Marxism and the question of “American Characteristics”
Carlos L. Garrido[1]
Platypus Review 190 | October 2026
In 1892 Friedrich Engels wrote the following in his preface to the American edition of The Conditions of the Working Class in England:
To play a very important part in the [U.S.] movement… they will have to doff every remnant of their foreign garb [and] will have to become out and out American. They cannot expect the Americans to come to them; they, the minority and the immigrants, must go to the Americans, who are the vast majority and the natives. And to do that, they must above all things learn English.[2]
Engels was speaking specifically to the largely German immigrant composed Socialist Labor Party, the first formally Marxist party in the country. It was understood by Engels that simply being a “Marxist” was insufficient. Marxism needed to acclimate itself, to be attuned to, the particular circumstances of the countries and civilization in which the struggle for socialism was concretely being carried out. For Marxists in America, it was not enough to simply study Marx. Marx had to always be “translated” into one’s context. I do not simply mean a literal translation of text, but more fundamentally a translation of the insights central to Marxism into the common sense and sensibilities of the people. The universal insights of Marxism needed to be adapted to an American context. An American Marxism had to be developed to provide clarity for the struggle for socialism — a socialism that could never be abstract and formless, but which, on the contrary, could only be realized by reflecting itself in a national form, that is, by obtaining — to put it in Chinese fashion — “American characteristics.”
Highlighting the problem of the “American form,” which is to say, calling attention to our failure to make Marxism, to put it in Engels’s words, “out and out American,” has been a centerpiece of my life’s work as a communist scholar, militant, and party leader.[3] I was therefore grateful to my friends at the Platypus Affiliated Society who invited me to reflect on this theme in The Platypus Review. What prompted this invitation was a comment made by Ed Remus concluding a panel on Eugene V. Debs and the American Revolution, which I had the pleasure to be a part of at the 2026 International Convention of the Platypus Affiliated Society.[4] The question implied in Ed’s comment was the following: what can actually be distinguished, or distilled, as the “American characteristics” to which an American socialism would need to adapt? This question, of course, took the garb of a rhetorical “low blow,” as it was formulated — almost mockingly — with reference to whether the values of the racist apartheid south could, in its moment, have been labeled as “American characteristics.” Could, for instance, a Marxist support the racism of the U.S. south as part of the “regional characteristics” that Marxism had to be attuned to? Evidently, no one would accept such a conclusion, but it does bring up an important general question: how can we distinguish the values and traditions of American history which should be integrated into American socialism from those which shouldn’t?
I think the first thing that must be addressed is that the culture, the values, the “being-in-the-world” of a people as a whole, does not change instantaneously the day after a revolutionary transformation of society. It is certainly true that the most advanced sectors of society should display the values of the new society they aim to build. Revolutionaries, those at the frontlines of the struggle, the “vanguard” as it’s commonly called, should display a maturity of character which resembles the new subjectivity which the society soon-to-be-born will develop, over time, in the mass of people. Che Guevara labeled this the creation of the “new socialist man,”[5] a new subjectivity which first takes form in the vanguard fighter — in the party cadre — and which, in the process of the advancement of socialist society, comes to spread across the general population, bridging any gap (in education, culture, and the development of socialist sensibilities) that existed between the party cadre and the masses at large. This is, nonetheless, a process. Supposing that the cadres could enact fully the new form of subjectivity without carrying with them the prejudices and vices of the old is unrealistic. Marx was clear that the new world comes stamped with the birthmarks of the old,[6] and certainly, before that new world is born, the revolutionary subjects fighting for it, while capable of demonstrating elements of rupture from the dominant forms of subjectivity, nonetheless are bound to sustain continuity with various aspects of it.
To return to the topic of the U.S. south, it is evident that even those white radicals who stood in principle against slavery, apartheid, and racism, nonetheless harbored various prejudices of their own. Morris Hilquitt, one of the preeminent early historians of the Socialist Party of America (and of the history of American socialism in general), makes basically no mention of the emancipation of four million enslaved black proletarians during the Civil War. This centerpiece of class struggle in the 19th century, which, to this day, marks the greatest expropriation of private property in the whole Western hemisphere, was not only ignored as part of the history of socialism and class struggles in the U.S., but often spoken of as a distraction to the radical labor movement which was taking shape in the North (frequently aligning itself with the Democratic Party of the planter class in the U.S. south, and seeing them as a fellow class enemy of the northern capitalist). The influence of an Orestes Brownson-style white radicalism was still felt in the early years of the SPA, whose lack of attentiveness to the question of apartheid, or as Du Bois called it, the “color line,” led Du Bois to making a quick departure from that organization.[7] This doesn’t necessarily mean that they were reactionary or not part of the progressive history of America, but it does show how a “white blindspot,” as it’s often called, prevented these early Marxists from seeing what Marx saw in his time, and what Du Bois would first systematically outline in book form, namely, the struggle against slavery (and later on) apartheid as not only forms of class struggle, but as central to the unfolding of class struggles in America.[8]
In my view, the central events of class struggle in America are in the 19th century, with the Civil War and Reconstruction, and in the 20th century Civil Rights Movement’s securing of the democratic rights lost in the counterrevolution of property of 1876. I remain in this terrain a loyal follower of the framework Du Bois provides in his magnus opus, Black Reconstruction. The first event wasn’t simply a civil war; it was a civil war which was concluded by a working-class revolution. It was the general strike of the black proletariat of the U.S. south, as Du Bois called it, which ultimately turned the tides of the war. The coverage of the Civil War in school textbooks has always been somewhat enigmatic. The story goes that the South starts winning thanks to the astuteness of General Lee. Then, under mysterious circumstances, the tides change, and the incompetent north ends up winning. Even in the old Looney Tunes Tweety and Sylvester episodes, this narrative — promoted by the south-sympathizing “Columbia historians”[9] — is kept up, with Sylvester playing messenger for the incompetent northern army while Tweety was the messenger for the well-put together southern one.[10] This narrative is sustained to prevent us from seeing the Civil War for what it was: a black-proletariat-led Second American Revolution which established, with the backing of the northern army, a distinct form of a “dictatorship of the proletariat” in various states of the U.S. south, commanded by Freedmen’s Bureaus of recently emancipated black slave workers. With Du Bois casting these events in a new light, the Civil War and Reconstruction could be seen as the first modern working class revolution and dictatorship, emerging well before and lasting much longer than the Paris Commune. With such a central event in our nation’s past read in this manner, the McCarthyite lie that socialism is foreign and antithetical to America would be seen for the ignorant absurdity it is.
In any discussion of “American characteristics” and the U.S. south, what stands as the kernel which socialism inherits is not the racism promoted by the white planter class, but on the contrary, the histories, narratives, and events formed by the struggle against it. We must recall what Marx said, specifically in the context of anti-Irish racism in England but applicable to the circumstances of the U.S. south: racism is the secret through which the ruling class sustains its power.[11] With this in mind, not considering the struggle against racism to be a form of class struggle, while considering its centrality for American capitalism, is ludicrous. The struggle against racism and the color line, first taking the form of the abolitionist struggle and then that of the struggle against the apartheid system enacted in the aftermath of the 1876 counterrevolution (a struggle which culminates in the Dr. King-led political revolution of 1964), is the dominant form the class struggle has taken in our country, at least until (but probably still a bit beyond) the enactment of the Civil Rights Act.
Class struggle, just like socialism, is a universal category. Not because it is the same across space and time (the traditional, anti-dialectical understanding of universal, particularly in the history of philosophy), but precisely because of its capacity for taking a plethora of different forms historically (remember that for Hegel and Marxism the universal is that which contains within it the “wealth of the particular”).[12] There is no single form of class struggle or of socialism. In accordance with the specific context one is in (place and time), both of these universals have the capacity to take on a variety of forms. And so it came to be that in America, where chattel slavery was central to the productive capacities of the country, and where racism and apartheid were central to pacifying and segregating working class communities, one of the principal forms the class struggle took was the struggle against racism. This is not the popular PMC “identity politics” which separates a million struggles into reified categories with hopes of a magic spell, crafted by a PMC shaman, intersecting them. This is, instead, an analysis rooted both in Du Bois (whom I call the father of American Marxism for being the first to discover this centrality of the struggle against racism as a form of class struggle) and in the tradition of how Marxism-Leninism has understood struggles such as wars of national liberation, the women’s movement, and the struggle against racism. To use the language employed by Domenico Losurdo in his book, Class Struggles, these are all various species of the genus of class struggle.[13] Or, in other words, various particular forms of the universal dialectic (universal within the meta-era of class society in human history) of class struggle.
The material premises, therefore, for understanding what “characteristics” American socialism will have are already given — even though often not understood reflexively — to those inheriting the class struggles of their country when they come to consciously participate in it. We live in a world where the current forms of class struggle are shaped by the ones of the past. The old victories and the conditions they afforded us are the background of our present fight. It is thanks to the successes of the struggle against slavery and apartheid that today we can wage a struggle for socialism in conditions far more fertile for multi-racial unity. In fact, it is today the “woke” forms of discrimination popular in sectors of the academy and radical liberal NGO world — a “wokeism” which often mirrors the racializing ontology of 19th century race scientists (except in the opposite direction, a real horseshoe theory) — which threatens most to re-segregate our integrated working class along racialized lines.
To speak, then, about American characteristics is to speak about the forms of cultural intercourse, such as traditions, rituals, aesthetics, values, etc. which emerge from the class struggles of the past, central of which (but not limited to) is the black freedom movement. Whatever could be “American culture,” from music, to literature, art, and film, has been affected by these class struggles. While Adorno and Horkheimer were correct in their critique of the culture industry, our cultural inheritance isn’t limited to the culture industry.[14] There are cultural forms and artifacts which exist outside of it. Sometimes, when they become too powerful and popular and are forced to be absorbed in a new form into the culture industry, there can still be rational kernels that seep through as latent effects to the population, even with the imperatives of the commodified culture industry operative. Even in some Disney animation movies one can find kernels of wisdom, insight, and an ethos of rebellion against injustice. It is for some of these reasons that I have often very provocatively said that America is a black country. In the central artifacts of the history of American culture we find often the complete presence, at other times the imitative samples, and yet at other times the traces of the culture that emerges from the black freedom movement. Could the archetypical white bands and stars of the 50s, 60s, and 70s, like Elvis, Creedence Clearwater Revival, or even the folk music of Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger, all central to the American unconscious, have existed without the black “sorrow songs” and blues, as Du Bois calls it? There is, of course, a degree of exaggeration here, since there is a multitude of influences (European, indigenous, Hispanic, etc.) which throw their lot into shaping the American cultural identity and trajectory (for instance, it is well known that Marty Robbins, a cultural icon of his time who is currently having a renaissance with young outlaw country fans, was often doing little more than English versions of traditional Mexican musical styles, which he frequently encountered in the southern border). Nonetheless, at the center of all of it are the cultural productions emerging from that sector of society whose struggle most defined the American trajectory: the black proletariat. Considering the trajectory of the country, it can plainly be said that Dr. King is more American than the apartheid system he helped overthrow, just like Lead Belly is infinitely more American than Johnny Rebel. One represents the progressive aspect of the contradiction, internal to America, which is pushing the trajectory forward. The other represents the aspect of the contradiction which is being left behind as a relic of obsolete past forms. It is evident which one socialists must adapt to as “American characteristics.”
In light of how the New Left in the U.S. has helped to shape the culture of the contemporary Left, it is important to make some clarifying comments about what the relationship between mainstream American culture and the culture of American socialists is. The culture of the progressive history of America isn’t simply something distinct from mainstream American culture. It isn’t the outcast hippy culture of freaks and anti-socials. It is, instead, the culture of Robeson and King, the culture of Seeger and Ochs, the culture of those who understood the heart of the contradiction which is America, and who, instead of seeking to escape it into a purer alternative, teased out those contradictions. They never condemned America (as today’s ultra-Leftists do), they simply asked it, as Dr. King so often did, to be consistent with itself, to be “true to what was said on paper.”[15] What was said on paper established something much more profound and weighty than a mere idea in someone’s mind. It was a principle which would be appealed to and given contextual form by everyone who has struggled on the progressive side of history in America, from abolitionists to labor radicals, to anti-war activists, to Marxists and socialists. As the late progressive historian Staughton Lynd wrote in his seminal Intellectual Origins of American Radicalism, “for almost two hundred years all kinds of American radicals have traced their intellectual origins to the Declaration of Independence and to the Revolution it justified.”[16] The progressive history of America, therefore, is the history of America. It was the American flag that Dr. King would fly in his speeches and marches. It was this progressive and revolutionary American spirit which Robeson celebrates in songs like “The House I Live In.” Let us recall what the great Du Bois said, “there are to-day no truer exponents of the pure human spirit of the Declaration of Independence than the American Negroes.”[17]
And so, central to the question of the “American characteristics” is this process of extraction and redirection, or, to put it in other terms, of identifying the rational kernels of popular American culture, those which have, as Gramsci called it, a “good sense nucleus.”[18] The key operation is to disarticulate these from the hegemonic framework in which they are embedded and rearticulate them toward the vision of a new socialist American civilization. Take something as simple as the flag, so basic and yet so contentious on the Left. The New Left of the 1960s and the Vietnam anti-war movement decided to take a national nihilistic position, rejecting any semblance of American identity, and burning the flag in their protests. This practice remains popular in sectors of the ultra-Left. This stamped in the imagination of Americans that there was some semblance of truth to the fundamental lie of McCarthyism, namely, that Left-wing socialist politics are “anti-American.” If the visible Left was burning the flag, writing America with three Ks (Amerikkka), and talking about socialism as the abolition of America, then the fearmongering of the anti-communist state becomes much easier as the Left does the fearmongering for them. It was a Left which took the gun McCarthyism pointed at communists and decided to point it at itself. There is a reason so many resources were spent trying to convince Americans from their infancy that socialism, Marxism, and communism are anti-American. The ruling capitalist class might be evil, but it is often not stupid. It understood that no socialist threat could arise if the people conceive of socialism as something foreign and hostile to their basic values and traditions. Socialism had to be made to seem as a radical imposition of a new form and content from outside, as the complete erasure of all it was that, up to now, defined being American. The New Left and its heirs today did this job for them by accepting the anti-American attitude which had previously been completely absent from the Left. Before the 1960s Left, all American Leftists, from communists to socialists, understood the importance of presenting their political vision as a continuity of the values and traditions the American people identify with the most.
William Z. Foster, for instance, argued that the communists’ task was to create an atmosphere where the people could plainly see that if the revolutionaries of 1776 were around in the 20th century, a consistency of values would’ve urged them to join the communist party and the struggle against capitalist imperialism.[19] In the Socialist Party, Eugene V. Debs never hesitated to admit that Thomas Jefferson was amongst his greatest heroes and that if he were around today, alongside Abraham Lincoln, they would be delegates of the SPA National Convention.[20] Paul Robeson, when testifying to the house of un-American activities, proudly avowed himself and his comrades as the real patriots, calling the architects of the anti-communist witch-hunts the true un-American ones, the Anti-patriots. To put it in the words of the late Michael Parenti, the traditional American Left understood that our patriotism is second to none, and that the tokenizing flag-waving, hurrah-hurrah military might “patriotism” of the ruling class is superficial and empty, it is a “super-patriotism” rooted in allegiance to capital and empire veiled in the pretense of allegiance to the country.[21] It accomplishes this by draping itself in the flag and symbols of America, and in so doing it embodies a pseudo-patriotism of form devoid of content, a symbolic patriotism.
However, this does not mean symbols, which include not only tangible ones like the flag, but also the symbolic value of figures such as the founding fathers and others, ought to be abandoned. On the contrary, we ought to expose the vacuity of their usage by the ruling class, which, we must be clear at all times, has no allegiance to the country, only to capital and the globalized form it takes today (interestingly, this was a point Teamsters president Sean O’Brian made at the Republican National Convention in 2024).[22] American Leftists should be flying the American flag. They should be situating the current class struggles in light of the struggles of the past. They should be presenting themselves as the cutting edge of the American trajectory, not as those seeking to abolish it. They should connect their dissidence today to that of the generation of 1776, especially the radical dissenters of its Left wing, those who later also expressed sympathy with the French Revolution. They should be seen as embodying the best of what it means to be American. When Dr. King asks America to be true to what it said on paper, in speeches and in a movement which was never scared to wave the American flag, and would’ve loathed the idea of burning it, he was filling the gap between what America has said it stands for and what the ruling order has actually done. Dr. King was embodying what it means to be “true to what was said on paper.” It is this attitude, this being-in-the-world of traditional American radicalism which the Left needs to reclaim. What was operative here was always a dual process of disarticulating history and symbols from its current employment by the ruling order with its framework and system, and rearticulating them toward the vision and struggles of dissident movements — movements which took serious the claim of various founders that for America to retain its radical soul, every once in a while a revolution must be made in it. This was a conclusion Dr. King himself came to in his later years, when he realized that only a revolutionary overthrow of the capitalist social relations which bred war, poverty, and racism could return America to embodying, in a modern context, the essence of the values of 1776.[23]
It is in this manner that we articulate Marxism and socialism with an American form, with “American characteristics.” I have attempted to keep this reply brief and to not repeat here things I have already said elsewhere. If the reader is interested in how I conceive of the vision of American socialism, and how I understand the importance and make up of an American Marxism to accompany it, I point them to my book, Why We Need American Marxism.[24] |P
[1] Dr. Carlos L. Garrido is a Cuban American Professor of Philosophy who received his M.A. and Ph.D. from Southern Illinois University Carbondale. He serves as the Secretary of Education for the American Communist Party, and as a Director of the Midwestern Marx Institute.
[2] Friedrich Engels, “Preface to the American Edition” of The Conditions of the Working Class in England (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1980), 22.
[3] It starts, in written form, around 2020 when I first wrote an article entitled “Socialism with American Characteristics,” and develops up until my 2024 book, Why We Need American Marxism (Dubuque: Midwestern Marx Publishing Press, 2024). Carlos L. Garrido, “Socialism with American Characteristics,” Midwestern Marx Institute (September 21, 2020): <https://www.midwesternmarx.com/articles/socialism-with-american-characteristics-by-carlos-l-garrido>.
[4] “A Century After Debs" (4/11/26 panel),” Platypus Affiliated Society .<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z6Pqatom0no>.
[5] Ernesto Che Guevara, Che: Selected Works of Ernesto Guevara (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1969), 155-170.
[6] Marx and Engels, MECW Vol. 24 (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1989), 63.
[7] W. E. B. Du Bois, “The Souls of Black Folk,” in Writings (New York: The Library of America, 1986).
[8] As Du Bois writes, “It is only the Blindspot in the eyes of America, and its historians, that can overlook and misread so clear and encouraging a chapter of human struggle and uplift.” Du Bois, Black Reconstruction, 693 and 443. Noel Ignatin and Theodore W. Allen, “White Blindspot: The Original Essays on Combating White Supremacy and White-Skin Privilege,” In Revolutionary Youth & the New Working Class (Pittsburg: Changemaker Publications, 2011), 164.
[9] The Dunning school of historiography concerning the period of Reconstruction, which originated with William Archibald Dunning during his tenure at Columbia University, criticized the efforts of Radical Republicans and was generally sympathetic to the Southern planters.
[10] Du Bois argues in the last chapter of Black Reconstruction, “On the Propaganda of History,” that this narrative was developed by the leading historians of the prestigious institutions of America, who broke with the old dictum of the “winners write the history,” and wrote a historical narrative that was much friendlier to the south (in part, of course, to ignore the black worker’s agency, plight, and ultimate role in that affair and its aftermath).
[11] Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Ireland and the Irish Question (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1970), 407-408.
[12] G. W. F. Hegel, Science of Logic, Trans. A.V. Miller (Atlantic Highlands: Humanities Press International, 1993), 58.
[13] Domenico Losurdo, Class Struggles: A Political and Philosophical History (New York: Palgrave, 2016), 14.
[14] Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment (New York: Continuum, 1993).
[15] “The Last Sermon of Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.,” <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uFmP3YA3i9g>.
[16] Staughton Lynd, Intellectual Origins of American Radicalism (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1982), 7.
[17] Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk, 370.
[18] Antonio Gramsci, Selections of the Prison Notebooks (New York: International, 1971), 333.
[19] William Z. Foster, “Secondary Aspects of Mass Organization,” The Communist (1939).
[20] Eugene V. Debs, “Speech Accepting the 1904 Nomination of the Socialist Party (May 6, 1904).”, available online at <https://www.marxists.org/archive/debs/works/1904/040506-debs-speechofacceptance.pdf>.
[21] Michael Parenti, Superpatriotism (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 2004).
[22] “Teamsters leader Sean O’Brien’s speech at the Republican National Convention,” USA Today, <https://www.usatoday.com/videos/news/politics/elections/2024/07/15/watch-sean-obriens-full-speech-at-the-rnc/74419476007/>.
[23] Martin Luther King Jr, The Radical King, ed. and introduced by Cornel West (Boston: Beacon Press, 2015), xi.
[24] Copies are available through the Midwestern Marx Institute, <https://www.midwesternmarx.com/books>.
