Daniel Tutt explores the intellectual trajectory of U.S. Marxism during the era of the Second International and, drawing from Brian Lloyd’s work on the history of U.S. radicalism, argues that the influence of Veblenian and pragmatist philosophy had a detrimental effect on the development of U.S. Marxist theory. Tutt, who has taught philosophy at George Washington University and Marymount University, is the author of Psychoanalysis and the Politics of the Family and an organizer of the Study Groups on Psychoanalysis and Politics. He is currently at work on a new Marxist critique of Nietzsche for Repeater Books.
‘The Struggle for Industrial Liberty’ by Art Young (1913)
I’ve never read Marx’s Capital, but I’ve got the marks of capital all over my body.
– Big Bill Haywood
As Hegel observed fifty years ago, there is no political life in America because no social classes have yet been forced to a lower level of life than they have been accustomed to. The Americans have so far no constructive political idea, no practical aims in politics.
– William Walling
Dewey’s pragmatism was consciously an ideology of capitalist agents, the builder and active supporters of the ‘American life-style’, from the outset. And pragmatism, consciously rejecting objective examination of a reality independent of the consciousness, studied only the practical usefulness of individual actions in surroundings taken to be immutable.
– György Lukács
Introduction
To capture the intellectual landscape of a generation is no easy task, especially when it comes to Marxist thought in America, a country known for its exceptional liberal tradition and poverty of Marxist theory. Hegel famously claimed philosophy only comprehends its own time in thought. But philosophers typically don’t know the first thing about the constraints the present imposes on their thought. Marxists, on the other hand, have historically shown bourgeois philosophers something about the constraints of their time. And bourgeois philosophy has likewise revealed what Karl Korsch called “blank patches” in Marxist thought. In his 1923 work Marxism and Philosophy, Korsch stresses the engagement between Marxism and bourgeois philosophy, specifically showing how the Marxists of the Second International period (1889 – 1916) were drawn into philosophy as a response to the rejection of the validity of scientific socialism by bourgeois philosophers. The denial of the scientific basis of Marxism as an account of social reality opened a crisis in bourgeois philosophy that would pit Marxism and bourgeois philosophy in a relationship that had both antagonistic and cooperative directions. In a more optimistic reading of this encounter, Korsch says bourgeois philosophy helped Marxists better grasp the “essentially new philosophical content of Marxism.”1 At its best, the encounter helped Marxists surpass the limitations of bourgeois philosophy, while at its worst, bourgeois philosophy sapped the radicalism from the praxis of Marxism entirely.
The American intellectual scene during the Second International period was shaped by a series of encounters between Marxists and a deeply embedded bourgeois philosophy. Perhaps surprising to us now, it is essential to remember that Marxism was actually a live wire intellectual orientation in America during this time, and many of the most widely read American intellectuals retained deep socialist and Marxist commitments. The wide distribution of the New Review magazine and The Appeal to Reason publications brought Marxist debates to large audiences. In general, Marxism was en vogue in American intellectual circles due to the vibrancy of the worker’s movement and the failure of progressive liberalism to resolve extreme poverty and inequality during this wider “Gilded Age” and its immediate aftermath. The American state security apparatus had also not yet undergone its Cold War anti-communist turn which proactively censored Marxist intellectuals. This was a period in which socialist politics were alive and pulsating. It was a time in which the Marxist and socialist theorist was a crucial part of labor agitation and worker organization.
Brian Lloyd’s book Left Out: Pragmatism, Exceptionalism, and the Poverty of American Marxism, 1890 – 1922 offers the most comprehensive account of the multitudinous Marxist theory that was developed during this period.2 Marxists and socialists today must engage with Lloyd’s study and with the theorists who wrote during this time as their body of work offers important insights into often overlooked lineages of political thought that we still live with. American politics have inherited distinct ways of thinking about social power, the state, and class that were initiated by Marxists, not necessarily by liberals. By getting a better grasp on the theoretical works of these Marxists we can more readily identify some of the built-in liberal tendencies that sapped their thought and which perennially threatens to sap the radicalism of Marxist thought and practice in America, including and especially in our present time.
The period of the Second International was a time of rampant theoretical revisionism in Marxist theory not only in America but around the world. The period formed a petri dish of distinct theoretical innovation; there were dozens and dozens of important theoretical works of Marxist theory that were written during this time in America. This period was bookended by the rise of socialist parties in the beginning of the 1880s to the success of the Russian Revolution of 1917 and the tragedy of World War I. These latter events re-shuffled much of the theoretical systems that had developed, especially in America. But WWI and the Russian Revolution did not erase this intellectual ecosystem. Although eclectic and often revisionist, this should not dissuade us from taking this work seriously and studying it closely.
To ignore this period and the rich theory and practice that was developed in it would be a mistake because we face dynamics today that these thinkers also faced. For example, what is the relationship of Marxist theory to the worldview of the proletariat? How are Marxist concepts to be applied to the context of the class struggle? How do we as Marxists theorize the working class, and how do we gauge which elements within the working class are most primed for revolutionary agitation? That this period witnessed theoretical revisionism on a profound scale should also interest us because such tendencies are hardwired into Marxist thought today as we see in debates around the inaccessibility of “post-Marxism” and “academic Marxism” to workers. The line between orthodoxy, revisionism and opportunism was blurred then, similar to how it is now. Although these thinkers did not have access to the later writings of Marx such as the Grundrisse or to the entirety of Capital, it is not clear what difference having access to the mature Marx would have made on the direction of their thought.
Friedrich Engels’s comprehensive work Anti-Dühring centered the philosophical stakes of Marxism, and it codified a set of principles that were in dialogue with bourgeois philosophy at the time. Although Engels did not engage the more diverse sorts of bourgeois philosophical orientations from vitalist, positivist, Darwinist, historicist, to pragmatist forms of thought that early 20th century Marxists did, his early engagement with philosophical questions set an important precedent for Marxists. Engels’s engagement with philosophical questions created the conditions for later Marxists to also engage philosophers and to engage philosophical ideas in wrestling with legitimating Marxism and refining its platform and project. Philosophy was utilized by Marxist theorists in order to address epistemological conundrums that faced the worker’s movement. As we will see in the thought of the American Marxist Louis Boudin, his rigorous attention to the conceptual problems opened in Marx’s Capital did not sway him from adopting a fundamentally liberal historicist reading of class and a Veblenian approach to praxis. It was Boudin’s embrace of liberal conceptions of class struggle and socialism that led his thought to wind up in the dustbin of Marxist history; his attentiveness to the conceptual intricacies of the mature Marx did not dissuade him from adopting liberal positions!
The philosophy of pragmatism in the thought of William James and John Dewey as well as the American social scientist and political thinker Thorstein Veblen formed a formidable and inescapable intellectual ecosystem for American Marxists. The most devastating conclusion of Lloyd’s Left Out is that it was this philosophical ecosystem that ultimately prevented Marxist theorists from embracing the more militant aspects of the IWW when its strike wave took on greater and greater militancy. It was also, importantly, the philosophical account of Marxism these thinkers developed in concert with these pragmatist and Veblenian historicist ideas that led them to embrace America’s involvement in the First World War and to flip their Marxist commitments into a conformist liberal progressivism when the social circumstances changed.
However, their betrayals and hypocrisies should not dismiss them as “un-Marxist”. We must keep in mind that they wrote texts that were deeply influential to the wider socialist-communist cause at the time. Many of these American Marxists interacted with Lenin and the Bolsheviks and learned from international struggles having lived in European countries that had a longer history of worker struggle than America. Furthermore, the confluence of bourgeois philosophy included strains of vitalism, Darwinian historicism, empiricism, and positivism, all theoretical orientations that Marxists grappled with beyond America during this time. Lenin’s critique of irrationalist bourgeois philosophy in Materialism and Empirio Criticism is one such example of the danger that this eclectic set of philosophies presented to the socialist-communist movement at the time. However, the American Marxists who turned to these eclectic philosophies faced the added challenge that the American intellectual world was home to such a strong pragmatist orientation that engaging it proved both unavoidable and determinative on Marxist thought. This encounter affected these Marxists’ conceptions of class struggle, their capacity to predict revolutionary upheaval, and how they theorized the relation between ideas and ideals.
The Philosophical Ecosystem of American Marxism
When we draw up the intellectual itineraries of these thinkers, we must begin with the fact that they were the most serious and committed group of American Marxists during the Debsian era. They include figures such as Louis Fraina, a founding member of the American Communist Party in 1919; Morris Hillquit, founder and leader, along with Eugene Debs of the Socialist Party of America; Ernest Untermann, the first American translator of Marx’s Capital; Louis Boudin, the most rigorous theorist of the group, whose The Theoretical System of Karl Marx in the Light of Recent Criticism was published in 1907 and Austin Lewis, one of the main theorists of the militant labor organization the IWW who wrote Proletarian and Petit-bourgeois in 1912. The story of how these thinkers developed a body of theoretical work that led to support for imperialism and an abandonment of working-class struggle must be read in relation to how they incorporated philosophy into their conceptions of Marxism.
But of course, it is not only their incorporation of philosophy that explains the paucity of their Marxist theory. Part of this story must also grapple with what American historians call the “consensus view” of American history that is put forward by historian Louis Hartz in his influential work The Liberal Tradition in America (1955). The consensus view maintains that American political thought has remained terminally liberal in its orientation owing to the absence of feudal social relations in America prior to the American Revolution and to the development of the ideology of what Hartz calls “Algerism.” This ideology emerged for the first time that working class struggle began to emerge in the mid-19th century. Algerism is an ideological promise to workers that social and class mobility is possible but reliant on the paternalistic charity of wealthy patrons so long as diligent work ethics are followed. Algerism is the Gilded Age forerunner to the ideology of meritocracy and Hartz shows how it emerged at the birth of the Republican Party in the 1850s and has remained the guiding ideological consensus up to the post New Deal era and into neoliberalism. Algerism should be understood as the more originary ideology of today’s neoliberal Third Way appeals to meritocracy that the Clinton, Obama and now Biden administrations have all centered.
But the consensus view on American history is bigger than Hartz’s theory; its primary question revolves around why America has reaffirmed a liberal consensus at each juncture of its history and dissertation after dissertation are written each year to disprove—or prove—the consensus view. Lloyd’s Left Out both proves and disproves the consensus view. It disproves it in the fact that it shows that serious Marxist thought was developed in America, and that these thinkers constructed a viable alternative to the liberal consensus, even though much of their thought was abandoned. But Lloyd’s work also proves the consensus view correct in the sense that this body of Marxist thought was fated to end up in dead-ends due to structural features of the American political situation, its class dynamics, and most especially the petit-bourgeois dynamics of American intellectuals. What Lloyd’s work shows is that ideologically these liberal and petit-bourgeois dynamics were infused into American pragmatist philosophy itself and the class dynamics were an explicit agenda of the philosophy.3 Thus, when the socialist movement turned to American philosophy to resolve theoretical questions in Marxist theory, the theory they developed all succumbed to the American liberal consensus because American philosophy itself was enveloped by the bourgeois class position.
What were the main problems with pragmatist philosophy as it interacted with this wider body of Marxist thought? It was the confluence of pragmatist thinking that created a “generic pragmatism” which informed and legitimated these thinkers’ revisionist tendencies. From this general philosophical milieu, a set of philosophical premises that argued Marx and Engels’s thought was already an outdated conceptual apparatus. In other words, the most significant problem this philosophical ecosystem created for these Marxists is that it ended up making Marxism itself obsolete to the very theorists who had cultivated such a careful appraisal and reading of Marx and Engels’s writings.
In the background of this philosophical milieu were two forms of empiricism in the socialist movement at the time. The first was typified by Big Bill Haywood, the militant labor leader of the IWW when he said, “I’ve never read Marx’s capital because I’ve lived Marx’s capital on my body.” Haywood’s statement should be read as support for the “hayseed” or “pistol shot” empiricist view, an orientation that maintained that immediate sense reality provided the working class with the adequate means to advocate for its coherence as a class project. The hayseed empiricist thus opens a lineage to more vulgar forms of liberal identity politics that exist today. But vulgar empiricism was not the predominant position of the Marxist theorists at the time; the theorists rather maintained what Lloyd refers to as “sophisticated empiricism.” Instead of the quick reduction of ideas and values to material interests that Haywood and the hayseed empiricists adopted, the sophisticated empiricists such as the socialist thinker and co-founder of the NAACP William Walling are worth considering in more detail. In his work Socialism As It Is, Walling provided a survey of the world-wide revolutionary socialist movement in 1912 and he reflected a more sophisticated empiricist claim that truth does not flow from personal experience and opinion or from socialist authorities but “from the concrete activities of socialist organizations and such declarations as they made in pursuit of day-to-day objectives.”4 Walling proposed the following formula to elaborate this notion of empiricism: “modern science equals pragmatism equals socialism.”
The pragmatism of Dewey, particularly his notion of “creative intelligence” played an important role in this wider empiricist split in the socialist movement as it tied the Marxist theorists to a certain conception of social reality that saw the truths of social reality as dynamic and unique phenomena to the American situation. In addition to Dewey, Thorstein Veblen, the Norwegian-American social scientist most well-known for his theory of the leisure class and conspicuous consumption, was another major influence on these Marxists. Veblen’s notion of “habit of mind”, which led to the development of a historicism based on spiritual stages of development which only science could overcome. Veblen argued that habits were associated with cannons of truth which had “unconscious, ulterior springs of willed behavior”. This idea would lead Marxist theorists to relate to Marxist theory itself as a “canon” that was filled with a supposed dogmatism.
Darwinian historicism developed from the influence of the English philosopher Herbert Spencer was highly influential to a certain strain of socialist intellectuals of this time. This orientation had the tendency to adapt socialist thought to the context of American middle class bourgeois ideological contexts, and the most vocal of the Darwinist socialists at the time was Ernest Untermann, a major influence on Jack London’s hardscrabble socialism. Similar to Walling’s sophisticated empiricism, Untermann’s Darwinist historicism culminated in a theory of socialism that tied all development of proletarian agitation to the direction of the socialist party. But this orientation proved insufficient in the context of actual struggle when Untermann opposed the IWW in his text No Compromise with the IWW (1913) where he put forward a narrow conception of the key revolutionary agents of the working class in the industrial proletariat and supported an exclusionary anti-immigrant position. Like Austin Lewis and Louis Boudin, Untermann’s theory of class extinguished the centrality of class conflict and struggle, which led him to argue that under modern conditions making revolution was simply a matter of waiting for the development of the inevitable.
Another important thinker during this time is Morris Hillquit who articulated a theory of consciousness that was reduced to instinct and sentiment, drained of all cognitive content. Hillquit conflated class consciousness with trade unionism, and class interest with the “feeling” workers are presumed to be expressing when they go on strike. Whereas for Marx, a truly socialist consciousness had to include the concepts that make it possible to comprehend and revolutionize bourgeois society; a body of theory he had worked out in Capital.5 Hillquit’s Marxism abandoned essential Marxist concepts and his biggest contribution to Second International Marxism was the development of a liberal theory of the state in which the state was no longer conceived of as furthering the class interests of the bourgeoisie. The state was thus ideologically up for grabs in Hillquit’s conception. This neutral theory of the state was in line with John Dewey and the liberal thought of Walter Lippmann as well as the founders of the New Republic magazine who later came to wash away much of the radicalism of the Marxist radicalism in American intellectual circles. Hillquit’s vision was that socialists must enter this neutral state and advocate for workers, but his theory of the state abandoned class power within the state.
Hillquit should be seen as an important precursor to Michael Harrington and the development of his famous notion of “realignment” that would shape American socialist thought in the latter part of the 20th century up to the present. That the state can be thought of as a neutral arbiter of working-class rights and values is owed to the way Hillquit theorized working class consciousness as tied to habit and instinct. If consciousness was an “acquired social instinct,” then any conception of class activity is in a way reformable via consciousness. For example, when the progressive political party emerged as a real political force this was interpreted as the bourgeois class linking up with proletarian goals at the level of instinct and habit. That the bourgeoisie turned progressive was a sign as to the success of the already burgeoning proletarian consciousness and its influence within the bourgeoisie. The notion of a neutral state and a theory of class qua social instinct meant that many Marxists welcomed the development of the Progressive Party as a natural ally to proletarian goals when in fact it was anything but an ally to proletarian goals.
Antirevisionist Revisionism: The Collapse of Louis Boudin’s Value Theory
The most sophisticated theorist of the group was Louis Boudin, whose work The Theoretical System of Karl Marx in the Light of Recent Criticism (1912) raised the problem of revisionism within the American socialist movement. Boudin accused leading party theorists of “non-Marxist materialism” and he was not shy to deem other comrades “reformists.” As a polemicist to his fellow American Marxists, Boudin’s main argument was that “ideas and ideals, not hunger and love power the wheels of history.”6 His main contention was thus in stark contrast to the empiricist pragmatists we have discussed above. Boudin insisted that American Socialists adopted an individual as opposed to a sociological understanding of historical materialism. He wrote:
Value is something which the commodity possesses when placed upon the market and before any price is paid for it. And it is because of this value that the price is paid for it. The value is the cause of the price. Value is a social relation and is therefore determined by social conditions.
Boudin was the one American Marxist who paid the most attention to the law of value and to the scientific laws derived from the power of abstraction, insights he gained from his study of Capital. The key idea he gained from his studies of Marxist value theory was that when “society has become sufficiently revolutionized economically, these ideas become a revolutionary factor in themselves and help to destroy the old order of things.”7 In addition to his analysis of the labor theory of value, surplus value, the materialist view of history and other key themes from his reading of Capital, Boudin sought to correct a debate between the “mechanical materialists” and what he called the “moral idealists” in the Socialist Party at the time. Against the former, he argued that ideals play a role in social transformations against ideas, but ideals unhitched from Marxist political economy were only suited for dreaming. To square this debate about ideas vs. ideals, a debate which had direct bearings on the intra-class dynamics of the socialist movement of the time, Boudin argued that ideas cannot have any real independent existence as they are merely the reflection of the material world as perceived through the medium of the senses. To resolve this contradiction, Boudin turned to Veblen’s theory of “habits of mind” to work out a position he named “practical idealism” which was meant to push against the more naïve forms of idealism Boudin saw in the Socialist Party. The split within the Socialist Party was between middle-class sensibilities steeped in Christian Socialist idealism and party intellectuals who were vulgar mechanical materialists. Boudin identified middle-class sensibility as a deterrent to the consciousness of the proletariat, but he did not adopt the view of the vulgar Darwinism of Ernest Untermann–who put all of his trust in the industrial proletariat–to resolve this dynamic. Rather, Boudin advocated what he called a “monism” premised on the notion that Marxist science must be examined overall which is what drew him to write his text on Marx’s Capital.
To reconcile the problem of the internal class conflict within the socialist movement Boudin leaned on John Dewey’s idea of creative intelligence rather than remain committed to Marxist concepts as guideposts for the coming struggle:
Boudin’s orthodoxy, in short, led not to the philosophical roots that nourished the concepts of Capital but to a revised empiricism that ordained the abandonment of those concepts as soon as he confronted issues a catechism could not address.8
Boudin’s fatal theoretical position which compromised the integrity of his otherwise sound exegesis and interpretation of Marx’s Capital was his attachment to a certain telos of “corporate collectivism” that would naturally lead to what he called “Commonwealth Socialism.” Boudin argued capitalist crisis would inevitably bring about conditions of a revolutionary situation and it was thus simply a matter of waiting for the development of the inevitable. Boudin ended up preaching a “revisionist anti-revisionism” in which value theory offered him a teleological argument in which a “purely economic-mechanical breakdown of the capitalist system” will inevitably occur without antagonistic class struggle or conflict. In Boudin’s vision, the conditions of “corporate collectivism” were assumed to naturally lead to proletarian advantage because it emphasized public ownership and democratic management of industry.9 This position meant that was afforded by Boudin’s turn to Vebelenian historicism which enabled him to theorize a harmony between the developments of corporate methods of doing business and the scope of modern imperialism.10 Boudin thus ended up affirming the wider error of Second International revisionism more generally, namely that “capital can be ended by the public ownership cooperative operation and democratic management of industry.”11
Although Boudin did center the working class as the agent for the overthrow of capitalism, he theorized the working class as unique because it possessed “a mentality and psychology” that makes it “peculiarly fitted for his historic mission.” 12According to this reading of the working class, any member of the bourgeoisie did not venerate property as such but grew attached to “the independent social status which the possession of property gives him.”12 It was this Veblenian theory of class as a state of mind and habit that caused such a rigid and economistic conception of class. Boudin’s conception of how ideas are to be treated was deeply shaped by this wider milieu of Dewey and Veblen and it effectively resembled many of the same tendencies towards “waiting for the inevitable” that Darwinian historicists like Untermann also embraced. This historicism led to nothing less than the complete abandonment of the historical relevance of Marx’s concepts and ideas. Boudin:
If new ideas constitute adaptations to new conditions – and if conditions are understood in terms of an entirely novel, “industrial” situation rather than as social relations obedient to laws that operate during the entrepreneurial and corporate phases of capitalism—then any nineteenth-century thinker must, by Darwinian logic, be obsolete.13
When Veblen Replaced Marx as the Key Philosopher of Society
Although Boudin was critical of Darwinian historicists his position ended up effectively embracing the same theoretical position as theirs as a result of his allegiance to Veblenian thought. It was Veblen who cast the class struggle not as a conflict over material interests but over “state of mind.” Workers and capitalist minds are constituted differently, and it was Veblen who replaced Marx as the unique thinker of the American political situation. Veblenian metaphysics, when combined also with Darwinist thought, led to a conception of class which completely removed the central importance of the independent organization of the working class, replacing it with an idea of socialism as a vital life force. Lloyd shows that although Dewey’s thought was arguably the most influential philosophical system these thinkers turned to, it was Veblen’s wider project that led them to more thoroughly abandon Marx and Engels in ways that seriously compromised their collective project.
Robert Rives La Monte in Science and Socialism: Darwin, Spencer, Marx (1900) argued that socialism was, “lived as a vital fact of modern life for the proletariat” whereas for the bourgeois, socialism could only be lived as a cultural form of radicalism. This meant that “class feeling” was thought of in such vulgar and narrow economistic ways that the Socialist Party would in fact limit its members to people according to occupation. La Monte was a good example of a socailist whose brilliance was next to Boudin’s in terms of the theoretical work he produced, most notably being his work on nihilism in Socialism: Positive and Negative (1912). La Monte’s embrace of Veblenian conceptions of society however doomed his project and proved fundamentally incompatible with a Marxist understanding of overcoming capitalism.
Veblen’s socialist metaphysis–it is important to note that at times Veblen professed socialist commitments, and later abandoned them–argued that the idea of “constant revolution” and of “the transitoriness of phenomena” were endemic to the industrial process and therefore impressed upon the worker “by force of habit.” Therefore, according to Veblen, there was no longer any need “to preach the dialectic” to workers because revolution was a matter of “waiting for the development of the inevitable.” Veblen’s empiricist metaphysics was based on the reduction of the experience of the working class, which he tied rigidly to occupational empiricism, proved to be a vision that led those Marxists who turned to Veblen to completely refuse to defend the more abstract concepts of Marxism. Instead of treating the concepts of Marxism as necessary for furthering proletarian organization, these theorists sought to identify which part of the proletariat was endowed with a revolutionary demeanor and intelligence that allowed it to live out its historical mission. It was this choosing of the most revolutionary elements within the proletariat that would lead to these thinkers supporting the industrial proletariat as the most primed group within the proletariat for revolutionary activity. Regarding Veblen’s influence on these Marxists, Lloyd notes:
Veblen offered American anti-revisionists a way to get revolutionary consciousness without revolutionary theory, class struggle without the political economic concepts that alone make class analysis a tool of concrete social analysis.14
William James’s Influence: Granting Scientific Legitimacy to Personal Experience
The influence of William James on Marxist thought found expression in two ways. For starters, James’s The Principles of Psychology (1890) argued that the content of consciousness derives from sentiment, habit, and native propensity. James’s thought made it possible for young radicals to think that preferences for “real life” and “direct experience” were grounded in the latest scientific wisdom.15 This is owed to his major work Varieties of Religious Experience and this premise of the scientific legitimacy to personal experience, mystical states etc. became a crucial vector and precursor to the later New Left era focus on “personal experience” as the terrain of leftist struggle and contestation.
In Capitalism, The Family and Personal Experience (1976) the historian Eli Zaretsky discusses the American Second International intellectuals–bohemian artists, writers, feminists and the “Greenwich Village intellectual” scene–centered the category of “personal experience” as the locus of proletarian struggle. For these petit-bourgeois thinkers, it was their own personal experience of being exempted from wage labor and the free time that afforded which led them to the view that socialist liberation involves the freedom for workers to enhance their personal experience. Through experimentations in personal life–a category that these intellectuals were in many ways responsible for giving birth to–these thinkers ushered in a new way of thinking about socialist revolution that stands out as a historical precursor to the American New Left’s emphasis on the “revolution of everyday life” in the 1960s. The problem revolved around the way that these writers conceived of personal life as an end in itself. Zaretsky notes how for these thinkers, “personal life could be transformed without a transformation of the mode of production.”16
Libertine thinkers such as Randolph Bourne, the eccentric radical and early disability advocate as well as Floyd Dell, editor of The Masses and author of pro-feminist works such as Love in the Machine Age: A Psychological Study of the Transition from Patriarchal Society and Were You Ever a Child?, both wrote of the importance of leisure and personal experience in socialist liberation. They wrote psychological studies on the importance of play and youthfulness, which they put in opposition to the more rigid and instrumental attitude derived from the working day. They thus assigned an outsized importance to the domain of personal life and owing in large part to their Veblenian commitments, they interpreted capitalist development as ushering in a coming panacea through the increasing corporatization of American society. They did not theorize the importance of a transformation in the mode of production but rather leaned on “personal experience” as an end to revolutionary thinking and practice. They are thus some of the earliest thinkers on the American left to propose a split between a revolution of everyday life without a fundamental connection to a transformation of the mode of production. This disconnect would open a chasm on the left between the petit-bourgeois and working class that would animate later 20th century debates and arguably still does today.
What I want to suggest is that we remain attentive to the class dynamic that is implicit in this chasm and that we also recognize that psychoanalysis would be put at the very center of the debate. Given that psychoanalysis is a technique for modifying the subjective repressions of everyday life, it became a tool of petit-bourgeois intellectuals to further articulate this theory of liberation through personal experience. As a methodology of therapy and as a theoretical perspective on modern capitalist life, psychoanalysis gave credence to the view that a revolution in personal experience does not necessitate a transformation of the mode of production. Psychoanalysis would, depending on how it was conceived and proposed by the theorist, come to loom as a possible stumbling block to a more full-fledged commitment to working class struggle and agitation.
This rift over the category of personal experience as the site of revolutionary agitation became a far more significant debate with the rise of the New Left starting in the 1950s and 1960s. For the New Left, psychoanalysis was generally seen as an approach to rectifying the domain of personal experience and overcoming familial repressions but its practice and concepts have been perceived as exclusionary to the working class both due to the difficulty of its concepts and due to the fact that working class people seldom have access to psychoanalytic therapy. The Second International American Marxists’ early flirtations with psychoanalysis thus open an important prehistory to the debates over psychoanalysis on the left that we typically associate with the Frankfurt School and the New Left.
To his credit, Bourne was one of the only American intellectuals to adamantly oppose WWI and in his theoretical work he expanded James’s views on mysticism and preferred mysticism to empiricist “matter-of-fact views”. Bourne, along with John Reed, the American journalist who documented the Bolshevik revolution in Ten Days that Shook the World (1919) were some of the lone exceptions on the American socialist left who refused to support America’s entry into WWI.17 Lloyd argues that it was Reed’s distance from the petit-bourgeois intellectual scene of these Marxist theorists that led him to a position which was, perhaps paradoxically, capable of remaining more true to core Marxist principles.
Bourne argued that “our ideas are always a generation behind our social conditions” and he assigned to the category of youth a privileged epistemological place just as the revolutionary Darwinians assigned the machine proletariat a privileged place in the unfolding of the class struggle.18 Using William James’s ideas, Bourne argued that youth possessed an unmediated access to the “facts” of social experience. Children were the “first scientists” because they expressed curiosity about facts and not theories. For James, “the recesses of feeling is the only place in the world where we catch real fact in the making” and Bourne fit this conception of experience into his view of socialism and youth.19 Bourne’s centering of the experience of adolescence and youth as the vanguard of social revolution is a tremendously interesting and important precursor to later more popular liberal ideas of “youth empowerment” that grew out of the 1960s Human Potential Movement. As the historians Christopher Lasch and Eli Zaretsky point out, the emphasis on youth by these radical intellectuals was adopted in social science of the nuclear family and influenced the post-war construction of the family wherein the “experience” of adolescence was elevated as an ideal.
The Dissolution of Homegrown Marxism
The founding of the New Republic magazine in 1914 was a watershed moment for American Marxists of this period and it split the intellectual scene over America’s role in the First World War. The transition from the socialist oriented New Review magazine to the progressive liberal oriented magazine New Republic galvanized liberalism and marginalized Marxist theory. The Masses magazine led by Max Eastman, another important intellectual and later proponent of Trotskyism after WWI, was one of the primary socialist publications during this time. As a sign of the paucity of the Marxist theory that was developed during this time period, The Masses was forced to radically rebrand its mission by the time of the economic crash in 1929. The Masses underwent a total rebrand away from its petit-bourgeois revisionism with the name The New Masses, a post-war magazine dedicated to fostering working class intellectual voices specifically as an effort to correct the revisionist petit-bourgeois direction of Marxist thought and practice that took place during the Second International period.
With the intellectual dominance of the New Republic magazine there was no longer any emphasis placed on the centrality of “class rule”; rather, pragmatist social psychology conceived of class as a natural habit and this conception was now the dominant view embraced in American intellectual circles. This shift was one from a “generic pragmatism” that overcame a more “metaphysical pragmatism” wherein with the New Republic, this generic pragmatism maintained that ideas and ideology should be understood as hooked to progressing social and political changes. If Marxist theory must constantly evolve with a changing and progressing set of cultural and social ideas and opinions, this proved to be a presupposition which effectively ended Marxism in America. The thought of Dewey, Veblen and founding editor of the New Republic Walter Lippmann effectively wiped out any Marxist commitments entirely from the intellectual landscape and retrenched a pro-imperialist liberalism. But even before the founding of the New Republic this wider ecosystem of Marxist thought could not account for the radicalism within the proletariat that the IWW brought onto the scene; a radicalism that was not tied to the electoral process or to the industrial proletariat alone. It had already been immunized by liberal philosophy. The IWW militancy was brought about by a combination of immigrant laborers and more radical wildcat elements outside of trade unionism and it completely took these theorists by surprise and it was met with disdain and suspicion. When Veblen replaced Marx for Boudin—the most serious of the American theorists—this led him to formulate a tacit solidarity with the liberal progressives who founded the New Republic both in his theory of class and in his liberal historicist telos which was naively optimistic about the coming “Corporate Commonwealth.”
Conclusion
What lessons do these thinkers offer to us today? For starters, they show how arriving at a theory of class formation and class struggle is itself an ideological project that has a direct bearing on the Marxist theorists relationship to bourgeois philosophy. Imagine if Boudin was able to reject Veblen’s theory of class and abandon the vulgar telos of “corporate commonwealth.” It was not Boudin’s failure to adequately grasp Marx’s value theory that led to this tragic revisionism; it was his turn to American philosophy. The liberal philosophies of Veblen and Dewey led to an economistic theory of class which said nothing of the importance of class conflict or struggle. In adopting liberal historicism and generic pragmatism they could not adequately account for revolutionary uprisings and they could not locate or trust militant activity in the class struggle when it occurred outside of where they expected it to occur. When the IWW embraced direct action tactics, the majority of the Marxist theorists refused their tactics as unnecessarily violent. When these theorists turned to American philosophy it tended to promote a dogmatic rigidity, and they abandoned rational commitment to the application of Marxist concepts and principles in the struggles they faced.
Given that today so many critics of Marxism accuse Marxism as vulgarly “economist”, we should not shy from reminding people of this history when Marxist economism was owed far more to commitments to liberal and pragmatist influences than it was to Marxist principles themselves. Both the Darwinist historicism of Untermann and the wider pragmatist conception of mental states led to a narrow idea of class agency that was specified to highly specific occupations. After contending with this period and the thought produced by these Marxists, one might ask whether Marxists should avoid adopting philosophical orientations that compromise the materialist frameworks of understanding capitalism and class struggle that Marx and Engels developed? The answer to that question must avoid the counter dogmatic trap of a resounding “yes” because it is important for Marxists to engage in philosophy. But engaging philosophy must be done with a greater attentiveness to this history and to the petri dish of Second International revisionism and defeat. This period offers us a playbook of defeat and betrayal that must be remembered and thought-through today. The thinkers we have considered in this essay make up an important historical lineage of political thinking we still live with today. Through studying these Marxists’ work we learn how not to repeat their failures, but more importantly, we learn how to remain true to Marxist principles in a philosophical and intellectual culture that has tended–for well over 140 years–to be hostile to our principles.
- Korsch, Karl Marxism and Philosophy, trans. Fred Halliday, Verso Books, New York, NY. 2012. Pg. 47.
- Lloyd, Brian Left out: Pragmatism, Exceptionalism, and the Poverty of American Marxism, 1890 – 1922 Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997.
- This is a similar argument to György Lukács’s analysis of John Dewey’s philosophy in The Destruction of Reason (1954), wherein he paints Dewey’s thought as premised on the American businessman’s perspective and the ways that Dewey took this perspective into the core of his philosophy. In support of Lukács’s view, Dewey did shift his pragmatist philosophy prior to the First World War and began to differentiate America from German culture based on the unique individual business acumen of the American which he contrasted with the German who tends to derive their ethics from the “authoritarianism of the Prussian drill sergeant.” This shift in Dewey’s political and philosophical thought contributed to what Lloyd refers to as the inevitability of American Marxists also supporting WWI.
- 211.
- 169.
- 123.
- 125.
- 128.
- 130.
- 131.
- 133.
- Ibid.
- 136.
- 156.
- 262
- Zaretsky, Eli Capitalism, The Family, & Personal Life Pluto Press, 1917. Pg. 119.
- John Reed is the main character depicted in the film REDS (1981) directed by Warren Beatty which covers this wider period leading up to the First World War and touches on some of the intellectuals we have discussed in this essay.
- 263.
- 265.