Reading ‘Karl Marx in America’

An eight-week study of Andrew Hartman’s recently published Karl Marx in America.  To read Karl Marx is to contemplate a world created by capitalism. People have long viewed the United States as the quintessential anti-Marxist nation, but Marx’s ideas have inspired a wide range of people to formulate a more precise sense of the stakes of the American project. Historians have highlighted the imprint made on the United States by Enlightenment thinkers such as Adam Smith, John Locke, and Thomas Paine. Marx is rarely considered alongside these figures, yet his ideas are the most relevant today because of capitalism’s centrality to American life. Karl Marx in America argues that even though Marx never visited America, the country has been infused, shaped, and transformed by him.

Facilitated by David Worley, a member of the executive committee of the Marxist Education Project and a longtime associate of the Brecht Forum, where he served a term as co-chair of the Board of Directors. David is a nonsectarian socialist, active since the 1960s in support of a wide range of peace and social justice causes.