Date: Thu, 18 Apr 1996 16:54:21 -0400 (EDT)
Subject: Re: QUERY: HISTORY OF AMERICAN MARXISM (fwd)



> From: Ralph Dumain <rdumain-AT-igc.apc.org>
> To: marxism2-AT-jefferson.village.virginia.edu
> Subject: QUERY: HISTORY OF AMERICAN MARXISM
> 
> I received an inf[o]rmation request from an inf[o]rmation-hungry
> citizen.  I need your h[e]lp in answering his question:
> 
> >A friend of mine is interested in the history of marxism in the
> >US from the 1930s to the 1950s.  He's interested in references
> >to both significant theoretical works produced in the US at the
> >time and to historical works on the development of marxist
> >theory and practice.  Could you suggest references in either
> >area?
> 
There's a huge and burgeoning literature on this. Hower and Coer write a
very hostile history of the CPUSA from a social democratic perspectic,
goes up to 1957. There's also Klehr's right wing but scholar book on The
Communist Party in the Depression Decade. From a New Communist Studies
Perspectives, there are Maurice Isserman's books, including Which Side Are
You On, the CP in WWII and If I had a Hammer, the CP and the Birth of the
New Left. He did an as as-told-to autopbiography with California CP leader
Dortothy Healy that's very interesting. Also a memoir, wonderfully
written, is Jessica Mitford's A Fine Old Conflict. It has a lot of great
stories, inclusing about how as a girl she decortaed her side of her
shared room with hammers and sickles, busts of Stalin, etc., while her
fascist sister, I think Deborah though it might have been Unity, also a
fascist, decorated _her_ side with swastikas and busts of Hitler. 

There are more specialized studies: R.D.G. Kelly's Hammer and Hoe, about
Black Communists in Alabama in the 30s, see also the life of Nate Shaw, a
memoir of a Black commie sharecropper. There's a goos book about the CP
and the Auto Unions, that's the tiltle, but I forget the author.

Of course that's only the CP. Elsewhere on the far left, there's Peter
Drucker's bio of Max Schachtman and several studies of CLR James,
including one by Paul Buhle, who also edited the Encylclopaedie of the
American left, with bios of everyone and commebtraies on everything, and
wrote an idiosyncratic book called Marxism in America. He's not real
brilliant, but his facts are straight. Somewhat more removed from the
direct party political context is Alan Wald's really brilliant and very
entertaining The New York Intellectuals. Michael Harrington has a
must-read memoir as well. One thing that Wald points out about memoir
literature is that people have selective memories, so you have to take
mempoirs with a grain of salt. I think there may also be a book about
Farrell Dobbs and the Teamster's Strike put out by the SWP, and of course
there is Cannon's voluminous writings, if you can take them. Important in
this context are the exchanges with members of the SWP in the collection
of Trotsky's writings called In Defense of Marxism. 

Anyway, there's no shortage of material  and there is more everyday.

--Justin




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