Oakley C Johnson - Marxism in United States history before the Russian Revolution (1876-1917)

Karl Marx died in 1883, and his friend and collaborator Frederick Engels spoke the farewell words at his grave: On the afternoon of the 14th of March at a quarter to three, Engels began, the greatest living thinker ceased to think.

In this address, Engels summed up what Marx meant for mankind. It contained high praise for the founder of scientific socialism, but not too high for that time, nor for ours. Two billion people today revere Marxs name, and honor his achievements.

Three times in this brief speech Engels connected Marx with the United States. He said the death of Marx was a loss to the fighting European and American proletariat and we recall, as we read, that the workers of this country were indeed fighting in the 1880s for the eight-hour day. Engels referred next to Marxs great journalistic contributions, beginning with the first Rheinische Zeitung in 1842 and ending with the New York Tribune from 1852 to 1861. In his conclusion Engels again spoke of the workers loss: Marx, he said, was loved and mourned by millions of revolutionary workers from the Siberian mines over Europe and America to the coasts of California.

Marx did take an active interest in the United States. It is not too much to say that, next to Germany, where he was born, and England, in which he lived most of his life and where he is buried, his greatest attention all his adult life was given to this country.

When he was twenty-six years old, and still defining and developing his philosophic views and methods, he made a notable statement in a polemic about social questions against a now-forgotten writer named Karl Heinzen. The subject of the polemic is not important here, but the heart of it was that Heinzen thought Communists were narrow-minded for continuing their struggle against the bourgeoisie even after the overthrow of the monarchy, as in France. Why, he asked, in effect, did Marx and Engels attack the kind German capitalists!

Writing in Vorwarts (1844), a German paper published in Paris, Marx stated in the course of his remarks: Socialism and Communism did not originate in Germany, but in England, France and North America. The first appearance of a really active Communist Party may be placed within the period of the bourgeois revolution, at the moment when constitutional monarchy was abolished.

What did Marx mean by listing North America as a place where communism originated? This was four years before he and Engels wrote the Communist Manifesto. It is clear that Marx was not yet thinking of modern or scientific socialism. He was thinking of the communism of the Utopians, who did in fact originate the idea of socialization of property in the hope of solving the problems of poverty and crime. Claude St. Simon, philosopher, and Francois Fourier, sociologist, in France and Robert Owen, manufacturer and philanthropist, in England, were the originators of this early socialist theory, and the plans outlined by both Fourier and Owen were extensively tried out in the United States. Marx was right in thus singling out the three countries, including our own, as the homelands of elementary socialist theory.