Andrew Hartman, "Karl Marx in America" (U Chicago Press, 2025)
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Welcome to the new Books Network.

Hello, everyone. Welcome to another episode of New Books Network. This is your host, Morteza Haji Zadeh from Critical Theory Channel. Today, I'm honored to be speaking with Dr. Andrew Hartman about a very topical book that has recently been published by Chicago University Press. The book is called Karl Marx in America. Dr. Andrew Hartman is a professor of history at Illinois State University. He's the author of a

A War for the Soul of America, a History of Culture War, published by the University of Chicago Press, and Education and the Cold War, the Battle for American School. He's also the co-editor of American Labyrinth, Intellectual History for Complicated Times. Andrew, welcome to New Books Network.

Thanks so much. I'm excited to talk to you, Martesa. Thank you. And you've been on New Books Network before, so before we start this discussion about the book, I do encourage our listeners to have a look at the website and check the previous podcast that Andrew has done with us. Now, this book, Color Marks in America, is

Can you tell us the story of the conception of this book? How did you come up with the idea and why did you decide to write a book about Karl Marx in America? I guess nowadays he's... Well, at least what you hear on media, he's one of the most hated figures, at least on the American conservative or right side of the politics. Yes. So I...

About 10 years ago, I had read and reviewed a couple of books in American reception history. These were books. One was Nietzsche in America, or I think American Nietzsche is the title, by Jennifer Ratner Rosenhagen. And the other was by Martin Wassner Heidegger in America, which was a strange but interesting book. And I was kind of fascinated by these reception histories and have since read several on the

Edmund Burke, Adam Smith, John Locke. And the sort of curiosity with these books is, you know, there's this supposed notion that the United States is

has the kind of thin intellectual history, whereas Europe has a much thicker, deeper intellectual history. And so what does it look like when one of these sort of canonical European figures gets the reception of their history throughout American history is studied? I was quite fascinated by that sort of larger project.

And I noted that there had not yet been a book on Karl Marx in America. I've long been fascinated by Marx and avid Marx reader going back to my days as a young man. I had been in several Marx reading groups when I was much younger during the 1990s and

So I thought this was a chance to combine my passion with Karl Marx with my expertise in U.S. intellectual history. When I set out to write this book about nine years ago, I assumed that like the other reception history books, it might be 250 or 300-page book. Turned out to be somewhere closer to a 600-page book. I would say for two reasons it turned out to be longer, and not just because I have a lot to say, but rather because

I was surprised at how many Americans across the last 170 some odd years have read Marx, written about Marx, thought about Marx, attempted to put Marx into action or read Marx through a sort of different lens, an unfavorable lens, one of hatred. It's like, it just seemed like everybody had written about Marx. And, but also the,

I determined that in order to do justice to this history, I had to put the intellectual history of the reception history in a much sort of deeper and broader context, one of political economy, one of the labor history of the United States. And so there's a lot of labor history and a lot of political history surrounding the reception history.

That's quite interesting. And you're absolutely right that when it comes to America, you tend to hear a lot about the influence of Adam Smith, even the French thinkers, but very little has systematically been written or studied about the influence of Karl Marx. And Marx himself had never been to America, but he was fascinated with this country for several reasons. But can you talk to us generally about

how America, I mean, was it because of slavery, because America was a symbol of capitalism back then or still? Was it the reason that he was fascinated by America? And did he ever think of America as being a place maybe for either a socialist or communist utopia to come true? Yes, he was throughout his life, even from the time he was a young man, a sort of burgeoning philosopher, fascinated by America,

because the United States seemed so extreme in the way in which it practiced the things that Marx was interested in studying. To begin with, the United States from an early stage had a form of democracy, what at the time was called universal suffrage or universal democracy. Of course, it was limited, but relative to

the nation states in Europe. It was much more expansive beginning in the 1820s and 1830s when every white man had a chance to participate in electoral democracy. And Marx half assumed by reading these sort of travelogues that were common in European political discourse at the time from Tocqueville and the like, these travel writers tended to be

quite dour on the united states because they hated democracy and they feared that such sort of mass prac mass political practice would come to europe

But Marx read them sort of in reverse and thought that this was an exciting development that potentially the United States or American working class voters could usher in socialism peacefully through the vote. Marx was quickly disabused of this notion the more he studied the United States and came to realize that

The people in power, the capitalist class, the bourgeoisie had a great deal of power in the United States. And thus he came to think of American style democracy as something of a sham in the sense of like most working people didn't actually have much power over their lives whatsoever.

But he continued to sort of think about the United States. He kept up a correspondence with a number of people who had emigrated to the United States after the failed 1848 revolutions. These were people he had participated with in the German 1848 revolutions. After they failed, you know, lots and lots of the revolutionaries had to go into exile. Marx ended up in London in exile, but many of them ended up in the United States later.

Some, such as his good friend Joseph Wedemeyer, moved west, ended up becoming prominent Republican activists in the newly emerging Republican Party of the 1850s. Eventually, many of them went on to participate in the Civil War on the side of the Union on the Western Front. They were anti-slavery. And whereas many of them came to the United States in the thought that

they would hopefully return to Europe, return to Germany quickly to sort of take up the revolution again. They learned that they could participate in revolutionary politics in the United States. And because of the correspondence Marx had with them, that's how he came to think about the United States. He also was paying a great deal of attention to the U.S. during the 1850s because he was a regular correspondent for the New York World Tribune, which was the

arguably the most widely read newspaper in the world at the time. It became sort of the daily Bible of the newly emergent Republican Party. It had 200,000 subscribers. Marx became the European correspondent for the Tribune, writing over 500 articles during this time period. So he kept his attention on the United States because he had a large American audience.

And then during the 1850s, politically and personally, very disappointing for Marx. He was kind of in a state of depression, but with the emergence of the abolitionist movement and then sectional tensions that came to a head with the Civil War in 1861, he actually grew quite optimistic. So his focus on the Civil War, his focus on the...

The sort of transformation of the war cause from one of constitutional democracy that is protect the Union to a much more revolutionary cause that is abolished slavery just gave him tons of hope and he he sort of came out of.

the middle of the 1860s with much more political optimism, which then led into the publication of his first volume of Capital in 1867. And through his journalistic career, he obviously knew Abraham Lincoln and he was familiar with his ideas. Do you think that he had a lot of sympathy with his ideas in terms of maybe he agreed with his idea of republicanism?

Let's say, what was the influence of Abraham Lincoln's thoughts on Marx? Yeah, there has been some recent scholarship that has put Marx in conversation with Republican political discourse in the 19th century, specific to European Republican discourse. A great new book, Bruno Leipold's Citizen Marx Does This.

Marx did see Lincoln as, I guess, on the right side of a lot of things because he

He saw Lincoln as a representative of the democratic masses, which eventually was going to sort of overturn the Confederate planter class and usher in a new era of democracy, which would allow the working class to flourish because they would no longer have to operate in such a divided system of half free labor, half slave labor. Marx and Lincoln, of course,

saw some things quite differently. I think Lincoln's ideal society involved lots and lots of small property owners. Marx had moved beyond that aspect of republicanism because he envisioned capitalism as

putting most people into one of two classes, the bourgeoisie or the proletariat. Most people would be workers. They would have to sell their labor in order to survive. And so Marx thought that his ideal society would kind of go through capitalism to the point where the working class would eventually socialize, unionize, gain the means of production. That's a much different vision of a political system

uh, future than Lincoln had, but they agreed on a lot of things in the sense that they were small D Democrats in the sense that they were anti-slavery to various degrees. Um, and Marx saw Lincoln kind of favorably in those terms, especially compared to the sort of venal and corrupt leaders of Europe at the time. And, um, obviously, uh,

The abolition movement was close to Karl Marx's heart. And I really love this quote in your book, laboring the white skin can never free itself as long as laboring the black skin is branded. So did you see this anti-slavery movement as a step forward maybe towards workers' revolution or liberation or emancipation of workers? Can you elaborate on that idea, please? Yes.

he was anti-slavery at the moral level. You know, Marx hated exploitation in all its forms or in all the forms as he understood it in the 19th century. So he's anti-slavery at the moral level, but he's also anti-slavery at the strategic level in precisely this sense as he outlined it in Capital and other places. It

It would be very hard for the working class to organize for power in society if a good chunk of the working class was enslaved, if a good chunk of the working class was unable to sort of fight for its own freedom in the context of a larger working class.

slavery allowed the capitalist class to better exploit the working class in total. And so he expected at the end of the Civil War that the working class would have a great deal more success in organizing power. And to some extent that was true, at least for a time. The working class gained some power during Reconstruction in the South, but even more so, a newly organized labor movement gained shorter working days, both in the U.S. and the U.K.,

One of the ways in which the antislavery movement made Marx hopeful again is because he saw enslaved people fighting for their freedom

He also saw that there were lots of people joining the United States Army or the Union Army precisely for abolitionist purposes, including many of his 48er comrades. And also the British working class, despite the fact that it might have been in their interest to align with the Confederacy because their jobs were kept separate.

alive by the fact that they were producing textiles out of the cotton picked by enslaved labor in the Confederacy. The British working class, for the most part, sided with the United States and took an anti-slavery position. Marx saw all of this as sort of like international class solidarity, and it gave him a great deal of hope, and it is one of the reasons why he became such an outspoken advocate for the union cause.

I'm guessing I could be wrong, so you're the expert in this area, I'm asking. He was kind of disillusioned with the British working class at some point in his career. It seems that he had more hope, let's say, of the United States to bring about or usher in some of his ideas. Am I right? He was more optimistic about maybe because the United States wasn't a rigid, let's say, monarchy like it was in Europe.

Yeah, so his analysis kind of ebbed and flowed when it comes to thinking about the promise of socialism in the United States. As I said, because there was no aristocracy...

um marx thought that capitalism would more fully develop more quickly which to some extent maybe is true and but he and and he thought that that was a necessary precursor to socialism because it would throw the masses of people into a sort of proletariat and where they would um

where they would come together. And so when capitalism in the United States socialized production, they would also eventually socialize ownership. But on the other hand, he was quite realistic about the limitations of socialist or working class consciousness in the United States. For example, he had a theory about the West that later historians such as Frederick Jackson Turner would write about.

And that is the West was sort of siphoning off the class conflict that Marx saw as inevitable in capitalism because lots of working class people win. Like say the, the sort of smoke clogged cities in the Northeast got too full and the competition got too fierce. They could just move West. And, you know, in some of his correspondence with his comrades, he would talk about how they, they might get lost in the shit in the West. So, yeah,

His notion of what was happening in the United States kind of went back and forth, as did, I think, a lot of social thought in the 19th century about the United States. Let's move to the 20th century and New Deal, FDR, and his progressive ideas, which were obviously influenced by Karl Marx. And he was branded as a communist, and then they had the Red Scare movement.

Can you talk about the influence of Marx on American politics, especially during the Depression era and also FDR's policies? So during the 1930s, more than any other period before or since, lots of Americans read Karl Marx favorably. This is like one of the periods I refer to as the boom periods in American Marx reception.

This is the apex. And it's not surprising, given a couple of different factors. First of all, due to the Great Depression, upwards of a third of workers were unemployed, thrown out of their jobs. And whereas lots of American workers prior to that might have had a sort of like, they might have blamed themselves. There's a sort of ideology of rugged individualism, which takes hold in the United States, probably stronger than other places in the world today.

But when a third of people are out of work, they no longer are blaming themselves and they're looking for other culprits for their misery. And many began to look to capitalism in part because

They started thinking in very Marxist terms. Another major factor that led people to Marx during the 1930s is the rapid growth of the Communist Party USA. During the 1930s, hundreds of thousands of Americans joined at various points the Communist Party.

And the party was more than just a party. It became a sort of cultural movement as well. Lots and lots of intellectuals moved in and out of the party. And the sort of like militant communist spirit also shaped many of the labor unions such that 1934 is what the historian Mike Davis referred to as the high watermark and class struggle in U.S. history. There were

Lots of general strikes, including one in San Francisco that was kind of led by the dock workers. There were textile workers on strike all across the eastern seaboard from Maine all the way down to the Carolinas. There was an unruly working class fighting against a capitalism that they deemed to blame for their misery. In this context...

You see the emergence of FDR as a highly popular political figure, becomes president in 1933, and quickly moves to reshape American political economy to sort of provide order to a system that had become quite chaotic.

And FDR explicitly said time and again, and many of the people in his cabinet, his so-called brain trust, explicitly said time again that their mission was to save capitalism, to save American-style democracy. Thus, they would explicitly say they were not Marxists, they were not communists.

But also they were not fascists. So they're working against the grain of developments across Europe and elsewhere during the 1930s because the economic crisis had led to the overthrow of sort of nominal democratic systems in lots of different places. FDR, to some people, was a class traitor. He grew up in immense wealth.

but he took on some of the more sort of revanchist capitalists of his time, knowing full well that capitalism would ultimately fail if serious reforms weren't made. And then in the midst of these, if this labor upheaval you see in 1934, FDR and his administration under the second new deal of 1935 embraced, um,

new set of laws that would make it much easier, much more possible for labor unions to form, for workers to collectively organize, collectively bargain. For the first time in U.S. history at this point, the federal government, the state is no longer working at the behest of capital. It seems as if they might be tilting more to the working class or at least working in more neutral ways.

The working class, even the more militant unions, sees this as a great development and they sort of move into the New Deal fold. And so what happens is the Democratic Party in the New Deal state captures the militancy of the working class. And even the Communist Party becomes something of a junior partner in FDR's New Deal.

So my argument is not that necessarily Marx shaped FDR, but rather there was a, there was a genuine notion that if some, like if small doses of socialism weren't injected into the system, the whole system would, would crumble and fail. Um, so it was really quite brilliant on FDR's part. And by bringing the working class into the fold, it helped create, um,

one of the strongest political coalitions in American history for the next 40 or 50 years. And now, was that the beginning of, let's say, the rise of unions in the United States? I'm just asking out of my curiosity. And the unions held a lot of power until 1970s, if I'm not mistaken, it was early 80s? Yes. So there was an emergence of a very...

but radical labor movements in the late 19th and early 20th century. But they were constantly fighting an uphill struggle because the capitalist class in the United States was so powerful, probably the most powerful capitalist class in world history. And the state, whenever it intervened, was always intervening on the side of big business during any kind of labor upheavals or labor conflict. And,

All of that changed in the 1930s. The unions grew rapidly. The unions changed their entire strategy to become a little bit more Marxist in the sense that they were adopting industrial unionism so that any worker could join in the union, not just specialized trade workers. But then at the same time, when the New Deal state embraces the labor movement, the unions grow rapidly such that, yes,

for the next maybe 40 years, the labor movement is a very strong, very important component of the larger American democratic political coalition. Critics beginning in the 1940s would argue that the labor movement had lost its militant edge and had caved in many ways to the capitalist class giving up control of the workplace in exchange for like bread and butter issues, better wages.

But yes, this is the high watermark of the labor movement in U.S. history in terms of its density and in terms of its power relative to the state. All of that declines beginning in the 1970s.

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This is a fascinating book, but my favorite part of the book is when you engage with liberals. When you study liberals' engagement with Karl Marx, I always enjoy books that kind of take down liberals' caricatures, renderings of Marx, or anything that is progressive.

Let's talk about briefly maybe about how liberals engage with Karl Marx. And I'm particularly interested in one figure whom I hadn't heard of before reading your book, Walt Whitman Rostow, if I'm pronouncing his name correctly. Who was he and how did he engage with Karl Marx? And in general, what kind of liberals engaged with Karl Marx? Yeah.

So during this 1930s boom period that I already talked about, so many intellectuals were engaging with Marx oftentimes in very favorable ways. It seemed many of them sort of hid themselves away in libraries with this notion that if they could redefine Marx to fit the American context, they could solve a lot of the sort of like

questions or problems plaguing American life relative to capitalism and relative to the potential of socialist revolution.

But lots of things sort of soured many American intellectuals from the sort of like from, for example, the Soviets signing a pact with the Nazis prior to World War II, the sort of increasing knowledge of Soviet brutality. And then the Cold War itself just kind of shifts everything and

And in any way, being aligned with the Soviet Union or international communism after World War II becomes something that just isn't really possible politically in the United States. And you see a massive shift and all the sort of energy moves into what's known as Cold War liberalism or mid-century liberalism.

And what I found really interesting and I was a little bit surprised by is that almost all of these liberal intellectuals in the 1940s and 1950s

were reading Marx, engaging with Marx. It's almost like they had to perform an exorcism of sorts to invent or create an American political tradition, or what's sometimes known as the liberal tradition in this context, often as the antithesis of Marx. Marx came to represent all that was bad. Marx's ideas had failed, and America or the United States had proven Marx wrong and America right.

One of the quintessential liberal intellectuals of this sort was, as you said, Walt Rostow, W.W. Rostow. He was an economic historian who grew up in New York City in the 1930s. Like many Jews in this context, he had engaged with Marx, read Marx as a young person, and

But unlike others, he never really liked Marx, and he determined from an early age, as is revealed in his diaries, his journal entries, that he was going to spend his life trying to prove Marx wrong, trying to undo the ideas of that angry old man, as he put it.

And so his first major research project ends up being a book about economic development that becomes quite well read, quite famous in this context. And its subtitle is A Non-Communist Manifesto. And so he had clearly sort of set out to prove Mark Strong with his first major book, becomes highly influential in...

in Washington, D.C., policymaking circles, and it launches his career as a policymaker. He works within the Johnson administration specifically on development issues in what at that point is known as the third world, especially on Vietnam. So there's this notion that American foreign policy and Vietnam are the warring

the U.S. war in Vietnam is tied to some of the liberal development policies of someone like Walt Ristow, as if the world could be remade in the American image and that everybody around the world would really appreciate this. Obviously, that vision failed miserably, but it was hugely influential and it was in conversation with Marx, which is one of the reasons why I consider Marx a ghost in the American machine. Yeah.

And I guess ironic even, you also talk about the Chicago School Economist engagement with Karl Marx, which mainly ridiculed him. And you have some caricatures that they produce of Karl Marx. And they still do. I still follow some of those pages on Twitter and I see that those really

And I try to read them sympathetically to see what is a critical, let's say, reading of Karl Marx. But it seems that it's just a dismissal of his ideas without really trying to actually engage with them. And I think we also make this argument that part of the reason that, as you mentioned, Karl Marx's ghost has, let's say,

perseverance remain is because he's never completely gone. He's always there for these at least new liberals or libertarians to attack. Can you talk about the Chicago School economists and how did they actually cause Karl Marx to stay current and relevant?

So whereas the Cold War liberals read Marx in order to prove him wrong because they assumed that lots of people had been convinced of the correctness of Marx's ideas, and they were trying to sort of create an antithesis between liberalism and Marxism, this really distinct difference, the conservatives who read Marx, and as you said earlier,

Yeah.

And so like a libertarian would make the case in the case of like Hayek or Friedman or someone like that in the 1940s and 50s.

that the U.S. society and economy, much like Britain, was on the road to serfdom or was moving towards a state of authoritarianism or unfreedom because the liberalism of the nation had embraced a form of Marxism, like they were closely intertwined.

Similarly, there were all kinds of other sort of more traditional-minded conservatives, religious-minded conservatives, who believed that liberalism's atheism, liberalism's secularism, liberalism's technocracy had pushed the nation towards – had pushed people around the world towards Marxism or communism because they wanted something to believe, so Marxism became a false god. Right.

All of this is happening in the middle of the 20th century in the context of the Cold War. So there are lots and lots of negative readings of Marx all sort of working together to form the larger sort of American political discourse at a time when it became politically dangerous due to the Red Scare to read Marx favorably. Yeah.

And some of them in their writings, they cherry pick quotes from Marx or they even fabricated quotes from Marx. I guess they did the same thing with Adam Smith to make him look like he's an unrelenting advocate of free market, whereas he did ask for government to intervene. And they also warned against the rise of, let's say, the merchant class movement.

You talk about several booms, let's say, in Karl Marx in American history. You talk about the first one earlier. But do you think that recently, more recently, Karl Marx has become Karl Marx? And I'm going to use also the word socialism as well.

It has gained more traction. Anything the conservatives don't like or the Republicans don't like is leftist ideology. They even call Biden or Kamala Harris leftists, which is just nonsensical. But anyway, do you think that there has been a recent boom in Karl Marx popularity and also in socialism? And if so, why?

Is it similar or quite different in nature from previous, let's say, rising in interest with writings of Karl Marx? Yeah, so I tracked these four periods in the U.S. reception history of Marx in which lots of people were reading Marx favorably. And each one is unique, of course. The historical context really matters in terms of how it

in terms of it shaping how people in the United States, Americans are reading Marx. So like the first Marx boom during the first gilded age of the late 19th and early 20th century, they're really focused on Marx's labor theory of value in terms of how capitalism operates by extracting value from labor by exploiting labor. And so this helps shape the,

socialist and militant labor movements of the, that period. Uh, some, the reading in the 1930s is similar, except there's an even greater focus on Marx's idea that capitalism inherently generates these crises in the system because there's an imbalances in the system as capitalism looks to increasingly exploit the working class such that the working class can't really sort of prop up society anymore. Um,

The 1960s then is this third Marx boom, and this one's much different than the previous two because, as I was mentioning earlier, this is a period of economic stability. The labor unions are strong. In the United States, people would have said there was a large middle class, including lots of the young leftists on college campuses who form what becomes of the new left class.

But due to the civil rights movement, which demonstrated or proved to many young Americans that American democracy was extremely flawed, and also due especially to the American war in Vietnam, which proved that maybe the American capitalist system was violent and imperialistic,

Lots of people began reading Marx in different ways. They began focusing on sort of Marxist theories, Marxist theories of imperialism. They also focused on the young Marx who seemed sort of existential, who seemed to many of them to speak to their alienation.

So now I argue, at least since the 2008 financial crisis, we're in this fourth Marx boom period. And the evidence of this is in this huge growth of Marxist reading groups, a sort of huge growth in books, articles, books published about Marx, articles about Marx, magazines that have a Marxist orientation like Jacobin, the massive growth of podcasts,

And then the Bernie Sanders campaign and, uh,

the rapid growth of democratic socialists of America, all of which can be categorized as millennial socialism. There was like a generation of Americans who it seemed like for the first time in many decades were living lives of precarity and that they were not going to be able to attain the same sort of economic success or stability as their parents' generation. And so many in this generation, beginning with the financial collapse of 2008, are turning to the left and

They're turning to Marx. They become socialists of a sort. The intellectual history of this is the intellectual production of books about Marx and analyses of Marx is incredibly rapid and has been. To some degree, this was true in earlier decades.

But the anything written about Marx for the most part, say in the 1980s or 1990s, was very academic, very theoretical, didn't have much purchase with like any kind of working class movement, in part because working class movements didn't exist. The new reading of Marx is refracted to some degree here.

through this academic turn in Marxist studies, but it's taken on a much more sort of much more vibrancy around the questions of labor, around the questions of freedom. In part, maybe this is because so many academics, so many intellectuals now see themselves as workers because they're struggling in unions for better working conditions or just for jobs, you

at all. But also, there's just a lot more recognition of how much inequality there is. Now people are referring to our current age as the second Gilded Age. And there's been a sort of return to the question of Marx's labor theory of value and questions of freedom. It was much more difficult to sort of put Marxist thought in dialogue with freedom during the Cold War because the

Marxist states or the states that organized in the name of Marx from the Soviet Union to China to Cuba, etc.,

to many people, rightly so, didn't seem very free. Now that the Cold War is 35 years in the rearview mirror, lots of young people of the millennial socialists, they just don't think in Cold War terms. And there's been a sort of a rush of sort of putting marks in the context of discourse about freedom.

And this is one of the ways in which Marx has been a sort of additive to American political discourse throughout this long history of Marx reception. Americans are obsessed with freedom. There's this notion that people in the United States care about freedom more than people around the world, that they have more freedom than the rest of the world.

And there's a sort of, there is a constitutional freedom that, you know, like free speech, freedom of expression, freedom of religious practice, that is a tradition in the United States. And you didn't necessarily need Marx to sort of understand that conception of freedom. The problem is Americans tend to work longer hours under worse conditions of exploitation than people, at least relative to the other wealthy nations of the world, are.

And so and if American workers are spending so much of their time at work in conditions that are not free, the sort of like traditional American theory of constitutional freedom is not very applicable when people have to sell their labor in order to survive. And so that's kind of where Marx has been additive. And so there's been a sort of.

of books talking about Marx and Marxism as being necessary to full human flourishing, to full human freedom. You raised a number of fascinating points that I

And I try just to ask your thoughts. I know that historians hate to talk about the future. I always ask a question about the future. I think you're absolutely right that there's been this shift more towards a popular version of, let's say, Marxism, socialism, questions of equality, because I guess more and more people have seen how

the capitalists of the corporate class have really, really doubled or tripled their wealth. I think it was a report. I live in Australia, so the situation is not as dark as it is maybe in the United States. However, it's more of the same trend. I think I read a report just last week that Australian billionaires have doubled in the past 10 years, and most of them during the pandemic when a lot of people were doing it tough, you

And again, there was an election in Australia a month ago. A Labour government won. It had an unprecedented, let's say, victory. They won a lot of seats. Well, Australian Labour is more or less similar to, more or less, maybe similar to American Democrats. But you could see that people were trying. But there was also a shift more towards independent senators or members of parliament, right?

which again shows that people are kind of disillusioned with the status quo. But again, very few people talk about socialism because the moment you talk about it, you're branded as a communist or a tanky. I think neoliberals have been successful in, let's say,

creating this accusation. But anyhow, you mentioned a lot of workers going more for unions like in Amazon workers or I think in the Starbucks as well. They were successful in unionizing. Do you think, are you optimistic about the future, about even Democrat politicians maybe trying to

address the needs of the young people, the younger generation who feel that they have been left behind. I'm not talking about maybe gravitating towards what's called socialism, but again, trying to eradicate those inequalities, which is one of the reasons that socialism or Marxism has gained more traction in recent days around the world.

I'm optimistic, but not about the Democratic Party. Here's kind of the way I see the present and future. It's obvious we're in a crisis, a moment of crisis. We are, the US political system, probably more than anywhere else in the world, or at least up there, is dominated by billionaires. These are some of the wealthiest, most powerful people in human history in terms of

how much, um, how much wealth, how much resources they control and how they're able to wield that, wield the resources to control the U S political system as well. We're in a moment of crisis. And of course, Trump and the Republican party are sort of the apex of, or the, um,

The manifest the apex of the manifestation of that crisis in terms of a turn towards authoritarianism and a turn to towards oligarchy. The US, I would say, has been oligarchic for a great chunk of its history, but perhaps never more so than now. There's a lot of political energy around.

in opposition to this. So, for example, Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez have been touring the country on this sort of anti-oligarchy tour and speaking to massive crowds like

50,000 people in states that regularly vote Republican. So there's a lot of energy. The labor movement, for the first time in U.S. history since the 1960s, the majority of Americans view unions favorably, positively. So there is a lot of energy there.

But it hasn't been channeled into the political system yet. The Democratic Party is controlled by an older class of Democrats who have very, very tight connections to their corporate donors. And they've created rules that make it very difficult, almost impossible, to overturn the Democratic Party leadership. It seems to people like me on the left that the Democratic Party for several years has been more interested in

The leadership has been more interested in protecting their power over the party than in winning elections against Trump and the Republicans. Maybe that's an overstatement, but that's the sort of appearance. So my optimism is with a sort of like groundswell of optimism.

left liberal, left labor organizing, left labor resistance that I think is beginning to take shape. The national unions such as the United Auto Workers are moving to the left and being much more outspoken about the resistance to capitalism and authoritarianism and, if necessary, the Democratic Party leadership.

But this movement, this groundswell has yet to break into the Democratic Party. And because the American political system is a winner-take-all system and has always been a two-party system, and there have really only been two times in U.S. history when one of the two parties has fallen away and given way to another, and both of those happened before the U.S. Civil War, it's hard to imagine that.

uh, the left or, or a sort of labor centric movement gaining any kind of political power and having a say over the political system, unless we're able to take control of one of the two parties, the democratic party seems like the most viable option, but it's, it, that's like a massive struggle coming. Um, so I think that's, there's a degree of hope, but it's very unpredictable and, and the sort of the stakes are high, but the achieving victory is, um,

There's a sort of like, if you're going to be pessimistic, it's like, can we recapture or capture the Democratic Party? It seems unlikely, but crazier things have happened in U.S. history.

Thank you very much. And I'm glad to end the podcast on a more positive note that you have alluded to. So, Dr. Andrew Hartman, thank you very much for speaking with us. It's a fascinating book and a story recommended to our listeners and viewers, Color Marks in America. We just scratched the surface. There's a lot in the book to unpack and engage with. And I must say that it is an academic book. It's highly accessible. It's not one of those...

history books that you need to have a lot of background information, even if you don't know much about Karl Marx's history, you'll enjoy reading the book. So thank you very much for taking the time to speak with us. Thank you so much, Martez. It was a fun conversation.