms of American attitudes toward Marx?

There have been four periods in US history when lots of Americans were reading Marx favorably. The first period was the first Gilded Age, when you see the emergence of mass socialist parties and radical labor parties.

The second period was the 1930s, which saw the worst crisis that capitalism has ever gone through, the Great Depression. Unemployment rates were 30 percent at certain points during that decade. It saw the emergence not only of the Communist Party USA, but also lots of offshoots of the communist movement. People were thinking both domestically and internationally through a Marxist lens.

The third Marx boom was the 1960s. This might be surprising, because the US economy had never been doing better, and there was a wide swath of people, especially white people, who were part of a middle class. But due to the civil rights movement and a growing left-wing movement in opposition to the US war in Vietnam, lots of people in the 1960s were reading Marx in addition to other left-wing theorists.

The fourth Marx boom is right now, since the 2008 financial crisis, Occupy Wall Street, and the Bernie Sanders campaigns. There’s been a surge of people reading Marx, writing books about Marx, participating in Marxist reading groups, and downloading David Harvey’s lectures on Capital. It’s hard to know where all this interest will go, but in all the other times in which people were reading Marx, there’s a particular way in which the Left helped change history.

Are there aspects of Marx’s influence on US history that you think would surprise readers?

Marx spent ten years of his life writing for the New-York Tribune. In the 1850s, it was his main source of income, in addition to gifts from Friedrich Engels. He authored over five hundred articles for the Tribune, which at that time was the most read newspaper in the world, with 200,000 subscribers. The Tribune was the Bible of the emerging Republican movement and the Republican Party. Abolitionists had all read Marx’s take on European politics.

Marx also wrote extensively about the Civil War. Many people who fled Europe after the 1848 revolutions came to the United States. While Marx landed in London, many of Marx’s closest friends ended up in the Union Army. They were vehement abolitionists and believed that the Union would only win the war if it made the fight about abolition. A lot of them were fighting on the Western front along the Mississippi, and Marx corresponded with them.

If you read his writings on the war, they’re pretty astute. They’re consistent with a lot of recent historiography, in terms of being extremely anti-slavery and rooted in the notion that Abraham Lincoln had to take the fight to the Confederacy and that if the war was about abolition, the Union would easily win.

I discovered that Marx’s close attention to the US Civil War — to the condition of slave labor and how enslaved people in the United States joined the Civil War effort — fully convinced Marx that one of the key aspects of capitalism was not just that profit derived from the exploitation of the worker, but that freedom required that humans have control over their bodies, their time, and their labor. You get this sense from Marx that there was a spectrum of labor from free to enslaved, and that what the Republicans called “free labor” wasn’t slave labor, but it wasn’t fully free either. For humans to be fully free, the working class would have to overthrow capitalism.

Although Marx had long understood that capitalism was dehumanizing for the worker, and although Marx and many others in Europe and the US had long compared wage labor to slave labor, a close study of chattel slavery in the United States — and even more so, recognition of the risks enslaved Americans took to get free from that odious labor regime — made their theories seem more concrete than ever.

Marx was inspired by the enslaved workers who, when they dropped their tools and fled the plantations for Union lines during the Civil War, undertook what W. E. B. Du Bois later described as a general strike. He was inspired by the abolitionists and antislavery freedom fighters who took up arms in the US Army, including many of his former comrades, the German ’48ers, and also many of the formerly enslaved. He was also inspired by the English workers who supported the Union and antislavery causes even when it threatened their own interests, a true showing of international working-class solidarity. In short, the US Civil War helped transform Marx’s theory of labor into praxis.

Where else did the United States enter Marx’s analysis?

The young Marx read a bunch of travelogues written by Europeans who had come to the US. From reading those, he came to think that socialism would come to the United States first, because in the US, all white men, even poor workers, had the right to vote. If the working class had the power to vote, why wouldn’t they vote in socialism, which would empower them?

Although Marx didn’t ever disagree with that original premise, the more he studied the United States, the more he came to realize that democracy in the US was very limited. Because of the power of capital, it didn’t extend to the lives of most of the working class. This idea always informed his work: that political democracy was bourgeois, in the sense that it offered a veneer of freedom, but until workers had control over their time and labor, they would never truly experience democracy in the full notion of the word.

You write that three distinct versions of Marx emerged in American politics. Can you walk us through those?

The most potent version of Marx in US politics is centered on his notion that we can’t be free as human beings unless we have control over our labor. That is a key kernel of Marx that you can see across much of his writings, but in particular in the chapter on the working day in Capital, which was published in pamphlet form and circulated among nineteenth-century socialists and radical labor unionists.

That idea really informed the American labor movements in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. You see this idea reemerge at various points — for example, in the 1930s, during the Great Depression. It’s also been key to the reception of Marx since the 2008 recession.

The second version is the hybrid Marx. Since the Civil War, there have been lots of Americans who have read Marx favorably, as somebody who they can learn from, but who is often seen through other lenses: through a Christian lens, which has always been extremely prevalent in the United States, or a feminist lens, or a black nationalist lens, or the lens of populism.

There was a moment in the 1930s when lots of well-regarded American philosophers were reading Marx intensively as a way to improve the world through pragmatism, which is probably one of the most important American philosophical traditions. There’s been a moment from the 1970s onward where lots of people have combined Marx with indigenous traditions. The United States is such a large and diverse country, and at almost every point, you see Americans trying to meld Marx with other political traditions.

The third version is Americans reading Marx seriously because they are anti-Marxist. Lots of people do this: libertarians, a few anarchists, communitarians, but most prevalently, liberals and conservatives. When liberal hegemony was at its peak in the early Cold War, you could not find a liberal intellectual who wasn’t reading Marx as a way to invent a liberal American political tradition. They couldn’t invent this American political tradition without disproving Marx, because Marx had been so important to the intellectual discourse.

Then you had conservatives who have always talked about Marx while not always reading him. Some of the more serious conservative intellectuals have taken his writing seriously. Others just use him as a boilerplate demon, which is incredibly common nowadays. But these conservatives have read and written about Marx not to disprove Marx — that was a foregone conclusion for them — but rather because they are interested in demonstrating that liberalism and Marxism are closely intertwined, and that the problem with liberalism is its close proximity to Marxism.

Could you talk more about Marx as a scapegoat for both liberal and conservative Americans? How does the Right use the canard of cultural Marxism, for example?

One thing I hope the book makes clear is that there’s nothing new here. Historians categorize periods in US history of deeply irrational anti-communism as Red Scares.

The First Red Scare immediately followed World War I and the Bolshevik Revolution. During that period, thousands of people were deported — which sounds very familiar. They might have been immigrants, but they were also deported for their political beliefs: their associations with socialism, communism, Marxism, or anarchism, most famously Emma Goldman. Thousands more were rounded up and put in jail. Some were lynched or executed by vigilantes. Lots of people are rightly very afraid of our current political moment, but it’s nothing new.

What historians refer to as the Second Red Scare — McCarthyism during the early Cold War — happened on a larger scale. Tens, perhaps hundreds, of thousands of people lost their jobs. Many people went to prison if there was any notion that they had ever been members of the Communist Party or associated with communism. Thousands of federal workers lost their jobs because they were gay, precisely because at that point you couldn’t be out of the closet and have a job. So petty bureaucrats working in the federal government would look at somebody and say, “That’s a prime target for blackmail.” Marx is always associated with these Red Scares.

We’re living through something similar now. In the last twenty years, anything that the Right hates, like critical race theory, is labeled Marxist, even though it’s not Marxist. The Green New Deal is labeled as Marxist, even though it’s essentially a social democratic project. The list goes on and on, and it’s gotten so bad that even Trump himself is constantly talking about Marxists. He talks about Marxist DEI [diversity, equity and inclusion] bureaucrats in the university.

There’s this widely held assumption among the Right that to be Marxist is to be anti-American. That can lead to lots of different forms of political repression against not just Marxists, but anyone who in some way can be labeled as such.

You write that we’re currently in a “Marx boom.” What does that mean? Are there specific lessons from Marx or other Marxists that could be helpful?

The billion-dollar question. Around the time of Occupy Wall Street, there were lots of young people developing what was known as millennial socialism — including the people who created Jacobin — who took a renewed interest in how Marx could explain the present world and help us overcome the neoliberal hellscape and get to something better. Some of those politics came out of the Bernie Sanders campaign.

There’s continued interest in Marx. I’ve probably read fifteen recently published books on Marx in the last decade, and if there’s a theme in these books, that theme is freedom. We’re returning to this original kernel of Marx in the United States, going back to the Civil War, which is that having to work for a living in contemporary capitalism — which is not that dissimilar from late-nineteenth-century capitalism — is a deeply alienating, deeply exploitative existence for most people. And it only seems to be getting worse. It’s really hard to claim that we’re free people, that we’re flourishing, and that we’re living up to our full potential in this context.

Lots of people have turned to Marx to understand what it is about capitalism that makes us unfree. And a time-tested answer to where we go from here is labor organizing. My faculty union finally formed two years ago, and we have a contract, and we have so much more power and autonomy over our work lives now because of that. This is just a starting point. Millions of people have to find these starting points from which to work.