The vital and untold story of Karl Marx’s stamp on American life.
 
To read Karl Marx is to contemplate a world created by capitalism. People have long viewed the United States as the quintessential anti-Marxist nation, but Marx’s ideas have inspired a wide range of people to formulate a more precise sense of the stakes of the American project. Historians have highlighted the imprint made on the United States by Enlightenment thinkers such as Adam Smith, John Locke, and Thomas Paine, but Marx is rarely considered alongside these figures. Yet his ideas are the most relevant today because of capitalism’s centrality to American life.
 
In Karl Marx in America, historian Andrew Hartman argues that even though Karl Marx never visited America, the country has been infused, shaped, and transformed by him. Since the beginning of the Civil War, Marx has been a specter in the American machine. During the Gilded Age, socialists read Marx as an antidote to the unchecked power of corporations. In the Great Depression, communists turned to Marx in hopes of transcending the destructive capitalist economy. The young activists of the 1960s were inspired by Marx as they gathered to protest an overseas war. Marx’s influence today is evident, too, as Americans have become increasingly attuned to issues of inequality, labor, and power.
 
After decades of being pushed to the far-left corner of intellectual thought, Marx’s ideologies have crossed over into the mainstream and are more alive than ever. Working-class consciousness is on the rise, and, as Marx argued, the future of a capitalist society rests in the hands of the people who work at the point of production. A valuable resource for anyone interested in Marx’s influence on American political discourse, Karl Marx in America is a thought-provoking account of the past, present, and future of his philosophies in American society.
 

"A nimble study that sheds new light on Marx’s thought and enduring influence." - Kirkus Reviews, starred review

"Recent books on Marx have oscillated between presenting him as a singularly nineteenth-century figure or as a timeless savant whose ideas are applicable across all of the spaces and times of capitalist modernity. Hartman’s approach, disaggregating the man from the posthumous deployment of his later ideas, allows him to stand on both sides of that divide. The result is an astute and politically useful book about a vital strand of American intellectual thought." - Jacobin

"Students of U.S. history and thought will benefit from this study." - Library Journal

"If you’ve never read about Marx’s life, Hartman’s book doubles as a short biography; if you’ve never read The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (1852), Hartman’s book is a primer on a variety of Marx’s most cited and important philosophy. If you’ve never read Marx’s interpreters—who are many, from Kenneth Burke to Frantz Fanon and David Harvey—Karl Marx in America is a road map. But the most interesting insight in the book comes from the laundry list of Marx’s haters, and their complete inability to land a good punch on our boy." - Los Angeles Review of Books