The following review of Mark R. Levin, American Marxism (Simon & Schuster, 2021) appeared on Amazon on November 12, 2021)
Trained as a lawyer, Mark Levin served under Attorney General Ed Meese during the Reagan Administration. When Levin speaks about the US Constitution, many listen, including this reviewer. And so when he turns his attention to extra-legal affairs, he’s assured of a respectful hearing. His many contributions to the constitutionalist cause have earned him the presumption of competency.
In American Marxism, however, Levin seems to have abused that privilege.
The book has no introduction. Chapter One announces “It’s Here,” “it” being the counterrevolution that’s been steadily overturning our constitutional republic for the past century. He claims that this slow-motion coup’s ideological driver is Marxism.
I have written about Marxism at length in two earlier books—Ameritopia and Rediscovering America and the Tyranny of Progressivism—and discuss it regularly on my radio and television shows. There are also untold number of books written about Marxism. It is not my purpose to contribute yet another long treatise to the many that exist, nor is it possible given the focus and limitations of this book. But the application and adaption of core Marxist teachings to American society and culture—what I call American Marxism—must be addressed and confronted, lest we are smothered by its modern manifestations. (Emphasis in the original.)
In Ameritopia, Levin classified Marxism as a species of utopianism and summarized the theses of historical materialism.
In Rediscovering, he compared and contrasted American Progressivism and Marxism, relating both as reactions to Hegel’s philosophy of Spirit, while seconding Karl Popper’s denunciation of the latter as the root of much contemporary evil.
Does Levin’s American Marxism live up to its billing? That is, does it narrate “the application and adaption of core Marxist teachings to American society and culture”?
Or does it merely chronicle the depredations Leftist radicals have visited upon America—riots and their attendant murders, racial strife, slanders, indoctrination, intimidation, censorship, bullying, vandalism, encampments—and insist they be identified as effect of one ideological cause, namely, Marxism?
I’m afraid it’s the latter.
Surveying nearly every radical outcropping from Black Lives Matter and Antifa to Critical Race Theory and the Green New Deal, Levin marshals evidence supporting a “dire” diagnosis of our current situation, but little to the effect that their pedigree is “Marxist” in the sense of his earlier books.
That’s because there is no such evidence: America’s latest domestic enemies are “Marxist” only in a fuzzy, Pickwickian sense. As a marketing hook, however, “Marxism” was apparently irresistible. (As was my title for this review, which no one is charging you to read.)
Lucifer, whose pawn Karl Marx was, instigated unrest and murder for millennia before this communist rejected his parents’ Lutheranism. (See Paul Kengor’s 2020 The Devil and Karl Marx: Communism’s Long March of Death, Deception, and Infiltration.) And as destructively influential as Saul Alinsky was, the “community organizer”—who in Rules for Radicals named Lucifer the “very first radical”—was never a target of Senator Joseph McCarthy’s or FBI chief J. Edgar Hoover’s investigations of Communist subversion. Alinsky didn’t have a Marxist bone in his body, but he was no less a threat for that reason.
Levin shows no interest in bona fide American Marxists. Herbert Aptheker, for example, his daughter Bettina, and her lifelong friend and comrade Angela Davis—all members of the Communist Party USA (CPUSA) at one time or other—are beneath his notice.
According to the CPUSA’s overtly “antiracist” ethos, racism is wrong because it divides the working class, that “oppressor” and “oppressed” are categories of class warfare, not to be defined by race. (That didn’t mean white comrades couldn’t be put on trial for “chauvinism,” e.g., serving a black comrade tea in a chipped cup, which was too much even for Eslanda Robeson.) Levin’s radicals have reversed that emphasis and enshrined the reversal in law: Section 113114 of the Build Back Better Act defines “underserved communities” (who are scheduled to get the lion’s share of “social spending”) racially, i.e., non-white. Whatever one may think of the motive or result, neither can be called “Marxist” without violence to language.
Herbert Aptheker, Ph.D. (1915-2003), was the literary executor of pro-Soviet Pan-Africanist and Communist W. E. B. Du Bois (1868-1963). Given that Harvard’s first Black Ph.D. (in 1895, when it was still worth something) continues to exert influence on academia, no overview of American Marxism may sensibly exclude him. (See Gerald Horne’s 1985 Black and Red: W. E. B. Du Bois and the Afro-American Response to the Cold War, 1944-1963.) Yet Levin manages to avoid reference to this notable Marxist who eulogized Stalin (in the National Guardian, March 16, 1953) and whom the USPS celebrates on two postage stamps. (For Aptheker’s role in the history of American Marxism, see my Herbert Aptheker: Studies in Willful Blindness.)
Bettina Aptheker, Ph.D., a leader of the “Free Speech Movement” (FSM) at UC Berkeley in 1964-65, is a radical feminist theoretician. She has claimed that when she was a tender-age child, her father, a World War Two artillery officer, molested her. Not a word from Levin about this “NextGen” Communist. (In 1996, FSM heirs destroyed 5,000 copies of the Berkeley campus paper, The Daily Californian, because of its anti-affirmative action editorial. Cancel Culture wasn’t born yesterday.)
In 1970, Angela Davis, Ph.D., had bought a pistol (for her protection, of course) that Black radicals used in an assault on a courtroom that left several people dead, including a judge. This was almost a half-century before the first Black Lives Matter (BLM) protester intimidated a white diner or found in fried, pork-based snacks a metaphor for police officers. Does Levin not see BLM as downstream from her?
In Germany, Davis studied under Theodor Adorno, a prime mover of the Frankfurt School, the radical theoreticians to whom Levin pays some attention in his book. (Three times, unfortunately, he mislabels them the “Franklin School.”) They (including Herbert Marcuse, another teacher of Davis’s) found Marxism wanting. In their view, it needed supplementation by psychoanalysis, existentialism, and one or another non-Marxist social theory. In the 1980 and 1984 general elections, Davis was Moscow gold beneficiary Gus Hall’s running mate on the CPUSA ticket.
In highlighting the Frankfurt School in a book on American Marxism, how could Levin omit mention of one of its most renown students and America’s most visible Communist?
There’s little gained and much precision lost when one baptizes nearly every radical ne’er-do-well a “Marxist,” especially since most of them would be hard-pressed to defend distinctive Marxist doctrines such as the labor theory of value, the tendency of the rate of profit to fall, and the immiseration (relative to capital) of the working class (the last repudiated by Adorno). A critical race theorist or earth-firster would be bored to tears by such an exercise.
One can, of course, measure gain not in scholarship, but in sales. Levin’s target audience does not include those familiar with other books about Marxism, let alone those aching to read “yet another long treatise” on it. In the main, it’s made up of those eager to have Levin’s take on anything under the sun and, having consumed his opinion, regard themselves as well-informed on the subject. Demonstrably, there are millions of them.
That there is wide interest in both the subject and the author is evidenced by some purchasers of William Reeves’s 2020 American Marxism: Our New Cold War Drives the Progressives’ Agenda, who thought they had ordered Levin’s latest. (See remorseful Amazon customer reviews for the Reeves book.) Levin may not have added “another long treatise” on American Marxism, but he did lengthen the list of books bearing that title.
Levin’s indictment of Leftist perfidy and its facilitators in what a friend has called the academedia complex is well-documented and instructive; I do not question the accuracy of his reportage; I’m sure it will have a beneficial political impact. For those reasons, the book merits four stars. As there is, however, no pedagogical reason to categorize these villains as “Marxists,” I suspect another reason governed. That cost it a star.
The danger that America’s radicals pose grows out of their spiritually corrupt denial of truth, not their affirmation of anything recognizably Marxist. Marxists are potentially thuggish communists, but not all of history’s potentially thuggish communists, have been, are, or will be, Marxists. (The peasant rebels of the 16th century, for example, weren’t.) Insisting otherwise does not prepare a nation to deal with the forms this danger can take.