Retrospective Review: Paul Buhle’s Marxism in the United States

Marxism in the United States: Remapping the History of the American Left

by Paul Buhle

Verso, 1991 (revised edition; original edition 1987)

Buhle’s book undertakes the formidable task of presenting a concise history of the experience of American Marxism, from its arrival with the German émigrés of 1848 to the Ronald Reagan era. He is strongest in his interpretation of the often contention-fraught relationship between the radicalism of the native-born socialists and that of the many immigrant communities that played such an important role in the history of the U.S. nineteenth and early twentieth-century left. Buhle’s signal concern is culture, specifically popular culture, and it tends to subsume almost all other elements here, including philosophical debates (admittedly, not a strong point in American Marxism). The survey of classroom Marxist debates in the book’s final chapter hasn’t aged well, although, as far as academic prominence goes, Buhle was certainly vindicated in the focus he placed on Frederic Jameson. Criticism &c. highly recommends.

The Marginal Marx

Marx at the Margins: On Nationalism, Ethnicity and Non-Western Societies

by Kevin B. Anderson

The University of Chicago Press, 2010, 319 pp.

Marx is journalistically rediscovered  at regular intervals, at least when business writers have to confront an economic crisis. He makes good copy. The academic intellectual consensus, however, is that Marx is no longer relevant. To them, he is either a brilliant but fundamentally mistaken critic of the excesses of capitalism’s early period or the figure chiefly responsible for the social catastrophies of the twentieth century (the late Tony Judt exemplified this attitude). An important new book by scholar Kevin B. Anderson—author of Lenin, Hegel, and Western Marxism—forces us to realize that despite the oppresive prevalence of this opinion, we may not yet even know Marx.

Marx at the Margins: On Nationalism, Ethnicity and Non-Western Societies is a thoroughgoing account of the extensive but little known writings of Marx on such diverse topics as the U.S. Civil War, the politics of Britian’s domination of Ireland, Tsarist Russia’s imperialism in the Caucasus, and early anthropological studies of India, Indonesia, and Peru (the global “margins” of the book’s title). Much of this material appeared as newspaper contributions to Horace Greeley’s New York Tribune (Marx was recruited to the paper by the Fourierist socialist Charles A. Dana) and the Viennese periodical Die Presse. An enormous amount of this writing, however, has remained not only unpublished, but also unseen except by a small circle of scholars and archivists since Marx’s death in 1883. The history and provenance of this material is another important focus of Anderson’s book.

Anderson’s argument—which in large measure he develops from currents in the work of Raya Dunayevskaya—is that the Marx scorned as an economic determinist and exclusively class-oriented thinker by the liberal intellectuals is by great lengths more sophisticated than his contemporary critics assume. So much so that Marx’s persistent investigations into the origins and history of the communal forms of property that long predate the age of capitalism are so wide-reaching that we must conclude that a profound rethinking of the idea of what used to be called “socialism” is in order.

While Marx’s critical notes on the American anthropologist Henry Lewis Morgan are known—perhaps unfortunately—through what Frederick Engels made of them in his Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State, Marx also made extensive notes on the works of lesser-known figures such as his friend Maxim Kovalevsky (Russia), J.W.B. Money (Java), John Budd Phear (India), and Thomas Raffles (India). Some of these multilingual excerpts and critical notes were transcribed (but not translated) by the anthropologist Lawrence Krader and published in 1972 as The Ethnological Notebooks of Karl Marx. Anderson indicates that these notes and others will appear in English some time in the near future as Commune, Empire, and Class: 1879-82 Notebooks on Nonwestern and Precapitalist Societies (multiple editors, including Anderson) and Patriarchy and Property: The Ethnological Notebooks of Karl Marx (from Yale University Press), edited by David Norman Smith.

The publication of these notes in English will make them available for the first time to those of us below the Olympian heights of international Marx scholarship involved in the production of the Marx-Engels Gesamtausgabe (MEGA) project.

Dunayevskaya—among the first American Marxists to single out these studies—called Marx’s Ethnological Notebooks a “trail to the 1980s” when she published Rosa Luxemburg, Women’s Liberation and Marx’s Philosophy of Revolution in 1982. Outside of the narrow realm of Marxology, what is their significance today? While the question is largely outside the scope of Anderson’s book, he does venture a brief answer to the effect that their immediate relevance to today’s world is limited, stressing the fact that the tenuously surving forms of communal ownership and production in Marx’s time have all but completely disappeared today.

However, he goes on to say:

Marx’s multilinear approach toward Russia, India, and other noncapitalist lands is more relevant for today at a general theoretical or methodological level, however. It can serve an important heuristic purpose, as a major example of his dialectical theory of society. Therein, he worked on the basis of the general principle that the entire world was coming under the domination of capital and its value form, while at the same time analyzing very concretely and historically many of the major societies of the globe that had not yet come fully under that domination.

But in a world in which both the left and right concur that humanity has no choice but to organize its material and spiritual existence on the basis of the expanded reproduction of value, an encounter with this “marginal” Marx may have the potential for an impact greater—on those who are willing to exercise the power of cognition—than Anderson seems willing to anticipate. Can a subjective “shock of recognition”—to use a phrase of Herman Melville’s that Dunayevskaya was fond of—produced by both Marx’s method and conclusions serve as the missing element in what the Russian revolutionary Alexander Herzen (who looked to the surviving communal forms of his country to serve as the basis of a new society) called the algebra of revolution? It is an open question, but in a world threatened in both the long and short term by the capital’s need to expand, humanity does not have the luxury of prolonging an answer.

Georges Henein: Egyptian poet and revolutionary

The massive ongoing uprising in Egypt provides us with an opportunity to recall an almost forgotten group of revolutionaries and artists—the Egyptian Surrealists. Robin Kelley and the late Franklin Rosemont included them in the book Black, Brown and Beige: Surrealist Writings from Africa and the Diaspora (reviewed earlier on Criticism &c.), but I recently came across a longer account of the group’s founder, Georges Henein (1914-1973), in a book called Dissident Marxism: Past Voices for Present Times, by Dave Renton.

Renton’s book profiles a rather idiosyncratic list of figures from the Marxist tradition (does Karl Korsch deserve to be lumped together with Harry Braverman?), but he does deserve credit for choosing to include Henein, who is virtually unknown in the English-speaking world.

Henein’s father was a Coptic Egyptian and his mother was Italian. This background may have provided Henein with a sense of otherness that responded to Surrealism, which he encountered in Paris as a young poet and  intellectual. He brought word of Surrealism back with him to Egypt, where he founded a series of groups that evolved into a tiny but independent counter to both the Stalinists and the Arab nationalists. The group, at first named Art and Freedom, then Bread and Freedom, considered itself Trotskyist in orientation and Renton provides excerpts from correspondence with figures of British Trotskyism. Henein and his comrades were distinguished by their internationalism and their refusal to practice the grand-scale class collaboration of the Stalinist parties of the colonial world.

State oppression seriously impeded the activities of the group and Henein left Egypt for Paris sometime in 1946. His development roughly paralleled that of André Breton, who while remaining a revolutionary and—in the broadest sense of the term—a Marxist, grew estranged from the Trotskyists. Henein was a signatory to Inaugural Rupture, the important Surrealist thesis of 1947 which outlines this position (Henein also signed the Surrealist denunciation of the Moscow Trials).

Renton mentions a fascinating work written as a response to the dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima titled The Prestige of Terror, which, like Breton’s Arcanum 17, condemned the discrepancy between the rhetoric of liberation of the close of World War II and the reality of class and racial oppression that characterized the societies of the victorious democracies.

At a time when the door to freedom in Egypt may be opening—however fleetingly—an encounter with this unjustly neglected poet and revolutionary might be a contribution to the struggle.

On the Paths of Breton’s Late Period: Constellations of Miró, Breton

Constellations of Miró, Breton

By Paul Hammond

City Lights Books, 2000

The period spanning André Breton’s return to France in 1946 to his death in 1966 is too often dismissed by critics as a mere coda to the productive decades of the twenties and thirties. This attitude essentially obscures a third of Breton’s life, drawing a curtain over significant political, poetic, and critical contributions (see the content of Free Rein for a sampling of Breton’s work during these years). Constellations of Miró, Breton by Paul Hammond (published in 2000), which focuses on twenty-two poems written by Breton in 1958 to accompany a series of gouaches by the Catalan artist Joan Miró, is an important argument against this interpretation.

Hammond, editor of The Shadow and Its Shadow: Surrealist Writings on the Cinema, opens his narrative with Germany’s invasion of France in 1940 and follows the trail of two of the millions of people involuntarily displaced by the war: Breton and Miró. Breton and his family eventually made their way to the U.S. (by way of Martinique), while Miró went first to the island of Mallorca, then to Catalonia. It was in these two places that he created the remarkable series of artworks that were to inspire Breton years later.

Hammond places Breton’s poems deeply in the context of what can be called the esoterism of this last period of his work, although the significant political efforts of the Surrealists in these years are not ignored (see excerpt below). Along these lines, the distinction between “historic” and “eternal” Surrealism is taken up in a discussion of L’Art Magique, a major still-untranslated work of Breton, a book Hammond contrasts with the earlier Surrealism and Painting.

A piece by Breton which served as a companion to a 1959 exhibition of Miró’s works is included in the book, along with translations of all twenty-two poems. (Alternate translations of nine of the series appear in the Cauvin/Caws Poems of André Breton.) I highly recommend Hammond’s book for those seeking to comprehend Breton’s thought as a whole.

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Excerpt from unnumbered chapter of Constellations of Miró, Breton: “In the Placelessness Where Interior and Exterior Merge”

The Surrealist Group was also busy politically, giving the lie to the tired cliché that they’d regressed into apolitical mysticism. (Breton campaigned, for instance, to save five Catalan anarchists, condemned to death for their part in the 1951 Barcelona Tram Strike, from Franco’s firing squads.) In 1954 the Algerian War between the Front de Libération Nationale (FLN) and the colonizing French Army began, the Foreign Legion and paratroopers responding to FLN insurgency with a campaign of terror. Widespread protests against the war met with brutal state repression. By early 1956 France was a divided country and in the grip of fascist reaction. In May 1958 a military coup in Algiers, led by the right-wing generals Massu and Salan, brought about the collapse of the riven Fourth Republic. The ensuing referendum restored De Gaulle to power as president of the Fifth. The Surrealists had been founder members, in November 1955, of an Action Committee of French Intellectuals Against the War in North Africa. By April 1956 the anticolonialist common front—which Breton likened to the Resistance—had a membership of 600, a motley assortment of PCFers, anti-Stalinist Marxists, anarchists, Sartreans, Christians, and Surrealists. The crisis attending the Algiers putsch made publication of a review a priority, leading to Le 14 Julliet (The 14th of July), edited by Dionys Mascolo and the Surrealist Jean Schuster. (Together with Breton and Maurice Blanchot, the editors were to prepare the famous Déclaration sur le droit à l’insoumission dans la guerre d’Algérie, or “Declaration of the 121,” in September 1960.) When Breton settled down to write his Miró essay he was heavily committed to the antiwar campaign, and it is tempting to think that the actuality of political events in the autumn of 1958 resonated  with those in the fascist France and Spain of the Constellations, tincturing his gloss on the prescience of the artist’s work. Ten years before, the privileged individual/mass subject for Breton had been the outsider artist/Citizen of the World. In 1958 we might argue that, among other possible permutations, it was Miró/the Algerian insurgents.

New Category: Recommended Books

I’m adding a new category of recommendations of books that I feel merit the effort to seek them out and read them. The first selection in this category is an intellectual biography of Marx by Jerrold Seigel, a professor of history at New York University, now retired. Marx’s Fate: The Shape of a Life was first published in 1978 and was reissued in paperback by the Pennsylvania State University Press in 1993. Siegel’s most recent book is The Idea of the Self: Thought and Experience in Western Europe Since the Seventeenth Century.

Marx’s Fate is definitely an attempt at a psychoanalytic survey of Marx and his work, but Seigel has such an impressive grasp of the relevant philosophic and historic currents that even the psychological material is interesting. I don’t adhere to Seigel’s view of Marx’s economic critique, but, even so, I still strongly recommend the book.

Google Books has preview excerpt available.

Below is an interesting passage from the author’s preface to the 1993 edition.

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In the aftermath of communism’s collapse, we need to find new ways to take seriously Marx’s insistence that the promise of modern life will not be fulfilled, nor its sickness cured, until we can establish a more harmonious relationship between what he called “the free development of each” and “the free development of all.” A second reason I hope readers may find interest in this book is its sustained attempt to see Marx’s life as a meaningful whole. The collapse of revolutionary expectations has fed those currents in modern culture that cheerfully turn their backs on meaning itself, sometimes even regarding the search for it as a tactic of oppression and identifying freedom with mere play and the undermining of stable personal identities and values. To say that Marx had a fate, that his life had a meaningful, even a tragic shape, it to side against these currents, to assert that human lives can be meaningful wholes even if human history can never be made to constitute one.