To Free Labor

As a young man, Karl Marx had once contemplated moving to the United States and had even gone so far as to apply for permission to emigrate to Texas. He was never to make the trip across the North Atlantic, but his ideas did. Starting in the 1850s, several of his treatises were first published in New York, including the “Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte,” and for years he made a living as a correspondent for The New York Tribune, where he, and sometimes his frequent co-author Friedrich Engels, wrote nearly 500 articles. By the end of the 19th century, Marx may not have necessarily become a household name, but his politics had spread near and far, from the Lower East Side to Harlem, to Alabama, Texas, and California. Reviewing Andrew Hartman’s Karl Marx in America, Robin Blackburn argues that Marx’s influence on American politics crops up in surprising places: His ideas influenced labor activists and progressives at the turn of the 20th century, inspired political parties and bohemian intellectuals, and even helped spur on social movements. Blackburn finds that Hartman, in offering “a kaleidoscopic vision of Marxism in the United States in the 19th, 20th, and 21st centuries,” demonstrates how Marx, even if he never made it to the United States, has cast a considerable shadow on both the American past and present. Even today, Blackburn concludes, there remains “the question of where American Marxism fits” into US politics. Read “The Triumphs and Travails of 
American Marxism”

A Family Business

Ever since Donald Trump’s election in 2016, liberals and radicals alike have struggled to understand the meaning of his rise and the persistence of his politics. Answers have abounded, but few have traced his appeal, or his understanding of politics and the economy, to the seismic changes in American capitalism that took place in the 1970s and ’80s. As large publicly traded corporations, built around elaborate bureaucracies and beholden to shareholders, began to be replaced by a proliferation of privately held family firms and holding companies, a shift took place in American politics and culture—from following the decisions of public boards and groups to bending to the whims of single individuals often beholden to no one and operating outside public scrutiny. This system of private-firm capitalism, Melinda Cooper argues in her book Counterrevolution: Extravagance and Austerity in Public Finance, helped launch Trump’s career and explains his continued appeal. Writing about Cooper’s book, Kim Phillips-Fein argues that this shift in America’s ownership structure did something else too: It offered Trump a theory of politics, an understanding of how to run a state in which decision-making operated much as it did within the realm of private companies and firms with which he was most familiar: “Trump’s autocratic style is not just a quirk of his personality,” Phillips-Fein writes; “it’s emblematic of the type of businessman he is”—and equally of the type of capitalist economy from which he emerged. Read “How the Capitalism of the 1980s Created Donald Trump’s Theory of the State”