With Karl Marx in America[i], Andrew Hartman burrows and raises molehills, creating extensive networks of historical and political ideas for our intellectual nourishment. Throughout its hefty 500 pages and nine chapters, Hartman adroitly historicizes a wide range of American readers’ uses of Marx since the mid-nineteenth century. He writes: “[T]he reception of Marx in the United States is a history of left, center, and right, sometimes all at once. Marx has served as a sounding board for Americans from every imaginable political background” (Hartman, p. 9). Hartman’s historical cast is strikingly rich and diverse. It ranges from Louis C. Fraina to Max Eastman to Sidney Hook to Raya Dunayevskaya to C.L.R. James to Dwight Macdonald to C. Wright Mills to Cornel West—and many more. This is not to say that Hartman is a completist: he avoids Richard Rorty—as he does the legendary Nancy Fraser.

To help in his historicizing of a century and a half of interpretations of Marx, Hartman posits that Americans positioned themselves vis-à-vis Marx in three main ways: the first is noteworthy for “its devotion to his classic theory about labor,” and has been used by such “figures as Eugene Debs, Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, A. Philip Randolph, and Bernie Sanders” (Hartman, p. 8); the second includes “[t]he creators of a hybrid Marx,” who adapted Marx to a “variety of American situations, by cross-fertilizing Marxism with traditions like Christianity, republicanism, populism, pragmatism, black nationalism, indigeneity, Keynesianism, feminism, and more” (Hartman, p. 8); and the third is “the array of unfavorable interpretations,” which “speaks to the exceptional degree to which anticommunism has shaped the United States” (Hartman, p. 8.). 

Hartman’s three-pronged typology usefully orients the reader as they set out, and Karl Marx, as mentioned,is a “reception history.”[ii] Reception history is a genre of intellectual history that has grown in popularity following the publications of Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen’s American Nietzsche: A History of an Icon and His Ideas (2010) and Martin Woessner’s Heidegger in America (2010). In the broadest of terms, the philosophical stance and historical approach adopted by intellectual historians who “do” reception history is that knowledge, truth, or meaning is socially, culturally, and contextually constructed rather than being rooted in a single, fundamental, and unchangeable principle or belief. In the cases of American Nietzsche and Heidegger in America, Ratner-Rosenhagen and Woessner, respectively, did not seek to excavate an “essence” or “ground” of their German philosophers, but only interpretations of these German philosophers within and utilized in shifting cultural and historical settings. Upon first glance, Karl Marx in America is one of the latest installments in this genre of reception history—that is, Hartman straightforwardly historicizes how Marx’s writings have been interpreted and put to use by three different groups of readers in the United States.

Yet, upon closer inspection, Karl Marx in America appears to deviate from and thus challenge reception history’s anti-foundational principles. Let’s work out this claim. Hartman summarizes in his introduction: “An accurate topography of Marx’s mind has been made known to the world. But this is a map that does not include America” (Hartman, p. 12). Hartman, indeed, not only enlarges that topography, but shows how readers exercised their readings of “Marx” to reflect on and make claims about “America.” He writes: “Marx the man, the myth, the legend has helped a wide range of people formulate a more precise sense of the stakes of the American project” (Hartman, p. 9). And, Hartman persuasively argues, those investments in America’s core principles and ideals have been inextricably wrapped up in capitalism. Hartman, quoting Christopher Phelps and Robin Vandome, editors of Marxism and America: New Appraisals (2021), calls this “the Marx-America Dialectic” (Hartman, p. 7). Accordingly, Hartman’s topography of the Marx-America Dialectic examines how features of this conversation were arranged; he narrates the shifting parameters of Marx’s reception in the United States.

And yet, Hartman’s characterization of his topography of Marx’s reception in America does not capture what he is fully doing in, and what imperative drives, Karl Marx in America. This is because, in Hartman’s narrative, an often-buried process, operating behind much of the map of the Marx-America Dialectic that he charts, is at work that seems to incline Hartman to stray from doctrines that guide reception histories. This underground textual activity in Karl Marx in America echoes Marx’s use of the metaphor of the “Old Mole.”

Before giving Hartman’s achievement more consideration, let us review several famous past uses of the image. In The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (1851-52), Marx drew inspiration from William Shakespeare and G.W.F. Hegel. The Bard used the metaphor of the “Old Mole” in Act 1 Scene 5 of Hamlet (1623) to represent the ghost of Prince Hamlet’s father who keeps speaking—and issuing commands—from under the stage, from the “cellarage.” This occurs while Hamlet, Horatio, and Marcellus tread the boards, trying to find a secret place to swear their oath about maintaining secrecy about their encounter with Hamlet’s father’s ghost:

HAMLET: Come hither, gentlemen,
And lay your hands again upon my sword:
Never to speak of this that you have heard,
Swear by my sword.
GHOST [beneath]: Swear.
HAMLET: Well said, old mole! canst work i’ th’ earth so fast?
A worthy pioner! Once more remove, good friends!

(Shakespeare, p. 54)

Hamlet’s “Old Mole” was not only a disparaging nickname for the ghost of his father but also a description of this apparition’s concealed efforts to work its way through the earth in order to then command the stage, make its presence felt.

In contrast to Shakespeare, whose play Hamlet told of a son Hamlet devoting himself to avenging his father’s murder, Hegel, in Lectures on the History of Philosophy (1837), used the “Old Mole” to narrate the history of the Geist, the World-spirit that unveils itself through human consciousness, manifesting throughout a society’s culture though particularly in its art, religion, and philosophy. Just as the ghost of King Hamlet operate internally and unseen in Hamlet, Hegel’s Geist persistently and silently works to bring about its perfection and fulfillment on the global stage:

All this time was required to produce the philosophy of our day; so tardily and slowly did the World-spirit work to reach this goal…[T]he Notion of Spirit, invested with its entire concrete development, its external subsistence, its wealth, is striving to bring spirit to perfection, to make progress itself and to develop from spirit…Spirit often seems to have forgotten and lost itself, but inwardly opposed to itself, it is inwardly working ever forward (as when Hamlet says of the ghost of his father, “Well said, old mole! Canst work i’ the ground so fast?”), until grown strong in itself it bursts asunder the crust of earth which divided it from the sun, its Notion, so that the earth crumbles away. At such a time, when the encircling crust, like a soulless decaying tenement, crumbles away, and spirit displays itself arrayed in new youth, the seven league boots are at length adopted. This work of the spirit to know itself, this activity to find itself, is the life of the spirit and the spirit itself. Its result is the Notion which it takes up of itself; the history of philosophy is a revelation of what has been the aim of spirit throughout its history; it is therefore the world’s history in its innermost signification. This work of the human spirit in the recesses of thought is parallel with all the stages of reality; and therefore no philosophy oversteps its own time. The importance which the determinations of thought possessed is another matter, which does not belong to the history of Philosophy. These Notions are the simplest revelation of the World spirit: in their more concrete form they are history (Hegel, p. 547).

Less than two decades after Hegel’s synthesis of the Enlightenment’s emphasis on reason and the Romantic movement’s emphasis on emotion and particularity, Marx overturned and reinscribed Hegel’s use of Hamlet’s “Old Mole.” While reviewing “materialist history,” Marx used the “Old Mole” to describe the hidden labor that drives historical change and which will, he believed, lead to the working-class revolution’s ultimate success:

But the revolution [that failed in their immediate goals in 1848 in France and elsewhere] is thorough going. It is still in process of passing through purgatory. It does its work methodically. By December 2, 1851, it had completed one half of its preparatory work; it is now completing the other half. First it perfected the parliamentary power, in order to be able to overthrow it. Now that it has attained this, it perfects the executive power, reduces it to its purest expression, isolates it, sets it up against itself as the sole target, in order to concentrate all its forces of destruction against it. And when it has done this second half of its preliminary work, Europe will leap from her seat and exclaim: Well grubbed, old mole! (Marx, p. 606).

According to Marx, the revolutionary past is not simply not dead and buried. It continues to toil and evolve internally, burrowing itself within the present. An “Old Mole,” it will, following the completion of its planning and preparation, burst through the earth’s crust, completing the revolution by newly confronting—and overthrowing—Europe’s ruling class.

Now, Hartman does not use the metaphor of the “Old Mole” in Karl Marx in America, but he suggests that it has been hard at work on two levels. The first: “[O]ur very understanding of America as it developed across the twentieth century is underwritten by a subterranean Marx,” he writes (Hartman, p. 249). Karl Marx in America, Hartman further maintains, “offers a corrective [to claims that the ‘Marx-America Dialectic’ never happened], showing that, although Marx’s ideas have not been assimilated into American political traditions, neither have they been purged, despite the best efforts of countless anticommunists” (Hartman, p. 6). Thus, for Hartman, the Marx-America Dialectic—the “Old Mole”—toiled silently behind popular historical representations of America.

Here is a specific example of the historical pattern that Hartman excavates: “Upticks in Marxism have consistently been followed by red scare” (Hartman, p. 503) Even more exact: In chapter six, Hartman examines postwar conservatism’s treatment of Marx as a menace, as un- or even anti-American. “With the help of the postwar red scare, [conservatives] nearly succeeded [in erasing Marx]. But in an irony of epicproportions, right-wing attention to Marx, even in its most conspiratorial form, helped his ideas persist, if through a dark mirror (Hartman, p. 330). Those ironies of history—or are they subterrain-driven dialectical reversals?—are familiar to us today: In the age of the social media, merely talking about the falsity of a rumor spreads it further afield.

There is also that second level of Hartman’s “Old Mole”: a number of instances in Karl Marx in America suggest that Hartman is not simply partial to the Marx known for his “classic theory about labor” but that it is this Marx that grounds and propels Hartman’s topography of the Marx-America dialectic. In fact, Hartman seems to want the old Marx of labor—marginalized, one might say repressed, as the twenty first century unfolded—to return to and for us. That Marx is the subterranean Marx—the “Old Mole”—hidden within, though quietly burrowing through, Hartman’s narrative.

For example, in chapter eight, Hartman critically exhumes how Marx was used in the 1980s and 1990s, particularly by historians and cultural theorists.He writes: “In a nation increasingly devoted to a ‘neoliberal’ brand of capitalism that annihilated the regulated New Deal version, a thousand Marxes bloomed. Marxism’s detachment from political [read: labor-oriented] channels allowed it to develop in creative ways” (Hartman, p. 394).The removal of “Marx” from so-called real politics, for Hartman, paradoxically allowed for cultural politicians—for example, Fredric Jameson—to read Marx in inventive (and albeit a-political, non-labor-based) ways.

Or consider Hartman’s eighth chapter’s section “A Postmodern Marx?”—note the question mark: there, he criticizes French-Algerian philosopher Jacques Derrida for transforming material and social interests into deconstructive texts, for, in other words, failing to engage Marx’s materialism. “[I]n a larger sense,” Hartman writes, “Derrida should be understood less as an agent of postmodern esotericism and more as a symptom of the intellectual Left’s abandonment of material concerns in favor of disembodied cultural and textual interests” (Hartman, p. 450). What’s clear from this presentation of Derrida is that, for Hartman (and a number of critics he sympathetically quotes from), Derrida harmfully sidelined the reading of Marx devoted to his “classic theory about labor.” That Derrida did so in 1993, after the fall of the Berlin Wall and collapse of the Soviet Union, reads like capitulation to capitalism—and, as Hegel might observe, indicates the harmony between the intellectual Left and the neoliberal era, as “no philosophy oversteps its own time.”

Seemingly encouraging him to stray from reception history’s anti-foundational principles, Hartman’s molelike embedding of a labor-oriented “Father of Communism” inside his map of the Marx-America dialectic is also noticeable in his analysis of Empire (2001) by Michael Hardt, the American literary theorist, and Antonio Negri, the Italian political philosopher. “Unlike those academics who viewed Marx as a paradigm provider rather than as a rebel prophet, Hardt and Negri drew inspiration from the revolutionary Marx. Yet they believed capitalism had outlived the Marxist paradigm. Their Marx had been ripped from the material that made his ideas pertinent. Empire is a byproduct of the anti-globalization movement’s detachment from working-class politics” (Hartman, p. 469). By the early twenty first century, the revolutionary working-class subject, Hartman observes, had been dropped from many readings of Marx in America. The kind of non-materialism espoused by Hardt and Negri’s and other leftisms was righteous but politically lacking if not altogether toothless: “The American Left at the turn of the millennium,” Hartman writes, “displayed sensibilities rooted in a moral Left tradition going back to abolitionism. The noble goal of the moral Left…has sometimes been achievable. But in confronting neoliberal sovereignty, moral leftism has proven poorly equipped” (Hartman, p. 466). In other words: principled leftism required and failed to secure a substance, a ground, from which to challenge the dominance of neoliberal governmentality.

Tantalizingly and, again, deviating from beliefs that steer reception histories, the Marx of labor almost peeks his head out from under the textual stage near the end of Karl Marx in America. While, like Hamlet’s father’s ghost and true to form as an “Old Mole,” this Marx haunted and issued otherworldly commands from offstage for one hundred and fifty years, burrowing beneath the visible landscape of Hartman’s topology of Marx’s reception in America, it threatens to burst through Hartman’s map and manifest itself in the present. “Reducing millennial socialism to a generational tantrum ignores the fact that many young Americans have been pushed leftward by deeply entrenched historical pressures. Although the current strike wave is nowhere near as big as the one in 1934, working-class consciousness is on the rise. Polls show unions are popular for the first time in half a century” (Hartman, p. 509). Yet Hartman himself baulks at predicting whether this all will help launch a democratic socialist revolution and finish off capitalism in America. “We may or may not,” he hesitatingly writes, “be living in late capitalism, a once popular phrase among overly optimistic Marxists” (Hartman, p. 506). In this respect, Hartman’s in good company, with Frederic Jameson, Slavoj Žižek, and Mark Fisher each having observed: “It is easier to imagine an end to the world than an end to capitalism.” Indeed, for Hartman, if capitalism ends, then Marx will paradoxically both emerge from his hole and depart. “[A] truth,” Hartman writes near his text’s end, “revealed by the long history of Marx reception: as long as capitalism persists, Marx cannot be killed” (Hartman, p. 506).

Perhaps, then, a political lesson of Karl Marx in America is not so much to be found in the reception history of readings of “Marx.” It instead might be located in the spirit of using Marx, here and now, so as to, finally set Marx free from his den. As Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak reminds us in “Global Marx?”: “What is it to ‘know’ what Marx wrote? ‘Knowing’ Marx’s writings preserves the old conviction that the idea of knowledge is knowledge about knowledge, halting Thesis 11 before its end: the supplementary task is to try to change the world” (Spivak, p. 265). Such practicing of Marxist theory, such exorcising of the specter of Marx, such excavating of the subterranean Marx, would accompany the end of capitalism—and maybe the fulfillment of long-promised and sadly obstructed principles and ideals of the American project.

And perhaps a historical lesson of Karl Marx in America is to be unearthed from Hartman’s seeming departure from and challenges to the principles that have directed reception histories. For, the “Old Mole” of the labor-oriented Marx not simply, as noted, receives Hartman’s blessing and grounds his critiques of non-labor-based readings of Marx. The “Old Mole” of the labor-oriented Marx, Hartman implies and like Marx’s revolutionary working-class in The Eighteenth Brumaire, nursed itself, quietly developing its strategies and gaining in power underneath his topology of a century and a half of Americans’ readings of Marx. Indeed, that Hartman’s introduction is titled “Karl Marx, Ghost in the American Machine” and his final chapter is titled “Specter Haunting: Twenty-First-Century Capitalism” gestures to what motivated his research and which Marxist (under)ground structures his narrative. Nonetheless, the Marx known for his “classic theory about labor” will return to a different context and thus necessarily depart from its nineteenth-century roots; this shields Hartman from accusations of harboring a naïve foundationalism. Laboring for so long underneath Karl Marx in America’s 500 pages, this Marx has perhaps now completed its preliminary work, ready to compel readers of Hartman’s text to jump off the couch and exclaim: “Well grubbed, old mole! My how you’ve changed!”

References

Hegel, G.W.F. (1955) Lectures on the history of philosophy, vol. 3, trans. E.S. Haldane and F.H. Simson. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.

Marx, K. (1978) ‘The eighteenth brumaire of Louis Bonaparte’, in R.C. Tucker (ed.) The Marx–Engels reader. New York: W.W. Norton & Company.

Phelps, C. and Vandome, R. (eds) (2021) Marxism and America: New appraisals. Manchester: Manchester University Press.

Ratner-Rosenhagen, J. (2010) American Nietzsche: A history of an icon and his ideas. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Shakespeare, W. (1893) The tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, ed. E.K. Chambers. London: Blackie & Son.

Spivak, G.C. (2018) ‘Global Marx?’, in T.A. Burczak, R.F. Garnett and R.P. McIntyre (eds) Knowledge, class, and economics: Marxism without guarantees. London: Routledge, pp. 265–278.

Wickberg, D. (2023) ‘Better to receive than to give’. Modern Intellectual History 20(4): 1297–1305.

Woessner, M. (2010) Heidegger in America. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

About the author

Gregory Jones-Katz is currently a Research Associate at the Institute for General and Comparative Literature at Goethe-Universität, Frankfurt and an affiliated faculty member in American Studies at TU Dortmund. He specializes in U.S. Intellectual and Cultural History and is the author of Deconstruction: An American Institution (Chicago, 2021). His public-facing scholarship has appeared in Raritan, The Baffler, Foreign Policy, and Merkur. He is presently working on two book projects: (1) an intellectual history of theory; and (2) a cultural history of Dungeons

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[i] Parts of this essay were reworked from an earlier review published in Foreign Policy. See Gregory Jones-Katz, “Karl Marx’s American Boom,” Review essay of Karl Marx in America, Foreign Policy: The Global Magazine for News and Ideas, June 1.

[ii] For an overview of the genre, see Wickberg.