The Last Marxist

Chris Cutrone

Presented at the Salmon P. Chase Center of Ohio State University in Columbus, Ohio, February 11, 2026.

Hegel made an exception to his philosophy of history for America as a “land of the future.” He acknowledged to a friend that his model political regime of constitutional monarchy on the basis of the English Revolution was improved in the American Constitutional Republic as the ideal form of state for bourgeois civil society, with its elected monarchy in the Presidency as counterbalance to democracy, to preserve the freedom of civil society. Marx and Engels regarded the United States as the most bourgeois, democratic and free country of their time. Lenin called the American Revolution a “truly revolutionary war” and wrote in the early 20^th century that in America “freedom was most complete.”

For their part, Marxist-informed socialists in the United States such as the Socialist Party leader Eugene Debs claimed both the American Revolution and the Civil War and their political leaders as historical figures, such as Thomas Jefferson and Abraham Lincoln, to their cause and as their rightful legacy, as against the capitalist political parties, the Republicans and Democrats, falsely wearing their mantles. Russian revolutionary Vladimir Lenin greatly esteemed Debs, especially for his denunciation of U.S. imperialism and its involvement in World War I which had landed Debs in jail, and Debs returned the praise, calling himself, during the counterrevolutionary reactionary panic after the Russian Revolution and Woodrow Wilson’s Palmer Raids repression of the Socialist Party, “from head to foot a Bolshevik and proud of it.”

Later, Frankfurt School Critical Theorist Theodor Adorno, who fled the Nazis to the United States, along with his colleagues Max Horkheimer and Herbert Marcuse, wrote endearingly about his experience of American society, and upheld the American Republic’s Constitutional separation of powers and checks and balances as the model for “critique,” the free interplay of theory and practice and subject and object, in maintaining and promoting the freedom of society.

So powerful was the influence of the American Revolution that the Communist Party in the United States named its party night school for workers after Thomas Jefferson. Its leader in the 1930s, Earl Browder, famously stated that “communism is as American as apple pie.”

What was the substance of this evaluation by such prominent Marxists of the United States and the American Revolution and its legacy? Marxism understood capitalism as a phenomenon based on bourgeois society, and regarded the American Revolution as a “bourgeois” revolution. What did this mean?

First, we must step back and examine the Marxist understanding of history and how it had led to capitalism. The basic idea is that the rise of modern “bourgeois” society or “civil society” was a societal transformation on the same order of magnitude as the Neolithic Agricultural Revolution, which in Marxist terms had ushered in “class society” from the original “primitive communism” of Paleolithic hunter-gatherer communities. This was understood as the beginnings of capitalism. The Industrial Revolution was regarded as the crisis of bourgeois society and capitalism, indicated by the class division into capitalists and workers, specifically by the proletarianization of labor, in which workers no longer owned the means of production — the machines and other capital goods owned by the capitalist class. The Industrial Revolution, according to Marxism, led to the possibility and necessity of socialism — modern communism. The Industrial Revolution historically brought about the modern class struggle of the workers against the capitalists that led to socialism.

Capitalism was defined by its contradiction and crisis: the contradiction of bourgeois social relations and industrial forces of production; and the crisis of “socialism or barbarism” — capitalism was understood as the barbarization and decadence of bourgeois society, in which bourgeois principles were observed only in form and not in substance.

It is important to note that for Marxism bourgeois social relations were the social relations of labor, and bourgeois society itself was understood as the emancipation of labor from the traditional social relations of prior civilization, with its caste system, subsistence agriculture and guild-craft control of artisan production.

The bourgeois revolution was the emancipation of the rights of labor against its traditional restrictions in the previous state — the ancien régime and its official religious sanctification. In this respect, it was the rights of private production and appropriation in civil society, which was the right of individuals to pursue their own chosen labor, offering its products on the free market. But this was a social form of labor: the social relations of free exchange, trade and commerce as the form of social cooperation and community; the freely associated laborers. Trade in traditional civilization was restricted politically by the caste order, and was primarily in luxury or specialized goods for the ruling castes, and not the subsistence needs for the vast majority of people. The rise of bourgeois society was the transformation of immediate local subsistence production into production for trade and commerce. One produces not for one’s own subsistence or those of one’s immediate local community, but for trade to acquire subsistence goods for one’s own consumption from more distant others: the dependence of the majority on the commerce in subsistence goods. The exchange of traditional civilization governed by custom was replaced by trade according to worth freely negotiated according to the value of labor in the market.

This is why the modern society of production for trade and commerce is called “bourgeois,” meaning “urban” in French, by contrast with traditional civilization of the countryside where production was for subsistence in local agriculture — 95% of the population were peasants; today, by contrast the vast majority of society’s members are workers: wage-laborers. Indeed, as Hannah Arendt put it, today even a king is someone employed in a job, not by Divine status but performance evaluation of function: the 17^th century English Revolution reduced the Sovereign to the highest paid employee serving ceremonially to perform the dignity of the state.

Capitalism, arising as such in the 19^th century, was the contradiction and crisis of bourgeois society in the Industrial Revolution, in which a dynamic of replacing labor by automation introduced the business cycle of boom and bust, which was not merely a commercial crisis of supply and demand in market adjustments, but a crisis of value of wage-labor in the social system of production, indicating its potential obsolescence.

The First Industrial Revolution is conventionally dated from ~1750 to ~1850 and was centered first in Britain and then, after the French Revolution, in France and the Benelux countries — Belgium, the Netherlands and Luxemburg — and those parts of Europe, such as the western part of Germany in the Rhineland, most affected by the French Revolution. (Marx and Engels hailed from this region, Engels from a factory-owning family.) This was where machine automation first took hold and the proletarianization of labor first took place.

The French Revolution was closely associated with the American Revolution, which itself was a further development of the English Revolution of the preceding century. The French Enlightenment and the revolutionaries it inspired were noted Anglophiles, and it was not mere coincidence that the storming of the Bastille took place in the centenary year of the seating of the constitutional monarch in the English Glorious Revolution, 1689, as politically theorized by John Locke. Marx said that of the two traditions of materialism, those of Descartes and Locke, it was Locke’s that led to socialism. Thomas Jefferson participated in both the American and French Revolutions, co-writing the American Declaration of Independence as well as the French Declaration of the Rights of Human Being and Citizen, co-written by Lafayette who himself had led the French forces in the American Revolutionary War. The later leading French Utopian Socialist Saint-Simon served as a soldier in the Revolutionary War under Lafayette, and wrote of the indelible experience of freedom he had in America. The American Revolution is best understood as the continuation and radicalization of the English Revolution, as expressed by Benjamin Franklin and Jefferson’s revising of Locke’s inalienable rights of “life, liberty and property” to the “pursuit of happiness,” of which property was the mere means and not a right as an end in itself. This prepared the United States for the social freedom that made it Hegel’s “land of the future,” to be realized in the 19^th century, contemporaneous with the rise of Marxism.

British Utopian Socialist Robert Owen presented his model community ideas to the U.S. Congress, meeting with Founding Fathers and former Presidents John Adams and Thomas Jefferson, and also James Madison, as a keenly interested audience. One of the final expressions of Jefferson’s political sentiments was to endorse, in an 1825 letter to Frances Wright, the Utopian Socialist experiments underway as a means for facilitating Emancipation and Abolition as part of the greater cause of labor.

The Second Industrial Revolution is conventionally dated from 1871 to 1914 — from the Franco-Prussian War to WWI. German victory over France led to unification under the Prussian Empire, which allowed for its rapid industrialization. Contemporaneously, the Meiji Restoration in Japan and political centralization under the Emperor, triumphant over the Samurai, and the victory of the Union in the American Civil War and the abolition of slavery, as well as the emancipation of the serfs in the Russian Empire, meant that these countries saw rapid industrialization in this period. The rise of these new industrial powers produced new international conflicts in global capitalism and eventually the World Wars of the 20^th century.

Whereas Marx and Engels were individuals in a “party of two” whose ideas about capitalism and socialism were relatively limited in their influence, in the era of the Second Industrial Revolution there was the emergence of Marxism as a predominant ideology in the modern proletarian socialist movement of the working class. The new socialist parties most influenced by Marxism in the era prior to WWI were those in Germany, the United States, Russia, Italy and Japan: the countries of the Second as opposed to the First Industrial Revolution. Unlike the others, the United States was a liberal democratic constitutional republic. It was also quickly emerging as by far the largest and most dynamic and technically innovative capitalist economy in the world. The Marxists of the Second International such as Lenin and Eugene Debs understood that the future of socialism at a world scale would be ultimately decided in America.

Furthermore, in this period, the working class was greatly internationalized, with many workers migrating for work around the world, often not permanently settling but returning to their home countries after earning their fortunes. It was a smaller world at that time of original historical Marxism than we tend to appreciate. Many workers from around the world had experience living and working in the United States in this period, and they were influenced profoundly by its social freedom — much as Marx and Engels had been influenced by the freedom they experienced as exiles in France and England. Interestingly, Marx seriously considered permanently relocating to America, to which many radical political refugees from Europe had emigrated in the 19^th century, such as the “Red ’48-ers” who had fled from the failed 1848 Revolution in Germany and Central Europe — “Bohemians.” These German émigrés, with whom Marx was associated, participated in the Abolitionist Movement and the new Republican Party in the United States, whose leading newspaper, the New York Tribune, Marx regularly wrote for in the 1850s, and the Red ’48-ers served as officers in the Union Army during the Civil War and figured as Radical Republicans during Reconstruction. Later, in the period before the Russian Revolution, many leading and rank-and-file Bolsheviks lived and worked and organized as socialists in the United States. They took that American experience back with them in leading the Revolution in Russia. Many American socialists inspired by the Russian Revolution had first met the Bolsheviks in America.

As elsewhere, the contradiction between bourgeois society and its values of the rights and freedom of labor with new industrial capitalism was clearly manifest. This introduced a complex dynamic in which the struggle for socialism of the industrial proletariat was connected with upholding the older revolutionary tradition of the American and French Revolutions and the bourgeois rights enshrined therein. Just as French socialism emerged from the revolutionary tradition there, so did socialism in the United States, through both the American Revolution and the Civil War.

In Germany, the preeminent country of the Marxist-led socialist movement at the turn of the 20^th century, the working class claimed the legacy of German Idealist philosophy of Kant and Hegel, which was itself inspired by the English, American and French Revolutions, as against the capitalists: the working class claimed the intellectual and cultural heritage of the bourgeois revolution that had decayed — become “decadent” — under capitalism. This was also true in England, France and America. In this way, the struggle for proletarian socialism took up the mantle of the earlier bourgeois revolution and emancipation that had been betrayed in capitalism.

So, it is not a simple matter of proletarian socialism succeeding the bourgeois revolution in terms of leaving it behind, but of actively recovering it, struggling within the revolutionary tradition from its contradiction in capitalism. Propagandistically, this was posed as the succession of the bourgeoisie by the proletariat as the historically revolutionary — and “universal” — class. What did this express?

The universality of the bourgeois revolution suffered some severe setbacks outside the United States in the 19^th and 20^th centuries, as well as at home with the reinvigoration of slavery as a function of the Industrial Revolution, preventing it from dying out naturally as the Founding Fathers expected. Whereas there has been one continuous American Republic from the Revolution to today — however modified substantially by the Civil War and Reconstruction Amendments — France, for example, is today in its Fifth Republic, interrupted by two monarchies, two empires and a fascist regime; and the U.K. remains a monarchy, albeit constitutional (even though it was a republic during its revolutionary Civil War in the 17^th century); and Germany and Japan have been liberal democracies only since WWII. And the U.S. remains the preeminent capitalist country in the world that it became during the Second Industrial Revolution.

The modern bourgeois republic differs from the ancient republic in its respect for civil liberties and rights — the rights of civil society against the state, not observed by Ancient democracy.

The Marxist understanding of the dialectical relation between capitalism and the possibility and task of socialism means that the contradiction of bourgeois social relations and industrial forces of production poses itself most purely in the United States of America, and has done so from early on. It has not been clouded by the question raised by Arno Mayer and others about just how “bourgeois” society and politics were in Europe before recent times, the supposed issue of “feudal holdovers” in Europe, even in France as well as in the U.K. up through the Second World War — before the victorious U.S. imposed the essential criteria of the American republican system of liberal democracy onto Europe and Japan. This was not merely a function of capitalism, since capitalism has been compatible with illiberal and undemocratic political systems. The tension between capitalism and the freedom of American bourgeois society was made global in character in the “American Century” and leadership of the “Free World.” This was the intention of Woodrow Wilson’s League of Nations and realized in the United Nations system of the victorious Allies under American leadership — the Cold War erupting soon between them notwithstanding.

Just as in Marx’s and Lenin’s times, the specter of socialism or communism apparently still haunts the world, as seen in the last Millennial generation’s attempted resuscitation of its tradition. Today, it appears as the ghost of Marxism. The greatest phenomenon of a new socialist movement in recent times has taken place in the United States with the Millennial Left. In it, questions of original historical Marxism — the recovery of Marx and figures such as Lenin — have figured prominently. This was also true in the last major historical upsurge of interest in Marxism, in the 1960s New Left, which back then — as now — was influential and inspirational throughout the world. It was long understood that if Marxism is not relevant in the United States, then it is irrelevant everywhere else.

Late doubts about this speculative proposition of identical fates of the bourgeois revolution — and America as its last standing avatar — with the struggle for socialism to overcome capitalism reflect not enlightenment but its forgetting. Socialist counter-identification with America as the predominant capitalist country expresses doubts about socialism. Marx’s and historical Marxism’s clear perspectives on the foundational character of the American Revolution and central character of the United States historically in the struggle for socialism have become obscured in the present. A reactionary anti-capitalism, both on the ostensible “Left” and avowed Right, has made a casualty of America and its revolutionary history. In its 250^th year this is particularly poignant. In the recent era of neoliberalism — the Reagan and Thatcher revolution of neoliberal capitalism — the American “Left” has reached to post-WWII European social democracy as a contrasting counter-model, and capitalism has been hastily identified with Anglo-Americanism. In this, both the counterrevolutionary character of social democracy and the revolutionary character of capitalism itself have been obscured. What was forgotten is that original historical Marxism opposed the welfare state of capitalism, which was seen rightly as — intentionally — undercutting the workers’ own social capacities and struggles by making them dependent wards of capitalist politics. Instead, this counterfeiting of socialism has been accepted falsely as good coin. The Millennial “Left,” for instance the Democratic Socialists of America, has been content to accept what the Right denounces demagogically as “socialism” in the welfare state, and inverting its value positively as their own program. The original meaning of not only Marxism but socialism itself as the promised self-overcoming and transcendence of capitalism has been deranged beyond recognition. — Worse still, “freedom” has become a strangely tabooed concept, both on the “Left” and beyond. Pessimism about America expresses pessimism about socialism. It is pessimism about freedom. Choosing the pessimistic version of capitalism in “progressive” welfarism has meant doubting the possibility of socialism that Marxism originally recognized in capitalism as a self-contradictory form of freedom.

The crossroads of “socialism or barbarism” has cut through the heart of America as the preeminent capitalist country for the last two centuries. It still does. Hence, so does Marxism, indelibly. As we remember the American Revolution and its historical legacy, we are haunted by the remaining task of socialism — to realize the historic promise of freedom as the dialectical truth of capitalism. The truly emancipatory character of the American Revolution lives, however contradictorily, in capitalism, and its fate will be determined in the struggle for socialism. | §

Chris Cutrone discusses his essay “Trump’s bid for a new Pax Americana,” published in Compact Magazine, with Doug Lain.

https://www.compactmag.com/article/trumps-bid-for-a-new-pax-americana

Michel Bauwens and Chris Cutrone discuss the commons and Marxism with Cadell Last for Philosophy Portal.