Of course, Kautsky and the others sought to do more than that. They also struggled to comprehend the nature of capitalism in the United States, the peculiarities of the US working class, the specific dynamics of US history. And, as appropriate with Marxists, this was always within the context of seeing how socialism might be advanced in the “New World,” in Europe, and globally. In a sense, we will be tracing a fluctuating but definite pattern in the evolution of analyses—from simplicity to complexity. Woven through this are shifting patterns of optimism and pessimism regarding the straightforwardness—or even the possibility—of building a working-class movement capable of bringing a transition to socialism in the United States.

What tools did Marxists bring to the effort of joining with Sombart to comprehend the realities and possibilities of the United States? We will see that within the Marxist tradition (and within Kautsky himself) there was a tension between an activist and a fatalist dynamic—the former leading to greater sensitivity of complexities and openness to possibilities, the latter closing off possibilities and reducing reality to much simpler propositions (in a manner consistent with either a dogmatic optimism or pessimism).

Actually, within Marx himself (and, to a somewhat lesser extent, in his co-thinker Friedrich Engels and Marx’s talented daughter Eleanor) we find a methodological approach that facilitates greater openness to complex and contradictory realities—with the result that we find fresh observations and flashes of insight regarding realities in the United States.

Such qualities were less apt to come into play as Marx’s thought congealed into a simpler theoretical orthodoxy providing an ideological orientation for a mass movement in the international working class of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Essential elements of “open Marxism” tended to endure particularly among some of the more revolutionary theorists of international socialism. Kautsky himself, as he tilted toward the revolutionary dynamic in Marxism, was able to contribute useful elements (although not always a rounded and fully coherent analysis) that remain helpful today in studying the history and complexities of the US working class and were not surpassed—or even approached—by US co-thinkers employing the more standard (and fatalistic) version of what is known as “scientific socialism.”

But the simple and optimistic assumptions of earlier socialists could not withstand the blows of “life itself.”3 The upward trajectory of working-class radicalism in the United States was reversed by World War I and the expansive capitalism of the 1920s. The resurgent labor militancy during the Great Depression of the 1930s, instead of generating the long-anticipated mass labor party and mass socialist consciousness, flowed into the New Deal pro-capitalist, liberal reform coalition of Democratic president Franklin D. Roosevelt. Since this seemed so divergent from European experience, efforts to define what made the United States so “exceptional” (and what was the meaning of this “exceptionalism”) proliferated among stalwart Marxists and disillusioned ex-Marxists—sometimes in ways that pushed in the direction of simplified certainties, but sometimes in ways that added new insights and elements to an increasingly complex analysis. Additional lines of thought opened up with the awareness that the US experience might not be an exception to but instead a precursor of European (and global) capitalist developments. Consistent with present-day trends of “globalization,” such lines of analysis include optimistic and pessimistic notions of what the future might bring.

The activist/fatalist dichotomy also emerges among US Marxists after World War II, with divergent ways of understanding distinctive aspects of the notion embedded in Marx and explicitly stated by his daughter—the existence of a “latent socialism” in capitalist America. This exists not only in the realities of capitalist society but in the consciousness (or, more accurately, in the subconsciousness) of working-class sectors experiencing oppression and exploitation in that society on a daily basis. An examination of the development of the labor process is one key to comprehending this, but so is an examination of popular culture. In both cases, we are dealing with the life-activity and self-expression of masses of people—how they spend their lives, how they make choices that shape the way society functions and history flows.

The fatalist or activist twist in this dichotomy (depending on which way one twists) can either nurture a sense of socialist inevitability or it can generate an intensified activism in order to help actualize socialist possibilities. The notion of a latent working-class socialism can also be given a twist that calls for the subordination of divergent and allegedly “diversionary” identities (such as race, gender, age, and sexual orientation) to class identity—a reversion to simplicity that (we will see) can slide into a variant of labor conservatism. It can also be approached with the complexity framework—giving attention to the ways in which “latent socialism” can be drawn out of the dynamically interpenetrating identities of class, race, gender, age, sexual orientation, and so on.

In any event, it seems likely that the persistence of capitalism will continue to sustain socialist commitments. It is noteworthy that Marxists in the early years of the twenty-first century should be reflecting over the work of the long-neglected Karl Kautsky, of all people. New ways of interpreting Kautsky have been developed by recent scholars, who urge us to push past the earlier dismissals. Here, too, there is more than one approach.

This elegant reinterpretation has never quite erased the image of “the renegade Kautsky.” His revolutionary rhetoric and theoretical “orthodoxy” during the glory days of the pre-1914 Second International masked the reformist corruption and impending collapse of social democracy in the face of an ascendant imperialism. Then came the murderous explosion of world war, and the embrace of the Kaiser’s war effort by Germany’s socialist majority. Kautsky distinguished himself with a stoic acceptance of the imperialist slaughter—only slightly modified by a belated and modest antiwar dissent. This pretentious “pope of Marxism” shook his finger at real revolutionaries (his martyred friend Rosa Luxemburg, Lenin, Trotsky) while clinging to a bureaucratized section of the labor movement that accommodated itself to the capitalist order. What can one expect from an old article by such a sorry figure? The answer: even Lenin, Trotsky and Luxemburg had thought highly of Kautsky in his earlier years.5

We owe it to Kautsky and to ourselves, however, to move beyond intellectual and political fashions—to confront the essay itself, and to understand its several contexts. One context has to do with the historical and sociological realities that Kautsky was writing about. Another has to do with the intellectual and political terrain of the socialist movement in 1906. Yet another context has to do with the tangled tradition of trying to explain “why there is no socialism in the United States.”

There is no single, clever answer. Reality is too complex for that—this reality in particular. Kautsky certainly did not answer the question but instead made his own contribution to the cumulative process of trying to work out what brought socialism closer and what pushed it further away on the American scene. What we will want to look for is the sort of process John Rees once described in discussing “the algebra of revolution”:

“Ever-newer waters flow on those who step into the same rivers,” Heraclitus emphasized in ancient Greece. Just as it is impossible, in a sense, to place your foot in the same river twice (since the water your foot went into has flowed far downstream by the time you step in again), so is the US working class in a dynamic state of flux. It is a different entity when Marx looks at it in the 1840s and again in the 1870s, when Engels engages with it in the 1890s, when Kautsky turns his attention to it in 1906, when Lukács and Gramsci discuss it in the 1920s, when Trotsky cheers it on in the 1930s, when Herbert Marcuse dismisses it in the early 1960s, and so on. At the same time, there are similarities, patterns, continuities, and an evolution within a definite (although contradictory, complex, dynamically evolving) social and economic context.

Sombart’s analysis of socialism’s failure on American soil consequently became one in a long succe...