Xu Liang: The Centennial Evolution and Influence of American Marxist Historiography
The academic community generally considers the emergence of Marxist historiography in the United States, in the strict sense, to have occurred in the 1920s following the founding of the Communist Party of the USA (CPUSA) in 1919; this marks exactly one century to the present day. Over the past hundred years, influenced by both domestic and international environments, American Marxist historiography has traversed a winding path of development, exerting a significant impact on both American historical scholarship and American society.
I. The Emergence and Early Development of American Marxist Historiography
As a school of historiography, the emergence of American Marxist historiography was predicated on the widespread dissemination of socialist theory. Before 1848, many European utopian socialists, represented by figures such as Robert Owen, arrived in the newly founded United States to establish various communistic experimental sites. Theories related to utopian socialism became more or less popular, making America a "second home" for utopian socialism. The publication of the Manifesto of the Communist Party in February 1848 marked the birth of scientific socialism. That same year, the revolutionary wave known as the "Springtime of Peoples" swept across Europe, posing a serious shock to the European socio-political order. Following the failure of these revolutions, the "Forty-Eighters" (referring to the group of refugees who fled to the United States after the failure of the 1848 revolutions), represented by Joseph Weydemeyer and Friedrich Adolph Sorge, continuously propagated Marxism through the founding of periodicals and other means. By the late 19th century, the contradictions between labor and capital brought about by industrialization intensified, leading to a surging wave of labor movements in American society. A batch of works concerning socialist history and labor history began to appear, laying the academic foundation, in a certain sense, for the emergence of American Marxist historiography.
After the Russian October Revolution of 1917, the dissemination of Marxist theory in the United States further deepened. On September 1, 1919, the Communist Party of the USA was formally established, marking a new stage in the development of American Marxism. A group of Marxist theorists, through their writings and theories, applied Marxist theory and methods to the investigation of American historical issues, thereby promoting the birth of American Marxist historiography in the 1920s and its rapid development in the 1930s and 40s.
As a senior leader of the CPUSA and a representative figure of the American communist movement, William Z. Foster published many works from the 1920s onward reflecting on the American labor movement and critiquing the capitalist system, such as The Great Steel Strike and Its Lessons (1920), Strike Strategy (1926), Toward Soviet America (1932), and The Twilight of World Capitalism (1949). As the "soul of the CPUSA," Foster sharply criticized the "American Exceptionalism" [1] proposed by the German scholar Werner Sombart in his 1906 book Why Is There No Socialism in the United States?, and engaged in a resolute struggle against supporters of "American Exceptionalism" within the CPUSA, represented by Jay Lovestone. In Foster’s view, the crisis of capitalism had arrived, and the CPUSA should adopt a strategy of class confrontation to lead the impending proletarian revolution; he saw Lovestone’s "American Exceptionalism" as a misjudgment of American national conditions and a betrayal of the cause of American communism.
Philip S. Foner was a representative figure of the American Marxist school of history in the 1930s and 40s. In his early years, he suffered long-term political persecution for participating in left-wing activities. He dedicated his life to the study of the American labor movement and Black history. His representative works include Business and Slavery: The New York Merchants and the Irrepressible Conflict (1941) and the History of the Labor Movement in the United States (Volume I published in 1947, with the final Volume VI published in 1982, spanning 35 years). He argued that, like Europe, the United States possessed working-class consciousness and class struggle, and that the American working class played an important role in every major historical event in American history, struggling to build a new and better society.
Herbert Aptheker was a renowned 20th-century Marxist historian of equal fame to Philip S. Foner. He long focused on the living conditions of ordinary Black people and their struggles for equal rights, writing a series of Black history works including The Negro in the Civil War (1938), The Negro in the American Revolution (1940), The Negro in the Abolitionist Movement (1941), and To Be Free: Studies in American Negro History (1948). In his view, studying American Black history to prove that Black people possessed the same qualities and aspirations as white people was an important ideological weapon against racism; showcasing the true image of Black people in American history was an essential link for Americans to understand their own past. (Wang Jiafeng: "Herbert Aptheker: An Outstanding American Marxist Historian of the 20th Century," Historiography Quarterly [2], 2010, No. 4, p. 16.)
It can be said that Foster, Foner, Aptheker, and others collectively constituted the first community of American Marxist historians. Most of them were Marxists or Communists, holding the dual identities of politicians and historians. The greatest merit of their historical research was focusing on the laboring masses, Black people, women, and marginalized people, serving the practical political struggles of these grassroots populations. This group of Marxist historians almost all held a reverent attitude toward Marxism; therefore, they are often referred to by later historians as the "Old Left" among American Marxist historians. Although Marxist historiography formed its own school in the American historical scene during the first half of the 20th century, fundamentally it could by no means be called the mainstream of American historical development at that time. In the historical writing of major issues such as the American Revolution, the Civil War, and the Reconstruction of the South, Marxist historiography was almost entirely eclipsed by the brilliance of Progressive historiography. By the 1950s, with the onset of the Cold War and the emergence of McCarthyism, the CPUSA was suppressed, and "Consensus School" [3] historiography flourished in the American historical scene, becoming the mainstream for a time, while the development of Marxist historiography was inhibited. Despite this, Foster, Foner, Aptheker, and others continued to write tirelessly, persisting in the fight through their historical writing and maintaining the lineage of American Marxist historiography.
II. The Prosperity and Flourishing of American Marxist Historiography
In the 1960s and 70s, national liberation movements in Asia, Africa, and Latin America developed deeply, and the anti-imperialist and anti-colonial struggles of the Third World achieved major victories, making Marxism immensely popular internationally. In the United States, the Civil Rights Movement, the feminist movement, the anti-Vietnam War movement, and the youth counterculture movement rose one after another, providing favorable conditions for the revival and prosperity of Marxist historiography. By the 1970s, Marxist historiography formed a feverish trend in the American historical scene. On one hand, a group of young "New Left" historians rose to prominence; to a certain extent, they used Marxist theory as a foundation to launch fierce critiques of American domestic and foreign policy. On the other hand, the older generation of Marxist historians labeled as the "Old Left"—Foster, Foner, and Aptheker—radiated new vigor and vitality in this new era [4], publishing numerous important works and achieving fruitful results. For a time in the 1960s and 70s, American Marxist historiography presented a unique landscape where the "New Left" and "Old Left" coexisted, gradually establishing a dominant position in the American historical scene, within which the "New Left" clearly played the role of the main force.
William Appleman Williams was the founder and pioneer of "New Left" historiography in the United States, and was regarded by most in the American historical community as the most persistent dissenter to launch an attack on traditional historiography in the post-war period. His historical thought deeply influenced the post-war generation of young American historians, and he was revered by many followers as "a great man of American intellectual circles." He was prolific throughout his life, writing many outstanding works such as The Tragedy of American Diplomacy (1959), The United States, Cuba, and Castro (1962), and The Great Evasion (1964). Against the backdrop of the US-Soviet Cold War, Williams and his prize student Walter LaFeber fiercely criticized American foreign policy. They pointed out incisively that the United States was a country with a tradition of expansionism and imperialism from the very beginning; its hegemonistic diplomatic behavior created a series of diplomatic crises and sowed the seeds of the tragedy of American diplomacy. They hoped the United States would abandon its expansionist foreign policy, reform domestic politics and economy, reorganize national life, establish a "balanced" domestic system, and create a "vibrant, democratic, and prosperous, world’s first true democratic socialism."
Beyond diplomacy, "New Left" historians also critiqued numerous problems in American national development from different perspectives. Regarding the Civil War and slavery, Eugene Genovese could be considered the most important representative of the "New Left." Deeply influenced by Marxism, he wrote important works such as The Political Economy of Slavery (1965), The World the Slaveholders Made (1969), and Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made (1974). He opposed the research methods of traditional Marxist historians who overemphasized slave resistance and struggle, advocating for moral evaluation from new angles—paying attention to studying slaves "from the bottom up" while also studying slaveholders "from the top down." In his view, Black slaves, as an objectively existing social class, made immense contributions to the United States, and the independent Black national culture they established greatly enriched American culture as a whole. Howard Zinn was a standard-bearer of "New Left" labor history research and a famous social activist. In his renowned book A People's History of the United States, he used the development of periodic economic crises and major historical events like the Civil War, WWI, and WWII as the warp, and the labor struggle movements in places like New York and Philadelphia as the weft, to vividly sketch a grand and magnificent picture of American class struggle. In his view, the problems existing in American society and institutions could not be solved by mere tinkering; rather, radical changes were needed to build a completely different new world.
During this period, the older generation of Marxist historians, inspired by the spirit of the times and driven by the wave of social protest, continued to produce a batch of important works, making significant contributions to exposing and critiquing American domestic and foreign policies. Examples include Foster's Historical Advance of World Socialism (1960), Aptheker's American Foreign Policy and the Cold War (1962) and The Afro-American History: The Modern Era (1971), and Philip S. Foner's American Labor and the Indochina War (1971) and Organized Labor and the Black Worker (1974).
Compared with the solitary struggle of Marxist historiography in the American historical scene during the first half of the 20th century, the development of American Marxist historiography in the 1960s and 70s displayed a high-pitched and passionate momentum. At this time, there was both the innovative development of neo-Marxist historiography and the continuity of traditional Marxist historiography; professing a belief in Marxism or attempting to use Marxist theory for historical research became an academic fashion for a time. Although they sometimes held different understandings of the concept of "Marxism," they all recognized Marxism as both a general theory for explaining the world and a method for changing it. They adhered to a "history from below" perspective, insisting on speaking for "ordinary people" and "the silent" represented by the working class, writing a vast amount of "grassroots history." (Michael Kammen, ed., The Past Before Us: Contemporary Historical Writing in the United States...)
(Michael Kammen, ed., The Past Before Us: Contemporary Historical Writing in the U.S., Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1980, pp. 24–25). Although some argued that Marxist historiography remained a minority pursuit within the American historical profession at the time, it is indisputable that the historical writings of both Old and New Marxist historians struck the strongest chord in American historiography during the 1960s and 70s. Together, they forged a heroic age in the history of American Marxist historiography. For them, this period was undoubtedly a time of lingering resonance and burning passion.
III. New Challenges and Developments Facing American Marxist Historiography in the Post-Cold War Era
With the drastic changes in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe at the end of the 1980s and early 1990s, followed by the final end of the Cold War, Marxism faced unprecedentedly severe blows and challenges. The "failure of Marxism" thesis and the "End of History" [5] narrative—claiming the final victory of Western democracy—became clamorous. The high tide of Marxist historiography, which had flourished in American historical circles during the 1960s and 70s, came to a grinding halt, falling into an unprecedented decline alongside the American socialist movement. As Hobsbawm stated: "The twenty-five years since the centenary of Marx's death have been the darkest period his legacy has experienced." [Eric Hobsbawm, How to Change the World: Tales of Marx and Marxism, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011, p. 384]. The dominant position Marxism held during the 1960s and 70s across various fields of social science, including history, gradually vanished. Similarly, in 2011, a French scholar pointed out that for the vast majority of young historians, Marx was a stranger; while for their predecessors, Marx had become a forgotten or even discarded figure. Although a "Back to Marx" [6] neo-radical trend has emerged in the West in recent years, specialized historical works are almost invisible in most Marxist textbooks and major dictionaries published over the past decade. Therefore, viewed as a whole, the historiographical community has not yet moved past the "crisis of Marxism" [Enzo Traverso, "Marx, History, and Historians: A Relationship in Need of Reinvention," Actuel Marx, Vol. 50, No. 2 (2011), p. 153].
Nevertheless, influenced by interdisciplinary research methods, American Marxist historiography—like American historiography as a whole—has shown a trend toward diversification, with the adoption of social science methods as its core characteristic. In the process of cross-pollination with philosophy, political science, sociology, and economics, Marxist historiography has taken on complex and diverse forms of cross-cultural research. Yet, its core concerns remain the reaffirmation of the importance of Marxism and the use of Marxist theory to analyze the new changes and problems of Western society in the post-Cold War era. Confronting the impact of the collapse of the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, Erik Olin Wright and others issued the call to "reconstruct Marxism" in their 1992 book Reconstructing Marxism, attempting to save the old theoretical system from collapse. Ellen Wood published Democracy Against Capitalism: Renewing Historical Materialism in 1995 and the article "Back to Marx" in 1997. In her view, globalization is the result of the development of the logic of capital as described by Marx and Engels—a logic of accumulation, commodification, profit maximization, and competition. James Glassman, in his 1998 article "Karl Marx’s Invisible Hand," also pointed out that while the world has indeed changed since 1989, Marxism is far from dead. The fundamental ideas of Marx in the Communist Manifesto remain profound in their influence across the world. Furthermore, in cross-cultural research, some scholars have linked class struggle with racial conflict, thereby exposing economic inequality in American society and injecting new vitality into the development of Marxism and socialism in the United States. Other scholars have proposed new theories of Marxist development; for instance, Nathan Rosenberg of Stanford University pointed out that American leadership in technological development has prepared the most ideal conditions for realizing socialist principles. The failure of the Soviet socialist economy does not prove Marx wrong; on the contrary, it proves him entirely correct. The Soviet Union failed to adapt technological progress and research results to the needs of its own industrial and agricultural development; by contrast, the United States occupies a far more advantageous position, making it more suitable for realizing socialist transformation. David Schweickart of Loyola University and James Lawler of the University at Buffalo proposed the concept of market socialism, arguing that socialism can only be realized through the market. They pointed out that market socialism is not equivalent to capitalism, but is the only viable path for developed capitalist countries toward socialism.
Generally speaking, American Marxist historiography in the post-Cold War era, guided by interdisciplinary methods, has strengthened its sense of reflexivity. It focuses on reflecting upon the essence, characteristics, and fate of socialism and capitalism, as well as the theoretical functions of Marxism, possessing a strong speculative nature. At the same time, it emphasizes analyzing and solving the problems faced by contemporary capitalism—especially the knowledge economy, globalization, ecological crises, and market socialism—demonstrating a profound reality-oriented nature (Nie Zilu, "Marxist Studies in the 1990s United States," Marxist Studies, 2000, No. 6, pp. 61–71; Peter Kirkpatrick, summarized and translated by Shan Feng, "American Scholars on the Current Status and Prospects of Marxism in the U.S.," Foreign Theoretical Trends, 1996, No. 14, pp. 105–110; Duan Zhongqiao, "Marxist Studies in Britain and the U.S. since the 1970s," Social Sciences in China, 2005, No. 5, pp. 47–56).
IV. The Influence of American Marxist Historiography
In a country like the United States, which many believe lacks a tradition of socialist thought, the century-long development of Marxist historiography—though full of ups and downs—has also been punctuated by brilliance, exerting a profound and extensive influence on both American historiography and society.
First, its influence on American historiography. It has cultivated a large number of outstanding radical historians, breaking the stifling atmosphere of the once-dominant American conservative historiography, opening new fields of research, and enriching the theories and methods of American historical inquiry, thereby powerfully promoting the transformation and development of American historiography. Since the founding of the nation, a conservative historical writing paradigm has always existed in American historiography. Conservative historians of different eras have taken it as their mission to propagate American nationalism and patriotism, and to beautify the harmony and consensus [7] among various social classes. In their writings, class contradictions and class struggle have never existed in American society; fairness, justice, liberty, and democracy are the basic characteristics of American social development; and the American federal union represents the future and hope of humanity. This was true of 19th-century Romantic historiography, the "Consensus" historiography of the mid-20th century, and the "End of History" thesis that cheered the so-called final victory of Western democracy after the Cold War. Correspondingly, another writing paradigm has existed in the development of American historiography: the radical paradigm. Before Marxist theory emerged and spread to the United States, the influence of this paradigm was negligible, but the emergence of Marxist historiography fundamentally changed this situation.
As the most important representative of the radical tradition in American historiography, American Marxist historiography has, since its inception, consistently maintained a resolute struggle against the conservative tradition. Using a completely different writing paradigm, it has drastically altered the face of American historiography. Drawing on the theories of historical materialism concerning the people as the creators of history and class struggle as the driver of social progress, Marxist historians have used economic analysis and a "history from below" perspective to conduct in-depth dissections and sharp critiques of the American capitalist system and society, sparking a major historiographical revolution. Carrying a sense of responsibility for the world, they focused on promoting social fairness and justice, insisting on speaking for workers, Black slaves, women, and other oppressed people at the bottom of society. They progressively opened new fields such as American labor history, Black history, women's history, children's history, the New Social History, and the New Political History, broadening the horizons of historical research. Their research results and concepts provided new directions for other historians, breaking the stifling monopoly of conservative historiography and continuously pushing American historiography forward. In a sense, the encounter and struggle between radicalism and conservatism can be seen as a main thread in the development of American historiography since the nation's founding; together, they constitute the complete form of American historical study. Without the continuous development of Marxist historiography, the absence of radical historiography would have caused American historical development to lose much of its momentum and color. In 1981, Bernard Bailyn pointed out in his presidential address: "No matter what historical research method we adopt, the Marxist viewpoint remains a powerful force for our understanding of history. History is greatly constrained by basic economic structures or 'material' structures and people's responses to them; in this sense, we are all Marxists." (The Challenge of Modern Historiography: Presidential Addresses of the American Historical Association (1961–1988), edited by the Chinese Association for American History, translated by Wang Jianhua et al., Shanghai: Shanghai Peoples Publishing House, 1990, p. 393). From this, one can see the immense influence of Marxist historiography on the American historical profession.
Second, its influence on American society. The historical writing of Marxist historians has continuously deepened people's cognition of capitalism and promoted fairness and justice in American society. As is well known, Marxism emerged within the context of Western industrial society, taking the critique of capitalist society as its academic DNA and the establishment of a fair and just ideal society as its lofty goal. Because of this, American Marxist historians have played the role of "physicians" throughout the nation's development, diagnosing and prescribing for the various ailments of capitalist society. In different historical periods, they focused on the suffering of the people at the bottom, using their pens as weapons to launch fierce attacks on institutional inequities and injustices, striving to build a more just, equal, free, and democratic America. Through their historical writing, they have often not only exposed the lies of conservative historians who beautified American society and history—stripping away the "Emperor's New Clothes" of moral brilliance manufactured for the United States to reveal cruel social realities like class oppression, racial discrimination, and the wealth gap—but they have also, through their works, continuously mobilized the masses to engage in large-scale social protest, driving the transformation and development of American society. It can be said that in the century since the beginning of the 20th century, the presence of American Marxist historians can be seen in numerous social movements, including Progressive reforms, the "New Deal" reforms, the social equality movements of the 1960s and 70s, and social innovations in the post-Cold War era. They have made important contributions to the construction of the American welfare state and to social progress.
Today, although the most radical social promises made at the founding of the United States...
The claim that "all men are created equal" remains far from being fully realized. However, viewed as a whole, it is precisely because successive generations of Marxist historians have leveled fierce critiques against American society that this social ideal has been able to remain on the path toward realization, fueled by an inexhaustible momentum. One could say that their reflections and critiques have opened up vast spaces for contemplation, continuously deepening the public's understanding of capitalism and enhancing their capacity for critical self-reflection. These historians have profoundly transformed the perspectives of millions of Americans, enabling them to reclaim their agency from the false propaganda of conservative schools of thought and politicians, and to soberly consider the direction and strategies for the innovation and development of American society.
(The author is a professor at the School of History, Culture and Tourism, Jiangxi Normal University) Web Editor: Zhang Jian Source: Journal of Historical Science (Shixue yuekan), Issue 7, 2022.