"A Subterranean Marx"

"The tension between the personalistic vs. scholastic approaches in the book is an outgrowth of the country's tension regarding Marxism itself: as compared to the rest of the world, the United States has never had a mass communist party or even a mass-member, expressly left-wing, viable political party. There have been transformative Marxist politicians, like Eugene Debs, whom Hartman covers in great detail, but there have not been transformative Marxist political parties in the United States on a scale to impact national policy. The backlashes against Marxism have tended to have far more political significance since World War II than the actual inciting theory. What this means for the book is that Hartman devotes a substantial part not to Marxism and American Marxists per se, but to the powerful anti-Marxist political forces and intellectuals of the twentieth century. Chapters five and six, 'False Prophet: Midcentury Liberalism,' and 'Red Menace: Postwar Conservatism,' are overwhelmingly focused on anti-Marxist intellectuals and the forces of American liberalism and the American right that were united in their mutual anticommunism after World War II. At times it seems the book would be more appropriately titled Anti-Marxism in America."

Mathias Fuelling at The Baffler reviews Andrew Hartman's Karl Marx in America.