Karl Marx, historian Hartman writes, was fascinated by the U.S. as \u201cthe nation most committed to the economic and social systems formed by capitalism.\u201d He had fleeting hope that his concept of freedom as encompassing economic independence would find a home in the U.S., even as Abraham Lincoln\u2014who, casual readers might not know, was the subject of much of Marx\u2019s work as a journalist writing for Horace Greeley\u2019s New York Daily Tribune\u2014also hoped that \u201cworkers might break free of capital and work for themselves.\u201d The alignment had enough points of difference, of course, to separate Lincoln\u2019s Republicanism from Marx\u2019s socialism and communism. Marx supported the Union and Lincoln in particular during the Civil War, if for nuanced reasons: He was adamantly opposed to slavery, \u201ca product of his firm belief that abolition was an essential step toward working-class emancipation.\u201d That is, slavery and wage slavery were not so far apart. Marx\u2019s optimism faded as Andrew Johnson, whom he called \u201cexcessively vacillating and weak,\u201d undid the higher goals of abolitionism during Reconstruction. Hartman goes on to examine how thinkers such as C.L.R. James and political figures such as Franklin Roosevelt interpreted Marx\u2019s thought in later years, the former in his radical history of the Haitian war of independence, the latter in shaping some of the planks of the New Deal\u2014for, as Roosevelt said, \u201cThere is no question in my mind\u2026that it is time for the country to become fairly radical for at least one generation.\u201d With the recent rise of populism and nationalism, Hartman concludes at the end of his era-by-era survey, it might be time again. As he writes, echoing Marx, \u201cWhat do we have to lose?\u201d<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Karl Marx, historian Hartman writes, was fascinated by the U.S. as \u201cthe nation most committed to the economic and social systems formed by capitalism.\u201d He had fleeting hope that his concept of freedom as encompassing economic independence would find a home in the U.S., even as Abraham Lincoln\u2014who, casual readers might not know, was the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":3037,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3036","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-interesting"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3036"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3036"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3036\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/3037"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3036"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3036"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3036"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}