Eddies of Marxism existed outside of the universities, for instance in Detroit with a group led by C. L. R. James and Raya Dunayevskaya, which sought a presence among autoworkers. But American Marxism largely unfolded on campuses. Nor is it surprising that two key journals that furthered New Left Marxism were founded by graduate students, Studies on the Left in 1959 at the University of Wisconsin–Madison and Telos in 1968 at SUNY Buffalo. With occasional self-doubts, both periodicals remained orientated toward an academic audience.
The first sentence of the first issue of Studies on the Left declared: “As graduate students anticipating academic careers, we feel a very personal stake in academic life.” As Michael Burawoy, a Marxist sociologist, has commented, unlike elsewhere in the world, the renaissance of Marxism “in the United States was more confined to the academy.” This fact had both negative and positive consequences.
Marxism and the Academy
On the positive side, this fact meant that Marxism could be studied untethered by the urgencies of immediate politics. The opening words of Negative Dialectics (1966) by T. W. Adorno of the Frankfurt School alluded to Marx’s oft-quoted eleventh thesis on Ludwig Feuerbach: “The philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it.” For Marxists across the decades, this edict served to short-circuit philosophy in favor of practical politics.
However, Adorno turned this proposition on its head: “Philosophy, which once seemed obsolete, lives on because the moment to realize it was missed.” He believed that “after the attempt to change the world miscarried,” the “summary judgment” that philosophy had “merely interpreted the world” crippled reason. In effect, he advanced the notion that since the revolutionary effort to change the world failed, philosophers can still interpret it.
Philosophy here means not just professional philosophy, about which Adorno harbored reservations, but thinking and theory in general. If this gave a lease to Marxist theorizing unrestrained by immediate politics, the campus setting also exacted its costs. Despite talk about broad theory, Marxism assumed the imprint of disciplinary divisions. Marxism thrived but subdivided by departments.
A cross section of the state of Marxism in the 1980s can be found in the three-volume anthology The Left Academy: Marxist Scholarship on American Campuses. The first sentence of the introduction reads: “A Marxist cultural revolution is taking place today in American universities.” For instance, there were “over 400 courses given today in Marxist philosophy,” compared to none earlier. Marxists led several scholarly organizations. The future for Marxist studies seemed promising.