Introduction to the Second Edition
John Peterson
Marxism and the USA was the first title produced by the US section of the IMT, a modest milestone that reflected the growing interest in the ideas of Marxism in the “belly of the beast.” The book was written at a time when George W. Bush was president, a time when many around the world—including many on the left—considered the US to be one reactionary bloc, devoid of class struggle or revolutionary potential. Woods aimed to dispel these misconceptions, draw on the marvelous traditions of struggle throughout US history, and inspire those new to the ideas of Marxism to learn more—and to get involved.
Providing one example after another, he showed how the ideas of socialism and communism are not recent, “foreign” importations, but have deep roots in the American tradition itself. He also debunks many of the common misconceptions Americans have about socialism, taking up the question of socialism and religion, freedom vs. dictatorship, an explanation of what happened in the Soviet Union, and more.
Authors such as Howard Zinn, Leo Huberman, John Dos Passos, Eric and Philip Foner, Herbert Aptheker, and others have analyzed US history from the perspective of the working masses, delving into little-known details and episodes and presenting them in an easy to understand style. Some, like Huberman, have focused on providing an economic history of the US in popular form (We, the People). Others, like Aptheker and the Foners, have offered a class perspective on specific periods or labor struggles.
Despite his later drift to the right, Dos Passos’s USA Trilogy is a literary masterpiece, blending primary sources with fictional realism to portray the stormy years of bitter class struggle in the early twentieth century. For many American activists, Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States was their first introduction to the country’s rich history of class struggle. And Gore Vidal, although not writing from a working-class perspective, has provided penetrating insight into the foundations and founders of the American republic and its particular form of democracy.
However, none of the above writers present the broad sweep of this vast topic from a consistently revolutionary Marxist perspective, and this is what sets Woods’s book apart. In this modest volume, he weaves together many of the most important, and often not-well-known episodes of American history. In a series of short and engaging pieces, he highlights the heroic revolutionary and labor traditions of this oft-maligned country.
As a young country, the history of the United States and its meteoric rise to world prominence is compressed into a few intense centuries. The wealthiest country on earth certainly has its vast natural resources to thank, at least in part, for its position. But above all, it was built on the backs of millions of African slaves, European indentured servants, Native Americans, and the endless stream of political and economic refugees who have searched for the “American Dream” on its shores.
Unfortunately, most American students regard history as dry and dusty, an endless and disconnected recitation of dates and individuals. But history need not be “one damn thing after another,” as the American Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. put it. It is a complex and contradictory process, driven forward by the struggle over control of the surplus wealth created by the labor of the masses. As Karl Marx explained in The Communist Manifesto: “The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles.” Or, as he further elaborated in his introduction to The Critique of Political Economy:
In the social production of their existence, men inevitably enter into definite relations, which are independent of their will, namely relations of production appropriate to a given stage in the development of their material forces of production. The totality of these relations of production constitutes the economic structure of society, the real foundation, on which arises a legal and political superstructure and to which correspond definite forms of social consciousness. The mode of production of material life conditions the general process of social, political, and intellectual life. It is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but their social existence that determines their consciousness. At a certain stage of development, the material productive forces of society come into conflict with the existing relations of production or – this merely expresses the same thing in legal terms – with the property relations within the framework of which they have operated hitherto. From forms of development of the productive forces, these relations turn into their fetters. Then begins an era of social revolution. The changes in the economic foundation lead sooner or later to the transformation of the whole immense superstructure.
This concisely sums up the Marxist approach to history, also known as “historical materialism.” Once we begin to understand history—not as a random series of unrelated episodes, but as an infinitely complex yet tightly interconnected chain of events involving mass social forces, in which cause becomes effect and effect becomes cause—a whole new world opens up. No longer does it appear to be more or less irrelevant collection of useless trivia. Instead, the experiences of past struggles of the working class come alive, ripe with lessons for our own fight to change the world today.
From the communistic traditions of the Native Americans, to the revolutionary-democratic beliefs of the Pilgrims; the Declaration of Independence and the revolutionary defeat the mighty British Empire; from Nat Turner’s revolt to John Brown’s implacable struggle against slavery; from the determined efforts millions of slaves to disrupt the Confederate war effort to Lincoln’s revolutionary expropriation of billions of dollars of human property; from the early labor movement to the Flint sit-down strike, American history is full of tragedy and triumph, of individual sacrifice and collective struggle for “Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness.”
When Marxism and the USA first appeared, the comrades of the IMT were a tiny minority in the US, scattered far and wide across the country, still in the initial infant stages of developing our ideas, program, methods, and traditions. In the years since, we have made modest advances, with a clear program, growing experience, and connections with the labor movement, and well-established branches in a handful of major cities. This book played an important role in drawing together those initial disparate forces into a unified organization, based on shared political principles and aims. In the founding statement of the US section, published in 2002, we paid homage to the militant traditions of the US working class:
The US working class has a proud and militant tradition. We look to the accumulated experiences of the American working class—the great railroad strikes, the mine wars, the formation of the Teamsters and the CIO, the Flint sit-down strikes, and more for inspiration. We rest on the traditions of William Sylvis, Albert Parsons, Mother Jones, Joe Hill, Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, Big Bill Haywood, Eugene Debs, John Reed, Louise Bryant, and the millions of rank and file workers who led and participated in the great struggles of the past. And we are confident that the greatest days of the US labor movement are still to come.
We also base ourselves on the ideas of Marx, Engels, Lenin, and Trotsky, and on the further development of these ideas by the supporters of the In Defense of Marxism [www.marxist.com] website. The ideas of scientific socialism have been tarnished in the minds of millions by the horrific experience of Stalinism and the continued lies and distortions of the ruling class. We believe that Stalinism was a historical aberration and a criminal totalitarian caricature of genuine socialism. We fight for international socialism, where the world working class has full democratic control over the means of production, distribution, and exchange, in harmony with the environment. Without democracy, there can be no socialism! A workers’ government in the US would take over the vast wealth now owned by just a handful of individuals and democratically use it in the interests of everyone.
This edition includes several appendices. The 1934 Teamsters strike in Minneapolis was a watershed for the labor movement and the young forces of American Trotskyism. David May’s article describing the struggle in context draws out the lessons to be applied today. Tom Trottier’s overview of the early years of the Socialist Party of America is yet another example that socialist ideas have deep roots in the United States. And my own piece on Shays’s Rebellion explores one of the seminal events of the post–American Revolutionary War period, which had a profound effect on the future development of the country.
Much has changed since Marxism and the USA was first published. GW is a distant memory, eight years of Obama have come and gone, and Donald Trump now sits in the White House. The 2016 elections unleashed the pent-up contradictions of the system, and socialism is now a household word.
Time and experience have proven Alan Woods’s basic premise correct: the United States is a society torn apart by tremendous class contradictions, and sooner or later, the militant revolutionary traditions of the past will return on an even higher level. From Occupy to Black Lives Matter to the rise of DSA and the growing wave of teachers’ strikes, eruptions of the class struggle are never far from the surface. To paraphrase W.E.B. DuBois, these more or less isolated eddies of the class struggle are swirling more and more into a mighty current. The revolutionary implications for the future are clear.
The US working class is destined to play a decisive role in the world socialist revolution. As the Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky put it, when commenting on his brief stay in New York City before returning to Russia in March of 1917: “[The United States is] the foundry in which the fate of man is to be forged.”